Microsoft to mark five decades of Ctrl-Alt-Deleting the competition Microsoft will officially hit the half-century mark on Friday as the Windows giant turns 50 years old. What do you consider the highs and lows of the company's journey to dominance? In addition to its successes, the House of Bill has also encountered numerous gaffes and missteps along the way. For every Windows 3.0 and 3.1, …
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I agree with W2K Server. If I was to formulate a list of requirements and break them into Must Do, Should Do, Like To columns, W2K got the Must Do and Should Do columns nearly all ticked and didn't spend a lot of time in the Like To space.
Current products seem to spend most of their development effort in the Like To columns and the Must Do and Should Do are thin by comparison.
Win XP was also a good usable product that hit most requirements by SP3 and if it wasn't for the ever evolving requirements forced by MS we would probably still be using it today.
In the non-OS arena the office suite was a hugely successful product and like it or loathe it it has been the Backoffice core application suite of most businesses in the world.
We concentrate on the UI here... Not on the OS below. The actual OS below is, with Windows 10, currently the peak of stability and reliability. Windows 11 has to do some catch-up now to get that stability back, but I like SMB-Compression (seeing over 200 MByte/s over 1 gigabit), robocopy /iorate and Nested-V for AMD. A few other Actual-OS features are good too. The UI, well........
While I still think back to 2000 with fondness (peak windows UI aesthetics imo), the security was very... NT4 vintage.
Remote cli at SYSTEM without authentication by default? Probably not the finest choice.
The software firewall for XP was broken on day one though- you could just inject a little bit of code into, say, a running internet explorer's process (totally fine, it's the same user as you, after all!), and then CreateRemoteThread your way to a silent exfiltration device. Since iexplore.exe was on the whitelist, there wasn't so much as a peep when your payload started opening ports.
I'm not sure if a firewall this leaky meets your requirements. It was never fixed during XP's lifetime.
Win7 was really a SP for Vista.
Especially bad or good versions:
Good DOS: 2.11, 3.3, 6.22
Bad DOS: all before 2. 4.0
Good Windows: Win 3.1 family when 32bit drivers, TCP/IP and Win32s added. Win98SE
Bad Windows: Any before 3.0, Original Win95 (no USB), Win ME.
Good NT: 3.5/3.51, NT 4.0, NT 4.0 Cluster, XP after 2002.
Bad NT: Vista, Win8, Win10, Win11
To be fair, before USB-as-we-know-it, RS232C[*] was pretty much the USB of it's day and '95 did support that :-)
Yeah, there were others like 20mA current loop, RS 422 and many others (XKCD standards comic is already in your mental image, no need to link it again), but certainly since the start of the microprocessor/computer era, most supported serial in one form or another and if they didn't come with RS232C type serial, it was almost always an option, even in the 8-bit days.
And Win95 went on to support USB with a service pack (poorly, from memory), or whatever they were called back then.
Ironically I've still got some USB to RS232 adaptors kicking around somewhere for when I need to talk serial to something. A rare enough event that the box probably has a lot of dust on it.
The USB was a bad example. Wikipedia does indeed claim 1996.
The first integrated circuits supporting USB were produced by Intel in 1995 and the official release was Jan 1996. I think the Win95a got USB.
The really stupid things in Win95 was CD autorun and lack of TCP/IP as the default network (NetBEUI was the default).
I don't know why I put "USB".
Most small LANs in 1995 where not TCP/IP based - there wasn't many devices running DHCP and DNS servers back then (first DHCP RFC is 1993). Those who can use TCP/IP knew hot to configure them. IPX was another common network in many companies. NetBEUI/NBF was quite common especially if compatibility with DOS sytems was still needed.
CD autorun was a feature for gamers - plug and play. As long as CD writers were not common, CD were rarely a security issue.
On a small LAN you used static IPs and the DNS was only needed for the Internet. There might have been a proxy like Wingate (a router was rare on dialup or ISDN). No local DHCP or DNS server needed. Later the router for ADSL or Cable provided the DNS & DHCP server functions. We'd been setting up all small LANs with TCP/IP since 1993 and using one PC as a proxy for analogue dialup or ISDN, if Internet was required.
CD autorun was a security issue and from day 1 of it, so we disabled it on every install (Win 95, NT 4.0, Win 98 etc). The Amiga autorun viruses already existed, so what was was MS thinking of? Then later we had to disable it for Network shares, USB storage etc. Stupidity of the highest order.
Evidently you never managed small network back then. TCP became common only later, and most small networks used what was already available before. Most of those machines weren't internect connected - maybe a few lucky ones had a modem - And most admins of small networks didn't know what a TCP address was. -- ADSL router came years later. In 1993 there was almost no commecial internet, even in 1995 MS believed it could create its oen "Microsoft Netwokr".
Sure, there were entities who used TCP/IP, especially academi institutions and large companies, for most of the others was IPX or NetBIOS Did you really believe MS choiised the default randomly? But I understand most whitebeards are old enough now their memory is no longer good enough....
