
"While arguably less efficient than a command line"
Actually, it depends on what task you're going to do. CLI too in many cases can be very inefficient.
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 …
"CLI too in many cases can be very inefficient."
I'm not sure what those would be. With command completion, automatic cd to any directory on any drive, and a well chosen set of TSR's the efficiency is pretty high. You do know that the first thing you do when setting up a DOS machine is write batch files for all your tasks. Right? In fact you will probably just copy over a big pile of your old ones.
I still use DOS most days and find it very efficient alongside KDE. And can report that it is only the things which DOS doesn't do which are more efficient on KDE. By the way, although the software wasn't written back then, now we have a complete TCP/IP networking stack that will run off a floppy and even using DOS 2.0. Of course, not everybody keeps up with the times.
Mine's the one with the copy of Pocket PC Ref.
"I'm not sure what those would be."
DOS was essentially a single tasked system which kludges for very small TSR applications. It wasn't multi tasking in any sense whatsoever. Many of the leading DOS applications became veritable kitchen sinks of extraneous functionality in order to circumvent these issues.
"You do know that the first thing you do when setting up a DOS machine is write batch files for all your tasks. Right?"
I don't doubt it. It doesn't help unless your workflow is extremely rigid and inflexible.
"I still use DOS most days and find it very efficient alongside KDE. "
That doesn't make any sense. KDE is a GUI for Linux and Unix systems. If you don't like KDE you would open a command prompt which would typically be bash. I suppose you could launch dosemu or freedos via a VM in Linux though I don't see much point. If you're so dyed in the wool that you haven't advanced from DOS then why bother with KDE at all?
That doesn't make any sense. KDE is a GUI for Linux and Unix systems. If you don't like KDE you would open a command prompt which would typically be bash. I suppose you could launch dosemu or freedos via a VM in Linux though I don't see much point. If you're so dyed in the wool that you haven't advanced from DOS then why bother with KDE at all?
Why doesn't that make sense? I use tcsh on BSD and have numerous terminals open in KDE, those are my three favourite environments, but DOS is simpler and much quicker because of the low level control. I'm well aware of the limitations of DOS, but also the advantages. The utilities available for DOS are superb (check out the Simtel and other huge libraries) and it is worth using and jumping back and forth from the BSD to the DOS machines. With a modern network stack everything communicates so the lan is like one machine anyway. Don't know about Windows, to me Microsoft's real gem is DOS.
Digital Research DOS (DR DOS), later bought by Novell, was a competing version of DOS. Novell DOS 7 had pre-emptive multitasking (compare to the 'co-operative multitasking' Apple and other had) which worked the way most multitasking systems do today. It basically could do most of what Win 95 could do, except that it was command-line and not a GUI, and it did it before Win 95 arrived. It was very nice once the bugs were worked out. Unfortunately there were a lot of bugs and it took a long time to get rid of the big ones, by which time Win 95 and its GUI was available and that was pretty much it. Novell sold it to someone else, I think Caldera. This resulted in MS going full Attila on Caldera, trying to rig it so that apps built for MS OSes couldn't work on DR DOS. That in turn resulted in a major lawsuit, which MS settled just before going to court, for an undisclosed amount. (Later revealed to be on the order of $280 million. Novell should have kept DR DOS and fought back against MS.)
> Novell DOS 7 had pre-emptive multitasking
DRI had pre-emptive multi-tasking, multiuser and networking systems since 1978 with MP/M, MP/M2, MP/M-86, Concurrent-CP/M-86, Multiuser-DOS and various other derivitives. It was demonstrating Concurrent-CP/M-86, with full pre-emptive multi-tasking using virtual screens*, when MS announced MS-DOS 2.0.
DR-DOS was originally built from Concurrent-DOS source code by removing multi-tasking and multi-user. It was preceeded by DOS+ which left in some multi-tasking.
DR-DOS 6 added task-switching so multiple tasks could be loaded and switched between using EEMS (only the foreground task would run). Novell-DOS added back multi-tasking but it was a very poor imitation of Multiuser-DOS.
> It basically could do most of what Win 95 could do, except that it was command-line and not a GUI,
DRI's GEM GUI had sold a million copies before Windows 1 was released. It then wound up on Atari 512s as TOS.
* A keystroke combination switched the screen between the running programs. On an IBM PC 8088 it required an EEMS memory card, such as a AST RAMPage. To do the context switching. It only required a small register block to be changed to 'bank switch' the program. The OS could recover disk access time to give CPU time to other programs (which Windows 3.x couldn't do).
>KDE you would open a command prompt which would typically be bash
Ok I can agree with everything else you said and I could even agree somewhat if you said Gnome isntead of KDE but KDE is still (for now) very much a POSIX in spirit UNIX flavor agnostic DE so assuming use of the insecure code hairball GNU shell mess that is bash is not necessarily safe. One of the big reasons OpenBSD is so safe out of the box is the wise choice to not include bash.
> CLI too in many cases can be very inefficient.
Microsoft went out of its way to make the CLI useless. While DRI gave CP/M-86 through DR-DOS (and all its other OSes) decent command line editing and recall, MS did its best to make its inefficient. Windows 95/98 did actually have doskey.com that gave a halfway decent command editor but it was not installed by default and not even in the manual.
At the 1983 COMDEC, Paul Allen outlined what features the 'next' version of MS-DOS (2) would have, including a help system (finally in MS-DOS 5) and command line editing. But they saw GEM being demonstrated and then started writing Windows 1, dropping most of what Paul announced.
"thank god that has gone with the dark ages"
Unless you still use *NIX of course. It is something that could do with fixing as there is no granular auditing or control of system settings, and parsing text files doesn't scale very well.
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>Unless you still use *NIX of course. It is something that could do with fixing as there is no granular auditing or control of system settings, and parsing text files doesn't scale very well.
Solaris for example and even many versions of Linux include RBAC and centralized service configuration (SMF and systemd) so your knowledge may be a bit outdated.
"Oh yeah the Windows Registry was the bees knees especially early on."
It was always better than text files.
"Solaris for example and even many versions of Linux include RBAC and centralized service configuration (SMF and systemd) so your knowledge may be a bit outdated."
It's still based on text files with no granular access control or auditing of individual settings.
>It was always better than text files.
