Screenshot History of Windows

jobugeek writes "Neowin has an article that shows the progression of Microsoft Windows from pre-windows 1.0 through the 2003 server. For those of you who have used all of them, I'm sorry."

Re:Man... what a garbage it was (like 1, 2, and 3)

[Anonymous Coward]

He had a 2 from karma bonus and got modded down to 1.
How he got that karma in the first place is anybody's guess, though.

Screenshots are originally from...

[eMartin]

First, many of the screens from the article appear to have been taken from The GUI Gallery, which is kinda lame since it's basically just a copy of that site anyway. The author even says that he "picked them up" from the internet. :P [toastytech.com]

And second, wasn't this posted here like a week ago?

Re:heh. slashdotted already

[tulare]

From the Netcraft link:

mod_bwlimited/1.0 PHP/4.3.1

Looks like it's working perfectly. They probably have to pay through the nose to their hosting company if throughput exceeds some arbitrary limit.

Looks ripped.

[eMartin]

Didn't see your comment, so I posted below.

The screens are from The GUI Gallery [toastytech.com], and the author even says he "picked them up" from the net.

Official Microsoft Story

[rf0]

You can read the official M$ story of the windows history at microsoft.com [microsoft.com]
including horrible coloured screenshots :)

Rus

Re:Windows just gets uglier

[Chanc_Gorkon]

ThemeXP.org [themexp.org] is where you can get lots of Visual Styles for XP. Some are good, some bad. My favorite is the Gumdrop VS. There's multiple colors of this theme and it really looks sharp. That one isn't on themexp. It comes with the product that I bought to enable themeing on XP. StyleXP by TGTsoft [tgtsoft.com] enables you to use these Visual Styles. There's also a free hack available that modifies a existing system file (uxtheme.dll). StyleXP is much nicer though as it also has a utility to change every single thing. You can even safely change the default login screen's look(unless your part of a domain). You can download all of these from themexp.

Re:NonBloated

[QuMa]

I doubt you have the full thing then, win 1.0 came on 3 360k floppies, and I doubt it'd compress to 22%.

mirror of first 10 pages

[lizzybarham]

here [soggytrousers.net]

the "skip to page number" at bottom of pages don't work - you'll need to hit back on your browser

Timelines...

[antdude]

Here's a Windows Timeline [windowspro.net] list of each MS OS and its date. Also, includes the current future OS'.

Re:2003 server

[PhrostyMcByte]

Actually, if you go to start->run->services.msc and enable the Themes service then reboot, it lets you select the luna themes again.

Just when you thought m$ cut down on the bloat, you find out it's still there ;)

Inaccuracies

[KewlPC]

This article seems to have some inaccuracies.

Namely that versions of Windows before Win95 didn't fully support the 386 (dunno 'bout NT, never used it), despite what the article claims, still had worthless (and error-prone) cooperative multi-tasking, nor did they have anything resembling a 32-bit filesystem. FAT32, Microsoft's 32-bit file system, didn't come along until Windows 95; prior to that they had FAT16.

Additionally, starting with the 286 you could have more than 640k of RAM. The 286, IIRC, had a 24-bit address space and could therefor address up to 16 megabytes when running in 16-bit protected mode, but even in its protected mode still suffered from the horrid segmentation model that so annoyed programmers writing software for Intel's earlier x86 CPUs. Intel's poor segmentation system didn't become a thing of the past (or at least something you could ignore) until the 386 and its 32-bit protected mode.

Re:Man... what a garbage it was (like 1, 2, and 3)

[Goth Biker Babe]

"For the time it was high-end. Nobody had 256 color displays, you were getting 'high end' EGA cards with 32 colors, and 256 colors was available for several thousand bucks. Your high-end machines were 32-bit and aproaching 33 Mhz, with 32-mb of disk space and, if you were rich, had 16 MB of RAM. A more common scenario was a 16-bit machine with a 20-mb hard disk, 12 or 16 Mhz, and up 2 MB of ram"

Some of us were using AmigaDOS or RISC OS and had 32bit machines, thousands or millions of colours and decent sound support all for a reasonable price. 80's PCs were crap!

Re:Windows just gets uglier

[jark]

deviantART [deviantart.com] has far more visual styles [deviantart.com] than ThemeXP and is a better resource all around. Forget Gumdrop, Everaldo2 [deviantart.com] is probably one of the best styles out there.

Don't forget about WindowBlinds [windowblinds.net] by Stardock [stardock.com], which is a much better Windows interface changer than the built-in visual style system. While you must pay for WindowBlinds it is well worth it!