This shaved whitebeard (well, still salt & peppa) still has his memory, and spotted way more typos per line in your post that I usually have. Even the brain-autocorrect could not help, to many... And I know many actual whitebeard which you would not stand a chance against regarding knowledge.
Another weird things in your post: You are probably non-US, TCP/IP was there much earlier. Windows NT 3 had TCP/IP right from the start, in 1993. And in 1993 I had commercial internet, in GERMANY... In 1992 I used internet at the University of Stuttgart.
Autorun wasn't just a security issue, it was a pain in the arse merely having the OS decide on your behalf what it was going to try doing every time you inserted a CD, until you found the option to tame that behaviour and have Windows simply preparing the disc ready for you to access it at a time of your choosing.
I had the unpleasant opportunity of trying windows Mistake Edition on an acquaitance... yes it was a dumpster fire.
It was stripped of all the managing tools that could be leveraged from DOS, while importing no managing features from Windows 2000, or not telling users what tools were available from NT or something. At least a tool translating directly a line like "format c:" to "fdisk"... nope.
It was a disaster.
That particular PC had a virus/malware and I had no recourse but to UNPARTITION the thing and install the OEM version that came with it on CD/DVD, if I recall correctly.
And yeah, Windows 10 is an OK OS, if MS was not trying so hard to shove ads and bloatware on it...
I worked with 2 different ME machines:
1. Crashed multiple times per day, for no apparent reason - even with nobody using it at the time! Unfortunately, our net access was DSL via internal modem, installed in that machine and shared via ICS, so net access imitated a yoyo until we finally switched to cable (w/ external modem). That machine was a "Win95 upgraded to Win98 upgraded to WinME"; I suspect it was schizophrenic from the ordeal.
2. Absolutely rock-solid stable, mostly used for playing multiplayer Windows games with my wife. I don't think it ever crashed. Dual boot (Redhat something and OEM-disk install of ME).
I think the lesson wasn't so much "WinME is awful" as "never do an OS upgrade, always wipe and reinstall from scratch".
I've always had a soft spot for ME, for the very specific to me reason that having suffered endless stability issues with 98 on my homebuilt PC of the day (which weren't resolved via the nuke and reinstall from scratch approach), I decided to take a gamble on ME and, as per your second example, it turned that PC into a rock solid system that served me very well until XP came along.
Was never able to work out what it was about that PC which made it so flakey running 98, or why it took so well to ME when so many other people were having obvious problems with it, but the more I hear about ME, the more I become convinced that the M actually stands for Marmite, because it really does come across as a piece of software that people either love or hate, with none of the usual more nuanced levels of meh-ness inbetween.
I enjoyed several of the Flight Simulator games and the first two Combat Flight Simulator games were great. They also made fairly good peripherals for a while, particularly the Intellimouse series of mice and the Sidewinder series of joysticks—a friend still has his from the 90s and uses it from time to time.
I'll agree on there never being a good operating system of theirs, just ones that were less bad and one could form a stockholm syndrome-esque understanding with. Same as their productivity suites.
What other OS were better? One from Apple that couldn't really multitask, despite its good look? Linux which still lacks a desktop system comparable to Windows 2000, released 25 years ago, and its applications? Server side, there's still nothing comparable to Active Directory. Have you ever tried to use Lotus Notes or Smartsuite?
It's really Nadella's Microsoft that is truly racing towards the bottom - even Windows 8 was a good tablet/phone OS (yet its UI should have never be shown on a desktop). But "the Web" and then mobes made people used to crappy applications.
Having used Windows in some professional environments for decades and Linux at home, I'd say that any current Linux desktop beats the pants of any Windows experience. (I'm sure you'll have your own arbitrary criteria why this isn't so. But this is how opinions work, and your defense of the truly horrid W8 exemplifies that.) I loathe AD and I hardly think I'm the only admin who does! The servers I manage are mainly Linux boxes with a smattering of BSD and I've been fortunate to work at places where management was skeptical of the siren song of Microsoft. Oh and I always preferred StarOffice back in the day and now I happily use LibreOffice.
As to other OSes I was fortunate enough to be able to play around with BeOS back in the day and that ran laps around Windows as well and am quite fond of its modern successor, Haiku. When I decommission some of my older kit, thinking of putting that on if the hardware support is there. NeXTSTEP also deserves an honorable mention though admittedly I didn't get much hands-on experience with it when it was current.
ROFTL!!!!! Any time a run a Linux desktop system I think I'm throw back in the past, at least thirty years. There's a reason why most people don't use Linux desktop. Designing a GUI, its widgests, fonts, etc etc. is a very complex task, and requires skills beyond simply programming. And Linux shows really it can't be done by amateurs in their spare time. KDE, Gnome, etc. are one worse than the other. Sure, if you spend most of your time in a terminal you're not much interested, but only a minority of uses work that way.
Windows 8 was an excellent design for a tablet/phone interface. It was a very bad design for a desktop system.
