Yes, Windows is now 30 years old. I found a couple of interesting articles that sort of reviews what most, if not all of us have been through over the years by using Windows.
It's funny how that goes. The fond memories make it seem like it only happened just yesterday. My first experience with Windows came in 1993 when I bought my first PC. The computer was a 486SX25, 4 MB RAM, 130 MB hard drive which came pre-loaded with DOS 5 and Windows 3.1. There was no CD-ROM, no sound card, no modem, but I did get a 0.28 dot-pitch 14-inch monitor. It may not sound like much now, but I was the envy of my friends for a while, especially when I started putting in the extras. Anyway, when I first brought the computer home and got it setup on my kitchen table and turned on the power switch, the computer booted up and it went straight into windows. Being a newbie to the PC at the time, I was impressed by that. I moved the mouse around, played with a few things and found the Windows's Help File with it's built-in tutorial on how to use windows. I went through the tutorial and thought that was pretty cool and very helpful while remembering what it was like using other computer systems of the day running some variant of CP/M that always gave you that infamous syntax error message with little explanation. It's too bad that that kind of thing is lost on the people running Microsoft these days. I honestly think they need to go back and play around with their older systems to figure out what it was that made windows so great back in the day. I'm pretty confident if they did that, Windows 10 would have been a much different product from what we have now.
I started at 286, 1mb, 30 mb, 8/10 MHz, DOS 3.1, amber monochrome, but one of the coolest things I remember was going from dialup and CompuServe, 70671.2234@compuserve.com, to DSL and IE Internet with Win95. I also remember that playing the videos on the Plus Pak cdrom was pretty cool.
I started my engineering career in the 1970s doing software development on mainframes, then with minicomputers, such as a Modcomp system at a small company, then later with Digital Equipment Corp. systems at a multinational company.
When I first interacted with a computer, it was via punch cards and printouts, but I moved up to video display terminals in the late 1970s. 1980 saw me working on a Digital Equipment Corp. VT-52 (a behemoth, but nice to use), and I also had an Intel 8080-based home system that ran CP/M.
A year or two later at work we moved up to VT-100 and ultimately VT-220 terminals on PDP-11 and Vax systems. To this day I use a now 30+ year old Digital LK-250 PC keyboard that was the PC equivalent of those VT-220 terminal keyboards. I'm typing this message on it, and it's as good as it ever was. Ah the values of yesteryear. One of the best keyboards ever. I have 4 spares in the closet. I'm pretty sure I'll meet my end before buying a different keyboard.
My first Windows experience was on a PC XT provided to me by the company. It ran Windows 2.0 - amazing, fully graphic windows you could move around to any position on the screen! I had seen and experimented with 1.0 on others' computers and kind of dismissed it because frankly it was not as useful as a well-tuned DOS setup that had some of the good character-graphic software you could add to DOS back then.
Even though I'd experienced the awesome Windows 2.0, my development was still done chiefly on DOS for a few years. I remember quite clearly in 1986 when a high-end 80286 workstation-class system by Intel finally supplanted my use of the ASCII terminal for my daily software development tasks. Wow, imagine compiling code right in your office! That was not long after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.
I remember doing the purchase justification and requisition for our first 386 system. A monstrously powerful 33 MHz Dell system for doing software builds using Microsoft C. That sucker was over $10,000. We could compile our whole set of 50,000 LOC of C source code into product firmware in as little as 30 minutes with that beast (by comparison today I can compile 250,000 LOC of C++ code in 8 seconds)!
We finally all really adopted Windows for mainstream use when Windows 3.11 for Workgroups came out, as it could actually do networking (via Digital DECNet cards and a special NetBEUI networking stack). You might even be able to work half a day without a crash or corrupted FAT file system.
I have always tweaked and tuned and developed tools for Windows. I set up systems for the whole engineering division, and we ended up doing things with early versions of Windows then that are still today recognized as among the best ways to do software work. We had source code management integrated into the context menu in Explorer even back then! WSIWYG editors, comparison tools... A whole department of engineers could check out files from PVCS, work on their software, then check them back in, and anyone could update their system with others' work as needed. Productivity soared and we made tons of money for the company.
The first Windows system I ever had at home had Windows 95. I got reasonably high up in the technical ranks, had a parking spot and corner office, and the company provided me a (then old) 386 PC system to take home. But that didn't satisfy me, so the first machine I ever bought for myself was a Dell 100MHz Pentium system in late 1995. That also ran Windows 95 - and rather better than the 386 system. I used that system for some years to telecommute - using a MODEM!
Since the late 1990s I've always opted for Dell workstation class machines, going through Windows 2000 on a multi-core Dell system, all the way up through today, which sees me running Windows 8.1 x64 Pro/MCE on a top-end 12 core Dell Precision T5500 workstation outfitted with all the best hardware (including 6 SSDs in RAID). I also run Win 10 in a VMware virtual machine. Computers have become so powerful that one can now run a number of whole systems virtually with reasonable performance. At one point I had VMs all running XP, 7, 8.0, 8.1, and 10 simultaneously.
I've always taken Windows further than Microsoft's vision would seem to extend, turning it into a real workhorse, high-productivity, high-reliability system. It's always amazed me that it was consistently delivered so poorly-configured by Microsoft out of the box, and with such missing functionality. But it always had potential that could be realized by tweaking, tuning, and augmenting.