Maybe from a desktop management perspective but it sure wasn't for app developers fighting dll hell on deployed machines. Granted of course that was long ago.
>It's still based on text files with no granular access control or auditing of individual settings.
SMF isn't (see Service Configuration Repository) and offers granular access control (not sure about auditing but assume also) but yeah systemd once again fails to solve real world problems. Also I believe IBM is basically best in class about auditing configuration with AIX.
"it sure wasn't for app developers fighting dll hell on deployed machines"
That has ZERO to do with how the system config is stored.
"SMF isn't (see Service Configuration Repository) and offers granular access control"
So *Nix finally dragging itself into the 21st century. Still doesn't cover anything like the whole OS though does it.
The first successful re-incarnation of NT. The greatest desktop since WfW 3.11? (from which I made more easy dosh than anything since). I mean what has happened since? XP was just a finesse with added activation issues. Vista was a mistake in trying to go in a different direction restored by Windows 7. MS didn't learn and diverged again with 8/8.1. Oh, don't they find retreat painful?
Win2k was great - is great. I still run legacy apps in win2k VMs. Faster and sweeter than it ever was. It will only die when the last app expires. Can't see that happening before its successors are history we may choose to forget.
Agreed 100%, win 2k was sweet.
XP took a couple of service packs to get ok, and 7 really reminded me of 2k's no nonsense approach.
Win 8 was as bad as everyone says and 10 is too dark and dismal - coupled with too many "things I may be interested in" like live stock quotes for shares I don't own and the weather in cities I've never been to.
"2k professional was also a nice step up from W98 and (of course) no DOS to worry about."
That was the entire point. The PoS's that were Windows95 and Windows98 were created to provide a migration path from DOS to NT.
When Microsoft released WindowsNT, the initial response from the IT community was "it's a very nice operating system, but it won't run all this software we currently have on the shelf and we can't afford to replace all that!" Win95 and Win98 were the shims that allowed that transition, being able to run both DOS and NT applications (even if poorly in many cases).
Win2k Pro was only offered to businesses. The "consumer" version with which it was paired was Windows Millennium, but anyone who could get their grubbies on 2k eschewed that abysmal undertaking.
The final unification took place with WinXP
But.... Mommy SatNad wants you to know all this crap. Didn't you get the Advert telling you that once you install W10 you are part of the MS Collective and that there is no escape....
Joking aside this is just their headless chicken approach to development. Throws a whole shed load of stuff out there and a few things are bound to stick, that's what Cortana has been programmed to say....
My take is that Apple's Classic OS probably peaked in 1991 with the introduction of System 7, not coincidentally approximately when Apple's many failed internal attempts to write a complete replacement began. They really missed a trick in moving to the PowerPC in not then writing something more modern and forcing 68000 apps into a sandbox, but I guess there's the list of things early-90s Apple could achieve with X developers in N years and the list of things it couldn't. Microsoft then leapt ahead until Apple was so far behind that it had to buy in a solution.
... but we can still thank the Apple of that period for Truetype fonts — not the idea so much, but the specific implementation and the help in market positioning. That Adobe Type 1 monopoly helped almost nobody.
Quirky printing was a feature on just about all printers until the first "winprinters"[1] turned up and WYSIWYG started doing what it says on the tin, rather then whatever the printer driver thought it ought to.
[1] Native GDI to page support. With the benefit of hindsight it seems bleedin' obvious that as a printer prints a load of dots and the O/S has just rendered what you want on screen as a load of dots, shoving the latter load of dots onto paper kicks the shit out of translating it all into printer language and having the printer translate it back into dots, both for accuracy and speed.
@TeeCee - My printer and screen are not the same resolution, and don't have the same colour capability, so just shoving the dots from the screen to the printer ain't gonna work.
"winprinters" still require the dots to be rendered again for paper, they just make the printer cheaper by requiring the printer driver to do that on the PC. It's also good for Microsoft - finding a driver for an alternate OS is difficult, so you're unlikely to switch, and encourages purchases of new printers when MS releases a new OS without drivers for "old models".
Personally, I'd prefer an intelligent printer, supporting PostScript.
[Edit] @Danny 14 - Yes, there is also merit in the "extremely dumb, very well defined" printer. I restrict my rant to the neither-one-thing-nor-the-other stuff between the extremes.
Native GDI to page support
On RiscOS of course, a lot more expensive. "Laserdirect" used an expansion card in the computer fitted with an FPGA and connected directly to certain models of printer. I think the first was an Oki but the other two were Canons - I had an LBP-4. Cost me something like £1,200 back in 1989 or thereabouts, almost as much as the Archimedes did.
In the days when full-page graphics were next to impossible in the 256k (or whatever) memory fitted to most laser printers (dot matrix didn't have the same problem because they only needed to "remember" one line at a time), the only way to get a page which mirrored what was onscreen was to have the two systems extremely tightly integrated. Systems which relied on PCL also relied on printer fonts matching onscreen fonts and so on and so on. Apple and Adobe did a tie-up and if I remember correctly the Mac's screen was essentially drawn by Postscript.
Computer Concepts - creators of Impression and Artworks (which morphed into Xara) created the Laserdirect which used the "video" interface on the LBP-4, could produce an effective 600dpi from a printer that was officially 300dpi, produced on paper exactly what was shown on screen (bearing in mind that Acorn had "outline" fonts on the desktop earlier than anyone else) and did it a heck of a lot quicker than other methods.
Only retired mine a few years ago, but the LBP-4 was built like a tank (I think it was manufactured by HP). It's in the attic now and I bet it still works.
M.
The original 1985 LaserWriter had a 12Mhz 68000; every Mac available at its launch and for the next two years had an 8Mhz 68000. Having the separation of Postscript — usually mapped to QuickDraw on the then-two-colour Mac — is more or less what made the first generation of desktop publishing feasible. Your slower computer with the approximately real-time display could stick with bitmapped fonts, and the resolutions and colour depth were low enough versus available RAM that you could use binary masking for complicated shape things like path clipping. Your printer which was allowed to take a few seconds to produce the image of a page could do so with a much more rigorous approach.
... plus it was just a helpful way to 'multitask' back when none of the high volume consumer OSes were very good at it.
Ditto, of our 80 odd Amstrad 640s we had 1 windows machine no-one used, and 79 Gem and DOS Automenu machines. By the time of Windows 3 and Netware 3 (I think) all that had changed. We had a brief flutter with OS/2 when Escom shipped it as the default OS, before switching to 95 when that came out. Windows all the way since.
