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Happy 30th Birthday, Windows!
v3rgEz writes: And what a ride it's been. Today marks the 30th anniversary since the debut of Windows 1.01, the first commercial release of Windows. At the time, it was derided as being slow, buggy, and clunky, but since then ... Well, it looks a lot better. .The Verge has a pictorial history of Windows through the years. What's your fondest memory of Bill Gates Blue Screen-of-death that could?
And yet has become the most used, most useful operating system in the world. Shut up.
What's your fondest memory of Bill Gates Blue Screen-of-death that could?
Olympic fail - Blue Screen of Death Strikes Bird's Nest During Opening Ceremonies Torch Lighting
http://www.gizmodo.com/5035456...
And what would it have done with any information it collected, without a network stack? Print it, with a header politely asking you to drop it in an envelope and send it off to Redmond?
You remind me of dogs barking while the huge caravan is passing in front of their tiny courtyards.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
There's now a wider variety of reasons Windows is derided.
Now Windows is too old to get a job in IT.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
DEVICEHIGH=C:\OWS
There are more Linux devices in the world than Windows devices, and the gap is growing quickly. Perhaps you're thinking of which operating system is popular on general-purpose consumer devices only. Gartner reports than in 2014, 14% of general computing devices purchased ran Windows, while 49% run Android.
For about another month, until Christmas, you CAN make the following claim;
In English speaking countries, during work hours Monday through Friday, the majority of web surfing is on Windows. Android is the most popular on weekends, and after the another few million Android devices are unwrapped on Christmas morning it may beat Windows during work hours too.
30 years of software releases and still no stable builds! how do they do it? ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Windows has a long and sordid history, with predatory business practices at the front of our minds, and there have been shithouse editions of Windows. But if I met the engineers and others who pulled together Windows 95, Windows XP or Windows 7 I would shake their hands as vigorously as I would those of a Linux kernel maintainer.
I can never again hear 'start me up' by the rolling stones without cringing due to windows 95 memories and the many parodies of the song that followed. I have a similar experience with 'come together' which will forever be in my mind as "the nortel networks song".
Marketing sure is sick. i can hear them both, plain as day, 20 years later!
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I like the ribbon. why does everybody hate on it?
If you could go back in time and strangle Baby Windows, would you?
Why is Snark Required?
If NeXTSTEP was so great, then why didn't it become as popular as Windows?
The success of something does not depend solely on how good it is. How well it is marketed plays a huge role as well. I will freely admit that Bill Gates is a world class genius when it comes to marketing software. When it comes to writing well designed, easy to use software his ability is far more modest.
History is littered with examples where marketing has triumphed over technical greatness e.g. VHS vs. Betamax, the Sony mini-disc, the incandescent light bulb (invented by others marketed by Edison), Acorn Computers (who developed ARM in the late 1980's) etc. It's very common for better products to lose to better marketing - Just look at the film industry the Oscar for best picture is not handed out to the highest grossing film every year is it? So by all means admire Windows for the way it was marketed but if you are going to claim it is an excellent product you need to provide more evidence than just the volume of sales.
While the Ribbon interface is somewhat functional, it is limited compared to what it is replacing.
* The Ribbon interface replaces both toolbars and drop-down menus.
----> The Ribbon interface is not as complete as the drop-down menu's.
----> The Ribbon interface is basically not customizable.
----> The Ribbon interface takes up more space than multiple toolbars and a menu-bar.
----> The Ribbon interface is limited to one "topic" available to use at any given time,
whereas:
---> Toolbars could have multiple different toolbars on-screen at any given time.
---> Toolbars could be docked to different locations on the window: sides, top, bottom. ---> Toolbars could be UNdocked, and displayed outside of a given window.
If NeXTSTEP was so great, then why didn't it become as popular as Windows? {...} Yet that never happened! NeXTSTEP and its descendants toil away in near obscurity while pretty much everyone uses Windows!
Are you aware that Mac OS X is a derivative of NeXTSTEP ?
And that iOS is in turn a distant cousin of Mac OS X ?
These are immensly popular OSes (lots of Mac Books and Mac Air, around), and they are descendant of NeXTSTEP.
Apple rehired Steve Jobs, partially to get hold on the technology as a replacement of the aging Mac OS Classic platform.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
And yet has become the most used, most useful operating system in the world.
Most used? If you're talking about the PC platform (including laptops etc.), yes, true enough.
Most useful? Matter of opinion. I personally find it anti-useful and a barrier rather than an aid to getting work done.
... left me thinking... Who says atheistic programmers and IT professionals are not religious? It's even driven some to pray...
Gates a marketing genius? I don't think so. He got lucky that he got that initial contract with IBM. He was even more lucky that IBM did not buy him out when he offered to sell. Jobs seems to be a much better marketing genius...if you ask me.
I think what made Windows last was applications and the attention Microsoft made to keep their software compatible with previous versions. The Windows team bent over backwards to work around problems that popular 3rd party applications had by misusing APIs.
And yet has become the most used, most useful operating system in the world. Shut up.
I liked Windows from Windows NT onwards, not the Win16 or the Windows 95 based OSs. In fact, I rooted for Windows NT to be the great microprocessor leveller - available on MIPS and Alphas, in addition to x86. Unfortunately, Microsoft at the time didn't make use of the leadership opportunity that it had of doing a 64-bit OS long before memory requirements would force it there. As early as the 90s, they could have made the RISC editions of Windows NT purely 64-bit OSs, and then today, Windows would have been as ubiquitous as Android, since the portability aspect of the OS would have been thoroughly tested. In addition to that, heavy duty applications, such as CAD/CAM, EDA tools, et al could have run on the NT/RISC platforms getting all the firepower they needed. In the meantime, MIPS and Alpha could have gotten market traction, providing alternatives to Intel and giving both DEC and MIPS volumes needed to become fab powerhouses.