You can loath AD simply because evidently you don't have to manage large organizations security. It's not rare that even organizations using a lot of Linux servers rely on Windows Domain Controllers.
Sure, you have to learn how to configure and use it - the average sysadmin is lazy and don't want to learn anything new. Being comfortably stucked into 1970s era technology make him fell at home. And that's the real enshittification. Instead of going forward, we're moving back. That's after all what all religions wish, and FOSS is a religion.
Ah, the mask slips—claims of knowing my life and professional usage better than I do, the contrary-to-reality implication that there aren't paid developers for many large projects in the Linux space, irrational defense of a universally detested figure (Win 8), evocation of religion coupled with smug putdowns ... pure zealotry from a religious fanatic (with grammar issues to boot) who is unable to accept a worldview other than their own. I'll continue to avoid the trap of the Microsoft ecosystem while getting paid, thank you very much. What's more, I'll continue to recommend Linux in professional environments for its lower cost of ownership and solid fundamentals and at home its stability and practice of staying out of my way will remain appreciated.
Which mask? You all have to keep on justifying in some ways your use of Linux - and keep on denying even the simples truth, and have to offend those who don't believe what you believe, and that's the very basic of every religion. All of you have to pat themselves on the shouder continuosly, because evidentoly you're not so sure abouot your choices, and need to be reassured continbuosly.
Sure, Linux is used because it's free. Nobody would really pay for it. And that's, after all, the reason you use it, while trying to reassure yourself it's not that, it's some mythical technical superiority. Avoid MS as much as you like, you just show your choices ideological, not technical.
About grammar, you can't even speak my language....
> About grammar, you can't even speak my language....
Mir erdeucht, dass selbiger welcher die meinige nicht kennet. So sollet er doch die Sprach der seinigen Heimat nennen! Auf dass wir unseren gegenseitigen Unwissenheit auf ewig vorwerfen. Allenfalls werden, in Erwartung der leeren Antwort, stinkende Fische als bekanntes Mittel der Zahlung bereit geleget.
Dieses Posting wurde wohlwissend dem Faktum erstellt, dass es mich nicht direkt angesprechet hat, sodenn konnte ich einer Einladung solcher Art nicht widerstehn.
"You can loath AD simply because evidently you don't have to manage large organizations security. It's not rare that even organizations using a lot of Linux servers rely on Windows Domain Controllers."
You may not be aware of this, if you are an AD specialist, but there's almost nothing you can do in AD that you can't do with tools available on linux or, indeed, any *nix out there. Since I have experience of managing both environments as a standalone ecosystem and many hybrid ones, I'm aware of both. The mixed environments tended to vary as to which one held the master back-end, often based upon what they set up originally. These design decisions tend to persist more tenaciously as the size of the org increases.
My current gig is at a corp with around 12000 workstations and servers to manage - it's windows-centric but with a significant number of linux servers alongside the windows ones. Here it's all done with AD. At my last position at a somewhat larger corp, their history was all unix servers of one flavour or another although the workstations were mostly windows and they now have a significant number of windows servers as well. Their infrastructure is now linux-based with AD taking a much more secondary role. Managing the two is different but they both work just fine and achieve the same things for their respective infrastructures.
Sure, in Linux as usual you can mix and match a dozen of tools, change thirty configuration files, re-change them and add another twenty because it didn't work.... than invoke fifty different cli tools to perform each task.
In Windows you have everything already ready and easy enough to configure and administer.
Never understand why people likes so much the 1970s they don't want to leave them...
It was the only comparable thing - AD was designed to compete with it - just Novel died long ago, and nobody in the FOSS space ever thought to design something alike. After all when the biggest companies just need to run web servers and little else, why they shoud invest in something like this and give it away for free? They will implement their internal proprietary solution, if needed and won't share it with anyone.
When I was a sysadmin at a local college, the decision was made (just before I got there) to implement AD. I'm a bit foggy on the details, since this is all blessedly decades past, but there was a domain name convention that AD insisted on ... but which was already in use and couldn't be changed. I remember looking up how to handle this situation with LDAP, since that's what AD is built on. It basically came down to modifying a line in a config file. Would AD allow this? Nope, no way, and it would end life as we know it if you tried. So the school spent a measurable fraction of a million US dollars, over several years, on consultants figuring out and implementing a workaround. At least they were frighteningly competent. I hate to think of the mess if they had been standard caliber.
> It basically came down to modifying a line in a config file. Would AD allow this?
You missed a crucial part in this: The whole AD is based on LDAP + encryption, kerberos. To have the right keys the names must be right. If you show the right encryption key, but the wrong name, it does not fit. Technically you CAN rename the AD, but then you might have to rejoin all clients fresh, and if you have AD-dependent auth (SQL etc) you may have to reconfig the auth there. On top there are more deeply AD-Ingrained applications.
So if you compare it with an LDAP implementation which allows renaming of the base so easily, it means that the security is possibly bad, that those encryption and auth key possibilities are not used, which allows easier spoofing.