I've had good times all through history with Windows.
However, it's a bit tough to see today's times in that same light. I mean, I've tweaked, tuned, and augmented Windows 10 as best I can, and you'd think I'd be happy to have it working so well, but it's just worse than its predecessor, and its predecessor before that. And Microsoft has changed policies so that I can't imagine it getting better.
My high school had a ticker tape thing that was connected to a computer somewhere. Not really sure where. I don't think we had computer classes, but I do seem to remember a computer club that met after school.
The first computer I worked on ran on metal tape on a reel-to-reel that had hole similar to the paper ticker tapes. It was for the missle system I worked on while in the Army back in the 80s. :-)
I started with a TI99. The OS was TI Basic. This was sometime in the 80's. It had a whopping 16k of memory and used a cassette tape to store programs. Next, still in the 80s, I had an Atari 520ST with 512k memory. Now that was a good computer back then. Don't remember what the processor was, but it had a Windows-like UI. I liked computers so much that I took a correspondence course (I spent the 80s in Germany), and got a Cordata All-in-one with an 8088 CPU with DOS 2.1 to do the course work.
When I got out of the Army in 90, I went to a technical school and then went to work professionally doing systems engineering. OS, security, and applications packaging are my specialties.
DOS 2.1 through 6. Windows 3.1, WFW 3.11, 95, NT 3.51/4.0, Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10. Never really used the consumer versions that much, either at work or at home. I always tried to keep up at home by using the business versions at home. That's why I have a Windows Server and domain at home and our home computers login to the domain, get GPOs and my WSUS server provides the updates that I choose to install...
My preferred version of Windows is 7, but I wish it had the configuration options of previous versions. I like the 3D look and Aero. The last version I ran at home was 8.1 with Classic Shell. Hated the 2D look and pastel colors.
I do remember the $10,000 computers from the 90s. We can get 10 computers for that price nowadays. :-)
My 486 computer from 1993 costed me $1700.00. After that, it seem like I was always paying my computer tech guy another $400.00 each time he came by to visit me to install some add-on hardware I wanted. By the time I had paid $1000.00 for 16MB of RAM to add to my system about a year later, I was pretty much doing it for myself by then. Ah yes, as expensive as the hardware was back then, I certainly enjoyed learning how to do it.
My favorite windows versions were WFW 3.11, Windows 95, XP, and 7.
<Rick> Good video. It's almost hard to believe that at one time Windows 98 was the resource hog, but even then, it still ran circles around what Windows 10 can do on today's modern hardware and look a heck of alot better doing it.
May 25, 2021 22:55:12 GMT -6
<Rick> As stated elsewhere, So much for the launch of Windows 11, "The Great Crash." Myself, I had a hard time getting into the site listed above, when I did get in, the video was partly done and then it crashed. There has been many other reports of crashing.
Jun 24, 2021 9:52:33 GMT -6
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<Rick> I see Microsoft has been very quick to pull down reports of site crashing regarding the Launch of Windows 11 on the Microsoft Insiders forum.
Jun 24, 2021 9:57:31 GMT -6
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<Rick> The rebroadcast is working okay.
Jun 24, 2021 11:00:25 GMT -6
<Rick> With reports of people being able to install the dev-edition of Windows 11 on machines not meeting spec, I thought I would give it a what-the-heck try. Lucky me, I'm caught in the downloading, doesn't meet spec, clearing, re-downloading loop on my machine!
Jul 2, 2021 7:08:46 GMT -6
<Rick> I've recently purchased a license for ArcaOS from www.arcanoae.com/ to play with. First impressions, it's still OS/2, but it now has a Linux twist to it.
Jul 2, 2021 7:32:53 GMT -6
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<dozrguy> laptop shit out and am stuck buying a new one. os win11 as fucked as win10 was?
Oct 2, 2021 12:56:10 GMT -6
<Rick> Let's see ..., my impression of Windows 11 is that it is a spruced up version of Windows 10 requiring a 64-bit processor plus a piece of security hardware that is less than 4 years old in order for it to run.
Oct 4, 2021 18:25:49 GMT -6
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<Rick> On the plus side, Microsoft is supposed to be supporting Windows 10 for some time to come for those of us still using systems with I7 or older processors.
Oct 4, 2021 18:44:35 GMT -6
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<dozrguy> i tried installing win10 om the 'shitout' pc this morning usung media creation. EPIC FAIL! went into an endless bootloop. win7 reinstalled just fine
Oct 21, 2021 11:23:38 GMT -6
<dozrguy> STILL so much bullshit and so little time for the kiddie ideas from the hill. My new laptop (MSI GE 11-UH461) would be an awesome "10" machine but because of Winblows I can only give it a "2"......wasted $3500
Oct 27, 2021 9:36:47 GMT -6
<Rick> Hello. Just checking in.
Mar 17, 2022 10:46:54 GMT -6
<isidroco> Each new w10 update adds >100000 useless files to \Windows\Servicing\LCU\Package_for_RollupFix... folders. Even in a SSD takes time to delete that stuff. In each version they manage to worsen stuff.
Mar 27, 2022 16:14:51 GMT -6
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<dozerguy> still traffic here?
Oct 9, 2022 17:32:44 GMT -6
<Rick> No, there does not seem to be very much traffic these days. I still check in from time to time.
Oct 9, 2022 20:08:58 GMT -6