Slashdot Mirror
20th Anniversary of Windows
UltimaGuy writes "When Windows first shipped, 20 years ago this month, it was considered nothing more than a slow operating environment that had arrived late to the party, well behind the industry leaders, Apple and Xerox PARC. Now, it's the operating system used on nearly 95 percent of all the desktops and notebooks sold worldwide. Take a look at Window's past and present, and what lies ahead in the future, including an interview with Mr. Bill Gates himself."
... how well Gates likes his Mac? Becuase it's widely known he uses a Mac and almost never uses Windows himself. This also applies to Ballmer and all other top-level executives working for MS. If there's an page where the interviewer asked him about that, I'd love to have a link to it. It seems most never dare. So you see, I'm not really all that excited about an interview with Gates; most of the interviewers seem too well-trained to ask anything interesting.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/WinHistoryIntro.m spx
I wonder how many of you did use those first versions of Windows. From 3.1 on, it was quite common but before 3.1...
--Use ant to make
Unlike most here on slashdot I'm quite happy with Windows, I think it works great, provides a myriad of features and is fast and stable. So heres to another 20 years of Windows
"...well behind the industry leaders, Apple and Xerox PARC." PARC was certainly a leader in research, but not an industry leader. You couldn't buy their stuff at the time. And the Mac was a slow seller with almost no software. DOS was king, and IBM was still on top. I have a 20 year old issue of Byte that reviews all the window managers (GEM, TopView, Desqview, etc) that were shipping, and it mentions the soon-to-arrive Microsoft Windows. My Windows 1.0 SDK has a "hello world" example with several pages of C code. I remember thinking "this will never work"...
Place nail here >+
I think that people expect too much of Microsoft. The sad truth is that Microsoft - as a corporation - is not interested in advancing computer science, innovation or helping to create better tomorrow. They are in the business to make money. That's their only motive to be the biggest player in the business. I'm sure that investors are very happy, how Microsoft has been able to grow in the past 20 years.
Well, at least in my books Microsoft is just another greedy company. Nothing more. I don't expect them to do same things than universities and other research organisations who have passion to this segment of industry.
What's changed is that, as the article says, 95% of computers run Windows. It may not be the fastest. (But then again, I'm writing this in Konqueror on a Gnome desktop, and... well, it seems to me that Windows XP on my gaming machine does boot faster, and renders a lot faster. Maybe because it doesn't render and antialias everything in software.) It may not be _the_ one that discovered the wheel. Etc. But a lot of people like it anyway. It's an achievent they can be proud of.
In a sense, the old wisecrack "Saying that Windows is better because more people use it, is like saying that McDonalds is the best restaurant" actually applies there. For a lot of people, McDonalds _is_ the better choice, or they would go eat somewhere else.
Choosing a restaurant isn't just a matter of who has the best cuisine and the rarest wines, but a compromise that also includes stuff like:
- price (self-explaining)
- time (maybe I just want to pick my hamburger and be on my way, not wait an hour while the chef prepares a complicated 5-star meal)
- accessibility and/or personal effort involved (if the 5 star restaurant is in the next town, and the McDonalds is right around the corner, you can guess where I'll eat. Doubly so if I have to drive home first and get a suit and tie for the 5 star restaurant.)
- familiarity (I already know what a cheeseburger and a Cola taste like. Maybe I don't have the time or inclination right now to figure out wth 'escargot provencal avec champignons' or 'canard a l'orange' even mean, or which of them I might even like, and if I want a Chateauneuf Sauvignon or a Valadilene Pinot Gris with either.)
- personal taste (maybe I actually _like_ a chickenburger, or not wearing a tie while I eat it.)
- social perception/acceptability (if I were a teenager taking my punk gang to a restaurant, chances are some snotty Chez Lex establishment would just make them uncomfortable)
Etc.
Yes, McDonalds didn't invent hamburgers or Cola, they're latecomers, etc. But people choose to go eat there anyway. Go figure.
Well, the same applies to OS's. If you factor in the whole mile-long list of reasons, and not just take one aspect out of context, for a lot of people Windows actually is the best choice. So, well, I'd say MS has reason enough to celebrate there.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You seem to not even know about UnxUtils, which happens to contain a native win32 port of wget and many other utils. I remember Evolution in 1998 too, what a piece of crap that was. It sure was pretty, but it really liked to hose the system.
And not to nitpick, but GTA on the PS2 is really bad. People just ignore all the slowdown and terrible aiming or something. On top of that, there's Multi-theft auto, something not possible on the PS2.
-]Phreak Out[-
"SUN and Apple had the world by the tail in those days (mid 80's), but they never worked to commoditize themselves (despite what they tell you its a good thing). Rather SUN, with its hubris laden leadership thought they were so great that only universities and large conglomerates were entitled use their software and hardware; a fact reflected in their price list. And look were its gotten them... McNeally - "I could've been a contender!""
