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."
Plus que ca change, plus que c'est la meme chose.
In Redmond, all windows are wide open.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
"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,"
Okay.....so how is it any different today? Viruses/spyware and/or anti-virus/spyware software continually slow it down, and all that Microsoft seems to do lately is copy the innovative things that its rivals do, so its still always late to the party.
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
20th post
Huh? A /. post about Microsoft Windows WITHOUT bashing?
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
So, nothing has changed then!
20 years and billions in R&D and the only change is in Longhorn we have RSOD aswell as BSOD. 20 years well spent I think./
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
We use UNIX. We shouldn't be making cracks about using an ancient OS.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Ugh. 20-odd pages, each with only three paragraphs of text? Massive great ads in the middle of the text? Seems like just a glorified way of getting more adverts seen. I'll pass, thanks.
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
Man, if there were EVER an article that Slashdotters weren't going to RTFA...
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
Some of us use Plan 9 =p
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
After using GNU/Linux for three years, it was kind of a relieve to return back to Windows. I still use tools like emacs, gimp, gcc, latex, etc. But Windows is very stable now, and it supports all the hardware you can throw at it. Now I don't have to sit for days at end trying to get my TV tuner, printer, etc. to work.
The cause of, and solution to, all of lifes problems!
I was using windows/386 well before 1995. (Though I am a bit embarrased to say it)
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I always thought MS biggest coup was not producing a graphical interface(others were doing far better ones at the time) but convincing companies like lotus to port there applications to it.
I bet the discussion did not go like "if you port lotus 1-2-3 to our new graphical interface and help make it popular, in a few years time we will use our position to write a competing app and wipe you off the mat."
I bet the head of lotus wished he had negotiated a non-compete clause.
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
IMO Microsoft made computing cheap (as in $) well before Linux was a twinkle in Linus' eye. And MS still makes computing cheap relative to all other commercial offerings.
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!"
An argument could even be made that Microsoft with its relatively low priced OS is what made the business model that created Linux. The only way to compete with cheap (as in $) is free (as in beer).
There is a problem when you get barrels near Balmer , He starts throwing them at short Italians wearing plumber outfits
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
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.
What good have they done? They made the PC a commodity, accessible to all but the most poor. Gone are the days of $7000 proprietary machines that didn't operate with other different computers. These are all good things but they came as a result of market share and fate rather than purposeful design and innovation.
I look back at the last 20 years of Windows and say - what a waste. What a colossal monument to greed and complacency.
Plan 9 has a web browser? Who knew?
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Just look at what Apple is doing now. No guesswork there.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
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
More lies about:
1. security;
2. efficiency;
3. non-draconian DRM;
4. interoperability;
5. openness;
6. standards compliance;
7. release dates;
I hope in 5 or 6 years time the Windows anniversary will be about "the year MS lost its monopoly".
Disclosure: I'm stupid
"...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 >+
Interesting, because this month is also the 20th anniversary for another OS and mouse-driven GUI - Amiga OS 1.0. The Commodore Amiga 1000 first shipped in October, 1985. It's truly a shame it did not become more mainstream, because the Amiga's GUI completely blew Windows away.
It took Microsoft at least another decade to offer a gui as smooth and responsive as the Amiga's, with the release of Windows 95. Yep, 10 years before they had a mouse pointer that properly followed the physical mouse like the Amiga's, instead of the herky-jerky mouse movement Window's users had to put up with.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
First, windows is getting better, but it sure seems like a slow grind.
More importantly, there is another thing that is not changing. The Wall Street Journal has an article today that confirms its previous reports of Google in talks with Time-Warner about giving them money to prop up AOL.
Nothing has changed. Every time a potential challenger to MS pops up, the challenger kills itself off through its own hubris. Once again, the folks at MS sit in Redmond and laugh all the way to the bank while Google is throwing its money away. Intense focus on small incremental changes for MS has turned them into a money making machine.
If you can compile it, it will run.
Of course, that's a pretty big if.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
I used to get really exited about Windows. Betas of Windows 98 and NT 4 at home, Systernals tools, things like TweakUI, an NT 4 era MCSE, caring about the differences between Windows 95 OSR2 and OSR1, etc.
...what? A crap web browser, an IM that only does MSN (Linux does AOL, ICQ, Yahoo, and Jabber, aka Google), a crap mail client (compared to Evolution - check hotwayd if you need to check Hotmail), OpenOffice 2 (yeah, I think OO 1 was crap too) a good firewall out of the box, no spyware hassles, and the ability to install and upgrade my apps/hardware without rebooting for every single one, over and over again. Sure, you could install all this stuff in Windows, but you have to find it and pay for it and reboot and reboot and reboot. If Linux fucks up, all the config files are documented and I can fix it. There's even useful shit like strace in the OS. If Windows fucks up, most of the registry isn't documented and Systernals tools are expensive as hell.
I kinda stopped being interested shortly after Windows 2000. What happened? Well nothing. Before Windows 2000, you had Windows 98, which was unstable, and Windows NT 4, which was a bastard to use (in particular, it had no Plug and Play support).
