Windows Vista Launched 17 Years Ago

[Jonj1611]

I wasn't lucky enough to have an Amiga, my parents got me a PC, considerably more than an Amiga but man I was at school. While other kids were playing games on their Amigas I was trying to work out how to create a graph with Harvard Graphics! Felt robbed I tell you.

[[GSV]Trig]

Mr money bags over here!

I think mine remained stock due to the costs and me not actually needing any upgrades.

Ha, I've still got the same problem now I had back then, if I want something, I'll work my arse off to be able to afford it, needing and wanting upgrades are a different thing...
Sometimes I just want new shiney stuff.

[MrJim]

While other kids were playing games on their Amigas I was trying to work out how to create a graph with Harvard Graphics! Felt robbed I tell you.

Oh gosh now that's a blast from the past! I used Harvard Graphics throughout my time at university (Powerpoint was just a glint in Bill Gate's eye back then), & even used it in few of my psychology experiments

[AGTDenton]

What I love most with Vista is how everybody hates it yet everybody loves Vista SP3... I mean 7...

I understand why people hated Vista, hardware manufacturers were not geared up for the new driver mechanisms within Windows and Microsoft kept moving the goal posts. I remember Creative Labs asking people to use their XP drivers.

Microsoft simply didn't give everyone enough time to learn & develop the new system and should have delayed it.

I found generally those who started on Vista RTM did not bother with SP2 knowing Windows 7 was a few months later.

[[GSV]Trig]

WAs Vista not a kneejerk reaction to Apple dropping the first 64bit OS though, so they rushed Vista out, which was a half finished something else?

[Saracen999]

Vista makes you old?!

I remember having to install Windows 3.11 from floppy disk (after you'd installed DOS from floppy) sticking the 3C509 drivers on there and then connecting to a Novell server..

Dataease, where the word ease belonged in there I'll never know, Lotus 123 and Wordperfect 5.1, pre-WYSIWYG word processing which was more like some sort of HTML writing in Notepad (Before Frontpage was a thing, and even then you'd want to drop whatever it spat out into a text editor to pull all the additional not needed lines out)

The joys of installing Windows 95 from CD so I could play Pinball and watch the 'Buddy Holy' video...


Vista, pfffft the youth of yesterday didn't know they were born then, let alone now

I remember my first programming efforts consisted of typing on a teletype terminal, connected to a mainframe via acoustic coupler, and saving the code on 7-hole ASCII paper tape. We could also submit batch jobs via optical mark cards.

Even with the university facilities some time later, it was batch jobs on card decks, but at least we then had IBM punch card machines which allowed you to type a whole line in to a buffer with a one-line display that could be edited ... until you committed and the card got punched.

Oh, and I was using COBOL, Algol, Fortran and, of course, BASIC.

Some years then passed, and IBM released the PC (after the times swith TRS-80's, Aprict, Sirius etc, and the Apple II Europlus (which I bought in 1979, I think), and we went through several versions of DOS before ever seeing Windows or GEM, etc. And as mentionedd above, yup, Wordstar (DOS), WordPerfect (DOS), Visicalc, Multiplan, Lotus 123, dBase II. III, IV, Dataease etc .... well before MS got around to Word, Excel and Access.

Windows 95 on CD? "pfffft the youth of yesterday didn't know they were born then, let alone now."

In fact, quite a few of them probably, literally and actually weren't born, then.

[[GSV]Trig]

Ok you win the 'feck me I'm old' game...

I do remember programming the old 16k rubber keyed Spectrums from magazines in whatever language they used, but I wasn't very old..

[Saracen999]

Ok you win the 'feck me I'm old' game...

I do remember programming the old 16k rubber keyed Spectrums from magazines in whatever language they used, but I wasn't very old..

Yup, I'm convinced my initial bout of RSI (along my thumb, up via the Carpal tunnel) was due to .... erm .... overdulging in a Spectrum game. And te zx81 before it.

I too remember a "not very old" experience - of playing Battleships on (IIRC) an IBM S360 mainframe. And yes, there's a story behind how I ended up doing that, as a pre-teen (but not by much).

[Percy1983]

Absolutely, Vista came out of the gates rough I remember the driver issues, but this was fixed over time but due to name getting trashed they basically made the next service pack 7 to get away from the vista name.

[AGTDenton]

WAs Vista not a kneejerk reaction to Apple dropping the first 64bit OS though, so they rushed Vista out, which was a half finished something else?

Quick search seems to suggest that Apple 'stunned' them with their Tiger release which I didn't realise. I knew about their WinFS problems. Looking at the history in more detail, it was chaotic!

[Iota]

I'm starting to trigger on flashbacks of himem.sys entries and autoexec.bat ordering, so I'll go do something else for a bit

It was the only way I could get Command & Conquer to run as the PC I was using at the time didn't have enough memory... oh god I DO NOT MISS those days.