History of Windows: 20 years of Copying, Intrigue and Innovation

Blogger's Note: Sa mga nagamit ng Bintana (Tagalog name ng MS Windows), basahin nyo ito para malaman kung paano ito ginawa. Puno ng intriga, pangongopya, at talunan. Isipin mo lang ang kasabihang ito: Ang Roma ay di nagawa sa loob ng isang araw. Basa na... 8-)

Twenty Years of Windows
ARTICLE DATE: 10.12.05
http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=162002,00.asp
By Michael J. Miller

Windows is so ubiquitous that we often take it for granted. It's the operating system used on nearly 95 percent of all the desktops and notebooks sold worldwide, relegating other OSs to niche players. But that wasn't always the case. Indeed, when Windows first shipped, 20 years ago this month, it was considered nothing more than a slow operating environment that had arrived late to the party, well behind the industry leaders, Apple and Xerox PARC. Windows had a lot of growing up to do.

Though it is now the industry standard, Windows is still not everything we—or Microsoft—would like it to be. With its 20th anniversary approaching, I visited Microsoft's headquarters recently to talk with the team behind Windows—to get reflections on the key moments in its evolution, its position in the market today, and what lies in store for its future.

Early YearsARTICLE DATE: 10.12.05
By Michael J. Miller

Microsoft today is a huge company, with thousands of employees in hundreds of buildings all around Redmond, Washington. That was hardly the case in 1983, when I first saw the product that was destined to evolve into Windows. Microsoft's headquarters were merely a small building next to the Burgermaster in Bellevue, another Seattle suburb. Then eight years old, the company had grown to about 400 people. It was primarily known as the maker of BASIC programs for many systems, and of MS-DOS, an operating system it had sold to IBM a few years earlier.

Many different companies during that period made computers that ran MS-DOS, but the problem was that these computers weren't all compatible with one another. IBM's version, called PC-DOS, was one standard, but companies like Digital Equipment Corp., Texas Instruments, and HP all made systems with different graphics devices.

Over the next few years, the industry would move to a world of "IBM compatibility," but many of these systems couldn't run applications designed specifically for the IBM PC.
Windows' 20th AnniversaryEarly YearsLiving in a Windows WorldWindows Into the Future

"We Bet the Entire Company On It"
That was one of the key goals behind the project that was to become Windows. Back then, it was called "Interface Manager," and when I first saw it, I was working for a magazine called Popular Computing. Interface Manager was being developed by a small team that included Rao Remala, who was Interface Manager's first programmer and worked for Microsoft for more than 20 years in various areas of the business.

Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates clearly remembers how much was riding on that project.

"We weren't kidding that we bet the entire company on it," Gates recalls. "The strange thing was we were a much smaller company at the time. We were competing to establish this platform with companies larger than ourselves."

When Interface Manager was first announced, Microsoft described it as an option that would work on top of all the company's operating systems, including DOS and Xenix, Microsoft's version of Unix.

The idea was that it would provide a single interface to control the bitmapped screen, graphics hardware, and various other I/O devices. The basic foundations of the future Windows were all there—on-screen windows, easy data transfer between programs, graphic icons, and mouse support. One of the key features was a series of menu commands at the bottom of each window, giving a common way of entering commands for all the programs.

Part of the reason this was included was that by the fall of 1983, "integrated software" was the big buzzword in the industry, spurred by the success of Lotus 1-2-3. At this point, a number of new "integrated operating environments" were being developed, including Apple's Lisa, which had shipped earlier that year, and a number of systems that were designed for x86 computers—notably VisiCorp's VisiOn, Quarterdeck's DESQ (which eventually morphed into DESQview), and Digital Research's Concurrent CP/M (notable for enabling multitasking).

Eyeing the CompetitionOf course, graphics were a large part of the discussion as well. Apple was working on its Macintosh project at this point, and Digital Research was soon to announce its Graphical Environment Manager (GEM). But everyone was taking cues from work that had been done earlier at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California.

From Our Readers:"The point-and-click world opened all sorts of new doors for me—and my career. It made me actually want to learn more about how the computer worked."—John Brown

"Certainly the work done at Palo Alto Research Center, among others, influenced the bet we made to say the company would put all of its energy behind the graphical interface," Gates remembers.

Gates adds that Windows wasn't merely a graphical user interface. "It was actually two things," he says. "It was multiple applications running at a time, sharing the screen and exchanging data, and it was the graphical interface."

Charles Simonyi, who had worked at PARC and was a key architect of Microsoft's applications business in the early days, says that everyone at Microsoft was aware of Windows' potential.
"We knew the graphical user interface would be the future," he says, adding that the company expected both Xerox and Apple to be in that arena.

Jeff Raikes, now president of Microsoft's business division, joined the company in 1981 and recalls studying the competition closely.

"Three or four offices down the hall from me, we had a Xerox Star so we could go and understand and play with the graphical user interface," says Raikes, who had worked at Apple and was very familiar with Lisa.

Unleashing Windows 1.0
In November 1983, Microsoft announced Windows to the world, saying it would be available "late in the first quarter of 1984" and that it was designed for systems with two floppy drives, 192KB of RAM, and a mouse. This certainly wouldn't be the last time Microsoft would miss a Windows deadline or underestimate the amount of hardware needed. The actual boxed software for Windows 1.0 launched during the time of the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas in November 1985. By that point, Microsoft was recommending a minimum of 256KB of RAM, or 512KB of RAM and a hard drive for running multiple applications or when running it on top of DOS 3.0 or higher. PC Magazine's first review, in February 1986, pointed out that "Windows strains the limits of current hardware."

"Of the five years of development time that it took to develop Notes, about a third of it ws spent on memory management. It was just staggering, and it wasn't the app, it was just fitting it in memory."—RAY OZZIE, a Microsoft chief of technology officer, on the early days of developing Notes for 16-bit Windows while he was at Iris Associates.

That first version had a large number of utilities and accessories, most of which remain in Windows today, including the Calendar, Notepad, Terminal, Calculator, Clock, Windows Write and Windows Paint, Control Panel, and the Reversi game. The menus had moved to the top of the screen, and the windows couldn't overlap; instead, they could be stacked as tiles, so one was next to another.

The first few versions of Windows were available as an "operating environment" that ran on top of DOS, or, more commonly, as a runtime environment that was included with applications. A few early programs would take advantage of this, notably the Micrografx CAD program called In-A-Vision. Still, most PC users were content to stick with DOS.

Windows 2.0: Overlapping Windows
Microsoft continued to improve Windows over the next few years. The most significant improvements during this period came in December 1987 with the release of Windows 2.0, when icons and overlapping windows were added, and with Windows/386, which took advantage of the abilities of Intel's 80386 processor to run multiple sessions of DOS. This established Windows as a competitor against products like DESQview, which was designed more simply to let you load multiple DOS applications in memory at once, switching among them.

What continued to hold Windows back in the late 1980s was the dearth of applications available for it. Along with In-A-Vision, the most important were Aldus PageMaker, a page layout program, and Microsoft's own Excel spreadsheet. Excel was one of three applications Microsoft had already decided to develop when Charles Simonyi arrived in 1981 and became director of application development. The other two were word processing and database products. But Microsoft focused first on Excel because it had the "best cost-benefit ratio," Simonyi says.
Both PageMaker and Excel had first appeared on the Apple Macintosh, but they were where Microsoft's application strategy really came together. Unlike Lotus, which was focusing on single integrated applications (Symphony on DOS and Jazz on the Macintosh), Microsoft concentrated on large individual applications like Excel and, later, PowerPoint and Word.Giving Apps "Depth" and "Breadth"Jeff Raikes says he convinced the company to work with the developers of AppleWorks (an older Apple II integrated suite) to create a low-end suite, which became Microsoft Works, to complement the individual large programs such as Excel.

"I had to explain to Bill how we were going to position Works with the rest of the product line. That's when we came up with 'depth users' and 'breadth users,' that whole positioning," Raikes recalls. "It worked."

"I had to explain to Bill how we were going to position Works with the rest of the product line. That's when we came up with 'depth users' and 'breadth users,' that whole positioning. It worked."—JEFF RAIKES, Microsoft employee since 1981; currently president of the company's business division.

