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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.
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.
Anyone who calls a phone or tablet a "general computing device" in an effort to lump them in with actual PCs is a fucking tool seeking to sell data and analysis to a bunch of MBAs.
Oh, you DID say it was Gartner, carry on then.
He did say useful though.
Desktop/laptops are where you get things done. IMO phones and tablets are toys. You can play simple games, check your email, bring your porn with you to the bathroom etc. But the email and phone calls that are work related are about stuff that, guess what, 90% of people need to go to their (mostly Windows) PC to do.
There are exceptions of course but most people do stuff other than communicating all day. Phones are horrible for anything requiring screen space, processing power etc. Phones might have the processing power but the apps that they run are still living in the 90's vs their PC equivalents.
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.
If you could go back in time and strangle Baby Windows, would you?
Why is Snark Required?
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.
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.
Spot on! And there's something else, too.
If IBM hadn't selected Microsoft to provide an operating system for it's IBM PC, I think it's safe to say that the computing landscape would look quite different right now. IBM approached Microsoft to do an operating system for the IBM PC in 1980. Microsoft then referred IBM to Intergalactic Digital Research (remember them?), where Mrs. Kildall (who ran business affairs for IDR) turned them away because she didn't want to sign IBM's confidentiality agreements. If IDR hadn't dropped the ball, we'd all be worshiping at their altar instead of Microsoft's. Remember, Microsoft was a computer language company at that time; they had no Operating System. After IDR dropped the ball, Microsoft bought what would become DOS from another company, modified it to fit IBM's specs, then licensed it to IBM and, as it turned out, other companies as well. Microsoft's initial success in the O/S market was pure luck. It's continuing success is marketing. Plus, it was an easy call for users (individual and corporate) to stick with Microsoft Operating Systems since most everyone went to IBM-compatible computers in the 80s, so it was easy to retain users for compatibility reasons.
Today's Microsoft is the Frankenstein's Monster that IBM created. Bill Gates was smart enough to seize on an opportunity and ran with it. None of this has anything to do with the quality of Microsoft's software. People endure Microsoft's software quality, design deficiencies and screw-ups because most feel like they don't have any other choice and, in many cases, they really don't.
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.