Re:Windows just gets uglier

[jark]

deviantART [deviantart.com] has far more visual styles [deviantart.com] than ThemeXP and is a better resource all around. Forget Gumdrop, Everaldo2 [deviantart.com] is probably one of the best styles out there.

Don't forget about WindowBlinds [windowblinds.net] by Stardock [stardock.com], which is a much better Windows interface changer than the built-in visual style system. While you must pay for WindowBlinds it is well worth it!

Re:NonBloated

[the_cowgod]

Here's the contents of the disks I've got:

Windows 1.01 (files dated November 1985) - 5 360K floppies - 1,598K
Windows 2.03 (November 1987) - 9 360K floppies - 3,540K
Windows 3.0 (October 1990) - 7 720K floppies - 5,423K
Windows for Workgroups v3.11 (November 1993) - 8 1.44MB floppies - 12,215K
Windows 95 v4.00.950 (July 1995) - 34,621K
Windows 95 v4.00.950B (May 1997) - 45,169K

Re:The lies prepetuated

[g4dget]

Windows 9x is still DOS with a quick switch over to the graphical shell.

That's true, but for the time it was the right thing.

Neither DOS nor Windows 9x were ever "the right thing". We are talking mid-90's here. UNIX was more than 20 years old, people were using 3D user interfaces on SGIs, you could get Sun workstations for $2000, Smalltalk was nearly two decades old. You could even get better open source 16bit operating systems at the time.

Windows 9x was purely a way of squeezing lots of money out of a pathetic architecture that was obsolete before it even shipped.

Also, Win95 had lots of 16-bit code inherited from Win 3.1, and it thunked into that a lot. Again, this contributed to the small size.

I think calling Windows 95 "small" represents a seriously distorted world view. You could run UNIX and X11 in less memory and with less CPU power than Windows 95. Except relative to other Windows versions, Windows 95 was a dog, and a seriously ill one at that.

Re:Windows 95

[spongman]

yeah win95 did not have a multithreaded 'kernel', it's ring-0 code was not reentrant. but this does not mean that 32-bit applications and the set of win16 apps could not be preempted if they were in user code. it wasn't until the preempt kernel patch that linux operated in precisely that same manner - threads in the kernel would spin before continuing. when you run 16-bit apps win95 doesn't 'resort' to a less sophisticated form of multitasking the 32-bit apps, they're multitasked in exactly the same way they always are, it's just the 16-bit apps that are preempted as a single app. To do otherwise would be impossible: 16-bit apps expect to cooperatively multitask with each other; they share a single address space, message queue, global heap, the whole lot. If you wanted them to preempt each other you'd have to rewrite all the existing 16-bit apps. Not much of a compatibility feature.

Your statements are not based on fact.

DeviantART's interface is pretty bad, though

[0x0d0a]

DeviantART takes the approach of showing an entire, scaled down screenshot as the thumbnail. A fair number of theme sites do this (infuriatingly enough, including themes.freshmeat.net). This is pretty much useless for evaluating a theme, since all one really cares about is what the widgets look like, for which you need a close-up.

Take a look at kaleidoscope.net [kaleidoscope.net] for an example of the ideal way to do this -- script-generated standard layout within thumbnail, so it's easy to compare multiple themes. The thumbnail is not scaled, and the image is a gif (admittedly, png would be better), instead of a jpg -- with themes, a "crisp" appearance and color matters. While jpg may be lovely for photographs, it's awful for evaluating how attractive a theme is, particularly if there are hard edges. With themes, often individual pixels matter, so jpg or scaling really ruins the theme's effect.

I agree that WindowBlinds is much better than the native theme system on Windows, but WindowBlinds also adds a good deal of slowdown to redraw.

Re:Inaccuracies

[julesh]

Who modded this as informative?

Namely that versions of Windows before Win95 didn't fully support the 386

Win 3 supported every feature of the 386 processor. It could run 32 bit code (although most of the code was 16 bit for compatibility). It could run DOS programs in V86 mode. It supported 4Gb of RAM. That's pretty much every 386 feature accounted for.

despite what the article claims, still had worthless (and error-prone) cooperative multi-tasking

The article claims that DOS tasks where pre-emptively multitasked. This is correct. I thought it was true for 2.0/386 as well, though, but I'm not certain, having never actually used that (I only ever used 2.0 on a 186).

nor did they have anything resembling a 32-bit filesystem.

Win3.1 came with a 32 bit filesystem driver. That is, the driver executed as 32 bit code without thunking to DOS. The articles text is ambiguous, and may cause you to think of FAT32, but it does clearly state later that FAT32 was introduced with Win95 OSR2.

