...and Apple, Dec, Netscape, Sun, etc. Allegedly...

That's a first!

Apple, Amiga, Gnome and pretty much everybody else.

A screen desparately short of pixels, but electing to use three lines worth of space for caption bars and menus. This is something that the Mac definitely got right. (In fact, it is possible the only thing the Mac has ever got right, ever.) There can only be one active application, so there need only be one menu bar on display, and it is not hard to merge it with the caption bar.

Another goof is alluded to in the reference to the "MS-DOS executive" (in the document on the right). KERNEL.DLL was an absolutely stunning overlay/memory manager, giving all the benefits of virtual memory on a basic 8086 CPU. Microsoft *could* have made it available to "console-mode" applications, offering a relatively easy upgrade path (replace all your calls to malloc) but instead chose to bundle it with the GUI which is a much harder upgrade (replace all your UI code, too). If they'd done that, they'd have found that most "DOS" programs actually ran fine on their OS/2 1.x offering, and the 386's V86-mode was needed only for the most stubbornly antiquated crud.

I hope nobody is proposing to delay Christmas 2009 for a few months - I like Christmas in December...

Microsoft of all companies would be able to spell "rudimentary"!

Looks like the Windows 1.0 spellchecker didn't pick up 'rudamentary'.

...and Gem. And VisiOn. And Macintosh. And Amiga Workbench. And Risc OS. And OSX...

Did you ever try running any version of Windows lower than 95 on its own without DOS? Did it work? Then why the fuck are you calling it an OS?

Paris, 'cause I'd like to give her one per os.

I used to have an XT with windows 1.0 and GEM installed. We were thrilled when windows could use more than the usual DOS 640KB memory boundary.

Oh well... happy today with win XP pro and for real work I'm happy with CENTOS linux. :-)

I mean the future is in the older generations. Microsoft is probably aiming at all those Silver Surfers that have trouble with small icons.

So in the ever warring quest of MS stole from Apple who stole from MS who all stole from everyone else...

we see that a return to dashboard icons / Leopard clones can in fact be put back to Gates in the 1980's. When will people just accept that GUI's should be simple, well structured and easy for the user?

Apple seem to have a good understanding (im not a fanboi) of what makes GUI's usable. The sparky gizmo's of the iPod Touch can obviously run on low power devices. They also have simple software installation / removal procedures. Linux has the power to enable complete customisation - often too much power for the normal user.

I would welcome a simple blisteringly fast OS which allows me to run 95% of the applications used in daily life... and suitable customisation for the rest. Oh wait... that was the idea of the EEE + Xandros; Aspire One etc.

> Gates unveiled Windows, the 16-bit operating system that ran on IBM PCs.

Sheesh, I wonder how many times geeks will have to set El Reg straight.

Win 1.0 was not an OS. It's a GUI shell for MS-DOS.

The entire Windows 1.x/2.x/3.x and 9x/ME line are not OSes, they're just shells. The NT/2K/XP/Vi$hta/7 line, however, are.

I remember that it couldn't really do much, but the idea seemed clever and the potential was obvious from the start. One thing that it would do is run dBase III; the speed slowed to a crawl, but you could then copy data from it and paste it into something else. I remember sitting there for hours doing that just because you could.

they also have "MS Dos Executive" listed. Are they going back to the 9x line of OSses?

Or are they giving in to the PenguinLovers and including a powerful commandline tool?

Oh, you mean a DOCK - now where have we seen that before?

Isn't it time MS decided to innovate rather than immitate?

No, no, no. Please do not perpetuate this fallacy.

Windows, until Windows 95, could not be classified as an operating system - it was a GUI layer on top of MS-DOS. (And with some coaxing, a little luck and a favourable wind, PC-DOS and FreeDOS too)

Even the later Win9x streams functioned in this way, bootstrapping a DOS 7.x layer then running DOS extenders to move everything into the higher memory areas.

Mine's the one with the Workbench disks in the pocket.

Ha!

There's proof in that screen shot that Apple stole the idea for the OS X dock from Microsoft's Windows 1.0 (and Windows 2.0, 3.0, 3.1).

Can't say I really played with Windows 1.0 (I had an Atari ST at the time) but I do remember at college back in 1994, they had Pagemaker running on Windows 2.0. The funny thing is, Windows 2.0 ran as an application in Windows 3.1!

It was slow, but kinda funny putting Windows 2.0 in a Windows 3.1 DOS Box window. Wasn't really much use though.

Rob

Though not sure what they're talking about with large icons - most so far seem smaller than the laptops pre-installed vista icons - which I kinda liked, vista's icons always seemed too big after using XP for so long.

