Twenty-Five years ago Bill Gates gave the world Windows 1.0. No one knew at the time what would become of Windows but looking back it's quite incredible what it has become. Bill boasted about a graphical user interface, or as he called it then, the 16-bit graphical operating environment, was a step up for the computer industry. The feature list was long and distinguished for its time but seems trivial by today's standard.
Regardless of what you think about Windows you can't deny the fact that it changed the landscape of our culture in every fashion. Who knows what OS we would be all running today if Windows 1.0 never saw the birth of light ( Fun fact, Bill Gates wanted to call Windows 1.0 "Interface Manager").
Windows has defined today's modern computing. From Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 we all owe Microsoft a little due diligence. Hats off to you windows and enjoy your birthday :)
The biggest developments from Microsoft are few, but DirectX is a huge contribution for gaming and graphics.
The biggest developments from Microsoft are few, but DirectX is a huge contribution for gaming and graphics.
OS/2 was techincally Windows, it was written by Microsoft in colaboration with IBM... you could even run windows 3.11 apps on it because it was so similar!
OS/2 was a true 32-bit OS; Windows 3.1 was just a graphical shell running on top of DOS.
Last edited by TRC on 11 Nov 2008 - 02:31
The biggest developments from Microsoft are few, but DirectX is a huge contribution for gaming and graphics.
OS/2 was techincally Windows, it was written by Microsoft in colaboration with IBM... you could even run windows 3.11 apps on it because it was so similar!
OS/2 could run Windows 3.11 in itself!
This is not the whole story. It's true that MS and IBM started to work on OS/2 1.0 together, and split because of philosophical difference. Both companies released their own version of OS/2 1.0. Both were very similar in look to Windows 3.1, but a lot more stable.
From there, MS went the NT way.
IBM started working on OS/2 2.0. That version had nothing to do with the previous one. It was designed from the ground up. It gain lots of favor with the financial industry especially in Europe, where IBM was basically giving it away inside huge mainframe deal. Version 2.1 made it the best OS you could run on a PC back then. But it was badly marketed by IBM and then they just abandonned the concept.
Warp came with version 3.0 and 4.0. They were never push and basically left to fend for themselves.
Hats off to you, Bill. I thank you for bringing such fierce competition to the world of operating systems. Without you, our world would have been far too different.
oh come one, second guessing a future that never existed....
oh come one, second guessing a future that never existed....
You mean like almost everybody else in their comments?
Mac OS was a new spin on Xerox PARC research. GEM (by Digital) was a copy of Mac OS, also used in the Atari ST (TOS), and copied for Geos (famous on the C64/C128 ).
Without Windows, who knows if the PC would be dominant? It would could have been an Amiga world, or Mac, .... We don't know. What we do know is that Windows (even if it was a copy) brought a standard in the computing world, even more so when Windows 3.0/3.1 came along. MS a monopoly, YES, but it was not always for the worst.
apple refused to license system os (or what they call now MAC OS) while MS accepted , the end result .....
MS still haven't learned that they should keep Ballmer locked up...
lol hilarious did that dude ever had hair?
1. Windows 1.0 was released in 1985, not 1983, making it 23 years this year.
2. Your linked article was posted on Nov 20th 2005 and refer to it as the exact date, so we aren't even on the right day here.
wat
I agree with gnuman, the biggest development for Microsoft was DirectX. The xbox 360 was pretty awesome too, especially Live, as it was the first gaming console to offer that level of online ability. I wouldn't be wrong in saying that any console manufacturers would look to Live before attempting to create an online environment for their games.
In the end ultimately it depends on end user what OS they use, there is no one OS that fits all, each OS has it own positives points and negative points. If Windows was that bad it people woudn't have used it for this long and honestly Windows has come a long way from 1.0 to Vista, and Both Mr.Bill and Microsoft have done a great job.
I am gaming freak, and I have enjoyed playing games on DOS, Windows, XBox and PSP. Playing games on Xbox was nice experience than playing on PC
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