My recommendation is still to have a domain.local as base. And then you can always add and remove extra UPNs (aka external domain.com) at will. But even if a AD domain name is already used externally, this is not a problem, can be handled easily. As far as that school goes: Fallback would be to rebuild new AD, then migrate over.
The uptick in downvotes doesn't surprise me but I have to agree with most of what you've said. Windows (nor any OS) is perfect - none can meet every need because some are mutually exclusive.
If Windows was/is really bad, why is it so widely used? If Linux is really the answer, why is it not used more widely? I recall when, >20 years ago, one of my jobs was auditing offshore fiscal metering systems. These were the systems that clocked up oil company revenue and ran on dedicated computers - specially built for a single purpose. Errors beyond the defined limits, if not quickly spotted and fixed, could lead to accounting mistakes that would plug the budgetary holes for most governments. These computers couldn't be used for anything else but were perfect for that job. I was disappointed, but not surprised, when one operator started to replace them with general purpose computers running Windows; their reasoning was to make it easier to manage them from onshore. I stopped working on that contract around the time the first batch were being commissioned - but I heard it wasn't going well (and the platform was shut down for decommissioning a few years later, anyway. The bespoke computers are still used in the industry because they do exactly what is needed - no more and no less. General purpose computers, and their operating systems, are compromises that meet the majority of users needs - and will always have faults and vulnerabilities. It's a case for Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: you can have perfection for a limited number of defined tasks, or flexibility to take on a wide range of undefined tasks - but not both.
I run a MacBook and have both Windows 11 and Ubuntu VMs running on it. macOS is my primary working platform because it does what I need it to do and my workflow has evolved to fit in with its foibles; I use Microsoft 365 office apps because they're what I'm used to, they're compatible with all the files I need to work with. Apple's iWork and LibreOffice would also do what I need but there is no advantage (to me) to switch. I run the Windows VM because I occasionally need to access a website that doesn't work with Safari - I used to have Edge installed on my Mac but it's just as easy to keep Edge in it's Windows sandbox (and Chrome isn't allowed anywhere near my MacBook). Ubuntu is handy when I need to work on a totally sandboxed system (e.g. to check a website that I think is probably genuine but I don't click on links I don't yet trust).
"I enjoyed several of the Flight Simulator games and the first two Combat Flight Simulator games were great"
They bought that in from Sub-Logic. I played it on a TRS-80 model 1!!!. Props for having built on it and turned it into something that as a non-flightsim user looks visually very appealing but I have little idea of it's authenticity (although I've heard it can be used as part of pilot training, so must be at least half decent :-))
That's not entirely true. Microsoft's first full-blown C compiler for MS-DOS (paradoxically called MS-C v4, a harbinger of things to come, exposing their inability to count) was really quite good. It worked, had copious, detailed and accurate documentation, and introduced one of the very first integrated, symbolic debuggers (called "CodeView" if memory serves) that also actually worked.
Course, everything that followed became an increasing stream of enshittification (long before the word ever existed in the lexicon). Add to that the OS/2 Misdirection, the Undocumented Windows debacle, and we all were well on our way to suffering through the warm, steaming heap that Micros~1 is today.
In 1987 I was writing my own memory management, because the MS C never checked if the freed block was contiguous to a previously freed block. Eventually (in the stupid program I was writing & debugging libraries for) the Malloc would fail out of memory. So since it was DOS, my memory manager grabbed most of the free memory and each time memory was freed it checked if was contiguous. Previously the the program would crash after about 40 minutes, with the change it could run indefinitely.
But I'd been programming with Pascal, Modula-2, Forth, Occam and C++ and designed two programming languages before I was using MS C for DOS.
Their early Intellimice were, IMO, THE best mice you could buy back in the day - the perfect combination of physical shape, tactile feel, weight, and ease of glide over your mousepad - just as many of us will these days wax lyrical about Logitech rodents that we've been using for years without any hiccups, I was one of those who'd prior to this have been similarly waxing lyrical about our equally long-lived Microsoft rodents.
Highest point: Word 8.2 - because it's screen layout and use of command keys beat the crap out of contemporary Word perfect versions with their three shifts needed for control keys and frequent need to drop into macro display mode to edit formatted documents.
Lowest point: Windows 8 and SQL Server are pretty much in a dead heat here.
"... Purchasing Nokia was not the mistake.
The mistakes happened after. Same for "here maps" and "here navigation". MS failed to make use of it, see the value, and make it viable..."
I agree. As I've said before, O2 sent me a Windows Phone (version 7 I think it was) and whilst it felt very much like it was in beta, there was quite a lot to like. The live tiles were particularly useful and the hardware itself was decent.
The biggest misstep here was when they then moved to the next version and determined that the physical button layout would change and as such if you had the previous version, you were left without an update path. That, I believe, more than anything killed it dead in its tracks. All of those early adoptors both from a user and developer perspective were simply left angry. Hell, it wasn't even my daily driver and I felt it.
And this was at a point in time where they still had a chance to make a dent in Android and iOS devices. But typical of Microsoft, they believed that they knew better and then the market proved them wrong.
