Windows 95 to Windows 7: How Microsoft lost its vision
Much better than Vista, and the best Windows yet. That seems to be the consensus view on Windows 7, and after two and a half months with the final build, I more or less agree - despite the niggling voice that says behind the new taskbar it is not really so different from Windows Vista. Nevertheless, Windows 7 on its launch today …
I see all these big lists of quibbles with the final code and have to wonder, especially amongst those that have been using the various beta/rc versions, how many of you ever actually clicked the "report this" link tagged on to every single window and fed back your opinions then, when it mattered...?
Much easier just to wait for the release and then give MS another bashing for not doing all those things it failed to read straight out of your mind eh.
I got my RTM copy last week and think its great, anybody who doesn't rate it above XP/Vista clearly hasn't used the 3 OS enough.
How did we get from Windows 3 to Windows 7? Windows 95=4, 98=5, 2000=6, XP=7, Vista=8. I have been merciful and left out ME.
When one considers all the businesses that rely on MS... One wonders about the numeracy of the Marketers.
I'll stick to an operating system that has gone sequentially from 1 to 11.
"To all the Amiga fanboys: yes, you had preemtive multitasking. What you didn't have was memory protection. That's sort of like driving a sports car at 120 mph with bald tires and no seat belts. The Amiga had NOTHING like mainframe or UNIX functionality."
Even though (some) Amigas had the hardware to provide memory protection (full 68030, '040 and '060 all had MMUs) it was never implemented in any version of AmigaOS. However, with a boot time of seconds (even from floppy) and a lack of applications where memory protection could be considered absolutely necessary, a crash was hardly the most earth shattering event.
The lack of memory protection is hardly the most important failing of the Amiga... That honour lies squarely at the feet of Commodore during its later years!!
I thought this article would be more retrospective, but it seems like you only wrote the first half of it. You need to fill in the chronological gap between 1995 and 2007.
I have a 3.2Ghz Pentium 4 PC that is FIVE YEARS OLD running XP.
I wiped and started again, now I've been running Windows 7 with the same applications and same PC for 2 days.
MUCH FASTER!!
Yes I said OLD hardware. Only major difference is that I'm running 64 bit Windows 7 rather than 32 bit XP, my PC's motherboard was once of the first to support 64 bit.
The Windows 95 interface was based on OS/2. IBM contracted Microsoft to develop OS/2 Presentation Manager, the GUI portion of OS/2 - it also had a CLI. This was in the days when Microsoft was small and IBM still had a relationship with them - primarily from the PC-DOS days. But the copyright on PM resided with Microsoft and not IBM - some piss poor contract drafting by IBM.
The OS/2 PM code was reused to become Windows 95 and has been reused ever since.
"How did we get from Windows 3 to Windows 7? Windows 95=4, 98=5, 2000=6, XP=7, Vista=8. I have been merciful and left out ME."
Actually Windows 9x, 2000 and ME are all different versions of Windows 4.
Windows 3
Windows 4 (95 - 2000)
Windows 5 (XP)
Windows 6 (Vista)
Windows 7
At least that's how I understand it.
NT 3.1
NT 3.5
NT 4.0
Windows 2000 (NT 5.0)
Windows XP (NT 5.1)
Windows Vista (NT 6)
Windows 7
Windows 7 follows the NT OS version number, of which 3.1, 3.11 for workgroups, 95, 98 and ME were never a part of.
the only one going to Vegas round here is me, oops, the only revolutionary one was NT3.1, designed by Dave Cutler. Win1.x/2.x/3.x/95/98/ME were just not-too-bad DOS extenders, while 3.5, 3.51, Win2k, XP, 2k3s, Vista & 7 came not too far from their great ancestor.
"Win 3.1/95 created the industry standard for how people would interact with a personal computer via a GUI. "
No it didn't. It's a ripoff from Apple who ripped theirs from Xerox. MS has never created anything significant unless you count ruthless and criminal methods for building and ensuring monopoly and it can be said that even that is ripped from IBM, leaving absolutely zero real innovations.
Even this "next version" is a Apple-ripoff.
MS expenses: 30% advertising, 30% "legal fees" ,20% "public relations", a fancy name for bribery and 10% product development. It doesn't leave much room for innovation, does it? But o boy, it sells like a hotcake.
( "Manufacturing" actual products is so insignificant part of expenses it doesn't show at all in this scale.)
"I can't help thinking that it was in the main interest of Microsoft to demonstrate that an OS's consistency and reliability are more important than innovation, especially after the headaches of Vista."
Well, no: They hadn't any choice but sell yet another repackaged version of NT. Vista was and is a nightmare, so you sell yet another vesion of XP with DRM-kernel from Vista. That's Windows 8: Old pieces, new version. Not really innovation, but repackaging. An art by itself, I'll admit.
If you rip off unnecessary cruft and eye candy (=classic look), what is the fundamental difference between 7 and NT, besides DRM and some drivers (easy to write to any OS) ? Yet another version of ActiveX?
I'd say there aren't any, except 64-bit version. But even NT had it (not on intel-platform, but that's another story).
"I got my RTM copy last week and think its great, anybody who doesn't rate it above XP/Vista clearly hasn't used the 3 OS enough."
Using it doesn't change some basic facts which make it inferior to XP:
1) DRM
2) Non-existing drivers
3) Huge footprint on disk and on memory, much larger than XP.
No matter how much you use it, these won't change. Now or ever.
