How
Windows
Won Me
Over
!IHt?HtM
Ed Word
Please send feedback and pie
to [email protected].NOVEMBER 2005 MA XIMUMPC
I
t’s still hard for me to believe that Windows has
been around for 20 years. I’m not going to pretend
I was using Windows during its earliest years. I just
didn’t see a need to burden my 286-powered “speed
machine” with a clunky graphical shell that ran on
top of DOS, which I was perfectly comfortable using.
Then I bought a new 386—a Wang, in fact—bundled
with Windows 3.0. True, it was useless for playing
games, it was slow, and it was an unbelievable mem-
ory hog, but I could run my spreadsheet and word
processor at the same time. Wow.
My true gee-whiz, this-Windows-thing-might-
work-out moment didn’t happen until I saw Photo-
shop 3.0 running on a Pentium-powered Windows
3.1 machine. Not only was I able to scan in photos,
I could also manipulate them pixel by pixel. I spent
the better part of that fi rst afternoon with Windows
3.1 scanning blurry shots of license plates and try-
ing to sharpen them enough to read the numbers.
The ability to manipulate photos is something we
take for granted today; digital cameras are plentiful
and cheap, image processing software is free, and
even the slowest computer can handle photo edit-
ing with aplomb. In 1994, it took a state of the art
rig—think Pentium 60 with 16MB of RAM—that cost
more than $4,000, and a hyper-expensive piece of
software to even rudimentarily edit photos.When I upgraded to Windows 95—10 years
ago to the day that I’m writing this—a whole new
world opened up. To me, the biggest feature
in Windows 95 wasn’t the new interface, but
native support for TCP/IP. I kissed goodbye the
cobbled-together collection of apps and drivers
I needed to connect to the Internet in Windows
3.1, and embraced the dialer and WinSock built
into Win95. Still, I was frustrated with Windows
95’s unstable nature, and the seemingly constant
need to reboot the machine.
In 1996, I bought Windows NT 4 and fell in
love. It had everything I was looking for: the built-in
stability of a native 32-bit kernel, native support for
Internet protocols, and the spiffy new Windows 95
interface. Sure, I had to boot to Windows 95 (and
later 98) to play games, but once I used NT for the
fi rst time, I never went back to a DOS-based oper-
ating system again.
When you’re reading the “Happy Birthday,
Windows” cover story on page 34, check out those
screens of Windows 1.0 and 2.0, and just think
about what your PC operating system is going to
look like in another 20 years.Features
MA XIMUMPC 11 / 05
Whether you’re in for two Franklins or
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42
Movie
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A step-by-step guide to
editing movies, with
synchronized sound and
audio, using software you
already own!34
Windows
Turns 20
And it doesn’t look a
day over 19! Maximum
PC looks back on two
decades of Microsoft’s
steadfast OS.