Indeed, the depth- and breadth-user concept was the overarching theme of the era for the industry. Each application fell under either low-end or high-end functionality, and integrated or standalone programs. In the low-end standalone category were products like the PFS line; low-end integrated products included AppleWorks and Microsoft Works. There were many high-end integrated packages, such as Symphony, Framework, and Enable; high-end standalone products included Microsoft Word and Excel, along with DOS competitors such as 1-2-3 and WordPerfect.

Though Microsoft had been working on a word processing program for a few years, it was an obvious missing piece of Windows until 1989, when Windows 2.0 and Windows/386 were the versions on the market. That year, first Ami (then from Samna, later acquired by Lotus) and then Word for Windows shipped. As Raikes remembers it, while Excel, which shipped a few years earlier, was mostly ported from the Macintosh version, Word for Windows was a whole new architecture. Simonyi points out that the Mac OS had handled many of the functions Word would need, such as dealing with fonts properly, but they weren't tackled for Windows until Windows 3.0.

Ray Ozzie, now a Microsoft chief technology officer, was starting a company at that time called Iris Associates, which would eventually produce Notes. He recalls how difficult Windows programming was in the early days. Memory management was very tough in 16-bit Windows, but Ozzie decided to stick with it, instead of trying to build a graphics environment of his own. "Because I knew Bill and Steve [Ballmer], after playing with it I talked with them about it," Ozzie says. "I was convinced that they had the will to want to get it right."

Iris Associates eventually signed a development deal with Microsoft and created Notes with Windows in mind; it shipped in December 1989. But memory continued to be an issue. "Of the five years of development time that it took to develop Notes, about a third of it was spent on memory management," Ozzie recalls. "It was just staggering, and it wasn't the app, it was just fitting it in memory."—next: Windows 3.0

Windows 3.0
ARTICLE DATE: 10.12.05
By Michael J. Miller

Big changes were to come with Windows 3.0, which arrived in May 1990 and addressed some of the stumbling blocks that plagued earlier versions. It introduced Program Manager and File Manager, which became two significant features of Windows for years to come. And perhaps more important, Windows 3.0 was the first version to allow programs to use memory beyond 640KB.

Indeed, Windows 3 would turn out to be the version of Windows that first truly clicked. But in the meantime, Microsoft's operating-system strategy had gotten much more complicated.

Microsoft and IBM had jointly announced work on OS/2 in early 1987, when IBM announced its
new PS/2 machines. As part of that deal, both companies were promoting OS/2 as the long-term future for operating systems. They shipped both a character-based version (1.0) and a later version with the graphical presentation manager (1.1).

IBM had announced OS/2 with both a standard edition and an "Extended Edition" that would include database functionality. Microsoft was a partner only on the standard one and was trying to sell it to many hardware companies. The Extended version was sold only by IBM and was designed specifically for IBM hardware.A Marriage in DisrepairThe joint venture between IBM and Microsoft soured quickly, largely because of a disagreement over graphics. Microsoft wanted OS/2 to have the same graphics as Windows, but IBM wanted it to have a different design, known as GDDM. "We got forced," Gates recalls. "There was this awful episode in '86 when they said 'We want GDDM graphics, not Windows graphics.' And they were basically kicking us out of OS/2. So then Nathan Myhrvold and I said we'd redesign the graphics to be like GDDM, which made it very incompatible with Windows and very big and complicated, and oriented toward this so-called metafile approach that for interactive interfaces isn't what you want."

From Our Readers"The worst thing about Windows and all Microsoft products is the #%$^@)*&%# 'authentication' process—totally stupid."—Greg Madsen

Gates remembers that he and Steve Ballmer, then Microsoft's vice president of system software and now its CEO, flew down to IBM's headquarters in Boca Raton, Florida, weekly to try to keep the team together. Meanwhile, OS/2 was being delayed, and Microsoft was complaining that IBM's software was larger and more complex than it should have been.

The key argument was over whether Microsoft should ship a version of Windows that would directly address memory greater than 1MB. Gates says Windows programs did some smart things to let applications directly use that memory, instead of the more complicated "expanded memory" managers that were used by earlier DOS-based programs, which, for the most part, were limited to 640KB of memory.

Gates says IBM pressured Microsoft not to release it, because it would place Windows in direct competition with OS/2. But he adds that OS/2 was growing so big and was so far behind schedule that Microsoft decided to go ahead and release its next version of Windows, which was 3.0. (For IBM's take on the OS/2 conflict, see the Q&A with Jim Cannavino, who oversaw OS/2's development at IBM.)

Microsoft had positioned Windows 3.0 as a lower-end operating system than OS/2. But in fact, while Windows 3.0 theoretically would run on a 286 with 640KB of memory and a hard drive, users really needed a 386 computer with at least 1MB of "extended memory" to take advantage of it. And when they did, they got an operating system that provided much of the graphical underpinning that people wanted, along with decent multitasking capabilities.

Goodbye, Typewriters
With the release of Windows 3.0, both typical computer users and large companies began to adopt Windows as an operating system. "On the client side, it was the proliferation of fairly inexpensive hardware and very cool apps that let people do things more productively," recalls Jim Allchin, who joined Microsoft in 1990 and is now copresident of its Platform Products & Services Division. "Getting rid of typewriters, getting rid of calculators, those were big deals." (See our interview with Allchin.)

Personal computing was beginning to change the way people worked. "The PCs were much simpler and could be tailored faster for business operations by the IT staff than these big mainframes, where you have to wait in a big queue to tweak an application," Allchin recalls. "And I also believe Microsoft was continuing to improve the system such that it was more acceptable in the business space."

Perhaps more important, Windows 3.0 attracted large numbers of developers. "It really took the 386 for Windows to have the underlying hardware platform that could deliver a useful application and developer experience," says Brad Silverberg, who was then at software company Borland but would go on to head the Windows 95 team. "Before that it was just way too difficult and, as a result, people just wrote to DOS." With Windows 3.0 came "a total flood in 1990 of Windows applications," he recalls.

From Our Readers"Microsoft succeeded against bigger, more established companies with a simple business model: Produce good software for a reasonable price, court the developers and try to get the best deal possible."—Ed Hill

In the next few years, Windows went through minor changes that actually signaled the inclusion of many new features. In October 1991, Windows 3.0a added a number of multimedia features, making Windows a player in a world with sound and CD-ROM drives. Windows 3.1, which followed in April 1992, focused more on stability and ease of use, and added TrueType scalable fonts, which made everything look and read better. And Windows for Workgroups 3.1 came out in October 1992, adding file sharing, printer sharing, and Microsoft Mail, the company's first big mail client.

3.1 Brings Stability
Although it was just a point release, Windows 3.1 ended up as a milestone, because its improved stability made it something more businesses were willing to consider.

"The Windows 3.0 code was a little rough and ragged, and crashed way more," Silverberg recalls, "which is actually quite understandable, because nobody had ever shipped a product like that. So Windows 3.1 really was trying to take Windows 3.0 and make it a lot more solid, more stable, something that corporations could feel comfortable in deploying and using on a daily basis."

Many hardware manufacturers began preloading Windows 3.1 on their computers. "By having it take off so strongly within corporations, it became obvious for both IBM and Compaq, who were the principal PC manufacturers selling to enterprises, to preload Windows on their machines," Silverberg adds.

Suddenly, after years of skepticism about it, Windows had stepped into the spotlight. But true ubiquity was a little further down the road, Gates says.

"I'm not sure we achieved ultimate mainstream," he says, "until the shipment of Windows 95."—next: Windows 95

Windows 95
ARTICLE DATE: 10.12.05
By Michael J. Miller

By the time Windows 95 came out in August 1995, the marriage between Microsoft and IBM had not only been severed completely but the two companies were engaged in an indisputable operating-system war.

The companies had parted ways in late 1990. IBM continued to push OS/2 with the Presentation Manager. Microsoft, along with pushing the various versions of Windows 3, was taking the work it had done on what would have been the next version of OS/2 and turning it into what would become Windows NT. That version, called Windows NT 3.1 (the number picked to echo Windows 3.1), was introduced in late 1993. It was the first version of Windows to be a full 32-bit operating system and introduced a lot of the basics of today's Windows.

