New
#1
I remember all the complaints when Windows first came out, I think all the same people are still complaining now, some things never change.
Windows turns 30: a visual history
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New #3
I can remember having a demo of Windows v1, on a couple of 5.25" floppies, but I learnt to use Windows 2 as a "mature student" (aged 38) on my Information Studies MSc. course in 1989/90 at Sheffield University. I wrote my dissertation using Paintbrush, Write, MS Word for DOS and Mac, carrying data as Word documents on both 5.25" and 3.5" floppies between the Information Studies Dept. and the Computing Centre - networking was limited to a few academic online data services and the library catalog, and the printing was queued to a central print server. I don't even remember using email at that time.
Windows 3.0 came out that year.
Windows was not a serious OS then, just a program that gave a graphical interface that ran on DOS, and supported a few Windows applications - which were almost all from Microsoft, very few, if any, from 3rd party software houses.
The PCs we used were mostly Opus and Viglen 286 or 386 machines with monochrome amber screens. The Macs had tiny inbuilt Colour screens.
Printing was mostly done on noisy Epson Dot-Matrix printers on fanfold paper. The computer centre had a Hewlett Packard laserjet. You were lucky if the PCs had 20 or 30 MB hard disks. At about £1.5K, I couldn't afford my own PC yet.
By 1992 Windows 3.1 was supplied on almost all domestic personal computers direct from the Manufacturers, Colour Monitors and up to 4 MB of RAM was standard. Networking was proliferating, mainly with Novell Netware. With Windows for Workgroups 3.11 in 1993, and NT 3.1, networks became available for all. Over the next couple of years, CompuServe and AOL meant that anyone could get online if they had a serial port, a modem and a telephone line, and it all mushroomed from there.
3.1 is still alive and just kicking apparently:
Windows 3.1 Is Still Alive, And It Just Killed a French Airport | VICE News
(I think this may be NTv3.1 though, hard to tell)Last edited by Fafhrd; 20 Nov 2015 at 02:00.
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New #9
I remember booting up a copy of Windows 1.0 and thinking how useless it was. I didn't have any actual Windows applications like Word so there was only the built-in apps like Notepad and Paint and I had better DOS based versions of them.
I agree with hTcloneM9user that younger users don't realize how lucky we are these days compared to back then. Word for Windows (Office didn't exist yet) was priced at around $300 and didn't have near the capabilities of modern Word. There were no free alternative compatible packages such as LibreOffice, there were alternative commercial programs and there were some shareware alternatives.
Windows turns 30: a visual history
Posted: 19 Nov 2015
Read the full history: http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/19/9...story-30-yearsThe PC revolution started off life 30 years ago this week. Microsoft launched its first version of Windows on November 20th, 1985, to succeed MS-DOS. It was a huge milestone that paved the way for the modern versions of Windows we use today. While Windows 10 doesn’t look anything like Windows 1.0, it still has many of its original fundamentals like scroll bars, drop-down menus, icons, dialog boxes, and apps like Notepad and MS paint.
Windows 1.0 also set the stage for the mouse. If you used MS-DOS then you could only type in commands, but with Windows 1.0 you picked up a mouse and moved windows around by pointing and clicking. Alongside the original Macintosh, the mouse completely changed the way consumers interacted with computers. At the time, many complained that Windows 1.0 focused far too much on mouse interaction instead of keyboard commands. Microsoft's first version of Windows might not have been well received, but it kick-started a battle between Apple, IBM, and Microsoft to provide computing to the masses.
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