Just about everyone who jokes about it has never used it. I did briefly and could see what they were trying to do - at a time when computers were still a bit scary, they tried out a design metaphor based abound making it feel more intuitive for casual users. Yes, it was pretty ghastly if you were used to the desktop metaphor and trying to do real work, but conceptually worth experimenting with.
I remember my PHB at the time looking at Windows 1.0 and commenting that it would never catch on, and that we certainly wouldn't be bothering with it.
Our flagship software product at that date ran on DOS and used GEM, having recently moved over from CP/M.
When WFW 3.11 was getting well established the same PHB gave* another company the entire source code to produce a Windows version, on the basis that the few people who might use it didn't justify the cost of developing one in house.
* That's "gave" not "licensed", "outsourced" etc. as their lawyers pointed out when he tried to claim royalties on the Windows version.
DOS 6.22 was three 1.44Mb disks, WFW 3.11 was six disks - seven if you wanted to add the "Wolverine" 32-bit TCP/IP stack.
Or one, when I first started playing with Windows. Until we networked the office (thin net and safertaps) I think there were three general purpose PCs, mostly just running Wordperfect. When the first batch of a dozen or so '386SX 4MB (IMSMC) machines appeared for desktops and all needed WfW3.11 and MS Office installed, I got very bored feeding floppies, even if I could do five or six machines sequentially.
One floppy disc with a minimal DOS install, NE2000 driver and Novell networking. Boot the PC and run the self-created batch file that found all the necessary DOS and Windows files / CABs / whatever on the file server. Walk away and do something useful for - ooh, thirty minutes then come back and run the Office installer also from the file server.
My greatest success was making WfW, Word and Excel work on a 286 with 2MB RAM and a 20MB HDD. The poor secretary in question had been overlooked in the initial purchase round.
M.
Usually referred to as Windows for Warehouses in reference to it's slow (initial) sales. IIRC (probably not) it introduced Microsoft's own TCP/IP stack, when world+dog was using Chameleon NEWT*. Like most Microsoft first iterations, it didn't really work very well.
* Yes, children, in those far off days you had to buy a separate piece of software if you wanted to communicate using any protocol other than NETBIOS.
it introduced Microsoft's own TCP/IP stack, when world+dog was using Chameleon NEWT*. Like most Microsoft first iterations, it didn't really work very well.
WTF was Chameleon NEWT? We were using Peter Tattam's Trumpet Winsock!
http://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/
From the Wiki-bloody-pedia:
Trumpet Winsock was one of the few Winsock 1.0 implementations that could be installed under Windows 3.0, which had no built-in support for Winsock. Trumpet was also the most popular shareware implementation of Winsock for Windows 3.x.
WTF was Chameleon NEWT? We were using Peter Tattam's Trumpet Winsock!
We had both of those, and a couple of others. One of our products was a middleware piece for Windows, and we wanted to support as many TCP/IP stacks as we could. At some point before Winsock became standard we were using a product called VSL - the Virtual Sockets Library - which provided the same flavor of sockets API on top of various stacks.
We also supported communicating directly over NetBIOS, NetBEUI, and Hayes-compatible async modems. I don't remember whether there was an SNA stack available for WfWG, but if there was, we supported that too (LU2 and LU6.2, plus talking to IMS over the LU6.2-to-LU6.1 bridge). For IPC on the local machine, we supported DDE. Maybe some other things.
> at the time we called this 'Widows for Wombats'.
Later 3.11 became 'Windows for Warehouses'. The new Windows (later called 95) had been announced and was supposed to be delivered by April but was delayed. Buying of 3.11 all but stopped though it was still being manufactured*. It was reputed to have filled several warehouses before manufacturing eventually** changed to Win95.
* Previously, when OS/2 Warp was about to go into full production, Microsoft went to all the diskette manufacturers and bought the total production for the next six months. This restricted the availability of OS/2 and was still being used when Win95 went RTM.
** Bill Gates is reputed to have said that "Windows 95 will be out before Christmas, but we may have to delay December for a couple of months".
For some reason where I worked at the time we called this 'Widows for Wombats'. I forget why, if there was ever a reason.
Nicely surreal, and I prefer that to our term for it, which was "Windows for Playgroups" (presumably, because we didn't see it as a "grown up" OS).
"You might be thinking of 95, although I think that was around 19 floppies"
Yes, 19 for a retail version. W95 OSR2 (4.00.950B) took 23 floppies, if someone decided to create installation disks. It wasn't normally sold on floppies. Only CD versions and OEM preloads on harddisks.
OSR2.5 (950C) may well have been 27 because of included IE 4.0 goodness.
Grr. Could use some mindbleach right now. Maybe a bottle of scotch will suffice.
"You might be thinking of 95, although I think that was around 19 floppies (when created from the CD) IIRC."
Win95 was offered for sale on Floppy and CD, many of the early adopters who queued up over night for the launch didn't have CD drives. Few people did then.
Queues you say? Yes, people queued for hours if not days for the launch of Win'95. Apple didn't invent that either :-)
Even on the PC some had been using GEM for 9 months, many more using it on Atari ST and I believe the Amiga was shipping as well. I'd already grown to hate the original Macintosh GUI before any of that.
As usual Microsoft were last to the party but somehow manage to get fans believing they were first.
@Danny 14; Uncle Slacky specifically qualified his comment with "(consumer) Windows" though, and Windows 2000 was never sold as a consumer OS.
While this may have been the original plan, it was abandoned, and the plan to move the consumer line to an NT base had to wait until XP. This is probably the only reason that the runt-of-the-litter, dead-end, DOS-derived Windows ME was ever released in the first place- as a quickly thrown-together stop-gap.
Given that it was only around for a year before XP came out (and that 98 and 98 SE were quite well-received IIRC), you wonder why they bothered with ME at all. Suggests that they might not have been too confident about getting XP out?
I remember the same whining I hear today about the impending "activation requirement" for Windows XP as I do about everything that came after Win 7.
Michael, have an upvote.
I especially liked Windows 98 Second Edition as that had most of the bugs worked out of it compared to Win 95 and Win 98.