Now Microsoft was talking up Chicago, the code name for the product that would become Windows 95, and IBM was countering with talk of OS/2 Warp.

Though Windows NT 3.1 had had success with the server market, companies shied away from it in client situations because it required more resources than most PCs had. "We outpaced the hardware," Jim Allchin explains. In contrast, the world seemed ready for Windows 95, which required fewer resources and was more backward-compatible with Windows 3.1 and DOS applications.

A 32-bit operating system really designed for client computers, Windows 95 was the first of the regular Windows series to include the operating systems; Windows versions 1 through 3.11 were designed to run on top of DOS. Windows 95 required a 386 or later processor, 4MB of RAM, and at least 40MB of free hard drive space just to start, though as usual, most people wanted more in order to take full advantage of the system. And it introduced much of the user interface features we see in Windows systems today, such as drag-and-drop icons, the famous Start menu, and many of the underlying networking and Internet features.

So Many Apps, So Little Compatibility
Like many Windows releases over the years, Windows 95 shipped far later than it was supposed to. The push for applications compatibility caused most of the delay, according to David Cole, then a Windows program manager and now senior vice president of Microsoft's MSN and Personal Services Group. Up until Windows 3.0, Cole says, compatibility wasn't a big deal, because there were so few applications and users anyway. But with the release of Windows 3.1, that started to change.

From Our Readers"My first Windows OS was Windows 95, and my first impression was, 'Wow, it looks like they stole the Mac OS.'"—James R. Stoup

It all came to a head during the holiday season of 1994. "We were thinking we were pretty close to being done with Windows 95. But then literally hundreds of these multimedia applications came out for the holiday season and didn't run, and we started testing them," Cole remembers.
The multimedia features in Windows 3.0 and 3.1 weren't well documented, he said, so developers had to "hack their way in and use undocumented APIs." As a result, the improved system in Windows 95 ended up breaking a lot of applications.

"We got in my little Toyota pickup that I had at the time, we drove it to Egghead, and we literally bought one of every multimedia application in the store," Cole says. "Picture a small-size Toyota pickup and the back of it is heaped with boxes of applications, games, all kinds of crazy multimedia stuff. We brought them all back, literally backed the truck up to the building, and we handed them out to all the employees and said, 'We've got to get these things tested.'"

"Start Me Up"
Fixing the problem took another eight months, as public anticipation continued to brew. By the time Windows 95 was formally launched in August 1995, the hype that surrounded it was unprecedented—with the first big advertising campaign for Windows (featuring the Rolling Stones singing "Start Me Up"). People stood in line to get the software when it was first available, and over a million copies were sold in the first four days. (In contrast, when Windows 3.1 was shipped, Microsoft was ecstatic that it sold 3 million copies in two months.)
Why all the commotion? "It was, in many ways, a perfect storm of all these major driving elements coming together all at once," Brad Silverberg says. "You could get PCs very inexpensively with very nice graphics displays and good-sized hard drives. People were starting to get Internet connections, and so there was the whole Internet element that was really coming together. You had software that was dramatically easier to use."

Yusuf Mehdi, who worked on Windows applications in the earlier years and now runs MSN, agrees that Windows 95 just happened at the right time. "Some of it, I think, we can't take credit for," he says. "We got to ride the phenomenon of the PC's becoming mainstream in the home."

Catering to this much larger and more general group of users required some significant design changes when developing Windows 95, says Joe Belfiore, who worked on the interface and is now general manager of the Windows eHome Division. Files and programs had to be easier to access than they were in previous versions, for example. The changes were time-consuming but necessary, he adds.

Windows 95 was also notable for a big change in applications. While most of the earlier Windows applications ran in it, it was really designed for 32-bit applications. The most successful of these would be a new version of Microsoft Office. Jeff Raikes traces Office's evolution to the emergence of chief information officers at many companies in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
They wanted consistent software, so Microsoft worked on developing a consistent suite.

The applications team, headed by Mike Maples, who had joined Microsoft from IBM, had to rethink the development process, focusing on the suite as a whole and not on the individual applications. As a result, the Office applications started using a lot of shared code, such as dynamic link libraries that represented a lot of the user interface. "That is still the structure we have today," Raikes says.

Other developers followed suit, and soon most applications were being developed for that system, including one that would ignite both excitement and controversy.

The "killer app"
"One of the things that really propelled Windows 95, obviously," recalls Silverberg, "was the consumerization of the Internet, and I would have to say that the killer app for Windows 95 was [Netscape] Navigator."

Netscape had launched Navigator in 1994, and the browser quickly helped turn the Internet from something of academic interest to a mass-market phenomenon.

From Our Readers"Windows is very much underappreciated. It has stability, utility, and appearance matched only by Mac OS X."—Patrick Lepak

Because Windows 95 was the first version to build in 32-bit networking support and the TCP/IP stack with DHCP and WINS, it made it easier for applications to connect. "One of the key objectives with Windows 95 was to be completely plug-and-play, and not just for hardware but also for software," Silverberg says. "I think we really succeeded with that with the Internet and made it possible for anybody to pick up a computer and be instantly productive."

For the next few years, much of the Windows team was focused on Internet Explorer, which first shipped in Windows 95 in a very weak version. Microsoft's decision to bundle Internet Explorer with Windows, of course, would later become the heart of the U.S. government's highly publicized antitrust case against the company in the late 1990s.

Inside Microsoft, there were debates about the role of the browser. The concept of the browser wasn't new from a technical perspective, but no one was sure how much it should be part of the operating system. One thing they all agreed on, though—they needed to answer Netscape Navigator, and fast.

"We were facing this notion that, hey, there's a new thing going on now with the Internet, where the time to market is much faster, so how do we ship new functionality to customers, and how do we stay competitive on the Internet, when shipping every three to four years is not going to be enough for some customers?" Mehdi recalls.

Several versions of Internet Explorer followed, but it wasn't until IE 3.0 that the Microsoft team felt they really had something to compete against Navigator, Mehdi says. "I think we had superior scripting, superior browser control, superior HTML standards, and I think that's where we took the lead," he observes. "Then we didn't have to pay attention to them as much, because we were pioneering the way."

With IE 4 came the Trident display engine that enabled dynamic HTML. At that point, the race was on between Microsoft and Netscape to add as many features as possible in every new release. Both were investing in "push" content, in which users would subscribe to information that would be pushed to the desktop. Microsoft called this "channels," and it ultimately failed because it was too slow over dial-up connections. It was pulled from IE 5.

Eventually, work on the browser slowed down. "I think we ended up having, believe it or not, feature fatigue, where people said, it's almost too much in this thing; can we just go back to some basics?" Mehdi says. "And that's why I think IE 5 was actually a way bigger hit than IE 4, because it just focused on simplicity and performance."

Over the next several years, Internet Explorer would begin to take market share away from Navigator, leading to Netscape's eventual acquisition by AOL and the antitrust case against Microsoft. The court declared Microsoft a monopoly and ordered it to open Windows to different browsers and software from other manufacturers.

Windows 98, ME
Windows 98, which shipped in 1998, included the version of IE that many people would use for years. The listed hardware requirements had grown to include a 486 or faster, 16MB of RAM, and at least 120MB of free hard-drive space. It was followed the next year by Windows 98, Second Edition, and then by Windows Me (Millennium Edition), both relatively minor upgrades.

By that time, though, most of the Windows team was focused on NT. In August 1996, Microsoft shipped Windows NT 4.0, code-named Cairo. The Cairo project was supposed to include an object-oriented file system, but it didn't make the release—and its current iteration, as WinFS, has not shipped to this day; it will not be included in the Vista release, either.
Originally, NT was designed to allow for different APIs on top of it—the OS/2 Presentation Manager, Posix (a version of Unix), and of course Windows, which, with the success of Windows 95 and the Win32 API, became the focus of NT 4.0.

