It Was Forty Years Ago When Microsoft Introduced Windows, Joining a New Wave of Graphical User Interface-Based Operating Systems

[Burticus]

As others have mentioned, that list is missing a TON. I remember when Windows 1 and 2 were out, I was working at Radio Shack in the late 80's in HS... at that point Deskmate was better (looking anyway). Win 3.1 changed all that even if it still ran on DOS. Hell we were STILL running windows on top of DOS until NT. I worked at a computer call center during all those fun years. I still have nightmares.

 

[Burticus]

IMO Me and Vista are the 2 worst OS ever released by far. Window 8/8.1 wasn't really bad performance/stability wise, but the interface was anything but friendly.

Yeah ME was a brutalized 98SE build with all kinds of extra BS and no real upsides. Every ME install I came across got downgraded to 98SE ASAP until 2000 workstation started to be viable. Drivers were still a big problem in the early 2000's and if you wanted games to work, you stuck with 9x. The only thing ME did well was bootable media and mostly included drivers on the image... install was pretty easy and you didn't have to spend tons of time on the side digging for network/audio/graphics etc drivers. ME install just "worked". Too bad no one at MS did any QA because it was buggy as hell. I was still building PCs on the side back then and the never ending phone calls and complaints about it never shutting down without crashing, or printer drivers, corrupt filesystems etc etc etc

I also HATED Vista. Every Vista build I came across got immediately downgraded to XP or 2003 workstation. But looking back now, it was pretty much Win 7... it's just that hardware wasn't ready to live in that Vista world. Win 8 could be dialed back to be mostly 7-ish with some helpful tools. MS jumped the gun on that one, but they were (sort of) right... we would eventually wind up in a touchscreen world, it just took us longer than MS planned for.

But if you worked in the IT scene back in the 90's it was a crapshoot as to how all that was going to play out. Netware was the network KING, until it wasn't. Banyan Vines was a thing. OS/2 (and Warp, which was VERY cool back in the 90s) was way ahead of it's time... too much. In an alternate world OS/2 Warp could have been the 98SE/XP we wound up with. Except that it was compatible with d!ck and forget gaming on it. IBM thought they had a winner and tried to wall it up.