For blast of the past, take a look at www.mgdx.com
This guy put a lot of effort into mixing the updated Dll files from Win ME into Win 98 SE. Worked a charm and gave it new life. Still a great resource for those of us who have to resurrect ancient computers.
Although when I finally gave in and got XP Pro, I never looked back at 98SE. Now that I have Win 7 I feel I have gone full circle.
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> Windows 1.0 (all the way up to 3.1.1) wasn't an operating system but just a DOS GUI?
Windows 1 was more of a graphics library with a few simple plug-ins. It could be static linked into your application so that it could run on a bare MS-DOS system. This was used by PageMaker:
"""Until May 1987, the initial Windows release was bundled with a full version of Windows 1.0.3; after that date, a "Windows-runtime" with no task-switching capabilities was included.[10][11] Thus, users who did not have Windows could run the application from MS-DOS."""
Not only a silver surfer, but reluctant to upgrade as well!
Arthur only appeared on the earliest BBC Archimedes (before they were branded Acorn). I'm pretty certain it was known as RISC OS after the first OS upgrade (What would have been Arthur 2 became RISC OS 2, possibly because of a trademark conflict with a Dudley Moore film), and on all machines after the A300 and A400 series.
Arthur only appeared on the earliest BBC Archimedes
Still got the ROMs in the attic :-) The Archimedes is there too, and worked last year when I was trying to recover some data from some old floppies, though some of the keyboard keys didn't work and the CMOS won't hold its settings even with new batteries. The Archimedes itself (an A310 with 4MB RAM and a 120MB(IIRC) HDD) is running RO3.1
The rumour I heard about Arthur 2 was that while the original Dudley Moore film was passable, the sequel was awful and Acorn didn't want to associate themselves with it in any way. Still got the RO2 ROMs in the attic too.
Or it could simply be that "Risc OS" sounds a lot more professional than "Arthur".
M.
"Not only a silver surfer, but reluctant to upgrade as well!"
@Peter Gathercole
We upgraded them certainly (A310s) by popping the ROMs in when they arrived, and I recollect sending the Arthur ROMs back for some reason. And we added those huge Rodime 20Mb (yes Mb) hard drives later on.
I was reaching back to my earliest memories of each, not meaning to imply stasis.
I never used 1.0 or 2.0 (used GEM instead), but started at 3.0, went through 3.1(1), skipped 95, 98 and ME (shudder) because I went to NT4, and later 2000, XP, 7, and now 8.1 (with Classic Shell).
I have good memories of NT4, actually. Installed it on my wife's home machine to protect it from cleaning sprees in which she would remove unused files.
....
like config.sys, and some other stuff cluttering the home directory.
and, no, I did not give here the admin password
Ah - Windows users who ran out of disk space - so they deleted "some files that didn't seem to be needed". Usually the system Ghost back ups - or even everything in the C: root directory. The latter was instant catastrophe - which was when the former was also discovered. The CD/DVD Ghost images they had long ago thrown away in a tidying spree.
My first introduction to Windows was when one of our guys upgraded from Windows 2 to Windows 3.0. We all went to see this new "OS" up close. My main memory was how we marveled as the beast of a machine that he'd been given to run it on booted up and counted through all 5 (yes, five) megabytes (yes, MEGAbytes) of RAM.
<sigh>...it was a simpler and a happier time....
"My first introduction to Windows was when one of our guys upgraded from Windows 2 to Windows 3.0."
Mine was with either Windows 1 or 2, but I can't remember which. When the company I worked for bought their second PC, the applications we used on it were DOS ones - the same as on the other computer - apart from the back up process, which ran in Windows.
When the article says "new way to navigate a PC", I assume they mean it in the "IBM PC compatible" (#) sense, rather than the general use of the phrase.
Anyway, the Commodore Amiga was already out by that point too, with a more flexible GUI than the PC (or ST) (##) and proper pre-emptive multitasking that even Windows 3.1 couldn't manage years later. (###)
Yeah, I know people are going to say "it wasn't that useful because the lack of memory protection meant a single program could bring your whole system down". True, but it was still useful and better than the stupid hacks and specifically-written utilities needed under DOS (and IIRC the ST) to do other things that weren't included in the program you were currently running.
Half of DOS's (and the PC's) complexity and those stupid config files that people took pride in being able to configure were only necessary because MS-DOS was just a 16-bit workalike of CP/M, i.e. an OS designed for limited 8-bit architectures, and everything had to be plastered on later while retaining compatibility.
It annoys me when people (e.g. my Dad) who don't know better because they went from 8-bits to the PC excuse this as being "that's how computers were in those days". No, that's how PCs running the hackily-updated derivative of a 1970s OS called MS-DOS worked.
Admittedly the Amiga was never well-enough supported in terms of "serious" apps- so I don't blame people for using PCs for that reason- and it was allowed to rest on its laurels too much until both PC hardware and OSes caught up with and eventually surpassed it. But it deserves credit for what it did in its day.
(#) That particular phrase itself now having the air of anachronism about it- when was the last time you heard it used?
(##) Yeah, I'm trying to reignite the Amiga vs. ST holy war. Bring it on! ;-)
(##) My archetypal example of the limitations of Windows' 3.1's co-operative multitasking was telnetting into an Internet-based bulletin board circa 1994, the remote server not responding, and the whole damn system locking up until the connection finally timed out because telnet wasn't sufficiently co-operative.
I remember it well. I had a day job, but also worked on a freelance basis for PC User Magazine (RIP). I was sent 'something-or-other-utility' to review, only to discover that it needed Windows to run. I spoke to the editor; one quick phone call to Microsoft and a few days later, a stack of 5.25" floppies arrived containing Windows 1.0. Might still have them somewhere.
> Well, I've only seen pictures of Windows 1.0 - So I feel young this morning.
I actually used (or tried to use) Windows 1 at work ... and remember the "novelty" of overlapping widnows in win2.
> I do remember having to replace DR-DOS 5 with MS-DOS 6 in order to try out Win 3.1.1
> while at college - and now I've made myself feel old again..
yes, also remember thinking I'd need to move from DRDOS6 to MSDOS if I wanted to use Win3 on my home machine ... but decided that due to this added cost I'd switch to OS/2 2.0 instead as "OS/2 was the future" (and to follow up someone else comment - I also have several stacks of 20+ floopies from, various versions of OS/2!).N.b. the DRDOS/Win3 incompatibility was the old-MS at its worst - refused to allow DR (as a rival) to have pre-release access to win3 and then used an undocumented response from some DOS command to cause it to crash on DRDOS - DR could fix this triviallty but couldn't report this until they were officially allowed to access win3 after launch - hence several weeks/months of "the new win3 looks great ... but not if you're running DRDOS" articles in the press.
