msdos.exe, you mean.

The registry goes back to 95, and was part of an effort to block piracy by making 'installing' software a requirement

No, the registry goes back to 1992 and it was part of Windows 3.1 Windows 3.11, a year later, added a better registry editor by default.

And no, it was nothing to do with piracy. It only contained HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT originally and it was used for storing file association info amongst other things - just as HKCR does in current versions of Windows.

A quick Google search will provide all the info you need to know.

I live in the UK and choose to stay on GMT year round. There seems to be no point whatsoever in fooling yourself into thinking it's later than it really is.

People say it must be confusing, but it really isn't; I've managed just fine for the past 7 years. (Of course, it means work starts an hour earlier when everyone else is on BST, but then it finishes an hour earlier too, making things more of a rush in the morning but giving extra time in the evening.)

You could get 1600x1200 back in 98, providing you had enough VRAM on your graphics card. I have an old 17" Iiyama monitor from back then and it supported 1600x1200. (Technically due to the dot pitch being 0.25 it couldn't resolve the pixels, so it wasn't a viable resolution to use, more a "wonder if it works" type of thing).

I had an 8MB Matrox Millennium G200 back then and Windows 95 was perfectly capable of running at 1600x1200 with the correct drivers.You only needed two megs of VRAM to do that in 256 colours, or 6 megs to do it in 24-bit colour (32-bit colour wasn't an option at any resolution with the drivers I was using back then, 24-bit or "True" colour was as far as they went.)

Windows Mail is still around, you just have to install it rather than have it bundled with Windows. Download link is here:

http://windows.microsoft.com/is-IS/windows-live/essentials-install-offline-faq

Scottish tradition, you mean. The USA just knocked it up a few notches.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trick-or-treating (note the reference to Halloween in 1895)

Free to Play on Steam is no more than a slightly different way of offering a demo of a game. And, of course, not all games have normal demos!

Just sounds like they're making excuses to pull out of the PC market to me. I'm sure the likes of Steam won't shed a tear if they go.

The shell is still explorer.exe - it's just that upon first run it loads the Metro start screen (by default - it's turned off in Server 2012, which dumps you on the desktop instead). Explorer.exe has been tied up with twinui.dll, which is responsible for handling the Metro stuff.

Remember that from Windows 95 onwards the Start menu and taskbar have been provided by explorer.exe. Win8 is very much the same, regardless of what the marketing blumf about "not loading the desktop until you click on the tile" says.

...if you delete twinui.dll. That gets you straight into the desktop (and kills off Metro), but it's not terribly useful as you don't get any taskbar buttons!

Concorde, although a very expensive plane to maintain, was a crown jewel as far as British Airways was concerned. The seats were sold as "supersonic class", something above even first class. They've reused the chairs in the rather posh Concorde Room at Heathrow and access to that is generally restricted to those flying in First.

It's generally believed that the main reason the Concorde stopped flying is because Airbus, who provided parts for the planes, decided they weren't going to carry on manufacturing spare parts. Simple as that - nothing to do with costs to the operators, merely the fact that they couldn't keep a supply chain maintained.

Fun fact: BA rather meanly drained the fluids from their Concordes when they retired them, meaning it'd be nigh impossible to get them to fly again now. The sole Concorde left at Heathrow is now used as a magazine storage room!

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/18842117-post10.html

Aside from the suggestion of packing a cheapo minibook (or netbook, or whatever they're called these days) along with say a USB flash drive, the best way would be to use good-quality media.

25 years isn't much time really. I've a 21-year-old IBM PS/2 which still boots up just fine (into Windows 95) - its Seagate SCSI drive is still going strong. I've a box full of Commodore Plus/4 floppies which still read just fine despite being over 25 years old, as do the old PC Plus coverdisks I kept back from my first PC (although they're only 21 years old).

I have a 5.25" drive hooked up to my (Sandy Bridge) PC and yes, it still works. I've another drive in an old P3 I keep ticking over for DOS games; that one's hooked up to a CatWeasel ISA card and that can read pretty much any format you're likely to come across.

As for optical media, I was too poor to afford a CD writer in the early 90s but by the late 90s I could afford one - I still have a few dozen CD-Rs containing source files from back then. The Kodak Gold Ultima discs read perfectly fine, but they were expensive - over a pound a disc. Some of the cheaper discs haven't made it, as the dye's faded and they're now unreadable using standard equipment.

Doh, make that 2 years - 1991. I was thinking of SIBO introduction with the MC range in 1989.

No touch screen, but the Series 3 predates the MessagePad by 4 years (1989). It had gridded icons and a GUI.

http://museo8bits.com/ficha.php?nombre=psionS3