Microsoft had tried to get corporate users to move to Windows NT, but that just didn't happen with the earlier versions, Allchin says. "Frankly, where we really made traction, just to be clear on the client, was NT 4, because it's still out there," he says.—next: XP & Vista

XP & Vista
ARTICLE DATE: 10.12.05
By Michael J. Miller

In many respects, the current generation of Windows started with a project called NT 5, which first began to show up in 1997 and eventually shipped as Windows 2000 in February 2000.
Windows 2000 took the NT basics and added a number of reliability improvements, more support for notebook computers, support for Plug and Play, and more. This became the core system for both the desktop and the server products.

In October 2001, Microsoft added the user interface and software compatibility from Windows 98 on top of the basic core of Windows 2000 to create Windows XP, which remains the company's main operating system. Win XP came out in two flavors: XP Home, which was positioned as the follow-up to the Windows 98/Me series, and XP Professional, the follow-up to Windows 2000. Both used the same basic code, but the Pro version had a few more features, mainly aimed at network management and administration.

The challenge with Win XP was to give users new ways to use their systems, while retaining the features they had learned to appreciate from previous versions, says Chris Jones, corporate vice president of Windows Core Operating Systems Development.

"A lot of the value proposition of XP was, it's basically the same, with a new look, a new set of experiences around photos and music, and some new scenarios," Jones says. "But it had the new engine in it, and so it was just way, way more reliable."

The basic details of the user interface may not have changed that much, but UI guru Joe Belfiore points out the different ways it allows people to use Web sites, cameras, and multimedia today. "If you gave somebody a PC running Win 95 today who is used to running XP and doing the stuff you do with XP," he says, "they would think it was something from the Dark Ages."

Variations of Windows XP
Since Win XP's release, Microsoft has taken the XP code and created a few additional variations. In the fall of 2002 it introduced Windows XP Media Center Edition, which added a "10-foot interface" for viewing—from a living-room couch as well as the usual office chair—all kinds of multimedia files. Media Center Edition also included the ability to record television. Times were changing when it came to multimedia, Belfiore says; Microsoft needed to recognize the digitization of content and the ways people wanted to take advantage of it. "The idea was that you could store your content in one room but eventually be able to get to it from other places," he says.

"A lot of the value propostion of [Windows] XP was, it's basically the same...with a new look, with a new set of experiences around photos and music, with some new scenarios. But it had a new engine in it, and so it was just way, way more reliable."—CHRIS JONES, corporate vice president, Windows Core Operating Systems Development

Media Center started slowly but in recent months has started to take a larger share of the retail desktop market in the U.S.

Another Win XP variation, one with a much smaller audience, at least so far, is the Tablet PC Edition. "These types of really significant changes in how people consume technology take time," Belfiore says.

Microsoft also released a 64-bit version of the OS, initially targeting workstations and servers.
Most interesting were a variety of changes that were delivered as part of Windows Update, a new process that was introduced with Win XP. The Windows Media Player evolved to include new codecs and a new user interface. And perhaps most important, Microsoft introduced a service pack last year, called SP2, that addressed many of the security issues that had been plaguing users for the past few years. It included a built-in firewall and many fixes to known security holes. The Internet and all the threats that come with it these days led Microsoft to change its security strategy, Allchin says.

"If all you could do is bring around a floppy or some other USB medium and plug it in, if that's the only time something bad could happen, you still might want to have security in the classical sense of access per control system, which is what NT had," he says. The curveball of the Internet took everyone by surprise, he adds.

What Vista Will BringNow, as Microsoft develops Windows Vista, which is scheduled to ship in the second half of 2006, security is a top priority. The company talks about the big push to make Vista more "confident," "clear," and "connected."

Helping people visualize and organize their information better is another goal, which is why the user interface is changing yet again. Certain functions, such as commands, may change too, Chris Jones says, which would force users to learn to type differently. Microsoft's challenge is to change just enough to make the interface more intuitive, without changing so much that users begin to feel lost, he says.

Another highlight of Vista will be its new integrated search. Learning to adapt to the new search function won't be too much of a stretch, Jones believes, because of the full-text search tools people use in Microsoft Outlook, for example, or Google. In Vista, search is built into the OS, and every file is automatically indexed. Applications will be able to open files through a search menu, changing the way you think about where and how you store your files.

Bill Gates says Vista users will also notice the most significant change to the menu structure of applications since Microsoft introduced its early Mac and Windows applications in the 1980s.

"It is interesting that now, 20 years later, is the first time we're really taking that single-level menu structure approach and saying that for the productivity applications, that has run its course," Gates says. "The Office 12 user interface—it's super-interesting what they've done; it's amazing, but there will be people who resist the change. But that menu approach ran out of steam probably four or five years ago."

Behind the surface, Vista will have many new features, including a new graphics engine with new
commands for programmers, a new programming model, new drivers, and security features that will make it easier for users to run without having administrator privileges on all the time.

A number of things Microsoft has talked about over the years won't be in Vista, though, including the Next Generation Secure Computing Base, a plan for running secure tasks separately from normal tasks; and WinFS, an object-oriented file system Allchin has been pushing for years. Though WinFS is currently being beta tested, it isn't expected to be included in the initial release of Vista.

New Strategies
As for future operating systems, Microsoft hopes to speed up the time between releases. During the 5-year-period between Microsoft's releases of XP and Vista, Apple has released several end-user upgrades and charged for them, Jones says. The question for Microsoft, he says, is "Where do we charge and where don't we for all these things?"

Security updates, for example, should be included as part of the OS licenses people pay for, Jones says, and there are other things added to Windows for free because it's good for developers to have those features deployed. But Microsoft still needs to work out which extras to charge for, he says.

Microsoft is also always exploring ways to make new versions of the operating system interesting and significant enough for people to want to upgrade to them.

"First, we'd better offer a set of compelling capabilities in the software," Allchin says. "Second, we'd better work on the migration and deployment problems that people have today. If I look in the future, we have to do an even better job."

Keys to Windows' Past Successes
Looking back, Gates says the two most important things that led to Windows' success were creating a standard for application developers to write to and creating a standard, intuitive interface for users.

"We've got the developer model that connects to the past but also provides these new services for new classes of applications," Gates says. "We write applications ourselves and exploit that with Office, but it's really the breadth [of applications] that has made Windows such a strong standard. And that you can walk up to any machine and know how to use it, that's the user-model piece."

Both now have to evolve, he adds. "We need a model that is not as single device–centric as Windows originally was but that brings all these richer services, both local and remote, into that developer picture and into that user model," Gates says.

He notes that, in general, the basic UI hasn't changed all that much. "I could take you back to the Windows 2.0 UI and you'd find there wasn't the bar at the bottom and some things, but Windows users today would find it pretty familiar."

Now, Gates says, it's time to "take the user interface to a new level." Such changes, he says, are always risky, just as moving from DOS to Windows was. But the goal remains to create a common developer model and a common user model.

"Those same benefits are as relevant today as they were when this got started."—next: Bill Gates on Windows

Bill Gates on Windows Past, Present, and Future
ARTICLE DATE: 10.12.05
By Michael J. Miller
Online Extra

It may be hard to believe now, but when Windows first launched it was an underdog in the industry. Twenty years later it is the default OS on nearly every PC shipped nationwide. Earlier this month Microsoft Chairman and CEO Bill Gates spoke with PC Magazine Editor-in-Chief Michael Miller to discuss what made Windows such a big success and what innovations to expect in future releases.

MM: What would you say was the most important decision you made that made Windows so successful?

BG: It is not as easy to recognize today that PCs didn't [always] have the power to do a graphical interface, so writing very clever code, and being will to wait a bit while the hardware grew into it was a big part of it.

Also developing these graphical applications was very different. People like PARC and Xerox never thought about getting a broad set of developers to write these modeless-type applications. So having the right toolset and the right evangelism behind Windows was very key.

Basically with Windows, we had the first decade, which was driving it to mainstream acceptance, and then a second decade, where it had become mainstream, so there was a lot of evolution and improvement but not this question of whether it was the right approach.

MM: When you first showed [Windows] to me as Interface Manager 22 years ago, did you believe it would become as ubiquitous as it did?

