History Of Windows article

[karlsnooks]

Chaps,
I found this article interesting especially since I was one of the users who thought that GUI and Windows was a waste of computer time and money and also a wast of human resources.
The Secret Origin of Windows

 

[fseal]

Wow, good article!

I was a developer for many years on DOS and up until Windows 3.0 Windows really did seem like a lot of work and incompatility for little gain. My boss was all over it but he couldn't actually demonstrate anything that was an actual usability improvement before 3.0.

But after 3.1 and especially 3.11 everyone was finally getting into the application view of things and a lot of the really refined DOS prorgams were fiinally becoming polished windows apps.

Fun reading a bit about the inside development. In fact the "Microsoft stole the UI ideas from Apple" events chronology actually mimics the "Microsoft stole Windows Vista/7 from OS X" chronology. Even though microsoft announces it's UI and OS improvements LONG before Apple ever started OS X, Apple got it done long before Vista was released so suddenly it looks ike Vista copied OS X when in fact it was in some ways other way around...

 

[karlsnooks]

fseal,
glad you enjoyed it. I too wasn't positive about windows until 3.1 and like you 3.11. Knew there had to be some other old-timers out there. Now, with frequently 4 or 5 programs open at once, I can laugh at my opinion then that you only needed one program at a time and anymore than that was for the muti-tasking fanatics.

 

[Kari]

We had VAX / VMS mini computer and dumb terminals when I studied in early 80's, privately I was an enthusiastic CP/M and DOS user, later OS/2 user until NT and then 95 were published. Windows 3 / 3.11 was not really my thing.

NT and 95 changed that, I can still remember how exited I was when I read from a PC magazine that I can create and use nested subfolders in NT.

The article brings back some nice memories!

Kari