...............bring back Microsoft Bob!!

Does this mean no ribbon bars? Oh please let it be true! I frickin' HATE ribbon bars! "Hmm," muses the MS designer "let's make the user do 1,000,000 mouse clicks for a simple action. And, lets have the options take up 100% more screen real estate than necessary. All this will drive bigger monitors, needing bigger graphics cards, bigger PCs and thus new versions of Windows."

I also detest the way Windows does stuff automatically. It should wait until I bloody well tell it what to do and stop popping up damned dialogs whenever I connect USB storage (or whatever). It should also allow me to force the ejection of a USB device (or at least deign to tell me what is using it) so that I can remove it. Plug 'n play may fat, hairy arse (that was not an invitation).

At least, unlike Linux, Windows has consistent dialogs. What is it with the FOSS lot and not agreeing the order for ok/cancel save/discard/cancel? Jesus Christ guys, it's not rocket science. I thought the FOSS was big on standards? Not with the UI it seems. Get it sorted.

If FOSS would fix their UIs so they are consistent, fix their network share browsing (the fact that this STILL does not work is staggering), fix how crap gets installed (why the hell do I need to create a launcher for everything?) and provide a GUI for tasks rather than having to hack config files and reboot constantly (e.g. configuring a newly attached USB device) then it may well be a goer. These are simple things guys; really, really simple. Low hanging fruit. Big bang for your buck. Shit that makes peeps happy.

Having said that, Linux IMHO is still leagues ahead of Vista. I have a Ubuntu 8.10 on a 1gb P4 laptop that bitch-slaps two core, 4gb Vista boxes into a cocked hat. And that's with the lappy running eye-candy.

Yes, I friend of mine installed Windows 3.11 on a Pentium 4 2,4GHz (with 128MB or less of RAM, I guess, so it wouldn´t crash, perhaps). That was the only time I have ever seen a pseudo-OS running so fast.

It also crashed so fast too, you couldn´t believe.

But damn, the thing was blistering fast. It rebooted in 5 seconds or less. The BIOS loadup was 2/3 of the total boot time, from hitting the switch to a moving mouse on screen. (Of course, he ran a point-of-sale software, that wouldn´t run on Win 95 or latter.)

That was the only time I thought ANY Windows could be really FAST!

In fact, it took more time to type WIN on the command prompt than the booting itself, (once you had shut it down, and wished to load it again). So, out of lazyness, just kicking the reset button would do the trick. Too bad only special lightweight flavors of Linux can do that today. Even my cell phone takes 10 seconds to boot, and it ain´t a crappiphone, it is a regular cheap-ass candybar phone.

Mine is the one with 13 beige 1.6MB floppies in the outer pocket.

"In fact, it took more time to type WIN on the command prompt than the booting itself, (once you had shut it down, and wished to load it again). So, out of lazyness, just kicking the reset button would do the trick. Too bad only special lightweight flavors of Linux can do that today. Even my cell phone takes 10 seconds to boot, and it ain´t a crappiphone, it is a regular cheap-ass candybar phone."

Er, you do know that by running "win" you're loading a GUI, not booting an OS. Akin to "startx" on a Linux box.

As for your phone, do you have any idea what processor is in it? Even the iPhone only has a 620mhz proc, is it any wonder that it doesn't boot as fast as loading a lightweight GUI on a 2400mhz machine!??

First mass market GUI, ergo all other GUIs "stole" from them.

As for Win being a shell: Yes. Just like OSX and Gnome, etc.

I love how people burble on about how MS rip off everything and anything to include in their OS. Isnt that called 'picking what works and what people like, and utilising it for the users benefit'? It would strike me that very little in the OS work these days is truly original, and most of the time, that which is generally doesnt tend to work as well as people hope it will.

And it has to be said , that most of the complaints and whining does seem to originate from people who dont use windows anymore, and take every opportunity to spew bile against it instead of just getting on and using whatever it is they use now. If you've changed, why keep railing on about something that has no impact on you anymore?

Remember, for every complaint here, there are probably 20-30 users who have had little or no bad experiences with the same product. Its a shame they arent as vocal as the Macolytes or the Church of Linux members.

"This is something that the Mac definitely got right... There can only be one active application, so there need only be one menu bar on display, and it is not hard to merge it with the caption bar."

And it apparently wasn't too hard to patent that idea either.

It doesn't. But nobody who knows anything about software calls KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment or even plain X an operating system.

Am I the only one who thinks that Windows and Linux are, in some ways, converging? With Windows coming out in command-line only server versions and actually having a sudo type command and Linux getting OSs that are usable by most people and can be made funky looking too?

Bend Over, Here It Comes Again.