Yes, but they didn't tell you it's a good thing back then.
Fact is, the commodities market isn't a place you'd voluntarily want to be in. Look at the mom-and-pop beige-box PCs or the generic cola drinks market. Those are commodity markets. They're not making a huge fortune out of it. Trust me, if either had a choice, they'd very much rather have a unique product they pretty much have a monopoly on, or a brand name that's been hammered down everyone's throat already, or whatever that allows them to charge an arm and a leg instead of a 5% profit margin.
And the same happened with computers. Whoever was ahead didn't want to become a commodity vendor.
E.g., while all swore undying love to Unix's portability and to open standards, they sure worked hard to make theirs incompatible with any other Unix, and to subvert and destroy any standard. Because open standards and the "write once, run everywhere" that Sun nowadays preaches is basically turning it all into a commodity market. All of a sudden it doesn't matter which computer you run it on, and you can just pick between a Sun, an IBM, a Mac and a PC purely on price/performance considerations.
Worse yet, a commodity market doesn't allow "vertical integration", a.k.a., "lock them in, and make them pay through the nose for everything." That's where the big money is. Having a bunch of customers that will gnash their teeth and buy everything from you anyway, because the alternative would imply ripping out and re-writing/re-buying everything else they have. You want a bunch of sheep penned in such a walled enclosure where the effort to climb out of it (e.g., to rip out all your Sun hardware and port everything to AIX) is greater than just staying there and being sheared by you every year.
People will often even take a loss to get you locked in, so they can shear you later. (E.g., see the console market, where the console itself is usually sold at a loss.)
So Sun, IBM and everyone did the same thing when they were ahead. Big surprise, eh? And now MS does it, once they're ahead. Who woulda thunk it?
The moment you start preaching a pure commodity market and how lock-in is bad, as a vendor, is when you're losing. When everyone else has the customers neatly penned in thir lock-in markets, and you'd want those customers set free, so maybe some will buy your kit instead. Then suddenly those artifficial walls are bad, because they're not keeping _your_ customers in _your_ pen, to be sheared by _you_, but they're keeping them in someone else's pen and out of your reach.
So now you see IBM, Novell, Sun and a bunch of others suddenly preaching about open standards and portability. Because they too would like a shot at shearing MS's penned flock, so they want that pen torn down already. They sure didn't mind it when it was _their_ pen, but now it's time to preach against it.
That's all there is to it in a nutshell.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Yeah, it sure does, if you carry around 30 driver cds with your windows installation cd (which you still are required to use frequently).
Not only did my GNU/Linux installation correctly detect all my hardware, I didn't have to use any CDs other than the one used to initially start the installation process. Windows is WAAAAAY behind the curve on this one.
Funny you should mention "throwing" and "hardware" in the same sentence...that's what I generally wanted to do with my computer pre-Linux!
With 20 years and 95% market share they had the time, money and resources to create the most advanced operating system ever. Instead, all they ever produced was "good enough" - never on the leading edge, never innovative.
I'd like to know where the phantasmal operating systems were that we could have had that were 'leading edge' and 'innovative'. The only candidate that's come along recently was OSX, which was unfortunately crippled to only run on proprietary hardware.
I'd go so far as to say that Windows 95 was pretty leading edge when it came out. Unlike the Apple operating systems of the time it had proper multitasking, and it had a lot of nice features. Was it as nice as NeXT? No, but unlike NeXT it did run on the kind of hardware affordable in the home. This is the thing about Windows - it could run on 'affordable' hardware. The first versions of Windows would run on 8086 machines, and Windows 3.0 could run on 80286 machines. The kind of 'advanced' operating system you seem to think they should have made just wouldn't be possible on their target systems. And remember, they also had to as far as possible maintain compatibility between versions.
Could Windows have been better? Sure it could, but as nobody else has managed to do any better than them, and that suggests to me it's not as easy as you make out.
I tried to RTFA, but I got depressed. There is no mystery as to how or why Microsoft became so ubiquitous - it represented the best balance of usability / functionality / cost to businesses and home users in the time before the internet. By the time the internet had hit, there was so much human momentum behind it that the microsoft of today was inevitable. We shouldn't blame Microsoft for becoming Microsoft, we should blame human nature. We wanted a single platform and we wanted it for as little money as possible.
The problem we're facing today is that there are two many people pushing single platform solutions. You can't blame them for that, you stand a better chance of repeat purchases if your software doesn't play well with others and the cost of migration is greater than the cost of an upgrade, but in the long run its not good for anyone, because it creates Micorsofts.
We need to educate people in the benefits of hetrogentity - don't buy software that only works for a single platform. Don't buy computers that will only work with similar computers. Don't buy into product that only has a single line of support - and never buy a product that has no support (I include offshore telephone support in that) and top of the list must be: don't buy software that generates files that can only be read by a single application.