Anywaym this means I'm definitely in the "feeling old" camp ... may even start reminiscing about loading bootstraps using front panel switches and stackes of fanfold paper tape if I'm not carefull!
> Anywaym this means I'm definitely in the "feeling old" camp ... may even start reminiscing about loading bootstraps using front panel switches and stackes of fanfold paper tape if I'm not carefull!
You mean like the hardware I had to use in my high school days? This was my "terminal" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33) attached to one of these: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-11)
> the DRDOS/Win3 incompatibility was the old-MS at its worst -
What makes you think that these tricks are only done by 'old-MS'. 'new-MS' just hide them better.
> refused to allow DR (as a rival) to have pre-release access to win3 and then used an undocumented response from some DOS command to cause it to crash on DRDOS
Actually DRI did have pre-release access, and had it running fine on DR-DOS, but when Win3.x was released MS had added the AARD code. This produced warning messages that it wouldn't work correctly. DRI rushed out an update that defeated AARD, but, even though Win3 ran better on DR-DOS, and had much more memory available, the damage had been done.
Just visit here:
https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows1
and see Windows 1.0 in all it's glory running on an emulated PC in JavaScript in your browser booting in seconds.
Love the speed, but the interface leaves a little to be desired...
You forgot the Ebola Virus of MSFT OS's: Windows for Workgroups which routinely barfed all over the network. WfW was short for "we ain't got a fucking clue about networks, but we're the Borg and damnit, you better do as we say".
WfW was a great believer in networks should all be set to a netmask of 255.0.0.0, or in other terms, it only worked in a Bridged network...
WfW 3.11 seemed happy running on /24's back in the day.
Watching NT 4 machines argue with DEC Advanced Server [1] over who was Domain Master Browser was a different matter. I solved that one by setting up a Samba server to provide WINS and outrank them all... "I am Windows version 25.5 from the far future ! Kneel before Zod !"
[1] PathWorks/PCSA sucessor on OpenVMS. Pint icon, as some of us are still drinking to forget.
[1] PathWorks/PCSA sucessor on OpenVMS. Pint icon, as some of us are still drinking to forget.
Now you've dunnit... brought back all those memories of juggling NDIS and LAN Manager/Pathworks to get the clients to work with both DECnet and TCP/IP.
And no, one pint is nowhere enough :-)
Remember Windows 1.0? It's been 30 years (and you're officially old)
Yes, I do, and yes I am. It was bloody awful.
As I recall, it taught me to drive Windows without using the mouse. This was essential with Windows 3.11 as the mouse frequently stopped working completely as it used the same interrupt(?) as the network interface (particularly on 386-SX computers(?). This was a skill that has even come in useful with a new Windows 10 Dell that regularly "forgets" that it has a mouse after you have used its touch-screen.
Came free with our first IBM ATE (512k RAM, Hercules graphics), I was bored one afternoon and played with it for about an hour and it eventually found its way to the bin. Definitely a case of hardware not being ready for that sort of software. We didn't look at Windows again until 3.11 had become generally available.
...working for a manufacturer, and playing with Windows 0.94 on prototype hardware.
Mice were exotic devices, so we had to find our way around using keyboard only.
When the hardware bods removed the final wait state from the memory circuitry, Windows would no longer load, proving that MS had broken its own rule about never writing self-modifying code.
We had to await 0.98 before it would run again.
Windows 1 did do multitasking, despite what the press claimed. I proved it by running two copies of the BASIC interpreter, each running a program which played tunes by tweaking the sound chip. Horrible dischord though.
IIRC the press was complaining because back then "multitasking" meant "pre-emptive scheduling" which didn't grace Windows apps for - quite a while.
That fits my recollection, too... the "real" OSes (including AmigaOS) did pre-emptive multitasking, and the co-operative multitasking that pre-NT versions of Windows had was inferior.
The difference as I understand it is that under a preemptive system, the OS kernel does the time-slicing and determines how many CPU cycles to give to each task, and in what order.
With co-operative multitasking, it's up to each app to say "OK, I'm done, time for the next app to have control of the CPU", like a game of pass-the-parcel. Obviously, that renders the system hostage to the niceness & stability of the apps, but it's simpler and cheaper to implement.
The Amiga had pre-emptive multitasking - which was smugworthy - but no hardware memory management unit, which meant that one rogue app could still bring down the whole system far too easily.
Gem was bundled with the Amstrad PCs in the mid-to-late 80s (#); I remember my Dad had it on his at work.
As the article notes, Windows itself never really became successful until the early 90s, so this wasn't quite as cynically useless as it might appear in hindsight. (##)
As for Windows 95, yep. Despite still being built on DOS internally, it was the first Windows-as-an-OS-in-its-own-right version aimed at consumers and moved on a lot from 3.1, particularly with proper pre-emptive multitasking et al. It's surprising that it wasn't noted more significantly here.
(#) For non-UK readers, Amstrad were the first to really launch the IBM PC compatible as a mass-market format here, with prices cheap enough to get higher-end home users. They lost that position in the early 90s, but for a point in the late 80s, Amstrad dominated the market that they'd help open up.
(##) Though the late Guy Kewney noted of its inclusion that it was an example of Alan Sugar's "mug's eyeful: A WIMP feature. A machine that looked like a Mac, with windows, mouse, menus, and pointer. OK, no one used it like that, they loaded PC-Dos and ran IBM software, but it made the machine look like it was worth twice the price."
IIRC
The big breakthrough came with the 386 processor that allowed a proper paged architecture in Windows 3.1. Windows 2 couldn't update applications' overlapped windows as the 286 cpu architecture didn't have full paging. My colleague wrote his own wrapper that allowed my previously batch DOS application to go interactive with menus etc in overlapping moveable windows - but still running in DOS. Then it moved on to running in a Windows "DOS box". Eventually the wrapper was itself wrapped to run as a Winconsole under MS Windows - probably W98. Still runs under W7 - except that even with a lot more cpu power the interfacing overheads make it sluggish.
