A 16 page long, illustrated history of Windows, from 1981 untill today, at NeoWin.
MS Windows History – from pre-Windows 1.0 to Windows Server 2003
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
To quote the article’s Windows NT 3.1 section:
“Microsoft had built a whole new Operating System from scratch”
Um, WinNT started off as OS/2. That’s quite a substantial oversight.
The plan originally was to base it off OS/2, yes…this was however scrapped, and NT was rewritten from scratch midway through since Windows 3.x took off, and OS/2 did not.
Windows NT 3.1 – 2000 contains a OS/2 Subsystem to allow OS/2 Applications to run but it is not based on OS/2 It was supposed to use the OS/2 API as standard but MS created the Win32 API.
No, the OS *was* written from scratch, but there was a layer/influense of OS/2 stuff. But the biggest influense in the architecture of NT 3.1 was not OS/2, it was VMS.
quote from the last page:
What began as innovative idea has since developed into a world wide phenomenon. Windows has helped gain Microsoft the status of the worlds biggest company, with over 90% of PC users choosing to adopt this software.
Innovative in what way? Not saying this to bash MS, but seriously, how was Windows an innovative idea?
Secondly, windows has not been actively chosen by over 90% of the users since most of them doesn’t even know that any alternatives exists.
Other than that, I can’t say that the page is much to talk about. Perhaps it’s interesting for those who isn’t familiar with the history of Windows, but then again, this just talks about it very briefly. Not that I blame him, the story isn’t that exciting.
Things i liked are photos and some info on the pre-windows 1.0 versions =]
windows xp and windows nt were the only windows that run in true 32 bit.
Preemptive multitasking maybe on win nt 2000 or xp, not on win 3x or 9x
Windows NT, 2000, XP and 2003 are all built on the same 32-bit pre-emptively multitasked codebase. The ‘kernel’ (or Virtual Machine Manager) in Windows 95/98/Me is 32-bit too, and pre-emptively multitasked, although many of the user-mode components aren’t. In particular, USER, KERNEL and GDI are 16-bit code on these operating systems.
Windows has been able to pre-emptively multitask DOS applications for a long time — since Windows/386 IIRC — by means of the 386’s Virtual 8086 mode. Windows 95 extended this pre-emptive multitasking to Win32 apps, and between Win32 apps, Win16 and DOS apps.
> Innovative in what way? Not saying this to bash MS, but
> seriously, how was Windows an innovative idea?
it was, and still is, the only popular, portable (please, *stop* beating the “OS/2 was superior” dead horse – OS/2 was just as portable and well-designed as DOS) and multiuser operating system not based on Unix concepts (I’m talking about Windows NT, of course – Consumer Windows wasn’t innovative, it was… PC-ish, just like OS/2 and DOS. The PC itself was an innovative concept). Nobody has ever attempted this much and succeeded (BeOS came close, but base concepts like process management, I/O, security, etc. were Unix-ish – they didn’t invent anything). If you exclude Apple, that, though, has chickened out, and adopted an Unix *codebase*
Where is Microsoft BOB, really liked that one 😉
http://toastytech.com/guis/bob2.html
http://www.levenez.com/windows/
(he also has a nice Unix family tree and another on programming languages
Windows has been able to pre-emptively multitask DOS applications for a long time — since Windows/386 IIRC
and since DOSSHELL
(indeed it had the exact same dos extender than 3.0)
once I ran INTERSRV.EXE in win98 and it locked it up telling it was running under the dosshell task switcher
> seriously, how was Windows an innovative idea?
the innovation was to steal^Wbring together all the technologies into a locked up monopo^W^W^WOS.
> OS/2 was just as portable and well-designed as DOS
Hmm, where did I hear OS/2 was ported on PPC then ?
oh yeah, NT was too, for a short time at least :p
> The PC itself was an innovative concept
Yeah… goog one, ROTFL
> Hmm, where did I hear OS/2 was ported on PPC then ?
I don’t know, where did you hear that? I didn’t.
> > The PC itself was an innovative concept
> Yeah… goog one, ROTFL
Sure, of course it was. Before the PC (or, more accurately, PC clones), where could you get such a cheap business/desktop machine capable of running a wide variety of software? Surely not from Apple.