Today, you have Microsoft wanting Windows 10 to be everywhere - trying to put it on Raspberry Pi's and so on. Sorry, but too little, too late. Had Windows NT and Windows CE been properly done on RISC based platforms, then they would have been viable platforms today, as a result of being tested on a range of hardware.
If NeXTSTEP was so great, then why didn't it become as popular as Windows? It's nearly as old as Windows. It runs on x86 PCs, and has for a long time. It even has modern descendants, like Windows does. Yet Windows still powers almost all desktops and laptops, while NeXTSTEP and its descendants have only a tiny sliver of the market.
We can't blame it all on the expensive-as-all-fuck hardware that NeXTSTEP and its descendants required. Clearly if the software were so good, it would be worth it for its users to spend some extra dough on it. Yet that never happened! NeXTSTEP and its descendants toil away in near obscurity while pretty much everyone uses Windows!
NEXTSTEP was a fiasco b'cos NEXT/Jobs couldn't get Sun and HP to realize what a gem they had when that OS was ported to SPARC and PA/RISC. Also, for the price of their hardware, NEXT made some poor choices for platform - the 68030 was a really wimpy CPU for what was required. NEXTSTEP should either have supported parallel processing, or they should have ported the OS to something like a SPARC or MIPS and made NEXTSTATIONS based on that. That would have been a more justifiable bang for buck.
I remember in college where I struggled w/ Unix terminals, not knowing much more than ls. Using a NEXT in our Computer Center totally exposed the power of Unix for me.
And one can argue that NEXTSTEP was what transformed Apple, even though by the time OS-X was out for the first Macs, Intel had closed the gap on the CPU performance front, which is why Apple finally moved to that platform. And once it did, it was in direct competition w/ Microsoft.
I was an "official" journalist and my magazine got me and my spouse an invite to Redmond. We met at a Seattle hotel to be bused over. I was on the same bus as a very disgruntled John Dvorak. Jay Leno was the MC, making stupid jokes about "Bill's double-wide" while "Bill" kept making cutting comments over how much he paid Leno to be there. It was, as was usual for MS events, very well catered with crab and shrimp, and the day was absolutely beautiful for Seattle: Blue skies and fluffy white clouds EXACTLY like the Windows 95 box. I'm sure Bill ordered the day extra special.
There was a small plane which circled the campus with a banner that said, "Windows 95 brought to you by Windows NT" At the end of the day they threw open a massive tent where everyone there was given an MS bag with a copy of Win95 in. My wife was ecstatic that she got a copy.
And yeah, I get it. Linux, Linux, Linux, and the fact is I was dragged kicking and screaming into a GUI from the old DOS days, or even back to CP/M and dBase II. But Windows is a phenom, and that's a fact, too. My life in IT would never have been the same without it, and you haters need to get over it. Sorry for your loss.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
And yet has become the most used, most useful operating system in the world.
Kind of.
Windows as we know it really is 22 years old, first released in July 1993 as Windows NT.
It was a complete re-design that bore only superficial resemblance to that grotesque piece of excrement that was bolted onto DOS, and reached its nadir in Windows ME.
That original windows was utter junk, and died when MS released XP, a version of NT with the nice desktop UI from Windows'95, but totally rewritten and redesigned underneath.
As for "most used, most useful", that is only on the desktop, and due to monopoly power. Linux dominates everywhere else, from supercomputers to embedded, and even phones (followed by BSD).
Microsoft did follow through on portability, the retail WinNT 4 CD had x86, MIPS, and PowerPC. Maybe Alpha but I think that may have been offered after launch day. WinNT was absolutely proven with respect to portability. Actually it was already proven, supporting MIPS and x86 from the beginning. NT 4 proved the "ease" at which new architectures could be supported.
If any corporation had a large part to play in failing to "level the microprocessor field" it was Apple. By failing to deliver CHRP, a PowerPC based motherboard capable of dual booting Windows NT and Mac OS there was no point to PowerPC Windows NT. Alpha performed better, x86 was less expensive.
As far as Alpha goes, few people needed the performance advantage.
And finally, hats off to Intel, they were absolutely miracle workers. The ability to keep x86 close to PowerPC was unexpected. Its not really that PowerPC failed to deliver on its expected performance, its really that no one ever imagined that Intel could get the x86 architecture to those performance levels. Yeah CISC is harder to work with than RISC, but with sufficient money to throw at the problem the difficulty can be overcome. Well, sort of, modern x86s are RISC at their core, the CISC instructions being translated to the RISC instructions on the fly and behind the scenes.
I remember in college where I struggled w/ Unix terminals, not knowing much more than ls. Using a NEXT in our Computer Center totally exposed the power of Unix for me.
My computer science department evolved out of the math department. While computer science degrees had been awarded for quite some time the CS department was organizationally a specialty within the math department. When CS became its own independent department in the 90s assets had to allocated. There was a fight over who would get the NeXT workstations and who would get "stuck" with the Sun workstations. Students and faculty loved NeXTSTEP and its development tools.
The reason WIndows takes a lot of tech support resources is because the whole world uses it for everything. If everyday people tried using Linux all the time, there would be just as many problems.
Linux runs, and is developed, on almost any platform, not just "last year's Windows PC". It was originally developed on Minix, a version of Unix. So what's your point?
Microsoft definitely wouldn't exist as it does today without its boost by IBM. And if IBM had not existed we would have had standardisation based on Commodore or some other brand of hardware - and been the better for it as the PC architecture was crippled. Standardisation occurred because the world needed it, not because of Microsoft, who have historically been the enemy of standardisation.
Whatever course hardware had taken, sooner or later it was going to become powerful enough to put a version of Unix on it. Nothing to do with Microsoft.