Re:Screenshots are originally from...

[linebackn]

Yes, many these were taken from my site http://toastytech.com/guis/ [toastytech.com] Some of them look like they were taken from elsewhere. You can even see my name in the NT 3.51 user manager screen shot. I can't get to all of their site right now since it is mostly slashdotted. I normally don't mind if people use my images or graphics, but I generally ask that they provide reference or a link back to my site.

silly remark

[n3k5]

on the other hand the changes between XP and 2k (which it evolved from) are tiny

XP is not the successor of 2000 and it didn't evolve from it. It replaces Me, as your parent correctly noted, and integrates some of the technology of the NT line, to which 2000 belongs. In spite of that, there still are quite some noteable technological differences between 2000 and XP. They just look very similar to the ordinary end user, as their user interfaces are very, very silimar (especially if you turn of XP's Luna GUI, which most /.ers seems to do).

Of course you can talk about differences between the two, but not about changes, as 2000 wasn't changed into XP.

Re:in response to your automatic windows zeal

[derubergeek]

I installed Win2k on an AMD K6-2/300. Fairly straightforward outside of a bazillion reboots. Then I installed RedHat 7.2 on it. Fairly straightforward without all of the reboots. I didn't have to muck with the kernel, etc., although the Win2k box didn't want to work with my Voodoo card - I had to hunt down updated drivers and then go through this screwy driver update system that slapped me back & forth between 640x400 VGA/16 color & the 3dFX driver.

Anyway, I recently upgraded the motherboard to an Intel board with a P4 2+GHz. Win2k completely barfed. I thought I had a config problem somewhere so I booted to Linux. No problems.

I did a bunch of digging around on google groups (using my Mac - which is by far easier than Linux or Windows) and found that I needed to:

1) Boot from the Win2k install CD.
2) When it asks me if I wanted to install or repair, choose REPAIR (what kind've brain damage is that?)
3) When it trys to install, it will detect an existing system and then ask me if I want to repair. NOW choose repair.
4) Four reboots & 45 minutes later (after spending 3 hours dicking with it), I'm up & running again.

Now I don't call that a superior system. That just plain sucked.

I would suggeset giving a recent RedHat install (or ask around for something better) a try. You might be surprised...

Re:Preemtive DOS Multitasking

[KewlPC]

It used preemptive multitasking for MS-DOS apps, because there would be no other way. For everything else, though, it did cooperative multitasking.

Re:The lies prepetuated

[g4dget]

Frankly, technological excellence aside, if it wasn't for DOS and those IBM PCs that IBM didn't care about, we wouldn't be using these computers we sit at today

Yes, indeed. There is a good chance that without Microsoft or Intel, the computers we sit at today would have better processors, better programming environments, better usability, and better end-user software. Microsoft and Windows have held back the industry and technology by at least a decade.

the wintel alliance has brought us a revolution in computing power, that those 20 years of unix failed to deliver even slightly.

That is clearly completely false. Even without anywhere near the sales volume of Wintel machines, in the early 1990's, Sun was selling $2000 SPARC workstations, including high resolution monitors, without any Wintel components at all. That included a full 32bit operating system, a decent window system, and full networking. The only thing that was missing was desktop application software. Imagine how much more the non-Microsoft vendors would have been able to do if they could have gotten their volumes up.

Microsoft clearly has their act together on the business side, but in terms of technology, they have been an unmitigated disaster for the technology industry.

Re:DeviantART's interface is pretty bad, though

[Fweeky]

Uh, then press "View Full Screen Deviation" and get the unscaled version.

Re:silly remark

[Anonymous Coward]

Completely false. XP replaces Me from a functionality/consumer standpoint. The only thing XP shares with Me is target audience. XP was from a technical standpoint derived 100% from Windows 2000.

Re:Timelines...

[KewlPC]

And MS didn't have anything to do with DOS until version 6.2 or whatever.

Not even close. When MS heard that IBM was designing the PC, and looking for an OS for it, they bought a dinky little OS that nobody had ever heard of called QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System), which was itself an x86 hack/clone of the popular CP/M operating system, and made some changes to it so that it would run on a PC.

IBM had been hoping to use actual CP/M, but the company that made it, Intergalactic Digital Research (the Intergalactic part was eventually dropped), was too slow off the mark in doing the x86 port (CP/M was originally for the Z80 microprocessor), so they picked Microsoft with their "new" "Disk Operating System". IBM called it PC-DOS, and shipped it themselves for a while, but all development beyond QDOS was done by Microsoft. MS, of course, also licensed DOS to companies making PC clones, such as Compaq, and eventually (at something like DOS 3.0) started selling it to the public themselves.