Windows Vista wasn't a bad OS once you got it onto hardware that was actually capable - again, it was the marketing around "Vista Ready" machines which were anything but that gave it the most bad headlines. Oh, and the fact that if you bought the Ultimate version, the promised updates and e.g. extra games never marterialsed.
Windows 7 nailed it for me - good UI, stable, etc. 11 is stable, but the constant fucking around with the UI from what appear to be 11yo's on too much sugar and E numbers is beyond a joke. It just gets in the way. I don't want an OS that I have to stop and think about where to find basic functionality.
To be honest, Win 10 is not bad. It is stable, reasonably quick and doesn't require too much CPU power. The UI sucks but that can be cured with Classic Shell or something similar. I'm working towards a final switch to Linux at some stage, probably when Win 10 goes out of support, but Win 10 is adequate for my current home-use needs.
Misleading: The 2 GB Limit came from the installer using FAT16, which was converted to NTFS during the setup. Once done you could increase C: with 3rd party tools, or use the rest of the drive as D: for your data. During the NT 4.0 time: You usually didn't need more than 2 GB C: anyway and could work with the D: drive.
As for "1024" cylinders: Was never valid for SCSI, and as soon as you installed more modern ATA(PI) drivers which used LBA you could use more than 8 GB for your C: with no issues. Some OEM manufacturers offered modified NT 4.0 installation media which included the drivers needed (was not that difficult) and create the > 2 GB C: partition as NTFS right from the start.
Another big nail in the coffin was lack of apps. It was (kinda) good in the start worth Facebook app that connected into the People Hub (and LinkedIn?) that conceded the contents of the apps. The same with the photo hub, where photos from the different apps were available. But beside the things Microsoft paid for the development of 3rd party apps, there was not a lot of good things. Not even Microsoft’s own departments had any interest in creating apps, so why should other companies bother? And when Facebook and the few others dropped the platform, and the hub integrations dried up, all the cool stuff fell apart.
After upgrading the OS to Win10 the Lumia Refocus did not work any more. And several other good apps as well, like here maps with 100% offline capability. This show how half-hearted it was done as soon as Satya appeared. Especially Refocus, which made a focus-series from which you could choose, or combined "full focus", or just save the seven pictures as they are. Worked very well, without AI-blur crap. Today OpenCamera, though the combining has to be done afterwards.
Luckily Total Commander is available on both to copy the photos to NAS without cloud crap between.
Way back when the company that I was working for was a dedicated Microsoft shop. It did _everything_ using Microsoft products, including company phones. They had their own custom company apps running on the phones, including large part because they couldn’t get 3rd-party apps because the required functionalty did not exist in 3rd-party apps.
And then MS changed the phone OS, and broke all existing apps, including the custom company apps. The company was dedicated to MS, and rebuilt the apps.
And then MS changed the phone OS _again_ and broke everything _again_. The company reconsidered its all-MS stance and rewrote the custom apps for iOS and Android, abandoning MS phones. (And, for the first time, put Macs and Linux systems on the desktop)
The phone support was vastly better at Apple and Google, even if some of the MS phone hardware was very good (except for battery life) and there were lots of 3rd-party apps which worked and were supported. An early version of Here would have sent me, personally, onto the offramp of an Interstate, head-on into outbound traffic. That was fixed, but was far worse than anything which happened with Apple Maps and simply didn’t have any equivalent on Google Maps.
I, personally, got an Android entirely as a reaction to how bad the software on MS phones was. The Android screwed up, not as badly as the MS phone, but bad enough that I moved to an iPhone and have had various iPhones ever since.
It’s a pity. The hardware was superior, except that the batteries sucked. It was the software that let the side down, and I suspect that a major reason for the battery suckage was badly written software eating too much power, if certain apps were unloaded the batteries lasted much longer, but we needed to use those apps. Power management on Android and Apple was much better. MS is supposed to be a software company. They certainly screwed up a lot of software.
"I don't want an OS that I have to stop and think about where to find basic functionality."
That is the flaw to end all flaws of Windows 11.
You spend too much time fighting the UI and trying to remember where things are 'this week !!!'.
Windows 8 - 11 are a pain with the evermore 'colourful' Fisher-Price UI.
Windows 7 works, the UI is usable BUT is long gone and dead !!!
[I still use Windows 7 --- behind lots & lots of firewalls etc ... Just in case !!!]
The only thing keeping me using Windows is that some s/w is not available on Linux etc
:)
Commodore bought Microsoft Basic as the "operating system" for its home computers in 1977 for an unlimited-use one-time fee of $25,000. Assuming that 12.5 million computers shipped with this (probably a low estimate), the cost per machine was $0.002.
Windows Server 2025 Datacenter Edition, 64-bit 24 Core License is $7,899.99 per machine, 395 million times as much.
Yep - for PCs - W7 (w2000 with direct X) was the high point of Microsoft's OSs.