There were several chipsets the equal of the not-yet-existent 386, superior to the 286 paged architecture.. When the 386 came out, MS standardised on the Intel architecture, and evidentally most people have forgotten the alternatives.
The 386 was not a breakthrough architecture. It was a breakthrough for Intel, because MS chose to support only the 386, not any of the equally good chipset-based compitition.
All of the other multi-tasking memory managers supported non-Intel solutions. Only MS Windows would only run on Intel-386.
And, by the way, Windows 3.0 was the breakthrough, became even more popular in it's 3.1 update, and "Windows For Workgroups 3.11" was a major upgrade, very well reviewed, that went into businesses that had networks, not into homes, not even into business without networks, hardly a "breakthrough" product, since it didn't replace other networking products to any great extent.
"Windows 3.11" was a few files and a bunch of printer drivers, trading on the good reviews of "WFW 3.11"
Windows ME wasn't all THAT bad, personally I found it a better OS especially compared with the shite they called Windows 98. The one funny thing that would happen you'd unplug a USB device and BANG.... BSOD. I did have an eMachines back then so that might have also had something to do with it.
First PC I had on my 10th birthday was an old IBM PS/2 Model 50 with Windows 3.11 installed. I thought it was amazing, especially as the school PC's only had crappy old Windows 3.1. I now know the difference, but when you're at school and your peers parents can afford to buy the latest Time PC with Windows 98 and a CD-ROM drive you have to take little victories where you can.
Windows ME wasn't all THAT bad, personally I found it a better OS especially compared with the shite they called Windows 98. The one funny thing that would happen you'd unplug a USB device and BANG.... BSOD. I did have an eMachines back then so that might have also had something to do with it.
For me, that was the wrong way around. WMe on the various machines I had it on back in the day had a habit of "forgetting" devices and crashing badly - after all, that's where ME-Tan got her break! W98, on the other hand, was pretty solid, at least once we got the second edition. I can, however, understand the USB problems as W98 was only just picking up USB. I generally left USB alone until I was well away from the older MS-DOS based kernels - W2K onwards were a big improvement, IMHO.
Personally I never did try Windows 1. I did have a go of Windows 2.0 on a friend's second hand PC many years ago but I missed out on MS-DOS 2 and all the frippery that came with it. My first mouse-driven adventures were on RISC OS 2 (complete with its "Filecore in use" errors), then Windows 3.0 on an Olivetti system that my employers had brought in to replace Word-11 on the PDP-11s I used at the time. The person who specified the system, however, specified WordPerfect for DOS 5 so the GUI went unused for most of the time! I wasn't impressed....
Windows ME wasn't all THAT bad, personally I found it a better OS especially compared with the shite they called Windows 98.
That was my finding as well. I managed to get hold of a very dodgy copy of ME only a week after they'd announced it was finished and a good couple of months before it actually shipped. I heard from most people that Internet Explorer was the most solid thing about it and the rest was a train wreck. I found the whole thing pretty solid except for Internet Explorer and a couple of friends who'd installed from my copy said the same. It was so bad that it drove me to Opera! Was my copy somehow different? Not that I'm aware of. It definitely had the same build number as the official release. If it was somehow different, what the hell did they do to it in those two months!?
Anon even though I wear a penguin suit rather than a pirate hat these days. ;-)
> Windows ME wasn't all THAT bad, personally I found it a better OS especially compared with the shite they called Windows 98.
The MSWin ME CDs were handy for extracting some updated files in order to install a "hacked" version of MSW98. When I was running MSW98, I would install it using the "98lite" utility (which actually pulled files from MSW95) in order to (of course) remove the cruft from '98. But the ME files were useful if you were running the highly-unofficial "Win98 Third Edition", which was a lot of aftermarket, 3rd-party patches which would bring MSW98 up to Win2K or WinXP compatibility.
As someon who worked for M$ in the Win2 days...
Win 1 was always designed for overlapping windows (look at the API documentation) but they were scared of Xerox, when Apple got away with it they turned it on in Win2.
TSR's were not really part of the original DOS spec - certainlythe interrupt handling and hooking was not part of the deisgn and emerged through industry custom and practice - led by Lotus IIRC.
It's an interesting point about whether it was an OS. You could argue Win/386 was the first version that was as it ran DOS in a Virtual machine and had drivers for the who machines including BIOS,. It used DOS as a loader, of course, but a loader is not an OS.
On the graphics driver front, the developers tested the graphics drivers by writing the HPGL driver and seeing what a plotter did.
In addition, for some time the Excel developers (Microsoft's A team out to kill Lotus) hacked the Windows servers to make Excel perform faster so they could compete with DOS mode 1-2-3.
It was of course all enormous fun
DESQView - for the win!
I loved DV! I ran my BBS from it.
IIRC you could only do 4 tasks (or maybe I limited it to that?), but that was plenty. Tasks 1&2 were for the two nodes of the BBS. Task 3 was where I did my messages, any other work, and my own time on the BBS (loved Trade Wars).
I found a beaut little utility that let me "spawn" task 4, so with the aid of some flag files I could shunt mail sorting and maintenance tasks out to #4 (flag files being things like "domail.flg" which meant of course if it existed, the running batch file would call the mail sorting batch when it was finished).
Still got the whole BBS on it's original 2x IDE and 5xSCSI HDD's (total space I think was little over 1G!) disks floating around. Wonder where I can find a machine with enough space to fit it all in.. So I can take it to a VM and bring it back to life... :)
Firstly, you really should have included Windows 2000 in the "Good", to my mind it was the most reliable, bomb-proof OS they produced, especially with SP4 plus.
Secondly, although Vista was unmistakeably awful in it's own right, one of the big reasons for it's failure was Microsoft's then policy of not releasing details of the new OS to hardware manufacturers until the last minute - on the grounds of secrecy - which meant that when the OS was released almost nobody had got round to writing Vista compatible drivers for most common hardware, including graphics cards, sound cards, network cards etc. so you were bloody lucky if your chosen hardware would work properly.
Why do "they" never mention W2K? I still consider it to be the best thing that MS ever did.
There were 2 versions - desktop and server. Simple and easy.
The PFY here says that only 2 versions of Windows is not profitable and a precedent that MS do not want us to remember!