Intergalactic Digital Research eventually finished the x86 PC port of CP/M (in something like 1982), but by then it was too late. They tried to pull a reverse-Microsoft on Microsoft by marketing their own version of DOS called DR-DOS (they had dropped the Intergalactic part of their name), but Microsoft had released Windows by then, and were able to out-Microsoft Digital Research by making Windows 3.1 only work on MS-DOS and spreading FUD that DR-DOS wasn't as good as MS-DOS (quite the opposite in reality, though; DR-DOS was vastly more stable than MS-DOS, and the only reason that Microsoft even thought about developing MS-DOS beyond version 3.0 was to compete with Digital Research; their marketing department announced MS-DOS 4.0 before any of the design people had even considered it, and later did the same with MS-DOS 5.0).

Re:Burned-in pattern

[cdrudge]

Your problem about keyboard mapping was just answered this month in Sys Admin Magazine. Check out the first Q&A here [samag.com].

You might also check out the Customizing Mozilla [mozilla.org] page at Mozilla.org [mozilla.org].

Re:Windows just gets uglier

[soulhuntre]

All of the following sites have skins for WinXP available. XP has a
style/theme engine built in, and several small utilities (StyleXP [tgtsoft.com])
let you add more skins that you download to the system. Alternatively,
Stardock [stardock.com] has WindowBlinds which is a
skinning tool that works for XP and previous versions of Windows.

• ThemeXP [themexp.org]
• WinCustomize [wincustomize.com]
• deviantART [deviantart.com]
• SkinEdge [skinedge.com]
• Skinbase [skinbase.org]
• Virtual Plastic [virtualplastic.net]
• ArtUproar.com [artuproar.com]
• Customize.org [customize.org]

Re:A crowd Pleaser

[sfe_software]

True that, if win2k goes down on me it just reboots.

Actually you're getting a blue screen, but Win2k defaults to "Reboot Automatically" in the event of a blue screen error. This is bad, in my opinion; I lost a system (had to reinstall) over a problem I never did figure out.

Microsoft's solution? Install another copy of Win2k to a different partition or folder, hack the old Win2k registry to disable the auto-reboot feature. I just reinstalled...

Ever since, that's the first thing I do: disable auto-reboot (System Properties -> Advanced -> Startup and Recovery).

I did recently have a blue screen. I plugged into my laptop, of all things, a monitor. An analog monitor. Got a blue screen. I had to boot safe mode, uninstall the video driver, and it just fixed itself (how the hell do you run a headless Windows server if it won't even boot without a video driver?)

Re:A crowd Pleaser

[Jucius Maximus]

" I was always a fan of having one or more local copies and redundant network backups on my roommate's computer. If his computer happened to be off at the time, I settled for a floppy. It did end up saving my ass at least once."

Good idea. I periodically copy my 'work' directory to CD-Rw for short term backup purposes. (I also us CD-R for long term backups.) This has saved me at least once as well.

Re:Inaccuracies

[KewlPC]

Win 3 supported every feature of the 386 processor. It could run 32 bit code (although most of the code was 16 bit for compatibility). It could run DOS programs in V86 mode. It supported 4Gb of RAM. That's pretty much every 386 feature accounted for.

You could only run 32-bit programs with the Win32S (yes, there's an S on there) addon. Most programs didn't use it.

4GB of RAM? Really, that's quite astonishing, considering that not even Windows 95 supported that much.

DOS programs in V86 mode? I'll give you that one. Keep in mind that I said Windows 3.1 supported some of the 386's features.

The article claims that DOS tasks where pre-emptively multitasked. This is correct. I thought it was true for 2.0/386 as well, though, but I'm not certain, having never actually used that (I only ever used 2.0 on a 186).

I never stated otherwise. But for all the non-DOS programs, the versions of Windows prior to Windows 95 (and excepting Windows NT) used cooperative multitasking.

Re:A crowd Pleaser

[x0n]

[flamebait]Since noone here really knows anything about Windows[/flamebait], I'd better answer this one -- on the contrary my friend, you _do_ have several logs of the event (details for default install of win2000):

- An event notification in the NT Event Log

- A carbon copy of the bluescreen data at C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\DrWatson\

- System crash dump (choice of small/kernel/complete) at %systemroot%\memory.dmp

- user process space dump at C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\DrWatson\user.dmp

Run drwtsn32.exe to see some of these options, additionally, right-click my computer, advanced tab, startup and recovery options.

