Happy Birthday, Windows!

[thewayne]

Version 1 was released 30 years ago Friday.

Wow.

I never messed with 1, I did mess with Windows 286 and it was pretty much garbage. That would have been around '89, IIRC. There wasn't much in the GUI/multi-tasking world. The first successful commercial release, Windows 3.0, followed by Windows for Workgroups 3.1 and Windows NT 3, were big improvements. NT was an excellent product: its improved memory management eliminated the crashes in Access that were a perpetual plague compared to running it under Workgroups.

Still, I'm writing this on an Apple MacBook Air, and I can't see me going back to Windows for my primary home computing stuff.

Comments

[silveradept]

Windows I keep to play games, all other things use Linux.

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

I may have to run a poll sometime, and find out what OSs people use/have used. I've used Windows one a few occasions (the Keil uVision IDE is/was Windows only, f'rex), but never on a sustained basis at home - I went from the BBC Micro to their Archimedes, and hence fell into the ARM early on, leading to my professional introduction to the world of Macs, as such were the host for the 3DO dev card. I gained a PowerBook 5300c through work, and once the company imploded, was given the opportunity to buy it and "my" NeXTs for very nice prices.

Always did enjoy NextStep, and the hardware design - who'd have guessed I'd be using its descendent 20 years on? ^_^

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

NeXT was VERY cool tech. I always wanted one, but my career has been database development and administration, basically record keeping. I never needed to live in the lower levels of the computer, so I never really learned it.

I'm hoping to rectify that a bit through trying to get in to Arduino and possibly RasPi programming, but I haven't found the time for it yet. There's some stuff that I want to do with the Arduino involving a strange lighting controller that's both touch and sound controlled, I also want to to a variation of a flame soundwave display using water.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

For me it's SQL Server, Microsoft Access, and occasionally Word. I find Word a bit better for editing big documents that I'm going to turn in to an ePub.

And some old games.