BG: We weren't kidding that we bet the entire company on it. The strange thing was we were a much smaller company at the time. We were competing to establish this platform with companies larger than ourselves.

One famous episode was that after we'd seen [Lotus] 1-2-3 for the first time there was a question of whether to chase 1-2-3 and try to make a better product in character mode, which internally was code-named Odyssey, or, because it was so good, should we risk of putting our energy into a graphical spreadsheet. That was hotly debated from both sides, and I chose to bet on the graphical interface. This, of course, became Excel.

MM: You came out with a lot more DOS programs at that point. Word shipped for DOS, but it didn't ship for Windows until seven years later.

BG: But we were working on it, believe me.

MM: In those early days, from 1983 to 1990, there weren't that many users of Windows.

BG: That's for sure. It was a tough sell, boy!

MM: Then in 1990, Word came out, Windows 3.0 came out. Was that a vindication of the strategy? At that point do you say "Yes, this really works"?

BG: The funny thing about controversy in the computer industry is there's a period when things are controversial, and then a period when they are obvious. You never get your moment where people say "Oh you were right." It went from "Windows is a joke, who needs it, it's slow" to
"Well, of course we're using Windows, are you kidding me, let's move on to the next topic." I'm not sure we achieved ultimate mainstream until the shipment of Windows 95.—Continue Reading

An Odd Competition With OS/2
MM: Let's talk about OS/2. Clearly that was controversial. In 1986 you do your deal with IBM, and you announce it in 1987, along with the PS/2.

BG: This was super controversial, because IBM was a partner originally on OS/2, so their view was they wanted OS2 for everything or as much as possible, whereas we were establishing Windows on our own.

We were very concerned about being in a joint venture with what I called the "high cost producer" – that is the company whose code was the largest and that used the most developers to get something done. It sounds really rude, and all that, but in terms of the team they had on OS/2 at the time, it was an awkward partnership because of the difference in the software development teams.

"There's a period where we don't know if we're in partnership with IBM because they won't talk to us."

By then [IBM's] share of hardware market had dropped, and so they were trying to use the software to move their hardware share up. So they had this thing called OS/2 Extended Edition that they were only qualifying on IBM hardware. And they kept making statements about how OS/2 Extended Edition worked best with this thing called Micro Channel Architecture. Of course there was no reality to that, but then of course they could have always put hooks in like they had been allowed to do in mainframe microcode that would have made it only work that way. So NCR came along and licensed Micro Channel, and there were charging higher patent fees for Micro Channel so they could get profits that way.

They didn't want us to have Extended Edition. They were willing to have us work with them on Standard Edition, but then they went to all the ISVs and said we want you to require Extended Edition for your applications, which none of the other OEMs would have. And the other OEMs were coming to us and saying "What about this Extended Edition? What are we supposed to do about that, because it's not qualified to run on our hardware. Are you going to get that from IBM or create a clone? What is your view of this Extended Edition?"

Meanwhile OS/2 is big – it is really big. For the graphics piece, which we had originally proposed to IBM just be the exact piece from Windows, they had this mainframe thing called GDDM [Graphical Data Display Manager] that [the IBM] Hursley lab really liked.

MM: So you're still pushing Windows.

BG: The key issue was whether we would ship the version of Windows that does direct addressing of greater than 1 MB. Internally, we had Windows running directly against large memory. IBM used a lot of pressure on us to tell us not to release that.

But OS/2 was getting so big, and schedules were pushed out and it was getting so mainframe-like that we did go ahead and release Windows.

MM: And that was Windows 3?

BG: Windows 3.0, exactly, which does this memory addressing in this natural way, and it's catching on. Even the demanding ISVs were saying Windows gives them lots of headroom.

Then people are getting confused by what they hear from IBM. There's a period where we don't know if we're in partnership with IBM because they won't talk to us. They won't talk to us, then we have a reconciliation, and then they won't talk to us again. Finally, they broke off relationships with us, and then you had a very clear OS/2 vs. Windows competition, where [former IBM General Manager] Lee Reiswig is crashing Windows in IBM demonstrations.

It's all very ironic, because it's most of the OS/2 code is still our code and we're still selling LAN Manager. Whenever we'd go out and criticize OS/2, that group would say "we just took more friendly fire."

MM: By Windows 95, you'd won that battle.

BG: It was clear to us. I don't know when IBM gave up. I remember flying over to Australia long after that, where [IBM was] still trying to get design wins, but basically yes, after that's, its over.—Continue Reading

Looking Beyond Vista
MM: Obviously now you're working on Vista. But what is your vision for the future? What would you like to see over the next 10 years, the next 20 years?

BG: In the future, things are going to be far more user-centric where a user will have a computer at work, a computer at home, a phone, and other devices. So instead of starting with your state being on that computer, you really want your state – your documents, your contacts, your schedule -- all to be available to you on every device. And if you personalize something and say you like this, it shows up on all those other devices.

So, we need a lot more richness in Windows itself, in particular in areas like speech recognition, ink recognition, visual recognition, and much more structured data on the machine that leads to automatic replication of the parts. It should include going up into the cloud where you can get [your information] even in a device you borrow, so you don't have to worry about it to back up, because it goes out into the cloud.

And PCs will get more specialized. We'll have ones that get down to be as small as a phone, and ones that control big wall-sized displays. Obviously, with Media Center we're now controlling the big screen in the living room and connecting you up at 10 feet away, so we're able to have communications between the 10 foot and 2 foot experience.

We're also doing more to unify the model between dedicated video gaming APIs, like the Xbox API, and the Windows graphics API. We also want to take all the rich services around what has been Xbox Live, and bring those to the PC as well.

The differences between a set-top box, a videogame, and a PC--those boundaries won't be the same as they've been.

MM: Now you're talking about things that are more like gaming machines like Xbox, things that are more browser centric. A lot of people say the browser becomes the operating system or the Internet becomes the operating system. How much of it is desktop centric or notebook centric and how much of it something else?

BG: There are two models that are important. There is the developer model where you, as a developer, understand what your storage services are and what your security services are. And then there's a user model: as you move between your devices, how do find things that you care about? How do you find new applications, get those on the machine, and use them? So the Windows developer model and the Windows user model are as important as ever.

Some of the services will be delivered locally from the disk that is in the portable machine you've got on the airplane, others will come off of a disk on server connected through the Internet.

Storage will not be in one place. We have to make it available everywhere so the user doesn't have to think about backing it up, or versioning it, or replicating it, but it's there for them at high bandwidth; it's there for them offline.

Likewise, [when using] the richer new applications where you have speech and ink, you want [processing] power right next to you because of latency. Fortunately, the power of microprocessor keeps going up and they keep getting cheaper. There was this whole movement called 'network computers' about 10 years ago. There's a reason why none of those [solutions] delivered the kind of empowerment and flexibility that the PC did.

In the meantime we've been hard at work on addressing the criticisms of the PC that gave rise to those discussions about state management, easy policy handling, and easy updating. The difference between having a Windows terminal server connected up or just having a full blown PC [is getting smaller.] They should both be extremely manageable where somebody is just setting policies and the state is replicated, so even if a device breaks you can immediately get at [your information.]

So we need a model that is not as single device-centric as Windows originally was, but brings all of these richer services, both local and remote, into that developer picture and into that user model.

Windows' 20th Anniversary
Dave Robson: Xerox veteran, worked on Xerox PARC's Smalltalk
ARTICLE DATE: 10.12.05
By Cade Metz

In 1974, Dave Robson joined Xerox PARC as a summer intern and worked on Smalltalk, the programming and computing environment that introduced the world to floating windows and pop-up menus, two mainstays of the modern GUI. He spent 17 years at PARC, and today he remains at Xerox, as a VP in the company's research operation, Xerox Innovation Group.

Q: How similar was the Smalltalk interface to today's Microsoft Windows?

A: There was a lot of similarity. We never had that taskbar that runs along the bottom of Windows, with its miniature application icons and buttons for starting things up. But the windows themselves looked very much the same. They could show up anywhere on the screen. Text could scroll inside a window. Menus would pop up when you held down a mouse button.

