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 ...
In NYC 47th Street Photo and MS were giving away a copy when one purchased a tube of memory chips. IIRC, same deal with a graphics card for awhile.
Sure do! Heck, 1,0 was first cabin.My first system was a trash 80, upgraded to a whole 16kb memory! (so I could program star trek) be around late 78 it was
Yep.
I read just now on the SYM-1 Wikipedia page that it had an oscilloscope display option.
That's funny, because I developed one of my own for the KIM that did true X-Y plotting on a scope, a 256x256 grid of dots. I set up two 8-bit latches with inexpensive 8-bit passive (resistor network) DACs, and rigged the Y latch so that when you wrote to it, a triggerable one-shot would fire. The X and Y DACs went to the horizontal and vertical inputs of the scope, and the one-shot went to the "intensity" input (brightness).
So you would latch an X value, then a Y value, and the invisible beam would move to position (X,Y) on the CRT, and then when the one-shot fired, it would brighten the beam for a few microseconds, producing a single dot on the screen.
The CPU had a display list of X,Y pairs, and it ran that list to produce graphic displays made from dots, meanwhile computing position values and so forth.
I wrote routines that produced 7-segment digits from dots, and eventually had a complete "Lunar Lander" program with a little sprite of a lander module with variable retrorocket flame, and numeric displays of altitude, descent velocity, and remaining fuel.
All the computations, the display routines, and the display data pairs, fit inside the KIM's 1KB of RAM, and the thing ran in real-time on the 1MHz 8-bit CPU.
Now, THOSE were the days.... LOL :-)
I bought a copy of Tom Pittman's TINY BASIC ROMs for the KIM, and got that running with an ASR-33 teletype, but BASIC was never my favorite language. Like you say, Assembler RULES.
16KB of RAM, man you were flying!!
That's great, I didn't know anybody was still making adapters for the old parallel printer ports. Cool!!
To be truthful, I haven't gone into VM yet. Maybe this winter after I fix all my progs that don't run in 10...
My thing is miniaturizing for rescue platforms, primarily... I used that DOS all the way into WinXP SP-2 in lieu of a decent boot disk platform (which for the most part, Microsoft didn't support). Nowadays I seldom even use my mini WinXP boot disks, not to mention the DOS stuff... Pretty much all about mini Win7 ...
But yeah, booting win 3.11 on a modern machine is pretty hilarious - That splash screen that used to be there for minutes is now barely a blue flash...
Yeah, more expensive, but back then Bill Gates could afford a Mac too. Look over his right shoulder on the table behind him....
I still use a computer with windows 95 on it...works fine!!!
I admit I finally retired my last Win95 install a couple years ago, and now the oldest version I run is Win98SE. But if 95 does what you need, keep it flyin' and more power to ya. What kind of hardware is it on, or is it in a VM now?
I worked for International Harvester in the late 1950’s in Broadview Illinois....you could get inside the computer and they said it produced enough heat for a 7 story hotel. Clicking switches and lights everywhere.
I wrote all my graduate school papers using a daisy wheel printer designed for it. We used Micom printers at work that utilized 12" floppy disks.
Both masters theses I wrote I did on this computer and printer set up, because in those days you had to submit a typed "letter perfect" theses for publication. You could not use dot matrix printers for that purpose.
So much easier to do job searches and type up resumes, when the only other alternative was a an IBM Selectric 3.
I still have that Royal CP/M and all it's 5.25" disks. Still works!
FReegards!
cleaning the lint boogers out of a mechanical ball mouse regularly became an OCD of mine
Anyone remember having to set jumpers on the NIC card? :-)
Windows ... you will believe your 386 will fly like a 286 running DOS.
... Yes, I’m old....
M4L xp
It often seemed my mouse was eating, or at least grooming, my cats.
6809
Perhaps some virtual Viagra would help bring it back up?
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