Then there was Windows 2000, and it was more stable and still easy to use.
Windows XP could hav been a Windows 2000 service pack. A better themable UI, a minor IE update, some utilities to do things like registry snapshots that were useful, but always available as cheap third party tools. No big deal. XP SP 2 was the same, except the firewall was so bad you still needed a third party firewall. And yeah, spyware got more popular in the last few years, so you need antispyware tools now too.
There have been no significant improvements since Windows 2000. Meanwhile, about 1998, I saw a screenshot of Enlightenment. I wanted Enlightenment. Linux came with the bargain. Linux was tweakable to my hearts content. And also really difficult. And I'd use it for a little while,. then mess it up or find something I couldn't do, then go back to Windows.
The thing is, Linux seemed to be improving. Things that seemed to buy me about Linux were bugging other people too. I went from Red Hat 5.2 to Mandrake, which had a nicer GUI, KDE. Then Red Hat 6 came out, and it had KDE plus a simpler GUI installer. Woo. And tools to notice new hardware and configure it. And I started learning about Linux, cause it was nice and tweakable and interesting.
After a while, I'd want to do something in Linux I couldn't do in Windows. First it was pull down sequences of files using wget. In Windows you'd need to fetch and install some trialware crap to do that, and Linux came with the tool. Then it was use Evolution. Then I found smssend, which was cool as hell. Meanwhile, Gnome got quite decent, so I switched to that. These days, Windows has
Meanwhile, I and my Linux buddies had finished Grand Theft Auto on the PS2 while most of my remaining Windows using mates were waiting for it to be released.
"...was considered nothing more than a slow operating environment that had arrived late to the party, well behind the industry leaders" - how times change?
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?
I'd much rather read Wikipedia's History of Windows[Wikipedia] entry instead.
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.
Someone insert some witty windows-creaks-like-an-old-person comment.
Windows is not old. UNIX is old, and behaves as many older people do, working calmly and quietly in the background, running everything.
Windows is 20 years of age, and like most 20-year olds, is annoying, unable to multi-task well, and thinks the world revolves around it.
I wish I had mod point to mod you all down to hell.
So maybe it isn't as relevant to the rest of the world, but it's also the 9th aniversary of KDE's founding today. I doubt whether Matthias Ettrich planned it so, but three cheers for the windows that are free for the masses!
(AP) Associated Press Hordes of rabid, self-described "elite open-source programmers" unable to properly keep their Windows-based PC's free of spyware, viruses. Experts attribute this to the fact that they spend all day downloading random .iso files from Russian serial/crack sites hoping to find a new Linux build that they haven't installed/reformated over on their ancient Pentium Pro machine.
Or about as long as the Serenity poll has been up.
"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" - Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, Le Figaro, 1849.
s e_Karr
Quaint, isn't it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Alphon
I live on a street that bears his name, so I'm favored by the stars and granted authority to tell you to stfuplzokthx.
A présent, éloignez-vous avant que je ne me moque de vous une seconde fois!
The operating system behind the e-commerce everyone uses is Windows? Wow. That IS quite a target.
Just goes to show....
You build a better mouse trap.... and some stinking Harvard MBA dropout will steal it, make a bad copy and sell it for a lot less!!
We "Old Timers" remember when Bill Gates was nothing but a smelly little geek salesman peddling someone else's stuff like a BASIC on paper tape and an operating system he's conned someone out of. Now my daughter's high school computer classes are being taught from books that state if it weren't for Gates we wouldn't have PCs at all and that he alone is responsible for everything that's in them and what's running on them. She and her friends think I'm a heretic and a delusional old man when I explain the true history and explain how we had other desktop machines that ran just alright before Micro Soft became one word. I knew legions of secretaries and book keepers that ran everything from command line as well as any UNIX/Linux admin today. They just learned how and did it. I wrote a lot of business programs on CP/M and Radio Shack Models I and II in BASIC, FORTRAN, and Z80 ASM. I never used an OS that had a Gates touch until I had to use a XENIX box.
This is one of those celebrations that starts with raising a glass and ends when one passes out holding the empty, tear-stained bottle.
Ade_
/
Big Bubbles (no troubles) - what sucks, who sucks and you suck
Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me. We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts. God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist.
Academician Prokhor Zakharov
"For I Have Tasted The Fruit"
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Windows wasn't an operating system 20 years ago, it was only a DOSShell, it turned into an operating system in 1995 (not really an operating system but it got bigger, but still a layer on top of DOS)
Quarterdeck's Desqview was vastly superior at that time. There's even a wikipedia entry for it! I rest my case.
Desqview got a look in only because of Quarterdeck's QEMM. Does anyone even remember that ? The good old days of really needing an expanded memory manager - never to be confused with an extended memory manager ? And that some of the key programs during that period worked with expanded memory and some worked with extended memory? And how the way you loaded your drivers and then your programs *mattered*?