Q: Legend has it that when he visited PARC in 1979, Steve Jobs stole the idea of the graphical user interface. And when Apple released the Macintosh, Microsoft borrowed it from him. How close is that to the truth?

A: There's some truth to it. But it's a lot more complicated than that. I was there when Steve visited, and it's safe to say that when he and his developers saw what we were doing, saw windows and scrolling text, they knew these things could be very useful, and they knew this kind of interface could be reproduced. But I'm pretty sure that nothing about the specific way we did things ever leaked out.

Q: What do you think of Microsoft's current operating system?

A: I'm a reasonably satisfied Windows user. It's been well product-ized and polished, and they've introduced some very creative features. From an aesthetic perspective, I still consider the Macintosh a more elegant design. But from a daily-use perspective, Windows works just as well. I kind of like it.

Jim Cannavino: Led development of OS/2 during his 30 years at IBM
ARTICLE DATE: 10.12.05

After joining IBM in 1963, Jim Cannavino spent more than 30 years at the company. By the early nineties, he was running Big Blue's personal systems division, overseeing the development of OS/2, the ill-fated operating system originally developed in partnership with Microsoft.
Today he serves as chairman and CEO of Direct Insite, an application service provider based in Bohemia, New York.

Q: Why was it that when Microsoft and IBM parted ways, Windows took over the market and OS/2 became a historical footnote?

A: Both IBM and Microsoft did a pretty poor job developing OS/2. When I took over the development team, it was still a 16-bit system, and it looked very much like something that had a bunch of different developers in different places working on it. But IBM had a lot of major customers committed to using it. They were in desperate need of a multitasking operating environment, and we had to finish it.

Q: By version 3.0, hadn't you ironed out a lot of those problems?

A: Version 3 was a solid, award-winning operating environment. It served our customers well. But by that time, the software developers of the world had struggled through the 16-bit version, and they were financially drained. Windows started to take off, and there just weren't enough application-development dollars to keep apps on both platforms.

Q: What's your opinion of the current Windows platform?

A: It's a very successful piece of software, a very successful venture. But a mainframe boots up faster than a laptop, and that's kind of silly. Plus, the architecture really doesn't lend itself to high-level security. Basically, you've got smart guys plugging holes. Though they do a really good job of it, they can never tell when they're finished. If you restructured the architecture of the system and really put some boundaries up that were hard to get by, then there's no reason that your e-mail system should be able to corrupt your file system.

Charles Simonyi: Former Xerox PARC, Microsoft employee
ARTICLE DATE: 10.12.05
By Cade Metz
As a researcher at the famed Xerox PARC in the mid-1970s, Charles Simonyi built the world's first What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get word processor. In 1981 he moved on to Microsoft, where he led the development of Word and Excel. Today he runs Intentional Software, a company that aims to turn even the greenest computer users into programmers.

Q: In the mid-eighties, after the debut of Windows 1.0, Microsoft was shipping versions of Word and Excel for the Macintosh. But on the PC side, why did these apps run only on DOS?

A: At that time, the demands of the applications were higher than Windows could handle. The OS was slow to progress, and a lot of that had to do with politics. Microsoft was in a bad marriage at the time. The success of Windows really had to wait for a divorce from IBM.

Q: Why was it so hard to develop Windows in tandem with IBM?

A: IBM was a large organization that wasn't equipped to operate in a nimble and efficient way. There was this tremendous bureaucratic organization where trivial decisions took an infinite amount of paperwork. That's expensive. Plus, it makes it very difficult to reverse decisions. The more people invest in decisions, the more they cling to them. All you need is for people to cling to a couple of bad decisions and you're dead.

Q: Was that the only problem?

A: The other big constraint was that Microsoft set out to build an open system that allowed other manufacturers to build their own PCs and peripherals. That is inherently much bigger and much messier than what Apple set out to do. Apple was also a hardware company. Their platform uses only two printers and one mouse and two keyboards and one computer.

Eric Hahn: Netscape CTO during the browser wars
ARTICLE DATE: 10.12.05
By Cade Metz
Eric Hahn started his first company at the age of 11, selling apps for early Altair PCs. By the late 1980s, he was vice president of engineering at cc:Mail, and when Lotus acquired the company, he was named divisional CEO. After his next venture, Collabra Software, was acquired by Netscape, he took over as Netscape's chief technology officer, just in time for the browser wars of the late 1990s. Today, he runs the Inventures Group.

Q: Is it easier developing software in today's PC market than in years past?

A: It's easier in the sense that, once developed, your application runs on hundreds of millions of computers. The downside is that many of these new platforms are controlled, or influenced, by very powerful vendors. You have to choose your applications very wisely because you're in a room filled with giant elephants— which was less true 15 years ago. Applications companies like Lotus were as large as operating system companies like Microsoft, and that's not true any longer.

Q: Who are the other elephants?

A: Microsoft is clearly the biggest one. But Apple is a slightly smaller one. And Sun controls an awful lot of the agenda on Solaris. At Netscape, we were in the business of building server products for Solaris, and we often felt that Sun was in a position to affect our servers adversely by building one themselves. Anybody who controls the platform tends to have undue sway over the applications that run on it.

Q: Some argue that Microsoft's position cuts down on innovation. Do you agree?

A: It is believed by many that Microsoft is the most innovative when they're trying to beat somebody who's gotten ahead of them. Netscape with the Internet. Apple with the GUI.
Probably now Google and search. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence that Microsoft is capable of innovation, but that they do it best when they feel threatened by a competitor. That's a slightly different flavor of innovation than what you saw at Xerox PARC or that you now see at Apple.

Michael Dell: Founder and chairman, Dell ComputerARTICLE DATE: 10.12.05
By Cade Metz
When Michael Dell started selling PCs out of his dorm room at the University of Texas, DOS was the operating system of choice, and the first version of Windows was still more than a year away. Over the next 20 years, as his company grew to become the most profitable PC manufacturer in the world, he witnessed the rise of Microsoft's OS firsthand.

Q: In 1985, when Dell Computer was still known as PCs Limited, did the company offer Windows 1.0?

A: We immediately offered it to any customers who wanted it. But there weren't that many applications for the OS, and it wasn't until version 3.0 shipped in the early nineties that the platform really started to take off. By then, the applications were in place, and it quickly became a de facto standard.

Q: Did the many driver and compatibility problems users ran into with Windows 3.0 and 3.1 hamper growth?

A: The type of user you were attracting back then was far more accepting of those sorts of problems. As our products became much higher volume and we attracted a new kind of user, the stability and robustness of the platform improved.

Q: How much of Dell's success is due to the rise of Windows?

A: The establishment of a de facto standard for personal computers combined with Dell's direct business model was a winning formula. But it also had a lot to do with the underlying standards developed by the industry as a whole.

Q: Are there drawbacks to that de facto standard? Having an OS with a 95 percent market share?

A: I remember back in the early eighties, when we had Radio Shack proprietary computers and CP/Ms and Ataris and Apple IIs and all these other platforms. Customers really wanted a single standard, and now we have it. The one drawback is that because of the enormous popularity of the platform, it's become a target for hackers.

Q: Could you imagine today's PC industry without Windows?

A: It could have been something other than Windows. But we needed a standard interface, something people could learn once and that many developers could write for. Windows has been critical to the growth of the PC industry.

Inside PC LabsARTICLE DATE: 10.12.05
By Bill Machrone
PC Magazine Labs got its start on a beat-up metal desk where we used to disassemble every new piece of hardware that showed up at PC Magazine, if only to see which of the latest and greatest chips and components the manufacturers were using. We did our first network hardware testing in a glorified closet until enlightened Ziff-Davis management gave us the budget to build the first of seven iterations of the labs, complete with dedicated test-bed machines and an energetic staff of experts. Head-to-head reviews became the hallmark of PC Magazine, and they changed the PC industry.

Those resources allowed us to test products like Windows aggressively. We installed Windows 3.0 on at least a dozen machines in PC Magazine Labs and quickly found that we could crash it in a variety of ways. We relayed our findings to Microsoft, who doubted that it was as bad as we claimed. They agreed, however, to send an engineer to the labs. Our welcoming present was half a dozen machines on one bench, each frozen in a different way.

