A History of Microsoft Windows

With the arrival (finally) of Microsoft Vista Wired has produced A History of Microsoft Windows, a series of screen shots that track through the history of the Windows operating system. Apart from Windows ME, which I’ve only used once or twice, I’ve used all of these. (I’m pretty sure I’ve used Windows 1 and 2, I think they came as part of Excel when that was ported from the Mac). Of all of them, I still have soft-spots for Windows 98 and NT. The former because it’s still running just fine on an old PC here (and Virtual PC on the iBook), and NT because it wasn’t too bad a development environment for building Delphi and C++ applications on (though I missed the UNIX scripting capabilities). Having to reboot every time you changed a setting was a pain though - especially when the NT box was a server.

I seem to remember the old Byte magazine also doing something similar back when they ran an article comparing different user interfaces back in the early 90s(?) - Mac OS 7, OS/2 Presentation Manager, Windows 3.11, Motif and Open Look were some of them. Seem to remember at that time I had been using Sun’s NeWs as my primary development graphical user interface on Sun Workstations, but had just shifted to X11.

Can’t see the need to upgrade to Vista in the near future, even if the eye-candy looks nice. The Acer desktop is running WinXP and Office 2003 just fine (and passes all the Vista specs for a reasonable system), the borrowed PIII runs a very stable Windows 2000, and the old Celeron 333 plays Age of Empires 1 & 2 on the LAN just fine under Windows 98. If it’s not broken, then don’t upgrade.

Of course, an Intel MacBook or Mini running Vista and Tiger would be very nice (and would allow some PC culling, and more desk space). Maybe sometime later this year.

Related link: Windows Vista Gallery