Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 11th Nov 2008 20:39 UTC
Windows Back in 1983, 25 years ago, the world was quite different. The market for the home computer - still a fairly new market - was wide open, but Apple was about to make a major splash with its Macintosh. It was also the year in which a company from Redmond first introduced its "Windows" operating system. What is this Windows you speak of?
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Mouse
by thavith_osn on Tue 11th Nov 2008 22:21 UTC
thavith_osn
Member since:
2005-07-11

What was really interesting about 1.0 was the lack of a mouse... Everything worked from the keyboard...

Maybe that's why Windows has always been better then Mac when it comes to the keyboard...

I was a Mac guy way back then, so WIndows was an interesting thing to see, but like others here have said, I was more interested in what Gem and others were doing, not to mention the Amiga of course...

Oh, anyway, Happy Birthday :-D

Edited 2008-11-11 22:23 UTC

RE: Mouse
by hobgoblin on Tue 11th Nov 2008 22:59 in reply to "Mouse"
hobgoblin Member since:
2005-07-06

given that no pc at that time came shipped with a mouse, not surprising.

same deal with cd-rom, dvd-rom, and so on.

games and software on cd's started showing up first when all new pc's sold had a optical drive. similarly, games started coming on dvd only when a majority had a dvd drive out the box.

usb sticks only really took of when pc's came with windows that supported the usb storage profile, and computers came with usb ports on the front.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2

RE: Mouse
by darknexus on Wed 12th Nov 2008 01:18 in reply to "Mouse"
darknexus Member since:
2008-07-15

Windows used to be better than Mac with keyboard support, and had the upper hand for a long time. This changed when OS X came out however, and Mac very definitely now has the upper hand especially in recent OS X releases. If you compare Mac's keyboard navigation to that found in Vista and Office 2007 there is absolutely no contest, OS X blows them out of the water. This is coming from someone who uses the keyboard 100% of the time out of necessity. I've yet to see any GUI match the consistency in regards to using the keyboard that OS X now has. Sure, the keys may not work the way you'd expect on other GUIs like windows (page up/page down, for example) but they are consistent throughout. Further, the sheer number of shortcuts in OS X itself is astounding, and first letter navigation works just about everywhere including menus and toolbars. Believe me this does matter if you are using the keyboard 100%. In recent years Windows has become a nightmare to navigate in some areas with the keyboard, and office even worse. Some parts of Vista's interface are downright clumsy and awkward for keyboard users--the new control panel and start menu just to name two. This doesn't mean it is not doable, because it is, but it's very clunky and sometimes horribly slow. Parts of the new control panel, for example, require me to tab through about twenty times to get to the item I want, and there's no shortcut other than switching to classic mode. This is not the best of ideas, as MS has indicated that classic modes are going away, so I do not want to take the easy way out ;) . The devil's in the details, as they say, and OS X has paid very good attention to detail in this area, whereas Microsoft seems to have lost sight of it for the time being.

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RE[2]: Mouse
by modmans2ndcoming on Wed 12th Nov 2008 17:55 in reply to "RE: Mouse"
modmans2ndcoming Member since:
2005-11-09

Try using the search feature in the vista control pannel. I find it works very well and uses live results.

I do the same thing with the start menu.

Good search with live results makes keyboard use of the general OS interface a lot easier.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2