And here we are, 30 years later, and MSWin once again has a flat, boring, lifeless look, and they even brought back the "hamburger menus" (that's right, does that object in the window corner look familiar?) So I guess all that *really* changed with MSWin10 is they moved the decimal point over one space and bloated the code up with lots of extra cruft.
Win95 (Chicago) was the Next Big Thing post 3.11 and, as noted above, all Windows ran on top of DOS until XP; apart from a revised interface, it had some native 32bit capability. It wasn't until it's OEM update, OSR2 (Detroit), that it became a legitimate contender, with additions such as support for USB. Win98 was essentially the release version of OSR2 with more bug fixes, better network and 32bit support, and further GUI polish, but not a critical upgrade, relatively. OSR2 didn't have the pedigree and/or staying power of WFW, NT, or 2000, but to me represents the real bridge between 3.11 and XP (SP2).
Absolutely valid points, but it's a bit of a quibble as 2.0 was 95 that worked and 98 that would be, 2.5 was just moreso. Dunno which had the greater distribution but I believe it was 2.0, and 2.5 was supplanted by 98 in short order, wasn't it? Memory fades, and I think there might be kids on my lawn. Hey! Youse kids!
Our IT consulting company grew up with Windows, starting with MS DOS then Windows 1.0 ad nauseum.
We're now looking Win 10 but not quite sure if it is stable enough for corporate usage; however, we support clients on Win 3.11 (yes, still out there and operational), Win NT, Win XP (one of best OS's), Win 7 (32 & 64 bit, and still the best to this point), Win 8.1 (terrible OS) and, just maybe, Win 10 at some point in the future!? Fortunately, after testing, we never adopted Win Vista!
A lot has happened in the past 30+/- years and, sadly, a lot has stayed the same... Operating systems are still full of bugs, infected by viruses, have inherent instabilities, etc. But in today's world they are a necessary evil.
bwa
Three decades of existence, yes.
Three decades of PC dominance? No. It wasn't until Windows 3.0 - which Microsoft had to make a deal to give a way free with Logitech mice - that Windows even made it to the radar screens of most PC users. It was only with Windows 3.1 that Windows became the dominant PC operating... environment.
Of course, before Windows 3.1, Microsoft still did dominate the IBM Personal Computer and compatible computers, but it did so with MS-DOS, not Windows.
That's certainly how I remember it.
I moved from MS-Dos ( and variants) to Win 3.1, then 3.11. Win 1 ( was there a 2?) didn't even make a blip on my radar.
BTW about five years ago I found an old win 3.11 laptop hidden in a cupboard at work. It'd been stuck there to avoid having to pay for Millenium Bug testing on a device that wasn't ever used for anything that was remotely system critical. Then got forgotten about. [ The council's contractors tested and charged for anything they saw, whether it mattered or not, we had no say in it and no extra budget to pay for it.]
It worked beautifully. It brought a tear to the eye. More to the point, I couldn't find many everyday office tasks that it couldn't happily perform.
As I recall it the reaction at the the time was more 'meh' that 'ugh'. In other words it's lack of popularity was because it wasn't a significant enough upgrade from 98SE, not because it was bad.
Personally I'd skipped 98 completely and upgraded straight from 95 (original, not OSR2) to Me. For me Me was the first time I'd seen plug and play actually work and the first installation of Windows I had that I considered stable (7 years without needing a reinstall, eventually upgraded to XP for hardware support (iPod classic). Compared with the frequency I'd had to re-install earlier versions I'd used that was truly remarkable).
People now seem to work backward from 'not that successful' to 'must have been bad'. My own experience was anything but bad. Perhaps I was just lucky?
I think you must have been lucky.
I had personal experience of installing ME on a large number of machines, due to a misguided PHB insisting, and a more god-forsaken unstable piece of crap has yet to be found (yes, even Vista and Win8 were better!).
Without any exaggeration I think we left it a month before uninstalling it and going back to 98SE - no small undertaking in itself.
This was on a range of hardware from different manufacturers, so it wasn't just a single model of PC.
As a now cranky old guy who attended the Windows 1 release party at the 1985 Comdex in Las Vegas - where Bill Gates rode in on a golf cart with Both Babes tossing shrink-wrapped copies of Windows v1 off the back - I would certainly differ with this articles view of certain facts. The first usable version of Windows was version 2_286, which many business people used as a way to run Excel (because they worked at places where Macintosh devices were banned, but still wanted that GUI spreadsheet experience). But this version was used from DOS, so not a real OS. Windows 3.1 was the first truly stable and usable version of what became the Windows we now know. Windows 3.11 on the other hand was to me at least a notoriously buggy interim release, quickly replaced by Windows 95 (and my company skipped Windows 3.11 entirely; so I view 3.11 as the first _Vista_ type release - the one to ignore until the right one came along).
I do agree that Windows XP (as of SP2) was likely the most important release, especially in terms of becoming the de facto baseline for the next 10 years of so. However, Windows 2000 was also important, because it was a version of NT that could be deployed in place of Windows 95 and 98 (don't even start with Millennium, which like 3.11 was just ignored at a corporate level given the Win2000 forthcoming release). As well, Windows 2000 Server was the first server version that - when installed with SQL 2000 - supported applications in a way that could establish server dominance for Redmond (a process that gained momentum with the release of the XP version - Windows Server 2003).
As with all things Microsoft, the rule-of-three applied: Windows 1 - an experiment; Windows 2 - much more interesting, but still not there yet; Windows 3 (especially 3.1) - time to get moving. All so long ago, but history does repeat itself - *cough* Windows 8; Windows 8.1; Windows 10 *cough*.
Windows 286 , then 386 user here - came with, IIRC Micrografix Designer - used it to design many systems. Remember using dos 3.0 on the PC AT when it was released, solely for Project Manager Workbench . Win286 looked really odd on the Tosh t3100 i was issued.
Funnily enough with the windows 1 .. 10 similes, I was reading the other day about OO UX , and was thinking congrats - they have just rediscovered CUA,and its OOUX, wheel turns full circle.
"I do agree that Windows XP (as of SP2) was likely the most important release, especially in terms of becoming the de facto baseline for the next 10 years of so. However, Windows 2000 was also important..."