Windows 11 is by far the worst, yes miles worse that ME and W8 (I always thought that was a joke name, just w8 for it)
What's wrong with W11, How many more clicks to adjust volume? how many clicks to change wifi connection? to many.
They broke PrintScrn!!!! the hosed Notepad into WordPad. How much data is it snorting up its AI nose?
You wanted to save files locally, but they are all on OneDrive, so your access can be removed, while it is still mined for data.
And the entire pile of crap is still made on ,CSV and ,CMD files, now called XLS and PowerShit. Same thing. MS has lost all creativity if it every had any.
Hopefully an underground AI will make a new OS - that has no bloat, no memory restrictions, no 40 year old legacy code that can be breached in a million ways, still have .5 million patches.
But hey, it's only a few more clicks, you don't need that finger. How much RAM does the OS need due to bloat and bad programming? 2, 4, 6 gigs or more.. Gads when 128MB was enough, how bad of an OS do you have to build to keep screwing up that much.
Windows 11 is by far the worst because it's more commercialised. As in has more commercials in it. From first sign-on, to even trying to log off, it's a festering swamp of pushing, pushing, pushing. Whether full-blown advertising or trying to force you into a Microsoft Corner.
Been using it since Windows 3.1. And so far have had no reason to switch to Linux. Mint anything KDE... they all seem to make things more complicated than they should be.
Downvote to hell and back as is expected from here, but the year of the Linux desktop is probably in the same category as The Second Coming of Jesus (ie, if you think it will happen, you better be prepared to wait a very long time).
It'll probably happen eventually when Wine gets good enough that Microsoft can give up on their creaky legacy NT codebase and make a Windows-branded Linux. Most users won't care or notice, but because it'll have to be free they'll push all their other products on us even harder
Yep! And you feel the need to smugly tell people on every forum thread about Windows that you have moved to Linux so therefore everyone should do so, including businesses. If anyone actually working in business IT points out the many barriers, that just gets ignored!
In Co-Pilots own words it has been half a century now since I got rid of their garbage on my machine, 25 years, hahahahaha. Cannot get a basic fact correct typical of the trash they put out. The "upgrade" to Win 98SE left my top of the line SB AWE64 sound card unable to play anything but a midi file, downgrading did nothing to change that. I was in computer store contemplating buying new card when I seen this thing called Redhat Linux I had been reading so much about nice and cheap so I bought that instead. Went home and installed put in the required IRQ and DMA settings in sndconfig utility and instantly had sound again. That was the last time that garbage was used on my machine strangely enough I seem to like sound with my audio and videos files..
I seem to recall XP (with SP3) was pretty stable and things seemed to be in logical places (for someone coming from Win 3.0 / WfW and NT). I got a new laptop that came with Win 7 and really didn't get on with it - when I tried to delete some Service Pack backup files, it appeared to be phoning home before removing each file: on the slow Internet link I was stuck with at the time, that really was the last straw. I burnt a live CD of Ubuntu, found it worked fine and even supported my scanner. That was in...err...2011 and I've felt no need to return to Redmond software since then.
*Disclaimer: I used SCO SVR4 back in the day so *nix wasn't entirely new to me.
Yeah, MS software's that nociceptive afferent downregulator of somatostatins, right up to the level of the most exquisite of S&M pain thresholds, imho. It's the whip me with your best shot -- fire away, of the IT industry. Hard to beat that sweet pommel horse OS feeling, and smell, with strapped girdle trampoline apps, and spanking ribbons, I say. Makes my machine so sweat, in complete heat, and associated ecstasy!
Well, that was until I installed cygwin anyways, and then started dual-booting into Linux, and now just plain run that loser OS all the time ... Loser? Yes, loser. It just works. With no excitment. No constant suspense as to when the next BSoD will irreversibly shriek out of some shadowy screen corner, and gluttonously ravage my last 24-hours of hard-spent pristine computational effort, and chastity belt, like a true winner OS does! Just how am I supposed to find new excuses for my low productivity now!?!?
Windows 3.1 was tolerable although I preferred DR-DOS with Software Carousel & QEMM386,, not to mention pfs:Professional Write & Quattro Pro 4 (which tabs and macros that worked first time everytime). The only reason I "upgraded" to win10 was because so any of mictosoft's sycophants crippled their software under mictosoft's orders to not properly work under win7.
There'll be all those naysayer that'll claim how much faster and more secure win10 and especially win11 are but win7 just worked, and I NEVER had any security propblems with it. I also didn't have to install a patch that was fixing a previous patch every week either.
...you get kicked
I know we're all professionals here, but I find it almost impossible to imagine what the world would have been like *without* Microsoft (free downvote for first person to say "better"). Sure some stuff was bad (my personal nadir is Win8), but some stuff was incredible. Visual Studio was pretty revolutionary, to name just one.
But over and above individual 'good' or 'bad' products, they went a long way to inventing the modern software industry. They realised that having a strong application ecology would be mutually beneficial to them and countless small (some becoming huge) software producers. And they never thought to take a slice of that income (I'm looking at you Apple - still seems unbelievable to me that Apple take 30% of every iPhone app sale)
Full disclosure: I worked for Microsoft for a couple of years. They were exactly how you'd imagine a huge international company - some amazing and brilliant bits, some terrible and mad bits)
"I know we're all professionals"
Hmm - not sure about that! Many of us are IT professionals for sure, but there are a fair few Linux fanboys who appear to think that because they can run Linux on the computer in their bedroom, that means that everyone everywhere should be able to run Linux easily. Minor things like functionality, staff familiarity, compatibility get ignored, because they are right and they KNOW that they are right!
Functionality - I guess you're going to say it does enterprise management like nothing else, but have you ever seen the fun you can have in Windows, Teams, Office, and SharePoint trying to get it to reflect an organisational merger or split?
Staff familiarity - apart from the complete UI redos for 8, 10, 11...
Compatibility - unless developers stick to Win32 then their new framework du jour will probably be dead in five years.
We skipped W8, and I've not had any issues with moving the users from 7 to 10 or 10 to 11 - 10 and 11 aren't actually that different, especially if you apply some customisation such as left-aligning the taskbar and pinning the most used programs to the start menu.
Picked up DAS in the mid-80's after flying mainframes for USAF. It seemed really cryptic, no good docs to speak of. Even Zork on the ARPAnet had better help. Was still using my Commodore at the time; it had better games.
Found a bug in a 9-track tape driver (controller was bigger than the SX-16 PC we had connected to it) around '90 or so while using their compiled BASIC "Professional Development System" on DAS 3.31, and actually got through on the phone to speak to a human in Redmond. The bug never got fixed, so while we'd sprung for the full 4 megs of memory, I could never take full advantage of it. (That much memory was 10% the capacity of a 1600Bpi tape, would have come in handy.) Even today, thinking about making incantations around QEMM and config.sys still gives me the shivers.
Got off of M$ as my daily driver in '09, switching to the Fruity OS. Still using that now but won't buy their hardware anymore until I can upgrade and work on it, so am hoping either Adobe finally ports to *nix, or I finally learn GIMP. Unless, of course the good people at Opencore get together with someone who's come up with a vanilla Arm hardware implementation.
Keep a WinDoze box handy for providing tech support. Have not let it see 11 under the general "even numbered version rule". DAS 3 & 5 were good. 4 sucked. Win 3 was OK, but super buggy. '95/'98 were good, but still more DAS than Doze. 2000 was OK, but nothing to write home about. ME needed to be taken out back and put out of its misery. Win 7 was finally NT for the consumer, fairly stable and as pretty as it could be for its time. 8 blew dead bears. Since 10 actually kinda works, am not holding much breath for the next one, might just have to start recommending clients move to React (maybe Fedora if they can handle it). Way too much bloat and ads, but that seems to be way of things these days.
The MBP still works, too, though for mobile I've moved to a FrameWork with Fedora. Server boxes are either Debian or Alma, since CentOS got retired. M$ Server licensing is insane, and their implementation of AD was taken from Novell anyway, just like their version of DAS was bought. I wonder what it is about the richest guys being the ones who know what to buy so they can re-sell it?
Even were I still on WinDoze, except for one thing, wouldn't use any of their stuff. Browser? FF. Email? TB. Spreadsheets? LO. DB? Maria. Web? Apache. Coding? Python. All open source. Don't get me started on CoPilot, it's about as much crap as their earlier take on cornering the mobile market, and we all saw how that turned out. Like all current versions of AI, it's a hula hoop, definitely not Ready For Prime Time, hopefully relegated to the trash bin sooner rather than later. (I remember M.U.L.E on the C64 giving a bonus sometimes that said "You've won $50 for your research into artificial dumbness". 40 years later, that's still my rough take on AI.)
I'd rather keep giving the Document Foundation a small token of my appreciation every month than have one of those infernable 365 subscriptions. At least with the former I can see the source code.
About the only good app they have these days is VS Code, though if Pulsar ever catches up on extensions I'll probably ditch it, too. (Yeah, Excel proper is awesome, but they wrote that for Jobs, and it's UI on 'Doze has been junk for years, ever since that stupid Ribbon thingy came out. Wish Bob would have buried it, along with Clippy, and himself). Code is also GUI, so for any remote work it's still Vim all the way.
I remember putting Doom on the office network, '94 or so. Thomas Conrad ARCnet cards, coax in a star topology (token-ring was a gift from the Devil, a blasphemy to be avoided at all costs), running at max a whopping 2.5M bits per second, dip switches to set the node ID, don't flip the wrong one or you may accidentally duplicate an address and everything stops dead.
There were five of us that used to play regularly when we could sneak in a little time. Until the boss asked why his files would never open whenever he heard grunting and chainsaws. Then it was after hours, and since we were off the clock, beverages. Who knows, maybe we invented the LAN party!