Anytime you buy/use a product that adopts and enhances a standard protocol and doesn't tell the rest of the world how they are doing it, you buy into the next Microsoft.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
I don't know about that. If you discount the virus, spyware, and exploit threat, Windows XP Pro is a pretty nice workstation operating system. I've never had it BSOD on me like Windows98 used to and it's pretty much rock solid. The main problem are third party applications introducing incompatible DLLs, spyware, viruses, etc.
Unlike in the Windows world, there are solutions to this problem outthere. Consider e.g. MacOS X which uses a setting with a bit more privileges for the admin account, but disabled login for root. If admin privileges are not enough for certain tasks, then suid root wrappers are used. By using root wrappers you can effectively control what is allowed to happen or not on the machine (like installing software which itself is suid root).
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
I can guarantee that if Linux were on 95% of computers in the world, it would be having the same malware and security issues as MS, mainly do to (inexperienced) users.
Um, no.
The major open source operating systems (Linux and the BSDs) actually take security seriously. The kernel and most userland software is specifically designed with security in mind and they deliberately try to make it quite hard (ideally, impossible) to get unauthorized root access remotely. When bugs are found, they are patched quickly and the world knows about them instantly via various security-related mailing lists. As long as his or her systems are kept up to date (which is easy to automate), a Linux/BSD user would have zero need for anti-spyware and anti-virus software, even if it were the most popular platform of the day.
Now, contrast with the Windows security model. I could never dream to guess at what goes on inside the minds of Microsoft developers, but I'm pretty sure security isn't (or wasn't until recently) something that pops up too often. New security-related bugs are found in Windows and Windows software every day. Not entirely surprising, because the same is true of the OSS world. However, the bugs that are discovered in Windows are much more often those that allow a person or program to gain administrative access to the OS. (Partly due to the fact that almost every program that runs as the administrator.) Meanwhile, we admins and users have no way of patching these new daily vulnerabilities. Our only hope is to rely on (third-party) firewalls, anti-spyware apps, and anti-virus apps, all of which treat the symptoms rather than the illness.
So, while OSS and Windows vulnerabilities might be roughly equal in number, it would be difficult to argue that they are anywhere near equal in severity. The statistic that Windows has 95% of the desktop market but attracts 99.9% of malware has always seemed a little odd to me. (By that logic, 99.9% of all software should exclusively run on Windows, which clearly isn't the case.) Even assuming that very nearly all viruses are written for Windows just because it's more popular (unlikely), if Windows market share does decline, we would still see Windows with the majority of the malware because it's a lot less challenging to slip a virus or spyware program onto a Windows machine than an open source one. As an example, if you penetrate the defenses of the Microsoft web server, you get full reign over the machine. If you do the same on Linux running Apache, you get full reign over
The moral of the story here is that Windows has the lion's share of malware perhaps not so much because it's a bigger target, but because it's simply an easier target.
Honestly, how much effort does it take to download a 300k setup.exe for Cygwin.
You missed the point. I'm not complaining about the effort to download and install one thing, I'm complaining about downloading and installing 25 things, many of which require reboots (Cygwin IIRC thankfully doesn't). Is this not a legitamite complaint?
Read my post before you respond to it next time.
Yes 8 fucking Mhz 286 machine, because we all are using that. How many other modern operating systems are bothered to run on such hardware. Its backward compat like that, which makes modern code slower. I also believe the GP was trying to be funny but i do agree with you on the secure part.
Turn based strategy game that runs over XMPP. Phalanx
It was a superb architecture - an advanced interrupt driven, custom active chipsets, multiple bus hardware that could be used by a its preemptive multitasking OS which could really be used. Very high quality compilers, among many other things available. Was linear addressing memory, multitasking and running with the large networked systems while others still trying to figure out how to fit things into memory, rebooting between applications, or to load multiple network stacks at the same time.
i cal_user_interface#Amiga_Intuition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graph
As if. Random sampling seems to put the number at around 80% and falling over time.
Help us build a better map!
games such as quake is not only reason people use computers, some people actually use an office suite to do actual work... Quake's the only reason I use a computer but since I can play it on Linux I am happy!
Where did you get that information?
The only major multitasking problem with Windows is a CPU chewing up 100% CPU (common to all platforms), and that can be worked around by having a high-priority task manager that can be used to kill rogue applications.
Even Windows 3.0 could multitask. I was playing solitaire while I had a DOS application wipe the sectors of a floppy disk (which kept pausing because of sector errors on that floppy.) As far as I know, there was only one competeting product that was capable of multitasking in the same way for that platform, and it certainly wasn't one of the Unicies.
Of course it thinks that - 95% of the population blindingly purchased Windows 95, even though some of them didn't even have a computer.