Additionally, Windows does not have "automatically reboot" enabled by default. Either you or your administrator chose to enable that behaviour.

Enough of the "bah, windows 2000 doesn't do this, nor that" banter. RTFM (yes, I know there is no manual, F1 it mate) or, ATFM "ask the f*ing adminstrator". :)

- Oisin

kind of true

[DrSkwid]

AT&T licensed Unix to OEMs and Microsoft decided to be one of them.

Bill was a Xenix evangelist, even putting it on the desks of the secretaries if the stories are true.

See here [theregister.co.uk]

and here [microsoft.com]

A Snippet of his 1996 speech at Unix Expo

One of the exciting things we're announcing today is that our commitment to the Internet and to building a state-of-the-art browser extends not only to Windows 95 and Windows NT, but also to 16-bit Windows and the Macintosh and to Unix. And so, working with some partners, we've created Internet Explorer 3.0, and that's our latest, with all the active control capabilities on several Unix platforms.

Re:A crowd Pleaser

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, here's one for you.

We have about 20 users at a time on Windows 2000 Terminal Services. The server was randomly rebooting.

No event in the event log (other than the "previous shutdown was unexpected")

Nothing dumped in Doctor Watson directory.

No dump file was being created.

Dell couldn't solve the problem (nothing in the onboard diagnostics for their hardware). Nothing on memory tests showing up errant.

Microsoft couldn't solve the problem.

Eventually (after nearly 8 months) we discovered that it was a session of Photoshop that would do it. No blue screen, no warning, nothing. It would just trigger a reboot.

It was actually happening on four identically configured servers, so it wasn't "just a hardware problem".

Windows blue screens becoming extinct, my arse...

Re:silly remark

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 2000 = 5.0
Windows XP = 5.1
Windows 2003 = 5.2

Don't remember versions for these, ages since I used the 9x series...
Windows 95 = someversion.subversion
Windows 98 = someversion.subversion+1
Windows ME = someversion.subversion+2

Re:NonBloated

[DanCo]

IIRC the difference is that B has Internet Explorer, the quicklaunch bar and support for user toolbars on the desktop. Not sure about any changes in the back-end of it though.

Re:A crowd Pleaser

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course it can. You just implement it without any windows boxes, and you're fine.

Re:A crowd Pleaser

[XO]

funny, we have a few XP machines at work (most are '95) .. the XP machines crash at least 3 times a day, and all they do is run Flash presentations all day long. The '95 boxes that are used as our cash registers have uptimes of months...

Re:Progression

[default luser]

Actually, you're forgetting some of the most important aspects that Windows 95 brought to the world.

Plug 'n Play - Nod to OS/2 for having the same feature, but Win95 is responsible for bringing it to the masses. There were, as expected, a few bugs, but in most cases the hardware was properly detected and configured without the user lifting a finger. Think of Win95 as the working, but basic PnP, whereas Windows 2k / XP with ACPI are the best it ever needs to be.

Built-in easy networking (IPX/TCP/Etc.) -
Come on folks. Linux was a pain in the ass for years to configure to talk to anything, unless you already knew how. In Windows, it was as simple as opening an applet, and selecting the protocol / service. Better still, most Dialup / Network adapters AUTOMATICALLY installed the protocols and services you needed, so no user interaction necessary.

No, it wasn't perfect. But time doesn't stand still, and in terms of features Win95 was an excellent starting point for things to come. Both features mentioned above ( simple networking, PnP ) have been nearly perfected in 2k/XP.

Screenshots????

[Anonymous Coward]

We dont need no stinking screenshotz!!!
Sierra Madre reference...

I run a school in Japan and have these installed and running as I speak... er type

English 3.1
Japanese 3.1
English 95
Japanese 95
English 98
Japanese 98
Japanese ME
English XP
Japanese XP

tadaaaaH An amalgam of the eclectic...

95 is the least stable
3.1 (on top of DOS) is a rock!!! It has been running on three machines without a hitch for over 10 years. NEVER reinstalled.
98 is much more stable than 95
XP appears daunting to reinstall, but has caused few problems yet.

Students can do work with all of the systems because I have the software for all this too... old stuff on old systems.... you know...
Anyone noticed that applications are getting worse?

BTW all versions are fully licensed. It is worth it.

Re:NonBloated

[ReverendRyan]

"B" (aka OSR2) has USB support, as well as major bugfixes.

Re:NonBloated

[the_cowgod]

The "B" release added USB and FAT32 file system support. I think IE3 was added as well. There was also an "A" version which is what you got when a service pack was applied to the original release, so those changes would have been in "B" too.