The shop got broken into one night. PC's and expensive HP Laserjet 4's stolen. The Novell server, sitting in a corner, a non-descript beige XT case next to all the pencils and other supplies, wasn't taken. Thankfully the thieves didn't realize that was the most powerful box in the building. I reminded the higher-ups we had no backup system in place, so if they had stolen that too... The next day I had a tape drive. And hid that set of tapes every morning in another part of the building, so at worst case we'd be one day behind, a vast improvement over the possibility of being *all* days behind and re-keying everything from paper.
The PC's got turned on and off every day, but the Novell 2.12 beast was like the proverbial Energizer Bunny. It ran 24/7, and was indestructible, never needing a re-boot. Got the snake up to over 1,000 days before upgrading it to 3.12. Before another K of days I'd moved on to a new shop.
The first time I heard the word "munged" was in the context of computers, from a guy that did contract work for the place with the tape drive. He wrote Clipper scripts, and was always munging data. Munge and massage. Munge and massage. Here's your invoice.
There is one fond memory of the little company Paul and Bill started, though, a quote from the latter that went something like "given the proper library, I can write rings around anyone with BASIC". I'll buy that. Libraries are great, shorthand for the mind. Condense a whole bunch of logic into something much easier to type, rinse and repeat.
I would imagine in another 50 years either M$ will be gone, or we'll all be in those Matrix coffins running Windows 67, as a giant click farm for the Great God Azure.
I remember MSDOS coming out. It had a fair amount going for it, but the PET3032 supported intelligent peripherals and the BBC "B" had a more intuitive syntax, superior graphics control (such as split modes), and sound. Still, MSDOS had nice features, such as mapping directories to drives and drives to directories, and support for more memory.
After a while, things started getting murky. DOS 5 and D DOS 6 got embroiled in lawsuits, often copyright.
I remember RISCOS, DesqView, GEM, and early Windows. Windows 3.11 was, again, embroiled in lawsuits, this time anticompetitive action.
Windows was available for PCs, RISCOS only for the Archimedes. RISCOS was better, but the Archimedes failed to sell and Acorn never leveraged the OS anywhere else.
I will decline to comment on later events, beyond saying Microsoft increasingly disappointed me on ethics and security, and whilst I respect others who feel it has changed, I'm not convinced.
But when it started, Ido freely admit they had good ideas and a stronger starting point than Commodore, Acorn, or Atari were able to devise, even though there were noticeable weaknesses.
[This hack's journey began with Microsoft's take on BASIC and progressed through various CONFIG.SYS settings (to persuade certain applications to work on MS-DOS systems), ]
I remember having to make custom DOS boot floppies to run certain games and programs as the configuration they required was kinda exclusive and there wasn't a one size fits all solution.
Granted I only had to do that for a few things but it beat manually changing boot files all the time.
Never been much of a gamer myself, but I do remember having to do that for MicroProse Grand Prix 2. It required DOS in the era of Windows 95, but you could (IIRC) create a bootable DOS 7 floppy without the graphical shell, then you had to manually configure a driver for the CD-ROM in order to access the actual game files.
-A.
Windows - from the company that created EDLIN...
Why do they have to use flat windows, flat buttons etc for the GUI? It is highly unproductive.
Give me the beautiful GUI of OS/2 (or at a pinch, Windows 3.1) where you can see where the bloody window border is, and which button or option is greyed out (or disabled)....
And stop putting a bloody search field in the titlebar of the window!
CUA is dead. Long live CUA.
> Windows - from the company that created EDLIN...
You should check out ed - and the OS it originally ran on. Then come back to edlin.
> Give me the beautiful GUI of OS/2
I choose Windows 2000, or Server 2003 R2. Not Teletubby-XP with is fail-search-indexer.
> And stop putting a bloody search field in the titlebar of the window!
Honestly, that is fine with me. But they should give more options as a menu below. Like the search from Windows 2000, instead of loosly documented "and" keywords which are different in every language and sometimes wrong translated.
> CUA is dead. Long live CUA.
That is true! Removing the window borders in Windows 8 is something I still cannot forgive. Hover over-outside the corner to see where the mouse changes to resize... Windows 1 had better usability. I know, 'cause I used it as kid on my uncles and aunts computers (more than one uncle and more than one aunt were computer literate long long before me - including my late mom).
"The multibillion-dollar purchase of Nokia, on the other hand, was on Copilot's list of mistakes"
Never knew that. So that explains why Nokia tanked.
Also relevant: the enshittification of Skype since MS acquired it.
At least they have left Swiftkey mostly alone, although I sometimes wonder what it phones home about.
This is a true story…
I once held a Windows phone. It was the night my car broke down on the interstate, before I owned even a basic flip-phone. One of my passengers happened to have a Windows phone and handed it to me so I could call a tow truck. The call wouldn’t go through, though. He took it back and said, “Oh, sometimes I have to reboot it before I can make a call…”
Micro-soft's high point would have been their BASIC.
Which wasn't an entirely original product, and somewhat dubiously developed with the help of a publicly funded University machine. Which I suppose established their sense of ethics from the get-go.
It's been downhill since.
Thankfully their dominance in the OS space is diminished and continues to do so.
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