If it wasn't for XP-SP2 (and all the work on trustworthy computing behind it's release), Windows 2000 would have had another few years of usage and hence been even more important. I remember many businesses holding off upgrading from W2K until MS finally delivered a worthy replacement. Strange how history, for Microsoft, seems to repeat...
Windows 3.11 on the other hand was to me at least a notoriously buggy interim release, quickly replaced by Windows 95 (and my company skipped Windows 3.11 entirely; so I view 3.11 as the first _Vista_ type release - the one to ignore until the right one came along).
This is completely at odds with my remembrances, my experience was that Windows For Workgroups 3.11 was the first edition that gained any traction in a business environment, allied with the TCP stack add-on, and is certainly the first Windows edition I remember dealing with in any numbers. Prior to that we used to run MS-DOS and various custom front ends like XTree Gold.
Remembering Windoze 1 makes me old? Hell I remember the "Osborn"! (Take a tower case and stuff a CRT in it, lay it on its side and hinge mount a keyboard.) Borrowed a " portable" pc from work that weighed 35 lbs. and left dents in my shoulder from hauling the heavy canvas bag it was stored in. (This was a post Osborn PC).
I remember buying time on a Univac 1108 which we talked to through a modified teletype machine....
So I guess I'm nearly pre-historic.
Add to the good, Windows 98. It covered over the warts in Windows 95, and arguably could have been called Windows 95.1, or maybe Windows 95D.
Add to the good, Windows 2000. Plain Jane, before Microsoft tarted up the user interface successively with XP, Vista-vomit, 7, 8-vomit, and 8.1. The very first useful Microsoft product designed to work without DOS. Rock-solid.
Add to the bad, Windows 8. Who in their right mind got the idea to cobble together a touch-screen user interface when desktop users depend on keyboards and mice, and not a touch-screen computer was in sight? Then Microsoft blames Dell, HPaq, Lenovo and the rest for not designing, building and selling a computer platypus that would work adroitly with either touch or keyboard/mouse.
Add to the neither good not bad, but somewhere in the middle, Windows 95. It was good because it was ground-breaking 32-bit software and it kinda-sorta worked. It was bad because USB was notoriously unreliable and it was full of bugs and quirks finally fixed by Windows 98.
Puhleeze! Let's do a complete job of both roasting and praising Micro$oft!
As I'm reading this, I'm also reinstalling Win7 Ultimate. Why? because I tried to protect my setup by creating a system restore point. "That's reasonable." You might say. I thought so any way. But, no create system restore crashed. Badly. And took out the OS with it. Bugger.
Still, it can be repaired, I thought (you can see the sparkle of optimism there.) No, after 5 or 6 tries the OS was a Norwegian Blue. It was, a dead parrot. Bugger.
Get the original DVD out then. DVD into the DVD reader and off I go. "Windows can't install on that drive." ???? WHY THE FUCK NOT!!!!
Three more tries. "WINDOWS CAN'T INSTALL ON THAT DRIVE." BUGGER, and fucking sod it!!!!!!!!
Quick search online. many, many, many, MANY, MANY people have had the same problems. I need to disconnect my raid array and DVD drive.
DVD DRIVE!!! that's what my sodding OS is on. fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. create a USB stick with all the files necessary. And drivers. AHCI drivers need to be preinstalled.
Drag my beast out from its cosy little hidy hole and into the harsh neon light. Off come all of the SATA cables. I try not to drip my tears into the case, I hope that I was successful.
Now this might be a silly question, but which tosser decided that Windows could only be installed on THE ONLY FUCKING DRIVE IN THE MACHINE!!! It must have been a decision of the highest order of fucking stupendous twattery in the OS programming world. What kind of numpty makes every one disable ALL BUT ONE drive in their machines to install an OS. Do Apple make you, no. How about UNIX, well solaris may have come on nearly a hundred floppy disks, but IT DIDN'T MAKE YOU DISABLE ALL BUT ONE DRIVE. Even Linux is smarter than this. No only the fucking tosspots at Microsoft would make you do this.
TWATS
I have to lie down now.
Fuckers.
Now this might be a silly question, but which tosser decided that Windows could only be installed on THE ONLY FUCKING DRIVE IN THE MACHINE!!!
I've been able to install XP and 7 on machines with multiple drives before, however I've generally always unplugged the other drives in the system when installing 7 simply to protect my precious data (which could be another OS or just a NTFS partition with music/video/photos on (so I can enjoy my collections in windows or in a real OS).
I've not yet experienced a bad crash from a System Restore. When you think about it, creating the restore point should only be taking a copy of the registry and system files. Aside from adding the restore point details to wherever it keeps them, it should not be making any changes to the system. What the hell is up with essentially backup software making changes to the running system?
I have seen big issues with 7 if you forget which SATA port it's plugged into. That whole lack of drivers thing still plagues even 10 - pretty poor especially when you're talking common AHCI drivers. Which were around for years before the install media was made....
And what's with Linux and I believe OSX having quite functional install media for years (basically a Live system which will let you recover media, use a decent graphical drive manager so you can be sure which partitions to delete for installing on; or indeed which one has the hosed windows system so you maybe can recover data from it).. The install media for most Linux distro's gives you a fully functioning system complete with office suite and browsers and so on (not really needed for the install but if you have something where it takes a really long time for some reason you still have a working machine), which installs these things on your machine for you.. Whereas windows gives you only the basic OS.. After a hugely long time... What's up with that MS? You're still like a decade behind every one else.. Still doing the "took MS 10 years to copy it, and even they they got it wrong" eh?
Oh, and stupidity of stupidity.. Trying to install or "reset" h8... No idea if 10 does this because the only "reset" our customers want with that pile of shit is to put a decent OS back on their machine (thanks MS, Linux install numbers rapidly growing!).. Anyway, trying to reset h8 because it refused to wake up from that stupid enforced hibernation.. So you're resetting it.. You know, basically wiping the disk and restarting... And you get "The drive is locked so you can't install". You can't delete the partition as you need it for the "reset". Thankfully (sometimes) you have the OEM restore partition.
"You cannot delete this partition because the OS you want to obliterate is in hibernation". Stupid.. Stupid to a level only MS can do...
Die please MS. Rid the world of your crap... (But maybe employ those behind pukeaudio and systemd first, take them out with you... :( )
(It's "early" sunday morning.. Damn cat woke me up after a late night Tib3 session.. I apologise if this post makes as much sense as MS source code...)