There's no such thing as NT7.x (yet). According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT, Windows 7 is actually NT6.1
I have my linux box configured to switch between GUI that looks like win xp, Apple and now Win 7. I can switch to any of those whenever some of my tech challenged friends want to use the computer. They usually can't make out the difference but do compliment me about how fast my old computer runs compared to their latest ones.
Yes, Windows 95 was revolutionary. An Operating System is a lot more than just a GUI. Wherever they stole the GUI ideas from, there was a lot more to Windows 95 that made it revolutionary.
"The essentials of the Windows 95 user interface remain in Windows 7, fourteen years later. What Windows 95 does, Windows 7 does better and with greater reliability, but there is no revolution."
Which is just one from a long list of reasons why I won't be buying it.
I gave up on windows in about 1999 when I was formatting a disk and accidentally clicked outside the DOS window. When I came back an hour later, the formatting had stopped at the moment I had clicked outside the window. Pre-emptive multitasking was by then standard in every other OS and expecting a program to continue working when you've clicked on another window didn't seem like too much to ask.
The "Start" menu is stupid as well. When I want to "Stop" my machine, I click on "Start"?!? WTF
So, if it's just a more reliable version of the crud they've been shitting out at us for the last 25 years, why should we bother? Faster? Is it? How fast is Win3.1 on a modern machine?!?
My prediction is that all these users saying "It's really much faster than the previous version" will be reinstalling in about 3 months... That's what usually happens ;)
As pointed out by others, this was when the DOS-based "OS" was dropped. The Win9x and pre-win95 "Windows" were nothing more than a glorified DOS-Shell with eye-candy; in fact the Windows 3.x line shared the basic DOSShell Program Manager concept. (The DOSShell menus were basically the same as the Program Manager.) The gigantic Win95 "jump" was basically MS copying Mac System 7's look & feel, much like Vista was copying Mac OS X's look & feel. My, things never change!
However, when XP was touted as the "replacement" for Win98 (WinME is something everyone, even MS, tries to forget it even existed), the desktop users were actually upgraded to a real technological jump. Of course, I say desktop users, because come corporate users were already using NT Workstation 4, which is basically the same as win2k sans Active Directory.
I think that it is really hard to do anything else to the current GUI as it stands without big hardware improvements; the only revolutionary concept I've seen is the Compiz/Beryl "3d desktop" or similar stuff around that concept. And they're still based on the basic windowed desktop! I'd rather see improvements on the backend-side of the OS... but I think Windows has also found itself on a dead-end there.
Cloud computing is still a long way off. If even Google can't run a continuous email service, why on Earth would we think that anyone can get a cloud software providing service to run? And 'free' internet connections out in the coffee houses and bars are being removed because too many people come in, buy one drink and spend all day leeching off the free Wi-Fi.
Do you want to find yourself desperate to finish that powerpoint for a meeting, find that you have to pay Starbucks to get access to the internet and then discover that the local server farm has gone down, so preventing you from getting at the software you need?
Also, AC wrote:
>1) DRM
>2) Non-existing drivers
>3) Huge footprint on disk and on memory, much larger than XP.
>No matter how much you use it, these won't change. Now or ever.
1) DRM? I hope you don't own an iPhone - that device is much, much more restrictive! I watch TV on my TV, so W7 DRM doesn't really bother me.
2) Windows 7 has built-in support for my printer, chipset, VGA, and audio which XP doesn't. Oh, and XP didn't support my first scanner, which I had to chuck. 95/8 to XP was just as bad (actually, it was worse, because Vista changeover sorted most drivers).
3) As for footprint - if you look at prices for HDD and RAM back in 2001, you'd find that Windows 7 costs less to cover for HDD and RAM footprint than Windows XP did when released.
Also:
3.x - Windows 3.0 & 3.1
4.x - Windows 95, 98, 98SE, ME
NT 3.x - Windows NT 3 & 3.5
NT 4.x - Windows NT 4.0
NT 5.x - Windows 2k, Windows XP, Windows Home Server, Windows Server 2003
NT 6.x - Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008
NT 7.x - Windows 8?
By the timeline of past OS releases, NT 7.x should come out roughly 2011/12. That would (presumably) be Windows 8. Windows 7 is to Windows Vista what Windows 98 SE was to Windows 95 (in terms of releases), so Windows 7 really is just Vista with fixes and extras. It will be interesting to see what MS do for Windows 8, and when it's now planned for release.
Interesting to note that despite the alledged speedy turn-around of W7, the gap between Vista and W7 is about the same as that between Win95 and Win98 and between Win98 and ME.
I have a 3.2Ghz Pentium 4 PC that is FIVE YEARS OLD running XP [...] Yes I said OLD hardware. Only major difference is that I'm running 64 bit Windows 7 rather than 32 bit XP, my PC's motherboard was once of the first to support 64 bit.
"Alex 3" - go and change your name, what the heck are you doing commenting here? You know nothing about what you are writing about.
BTW: 7 is faster than Vista, though MUCH slower than XP on any hardware we tested at work.
This wasn't a completely new OS. was it worth 120 bucks to upgrade. YES. Thats all i need to know. I have XP on several machines and its not better then Windows 7 by any means.
Last time I checked the P4 had 32bit registers so it's bloody amazing you are running a 64bit OS on it.
I neither like or dislike 7 it is way better than vista and will stop me from having a nOS (XP) that is unsupported after 2014 (getting in early)
Remember when Microsoft revolutionized the Office interface with the Ribbon?
They got shat on by people because people don't like change.
Now you are all criticizing them for evolving Windows and refining it and making it better instead of changing it all?
Tough crowd...
