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

Peter_Brosdahl

Peter_Brosdahl

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Forty years ago, Microsoft joined the GUI party, which included rivals Apple, Atari, and Commodore, by offering Windows 1.0. It was the 1980s, and the console crash had just happened, but PCs had begun the move to the 16-bit era, ushering in new graphics and processor capabilities. At this point, there’d been multiple generations of […]

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And I own (owned if I cant find the box/license I suppose) most of those versions. Starting with 3.1.
 
Yea infused most but base windows 8. Never touched that tile hell.
 
I basically went from Atari DOS (1>2>3>3.5) to MS-DOS, and then to Windows 95, since I stopped using PCs for a bit in between, and have used almost every version since. The two I most loathed were Vista and 8, but I mainly upgraded to them for DX API stuff and just worked through any issues I had with them. Ten had some rough patches here and there, but given how long it was around, I think it did okay overall.
 
You are missing Windows NT, and XP64 if you are really picky.

Windows really started with 3.11 and gained traction with 95, but 98SE paved the way to what MS is today, more so from a gaming standpoint.

Best Windows OS Ranking IMO
Windows 7
Windows XP
Windows 10
Windows 98SE


Worst
Vista
Windows Me

The rest were neither as good nor as bad.
 
Stoly said:
You are missing Windows NT, and XP64 if you are really picky.
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Funny, I totally agree and thought those were in that list I got from VideoCardz. In my head I thought the same about them because while I didn't use NT personally, I know a lot of folks loved it and pretty sure our old servers ran a version of it (which I did maintain until they were retired a few years back).
 
ME didnt have the time to hit it's stride, IMhO
Vista, again IMhO, the OS/giu etc were fine. It was just a pissant poor product launch. MS did get much resistance from developers, including big companies, to making new drivers.

The sound blaster I had at the time never got a new driver. Had to buy a new card - soured my perception of creative labs for sure. Took some time for everything on the device manager to work. (like a year or more).

Is MS to blame? Yes, lots of other companies too.

-edit
really should not post from my phone. Fixed grammar and clarity.
 
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I got a lot of miles out of Windows 2k - almost as much as I did XP.

Win10/11 may as well be the same system... and I think the prophets were right 25 years ago when they claimed the OS is dead, the Browser has taken it's place -- I think that's largely true, although I'd augment that to say "Browser and mobile app" today. The OS isn't entirely insignificant, but it's pretty darn close for most things outside of corner cases (some of those cases are important, I agree, like bare metal performance).
 
Xp was the first one I felt was 'real' not quite as crash prone as 95/98/me - I remember having to reinstall 98 4 times in one day because of .dll conflicts.

Vista/7 were each incrementally more solid and less crash prone.

8 looked goofy, like a phone OS, but worked just fine.

IMO 10 was great, and so is 11. I know people have issues, some valid, but it works and is efficient enough for me.
 
Elf_Boy said:
IMO 10 was great, and so is 11. I know people have issues, some valid, but it works and is efficient enough for me.
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I guess I have to draw a dinstinction... as an OS, yeah, 10/11 seem to work fine. What I really don't like is Microsoft's attitude of updates/features they keep pushing. Like... Notepad now has AI? Start Menu has advertising? Updates tend to break more things than they fix?

I'm all for evolving... but it seems like the OS has been relatively stagnant since 10 and just used as a platform to push peripheral stuff on top of it lately.
 
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