Goddam you young 'uns have it easy.
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
I'm sure it would be there, and it basically would be Linux. It just wouldn't compete with Windows, but maybe with an OS based on GEM (remember, originally Windows also just was a GUI on top of DOS), or with MacOS, or maybe with some OS which doesn't even exist in our world but would have been written if Windows had not existed.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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 hope you do realize that there's a difference between "spyware", "virus" and "worm". Hint: "spyware" is usually installed with the user's unknowing "consent". E.g., I can assure you that all the buggers who got Claria/Gator on their computer, didn't get it via ActiveX, but got it buried in some other piece of software's installer (e.g., even DivX helpfully offered a variant with Gator) and usually barely mentioned on page 27 of a 50 page EULA.
/home/joe for example. If he installs that cutesy toolbar as non-root, that's all I need to steal (and if I'm malicious: destroy) all his data.
So if I offered some spyware as some super-duper Mozilla toolbar instead of an IE toolbar... how would the Unix architecture prevent Joe Clueless from installing it? No, seriously.
Even if my hypothetical malware needed root access to really do the dirty deed, want to bet that a simple "You need administrator (root) rights to install this software" would get 90% of the Joe Clueless population to dutifully su and try again? What advice have you given Joe? "Only run as root when you install stuff", maybe? Well, he'll do just that: run as root to install my stuff.
Would that make Joe suspicious? Chances are, it won't. But if I really were worried about that, I'd wrap it neatly in something that looks legit enough in its need to be installed as root. E.g., as a driver. "Our patented InternetAccelerator (TM) drivers use special compression to double your internet's speed!" Watch a batch of Joes rush to install it. "Or EvidenceEliminator (TM) drivers act as a low level gateway, ensuring that none of your porn surfing habits are even written on the hard drive at all!" Watch another batch of Joes install it. And if I'm really evil, I'll pack it as an Anti-Virus/Anti-Spyware/Firewall package, and say it needs to be installed as a driver to scan everything as it's transferred through the network, before it even reaches your hard drive. Yep, watch another batch of Joes install it.
And if that doesn't get Joe, maybe I'll target a weaker link. E.g., his wife, Jane Clueless, with some cutesy screensaver or puzzle game. Or maybe his kid, little Timmy Clueless, with some Counter-Strike wall-hack. I'll just tell Timmy that it needs that to hide itself from the HL executable, so PunkBuster doesn't catch it. (And it's even truth in advertising. It'll be a rootkit that hides itself all right, that he installs there.) Chances are one of the three, I don't even care which, will be less savvy enough to actually do it.
That is, if Joe even bothers about not running as root. Chances are at some point he'll decide it's too big of a hassle to keep su-ing back and forth, and just run as root anyway.
But do I even need root access to rape Joe's privacy? Nope. I don't give a damn about his executables, which are just what was on the distro CD anyway. Any data I'd want to steal is in Joe's own files, in
Etc.
Basically, please. Unix design and architecture mean jack squat when you have a far weaker link to attack: the untrained users. For that architecture to keep anyone safe, their own knowledge would already need to be a lot less weak a link. I.e., they'd need to be at a clue level, where, well, then they'd have no problem keeping their Windows machine clean too.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Actually, the FREE software movement started as a reaction to the mess that proprieatry UNIX market was. Why do you think GNU stands for GNU is NOT UNIX?
As for linux, if you read Linus's early e-mails from 1991, you won't find any mention of Windows in it. Couple times he mentions DOS. It doesn't surprise me, because at that time, Windows was just beginning to be popular, around version 3.1. I think that both increasing popularity or Windows as well as emmergence of Linux can be attributed to Intel's 80386 chip.
I think for a long time Linux evolved pretty much independently od Windows. It's only lately that we see a lot of work being done on "desktop environments" that are inspired by/competing with Windows in some way. There is a lot of newer applications (like office suites) that are definitely influeneced by Microsoft. Interestingly, I almost never use any of them. I only use OpenOffice or Abiword to open word documents that other people send me, and gnumeric to keep track of grades (and I am actually thinking about going back to slsc, which I used before).
AccountKiller
How to win a war? Make sure double clicking on the icon works at any cost.
"We got in my little Toyota pickup that I had at the time, we drove it to Egghead, and we literally bought one of every multimedia application in the store," Cole says. "Picture a small-size Toyota pickup and the back of it is heaped with boxes of applications, games, all kinds of crazy multimedia stuff. We brought them all back, literally backed the truck up to the building, and we handed them out to all the employees and said, 'We've got to get these things tested.'"
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Windows 1.0 to XP: Screenshots
Word started out as a DOS application.
Word for Macintosh was ported to Windows (WfW), not the DOS version.
Windows is not old. UNIX is old, and behaves as many older people do, working calmly and quietly in the background, running everything.
That is until they (kernel) panic ans shit the bed....
Well, my text was a quote from SMAC :)
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
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!
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.
Linux is a clone, so its effective age is more similar to that which it was cloned from, rather than its chronological age.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz