Happy 25th to Windows!

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Happy 25th to Windows!

Postby jon » Sat Nov 20, 2010 2:29 pm

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the day that Microsoft first released Windows 1.0 on November 20, 1985. Not that anyone much took notice, for lots of reasons:
  1. These were the days before major product launch events, though Apple spent millions the year before on "1984"-themed Mac TV ads for Superbowl Sunday
  2. Nothing very interesting ran on the new Microsoft Windows environment
  3. Windows 1.0 was not an operating system, just an add-on to DOS
  4. You could only run applications side by side ("tiled") which made the view pretty small on the low resolution small monitors of the day
  5. Windows was over four years in the making, after endless delays and at least one name change (Interface Manager was its original name)
It was not really until Windows 3 was released in 1990 that the world stood up and took notice. The seeds of success were already there a few months earlier, and I was caught up in it, too. Excel came out with a free run-time version of Windows 2.2 and was the first important piece (Paint came out with Windows 1.0) of software to run on Windows. For my money, it was the finest spreadsheet available at the time for those of us who refused to look at Macs. Word was released for Windows 3. And the more popular WordPerfect lost a lot of ground before finally relenting and releasing one of the more poorly designed Windows version of a software product in history. Less than a year later, WordPerfect got it right, but still ended up getting killed by Microsoft Office as Microsoft offered it free of charge to most businesses.

Windows 95 marked the first time that Windows was an operating system, not just something you installed on top of DOS. And the rest is history, detailed very nicely here (with a lot of ads):
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/ ... of_Windows

Although this article doesn't touch on what came before, Windows was really a "Johnny Come Lately" as the Apple Macintosh had sold big thanks to the technology. Even the Mac was really Version 2 of the Apple Lisa that came out at the beginning of the 1980s. All of which was preceded by Xerox PARC, a 1970s research organization in California that invented the mouse and the graphic interface we know as Windows. Apple's Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC and knew he had found the future of computing.
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Re: Happy 25th to Windows!

Postby Buckley » Sat Nov 20, 2010 4:31 pm

jon wrote:It was not really until Windows 3 was released in 1990 that the world stood up and took notice.


My first computer was a 386 with 4 megs of RAM, a 120 meg HDD, and running Windows 3.11 and DOS 6.0. I'm sure there are members here who had computers far older (and I had a friend with a Commodore 64) but I still remember how excited I was to get a computer in the house. It was also the first computer I used with a modem to use Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and I remember the first time I put a song on the HDD... had to be ripped from a CD in WAV because the mp3 format didn't really exist yet (or at least there weren't tools I could find "online" for converting), so, I could store one song at a time (and that was after my dad spent about $300 or so on a CD-ROM upgrade). I still say that Windows 3.11 was probably the most stable "OS" I ever ran (maybe because it was nothing more than a skin). I actually found and booted that computer a few years back, it still ran.

Happy 25th, Windows!
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Re: Happy 25th to Windows!

Postby jon » Sat Nov 20, 2010 4:53 pm

Within a year of the release of the IBM PC on August 12, 1981, they seemed to be "everywhere" in the business world. Of course, there are been computers dedicated to a single person previously, but never had they shown up in such huge numbers on the desktops of office workers before. Now many company presidents, including mine at CKUA/Access TV, wanted them on their desk. Previously, in 1981, at my previous employer, a 775 person engineering firm, my boss the VP Finance was cutting edge when he ordered an Apple because of VisiCalc, a spreadsheet that allowed him to do What If? calculations that were previously too time consuming to even contemplate.

Personally, I'll be celebrating my 40th anniversary of Computing next February. A pure accident really. I was in First Year Science at UBC, and had taken an extra course which turned out to be the first time an undergraduate Math course had used a computer as part of the course itself. They taught us to keypunch as part of the course!

Within two years, I experienced "personal computing" as the IBM mainframe operating systems of the day supported computer terminals that make it look like you owned the computer yourself, even though you were sharing it with hundreds of others. Another year after that, thanks to a PhD. thesis by a UBC Computer Science student, I was using e-mail. Yes, that's right. In late 1973. At the time, it didn't go anywhere else except UBC.

The closest I ever got in school (UBC) to Windows was a virtual editor that took over the whole screen and let you move around freely, making changes to the lines of the file you could see. Before that, we only had commands that meant things like "Change Line 47 from ABC to DEF".

But we still don't talk to computers like we envisioned as only a few years off back then.
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Re: Happy 25th to Windows!

Postby Mike Cleaver » Sat Nov 20, 2010 5:32 pm

Oh but there are voice command systems that work better every day.
I began experimenting very early with voice dictation systems.
The first were horrible, barely able to recognize even the simplest of words.
One of the first I tried was something dreamed up by a computer programmer at BN.
I then tried Dragon with not much success but I understand it too has vastly improved over the years.
Now, voice dictation with the built in Windows Vista system actually is very good and the program continues to learn as you use it.
It's still not perfect though.
You actually need a very good microphone (preferably a professional headset) and a relatively quiet environment so the system doesn't become affected by outside noises.
You can tell the computer to open and close programs and do most of the things that require a mouse or a keyboard.
Once you get the hang of it, dictation makes inputting long documents a lot easier and more accurate than keyboarding because of the auto correct features built into the dictation program.
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54 years experience at some of Canada's Premier Broadcasting Stations
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Re: Happy 25th to Windows!

Postby crs » Sat Nov 20, 2010 5:54 pm

Is this something worth celebrating??? Gates ticket to get richer every 2-3 years. Sheeesh
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Re: Happy 25th to Windows!

Postby jon » Sat Nov 20, 2010 7:22 pm

crs wrote:Is this something worth celebrating??? Gates ticket to get richer every 2-3 years. Sheeesh

I remember it ever since the Japanese Invasion of the early 1970s when Datsuns seemed to be everywhere in Vancouver: the fear that we in North America would no longer profit from the Technology Revolution. That "low wage" countries would be impossible to compete with, leaving us with no jobs in North America.

Over the years that followed, we lost a lot of jobs to the lower wages of other countries, but most of the Computer and Hardware in the world (based on Sales $ Volume) is still being "designed" in the U.S. I eventually concluded that the type of society that exists in the U.S. and certain other countries allows individuals to be the type of creative people required to create software and hardware.

That, I think, especially after 40 years, is something to celebrate.

Mike Cleaver wrote:Oh but there are voice command systems that work better every day.

True enough. Even the most rudimentary cell phones have pretty decent voice command systems.

But what we thought was so close at hand during my years at UBC (1970-74) was the ability of computers (i.e. - software) to understand human speech. Not just recognize the individual words, but understand the meaning of the sentences and paragraphs.

On the other hand, so many technology advances have happened that we never even conceived of back then.

The Oil Crisis already had us thinking that "Less is More" might take over from "Bigger, Bigger, Bigger", but we never imagined that no one would go the Moon again in the next 40 years. Unless, of course, they were bypassing it for Mars.
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Re: Happy 25th to Windows!

Postby PMC » Mon Nov 22, 2010 7:04 pm

today it is Windows 7 in 64 bit.

When Windows and the Mac existed then, the idea of having a 64 bit processor on a desktop was only a dream.

For those using 64 bit from 32 bit (XP,Win2k), when buying/installing devices, 64 bit device drivers are required, and the included disc may only be for 32 bit versions of the OS. Some of you will remember this same transformation occured with 16 bit to 32 bit. When buying a device like a PC Tv, browse the manufacturers website for the 64 bit device driver(s) if the disc doesn't have it.
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