Windows at Twenty

Bring out the trumpets and the drums!

While we are all out there rushing around dealing with our regular day to day rush, Microsoft Windows is celebrating its twentieth birthday. Can you imagine that. I can recall having staff playing with early versions (1.0 and 2.0) before the product took off with version 3.

Eweek devoted much of a recent issue to reflections on the last twenty years and prognostications for the future. The real questions are: have we really progressed? does the MS Windows standard encourage or stifle innovation?

Comments

  1. Joel – if you’d seen the system in the late Eighties, it was not pretty. Apple ran rings round it as a GUI. Only when 3.x came along was it really here.
    And don’t get me started on whether this standard has advanced the world. De facto it’s here. Merit is another term.

  2. Dangerous territory, Joel, this reminiscences thing. Some of us who are comparatively unyoung can remember TRS 100’s and null modem cables, CPM and 64K of memory, and think that WordPerfect 4.2 was perfectly sufficient… What is truly amazing is the lock Windows has on the world and the corresponding fortune it’s generated. Didn’t say it was great: merely amazing.

    What will comparatively unold people look back on twenty years from now with a similar sense of wonder?