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Twenty-Five Years Since We Heard About Windows
By Dave Peterson | November 10, 2008
Today was an anniversary, barely noticed but worth at least a moment’s thought, as it marked the beginning of a major change in the world of small computers. Twenty-five years ago today, a young guy named Bill Gates heading a company called Microsoft, announced a new thing called “Windows” publicly for the first time. A couple years later, Windows 1.01 was released as a slightly more user friendly extension to MS-DOS (which was still required for a computer to operate).
Regardless of how each user may feel about the product that created the world’s greatest personal fortune, almost everyone who uses a computer has had at least some experience with Windows. For me, it inspired the first time I ever cracked open a PC’s case and performed an upgrade, when in the early ’90s I brought my system’s memory from one to three megabytes in order to install Windows 3.1. Now I live an OS-ambidexterous life, with one hand on Windows machines and the other on Macs, but for many, many years Windows was my world.
Despite all the aggravation, it’s been a lot of fun. Happy Birthday, Windows.
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