Yesterday, (November 20) Microsoft celebrated its 20th birthday. Twenty years after the initial release of Windows™ 1.0, we have witnessed how Windows transformed from one version to another.
My first encounter with Windows was Windows 95. I was able to play with computers running Windows™ 3.1 back in elementary school days and it was too dull to look at. Windows™ 95 improved a lot of Windows™ 3.1’s shortcomings. Even though it is slow, it was intuitive (take note it was considered fast during those time)! It has the best support for softwares and games, which I really liked. I installed a lot of kiddie games in my ancient Pentium 1 machine. MS-DOS was still widely used in applications during those days and internet was just on its way. I bought my second PC with Windows™ 98 installed in it, and the GUI of Windows™ 98 is a lot better compared to Windows™ 95. It ships with so many bundled applications and default softwares like media player and internet browser. I was just building my interest in computing back then. I hated Windows™ 98 because it gave my PC a lot of problems. I started using utilities to clean up my PC but it was useless. Apparently, using Windows™ NT was not the best solution as I could not install my precious games in my PC, so I adopted Windows™ ME. And so Windows™ ME came…it was more like a curse than a blessing. It’s the most bugged Windows ever after all. I was introduced to Linux after several months; my very first distro was RedHat 6.0. Its functionality was still far from Windows but I gained some interest in alternative operating systems. Soon I realized that Windows is unparalleled not only in UI, but also in customer base (of course, it is supposed to be fool-proof OS). With my 3rd PC on its way, running in Pentium 4, I got Windows™ XP soon. I guess I still can’t use a full-pledged Linux until this very moment. Windows™ XP provided the biggest upgrade since Windows™ 98 and became my prefered OS. It is very stable compared to Windows™ 98 because it boasts new kernel derived from Windows™ NT / 2000. I still think that Windows™ is the best OS for normal day to day computer activities. I reserve Linux for specialized computing.
Windows became part of my life for at least 10 years already; Linux, only 4 years (obviously I have a lot of catching up to do with Linux) but my point here is — the ubiquitous Windows operating system managed to become the number one software I use everyday without me acknowledging it. I’m probably not in the IT industry today without Windows (well, perhaps Linux would but the chances are very slim).
Now, time for trivia! DownloadSquad has 20 interesting trivia about Windows™ 1.0. It’s worth checking out.
Links:
20 things you didn’t know about Windows 1.0
Windows Desktop Products History
Sun Java Studio Creator 2 is so cool. I had the privilege to download it because I registered at Sun’s Early Access program. It seems that Sun is aiming at Visual Studio. Take note, this IDE is free! This Java IDE functions like Visual Studio with drag and drop feature and automated code generation. It supports a lot databases and features intellisense. It really behaves like and looks like Visual Studio IDE. Not only that, it is also meant for rapid deployment! It comes with different export containers so you can deploy your web archive file (WAR) or servlets without any code modifcation. That’s the good thing about Java — you are forced to code with standards.