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."
"...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.
A lot of things are "widely known". That doesn't make them all true, it just means that very often people believe what they want to be true rather than what can be shown to be true. Any useful citations about Gates using a Mac? Or are you just blindly regurgitating what you heard and wanted to believe?
Why is anything anything?
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[-
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!
The general perception was that windows was that thing you needed to make pagemaker work. GUIs were not all that popular in the work environment at the time because they just slowed things down.
The internet made multitasking a legitimate necessity. Today it seems absurd that we wouldn't be able to keep our im windows open while we download files and stream music all in the background of our actual work. Back then, however, multitasking was like the solution looking for a problem. The first version of windows didn't provide any form of multitasking and later versions didn't multitask dos apps. Desqview, however did, and before windows 3.0/3.1, desqview was the multitasking solution of choice for those people who really needed it.
People did want to switch between tasks quickly but there were lighter weight solutions than windows for that. Products like sidekick and expanded memory print buffers (one of the few ways to use more than a meg in even a 286) gave people the quasi-multitasking solutions they needed to get their work done. It was precisely the explosion of applications for windows 3.1 that made windows successful. Before 3.0/3.1 few people used windows because there wasn't any point in using it. Until native windows applications came along, windows was just a silly, bloated, guified app switcher that just got in the way.
Wanted: Clever sig, top $ paid, all offers considered.
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.