We started the diagnostic program Dr. Watson to show our troubleshooter what had happened.
Our findings, along with those of others, helped shape Windows 3.1, which was stable enough (being generous here) to hold the fort until Windows 95 came along. We really weren't sure whether it was more stable or whether we'd just become inured to rebooting. But we knew that DOS apps weren't coming back and that future testing would be in the Windows environment.

In 1993, with input from Microsoft, Intel, AMD, and several software vendors, we developed the Winstone benchmark-test series to evaluate hardware performance. It was also a rigorous workout for software compatibility as the interplay of applications, drivers, and OSs became more complex. With Windows 95, the code base moved to 32 bits, but the OS still had to run all the 16-bit apps that everyone already owned. Sixteen-bit DOS still lurked beneath Win 95, making it prone to memory leaks. Windows NT and OS/2 touted their stability, but people were reluctant to give up their 16-bit apps and DOS utilities and paid a terrible price in crashes and lost work.

So PC Magazine Labs embarked on a huge project—6,000 hours of testing, running over 5,000 performance tests and over 1,000 compatibility tests—to determine the robustness of 32-bit Windows versus the 16/32-bit hybrid. The tests included intentionally buggy 16- and 32-bit programs, and as you might have guessed, it was no contest. Executive editor Ben Gottesman, then technical director, says, "It was exhaustive and exhausting. It was one of the largest product tests ever done." Ben still treasures a cartoon done by former PC Magazine Labs staffer Jay Munro depicting the staff performing various acts of mayhem as Ben asks for "just one more test."

"Sixteen-bit applications became a bad memory," says technical director Rich Fisco. "It was time to shift our focus again to hardware compatibility, this time in the guise of Windows 98's Plug and Play, which pundits quickly named Plug and Pray. The idea of peripherals that would install their own drivers was, and still is, seductive—and somewhat elusive.

With the advent of Windows XP, PC Magazine Labs is able to put most reliability and stability issues behind us and concentrate on networking, functionality, usability, and the pain of upgrading from Windows 98. "As Vista enters its beta phase," says Gottesman, "we'll be living with it as our day-to-day OS, taking notes, trying all our applications and peripherals, so that when it's finally released, you'll have an authoritative, hands-on report of its capabilities." Bring it on.

Bill Machrone is a contributing editor of PC Magazine and former editor-in-chief of PC Magazine Labs.

Whose Idea Was It?ARTICLE DATE: 10.12.05
By Cade Metz
A behind-the-scenes look at the birth of the GUI and the researchers who had an impact on Windows

It's no secret that the basic characteristics of the Windows interface—graphical icons, pop-up menus, and the overlapping application windows that give the OS its name—did not originate at Microsoft. Ted Turner even made a TV movie about it. As Anthony Michael Hall and Noah Wyle made oh-so-clear in Pirates of Silicon Valley, the origins of the Windows GUI predate Microsoft by many years.

Thanks to Pirates and any number of related books, newspaper articles, and magazine stories published over the years, even the marginal computer geeks of the world will tell you that Microsoft stole the idea from Apple and Apple stole it from Xerox PARC, the famed Palo Alto, California, research center that flourished in the 1970s.

"Stole" may be too strong a word, but there's no denying that the Apple Macintosh offered a similar GUI as early as 1984, a year before the debut of Windows. And there's a great deal of truth to that endlessly repeated story about Apple founder Steve Jobs visiting Xerox PARC in 1979. As the story goes, the idea for the Macintosh was hatched when Jobs saw a demo of Smalltalk, the programming and computing environment developed over the previous decade by a team of PARC researchers.

The origins of the Windows GUI actually go back even earlier. The Smalltalk team was heavily influenced by various computer-science projects dating to the early 1960s. Dave Robson, who joined the Smalltalk team in 1974, cites the work of Ivan Sutherland, who developed a graphical user interface called SketchPad as part of a 1963 doctoral thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Bob Barton, who built a machine called the B5500 while at Burroughs Corp. in 1961. But the biggest influence may have been NLS, an online system created at around the same time by Douglas Engelbart and a group of researchers at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI).

NLS was the first system that organized its interface into separate windows-like sectors, and users could navigate these sectors with a computer mouse, another Engelbart invention. "Even way back then, we already had the concept of multiple windows," says Engelbart, who now runs the Bootstrap Institute, a technology think tank. "Any one application could manage multiple windows, and you could easily move objects, paragraphs, and words between them."

Running over ARPAnet, the government network that became the Internet, NLS was so far ahead of its time that it offered real-time video conferencing and would soon include something very similar to what we now call remote control. Says Engelbart, "I could see what was on your screen, and you could pass me your mouse and keyboard controls, and I could actually show you how to do something."

By the early 1970s, a handful of Engelbart's researchers, including Bob Belleville, Bill Duvall, and Charles Irby, had moved on to Xerox PARC, where they had a hand in shaping Smalltalk and the two other computing environments then under development at the research lab, one based on the LISP programming language and one based on Mesa.

A great deal of cross-pollination was going on among all three platforms. Says Dave Robson, "They were being developed in parallel. There were various features that would show up first on one of the platforms, but if a feature was good enough, it would soon show up on the other two."

Eventually, all of them would use a graphical interface, but the Smalltalk platform was the first to use overlapping windows that could pop up anywhere. On Engelbart's system, windows ran the width of the display, stacked one atop the other, and originally windows had similar restrictions on the Smalltalk platform. The bits that made up the system's monochrome interface were grouped into 16-bit chunks, or words, and windows had to begin and end on the edge of a word.

"The instruction for creating a window was called 'blit,' for block image transfer," says Robson. "And people kept saying 'Wouldn't it be great if we had a blit that worked on bit boundaries, rather than word boundaries, so we could draw windows anywhere on the screen.'" One week, Robson's colleague Dan Ingalis went off on his own and developed an instruction called "bit blit," and the overlapping window was born.

Cue Steve Jobs and that famous visit to PARC. In developing the Mac and an earlier GUI platform called the Lisa, Apple even hired several of PARC's leading researchers. After jumping from Engelbart's SRI group to PARC, Bob Belleville then joined Apple. In the early 1980s, he even arranged a meeting between Jobs and Engelbart.

Though it's the PARC visit everyone remembers, this meeting undoubtedly had just as much influence on the Mac and the Lisa. But Jobs was set on taking the GUI in a new direction. "When he looked at my three-button mouse," says Engelbart, "he told me that three were too many. He was sure that one button was all you'd need."

Jobs took the general mouse idea and made it his own.
A few years later, Bill Gates would do the same.

Windows: The Formative YearsARTICLE DATE: 10.12.05
Microsoft has rarely delivered a Windows version on time, but with the possible exception of Windows Me, each of the upgrades to the operating system has been a clear improvement over its predecessor. Here's a look back at our takes:

Windows 1.0
"Most industry watchers, this writer among them, declared Microsoft Windows stillborn the day IBM rolled out Top View. . . . In order to make Windows a big winner, Microsoft must convince software developers, including its own colleagues, to build Windows-based applications. This will be easier every day as the word gets out."
—Jonathan Lazurus (January 14, 1986)
Minimum requirements: 256KB RAM, two double-sided floppy drives, and a graphics adapter card.

Windows 2.0
"The most-improved-where-it-counts-the-most award must surely go to Windows 2.0. While Windows 1.0 certainly showed us the promised land of consolidated video and output device drivers, it left a lot to be desired in the speed department. It also had some user interface inconsistencies. . . . Windows 2.0 corrects all these flaws and has enough new features left over to make it a strong graphical platform for DOS."
—The Editors (January 12, 1988)
Minimum requirements: 512KB RAM, a graphics adapter card, and DOS 3.0 or higher.

Windows/386
"Microsoft Windows/386 is the operating environment that doesn't have to apologize for anything. It delivers everything that today's users want: multitasking, graphics, interprogram communications, and multiple windows. . . . Best of all, it can run existing [DOS] applications inside graphics windows (or give them the whole screen), and it gives each a full 640KB of memory. Windows/386 is an eloquent answer to the question, 'What do I need an 80386 for?'"
—The Editors (January 12, 1988)
Minimum requirements: 80386 processor, 1MB RAM, and DOS 3.1 or above.

