Posted on 11/20/2015 6:15:33 PM PST by dayglored
Microsoft's cash cow celebrates three decades of PC dominance
On November 20, 1985, Microsoft unveiled its graphical operating system.
Windows 1.0 offered a new way to navigate a PC, clicking a cursor on various boxes rather than scrolling through lines of text in order to navigate data and applications. While arguably less efficient than a command line, the graphical user interface (GUI) was more intuitive and easier for novice users to manage.
Running Windows 1.0 required a PC running DOS 2.0 as well as two double-sided floppy disk drives, 256K of memory, and a new-fangled device known as a "graphics card." Windows worked with some DOS apps, while others would just run in full-screen mode.
Windows 1.0 was not exactly a stirring success. PC users accustomed to the command-line interface of DOS weren't yet sold on a GUI, and only about 500,000 copies were sold in the first couple of years.
It took until the early 90s for Windows to catch on, but when it did, the OS became synonymous with the PC and made Microsoft one of the most successful and powerful companies in the world for the next two decades.
So, let's look back at some of the high (and low) points from 30 years of Windows...
(Excerpt) Read more at theregister.co.uk ...
This was the 80's. It was like, totally RAD, dude!
Windows 1.0?? Heck, I started programming (badly) in DOS 3.3!
Oh, shoot, you're right...
Before that it was Basic on a Commodore 64. I really am old, aren’t I?
This article jumps from Windows 1 to Windows 3 to Windows XP?
I played with it. It.took about 360k of the 600k or so ram you had. This was really before Extended and Expanded memory. The ugly fonts and constant crashes. I wrote some windows 2 and 3 programs in C back then but 1 was really really worthless except as an exercise.
Our first computer/PC was an IBM.
I’m surprised Windows NT didn’t make the “Good” list.
It was a pretty solid and long-lived OS in its day.
(From: Microsoft TechNet Magazine https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2008.07.windowsconfidential.aspx
Remember Microsoft Bob? It was intended to be a friendly user interface on top of Windows 3.1, but instead it flopped infamously (earning the dubious distinction of being named one of the worst technology products of all time by PC World). In the years that have passed since Bob's demise, the product has been relegated to the status of a running joke with the mere mention of its name drawing snickers.
Incidentally, Microsoft Bob's internal code name was "Utopia" -- an ambitious name to be sure, but at least one that had some snap and pizzazz. When we learned that the marketing folks had decided to name the product Bob, we all shook our heads in disbelief.
But there's more to Bob's legacy than you might know. It turns out Bob was actually more useful dead than alive.
When you intend to distribute your software on a CD, one thing you have to worry about is making sure your product actually fits on a single CD. Fortunately, it so happened that even after taking into account the disk space required for translations, support tools, and the other stuff that has to go onto the Windows XP CD, there was still about 30 megabytes of storage capacity remaining. The people who worry about these sorts of things figured, well, we already paid for all that storage capacity on the CD so we might as well use it, right?
The result was a rather feeble attempt to slow down the people who like to make illegal copies of Windows. Somebody decided to fill that extra capacity on the CD with dummy data and to have the Windows Setup program verify that the dummy data was still there. This, the logic went, would force people downloading a copy of the CD image to download an additional thirty or so megabytes of data. Remember, this was back in the day when "broadband" hadn't yet become a household word and mainstream users were using dial-up connections. Having to transfer an additional thirty megabytes of data over a 56Kb modem was a bit of an obstacle to slow users down—not that it would slow them down much by today's standards.
The person who was asked to implement this check needed a source for the dummy data. Now, he could have just called the CryptGenRandom function to generate 30 megabytes of cryptographically random bytes, but where's the fun in that? Instead, he dug through the archives and found a copy of Microsoft Bob. He took all the floppy disk images and combined them into one big file. The contents of the Microsoft Bob floppy disk images are not particularly random, so he decided to scramble up the data by encrypting it. When it came time to enter the encryption key, he just smashed his hand haphazardly across the keyboard and out came an encrypted copy of Microsoft Bob. That's what went into the unused space as ballast data on the Windows XP CD.
In the end, Windows XP became the most effective Microsoft Bob deployment tool ever developed. And if you go way back into your closet, dig out your copy of Windows XP, and can somehow channel the right spirits to mash your hands on the keyboard in exactly the right way, then out of your encryption program will come a copy of Microsoft Bob.
>> don’t forget Clippie!
PLEASE. Let me forget Clippie.
It's not listing every release, just the best and worst. And only vaguely in chron order.
>> don’t forget Clippie!
But what was even more annoying than Clippie was that stupid damned dog. Whatever its name was. Probably “Tim Cook”. ;-)
Can you plug a mouse into it?
But also had W/95 and 98se, and learned many way to tweak it (es. with the constant low system resources). Went from that to XP, then jumped to W/8 and then to W/10. Word Pro software is the most transcendent it seems. Thank God for all.
I still have my IBM luggable. I logged a lot of time on it.
30 years ago, I didn’t have a PC at home, and I think the office where I worked had a DOS version of Word Perfect. That was the extent of computer sophistication for that firm back then.
I was having a lot of fun with MSDOS 5 and Visual Basic, until the office bought this stuff.
heh heh . . . windows 10 is cheaper! :)
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