Windows 3.0
"A funny thing's happening on the road to OS/2. Microsoft Windows has turned into the dazzling multitasking operating system that OS/2 is still struggling to become. . . . This upgrade has raised talk of trouble for Apple and NeXT, and it's not hard to see why."
—Gus Venditto (July 1990)
Minimum requirements: 80286-based PC: 640KB RAM, one floppy drive, and a hard drive. 80386-based PC: 1024KB of extended memory to take advantage of the 386 Enhanced mode, MS-DOS version 3.1 or higher.

Windows 3.1
"Windows 3.1 is better than 3.0 for a wide variety of reasons. The abolition of UAEs (Unrecoverable Application Errors), the arrival of OLE (Object Linking and Embedding), the WYSIWYG printing, the TrueType fonts, the new File Manager, and the multimedia features all are good reasons to upgrade."
—Bill Bettini, Matthew J. Ross, and Don Willmott (April 28, 1992)
Minimum requirements: Same as Windows 3.0.

Windows NT 3.1
"Windows NT is a 32-bit operating system every inch of the way. . . . Some advanced features—such as NT's scalability, built-in networking, high-level security, fault tolerance, performance monitoring and management tools, and its interface to major networking and mainframe standards—make NT a clear case of overkill for most desktop PCs."
—Rick Ayre and Robin Raskin (September 28, 1993)
Minimum requirements: 80386 processor or later, 8MB RAM.

Windows 95
"If you're used to Windows 3.1, you'll find that performing basic file management from the desktop by dragging and dropping file icons takes some getting used to. But you'll soon notice how much power this UI can offer. For example, a single icon called My Computer provides access to your drives (and all the files they contain), the Control Panel, your printers, and dial-up networking options."
—Michael J. Miller (May 16, 1995)
Minimum requirements: 80386 processor or later, 4MB RAM.

Windows 98
"We've been hearing about Windows 98 for a long time, ever since it was supposed to be Windows 97. . . . Microsoft has delivered on the bulk of the features promised for the new OS. This includes the controversial extensive integration of Internet Explorer. . . . For new systems, Windows 98 is likely to be a nice improvement—one that should allow for a more stable OS, faster performance in some cases, and better support for new hardware."
—Michael J. Miller (August 1998)
Minimum requirements: 80486DX/66 MHz or faster processor, 16MB RAM.

Windows NT 4.0
"Originally, Windows NT was envisioned to be an 'equal opportunity' operating system that could run other operating system applications as easily as its own. But now that the Win32 API has assumed center stage, Windows NT has been optimized to run Win32 applications faster than ever before. . . . It apparently does so without compromising the qualities that made Windows NT famous. All things considered, its users could hardly ask for more."
—Jeff Prosise (September 24, 1996)
Minimum requirements: Pentium processor, 16MB RAM.

Windows 2000
"Windows 2000 Professional, the desktop part of Windows 2000, is more stable, more secure, and easier to use than Windows NT 4 Workstation. It's not an obvious upgrade for every system, but medium-size and large enterprises should strongly consider Windows 2000 Professional for new systems. And unlike Windows NT 4, Windows 2000 Professional is a great notebook OS. For the average home or home-office user—or the less savvy small-business user—Windows 2000 Professional is still a little too large and too complex compared with Windows 98."
—Larry Seltzer (February 22, 2000)
Minimum requirements: Pentium/150 MHz or higher, 32MB RAM.

Windows Me
"The name says it all. Microsoft Windows Me—short for Millennium Edition—is designed for individual home users, not for business. . . . Windows Me is the most radical upgrade yet in the Windows 9x family. . . . Should you upgrade an existing machine? Most users will upgrade without problems, but if your system includes cutting-edge broadband and firewall software designed for the Windows 9x TCP/IP stack, you may be in for trouble."
—Edward Mendelson (September 1, 2000)
Minimum requirements: Pentium/233 MHz, 128MB RAM.

Windows XP
"Windows XP combines Windows 98's and Me's aptitude for running games and legacy hardware with Windows 2000's more stable and manageable kernel. . . . But Windows XP is also proving to be a rather controversial upgrade. It includes features—like an improved media player, built-in instant messaging, direct support for recordable optical drives, strong integration with Microsoft's Web-authentication service Passport, and links to other Microsoft Web services—that raise new concerns about competition and what should and should not be included in an operating system."
—Michael J. Miller (October 30, 2001)
Minimum requirements: 512KB RAM, a graphics adapter card, and DOS 3.0 or higher.

The Many Flavors of Today's WindowsARTICLE DATE: 10.12.05
By Don Willmott
Windows XP Home Edition and Professional Edition (October 2001); Service Pack 2 (August 2004)
What It Is: The two current versions of Windows with the largest installed bases; both are derived from the Windows 2000 kernel. Pro is a superset of Home, adding corporate features including improved manageability, as well as remote control and offline folders. SP2 is a major update focused on making the OS more secure.
Our Take: "Windows XP is Microsoft's latest—and dare we say greatest—operating system to date." "While SP2 won't make us impervious to attacks, it's a big step forward in many areas and should be considered a must-have update. SP2 provides more efficient patching, a stronger and easier firewall, a pop-up blocker, and several other improvements, including many under the hood."
System Requirements: 300-MHz or faster processor, 64MB RAM (128MB RAM recommended), 1.5GB hard drive space, CD–ROM or DVD drive.

Windows Mobile 5.0 (May 2005)
What It Is: Microsoft's OS for handhelds including PDAs, smartphones, and portable media centers. It's packed with features to satisfy gadget lovers, with everything from gaming APIs and Bluetooth support to an improved minisuite of office apps and portable versions of various Windows media players.
Our Take: "Windows Mobile 5.0 isn't a radical reimagining of Microsoft's previous OS, Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition. Rather, it's an accumulation of new features designed to satisfy users' wish lists, stave off competition, and prepare Microsoft for the devices we know are coming in 2006."
System Requirements: compatible phone, PDA, or personal entertainment device.

Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition (June 2005)
What It Is: The first desktop version of Windows engineered to take advantage of 64-bit processor power.
Our Take: "XP64 uses the full power of modern 64-bit processors and makes that power available to compatible 64-bit programs. Or it would if there were any. Most 32-bit applications work fine under XP64 and may get a small performance boost. The bad news: Some programs, particularly low-level system utilities and drivers, just aren't compatible."
System Requirements: 64-bit processor, up to 128GB RAM is supported.

Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (October 2004)
What It Is: The latest update of a special version of Windows designed to run on PCs outfitted with lots of home entertainment bells and whistles, such as TV and radio tuners, DVD players, music jukeboxes, and photo managers. The third version finally gets it right.
Our Take: "Microsoft may have unleashed the perfect OS for a home PC. Fulfilling the promise of the previous two iterations, MCE 2005 is a markedly better OS, supported by markedly better graphics hardware—particularly the TV tuners, which now deliver picture quality comparable with what you get from a good TV. For virtually anyone buying a new PC for home use, we can't think of a reason not to go with an MCE 2005 box."
System Requirements: P4 processor or better, 64MB RAM (128MB RAM recommended), 1.5GB hard drive space, CD–ROM or DVD drive.

Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 (August 2004)
What It Is: In 2002, ten years after the so-called "year of pen computing," Microsoft finally delivered a Windows version that took advantage of the note-taking and sketching properties of a new generation of tablet systems. This is the first major update, with improved handwriting recognition and other new features.
Our Take: "There's a lot to like about Microsoft's Tablet PC OS. If the handwriting recognition didn't live up to my expectations, the use of ink did. Extensions that come with the machine or that can be downloaded from Microsoft's Web site let all of the Office XP applications use ink, and it quickly becomes an interesting new way of annotating files and taking the kinds of visual notes you can't create with a keyboard."
System Requirements: Tablet PC, Pentium M or Mobile Athlon CPU, 256MB RAM.
next: Living In a Windows WorldCopyright (c) 2005 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved.