The History of Windows….Microsoft that is. Pt3

Windows 1 to 10

The first incarnation of Windows wasn't really Windows as you think of them now, on current Windows we can now open drag and overlap multiple Windows, Microsoft's first Operating Systems Windows 1 released in November 1995 was flat allowing you to only open windows side by side and running on top of Microsoft's DOS OS this was cutting edge in its day allowing for the use of mouse control.

In December 1987 Microsoft released the next evolution Windows 2, this was the first OS to come with overlapping Windows a control panel for easy access to system settings and also introduced the minimise and maximise Windows function, basically this was the great grandparent of what we use now. Windows 2 was also the birth of Word and Excel.

Next is Windows 3 launched in May 1990 this was the first OS that required a hard drive this was Microsoft's first major contender against rival Operating Systems. Windows 3 allowed the running of MS-DOS programs in Windows, it also brought 256-bit colours this gave a more colourful and modern look to the user interface, also this version introduced the biggest waste of time management in the guise of Solitaire.

Windows 3.1 the update for Windows 3 was a significant one because it brought truetype fonts making it a useful publishing tool, Minesweeper was also introduced in this update.

Windows 95 released in August 1995 was a massive leap in the Operating System with the introduction of the 'START' button with the start menu to. This was the OS I remember most due to the Rolling Stones sound track on the advert.

There was a few first's introduced with this OS these were Plug & Play this enabled you to connect a device and Windows would find a driver and install it though this failed as many times as it worked. 95 also sported a 32-bit graphics it also introduced Internet Explorer.

Released in June 1998 Windows 98 was the step up from 95 same OS just that bit better. It came with Internet Explorer 4, Outlook Express, Windows address book and microsoft chat.

Windows ME Microsoft second most hated OS released in September 2000 ME was the last in the Windows 9x series.
Windows ME was mainly targeted at the home user it included Internet Explorer 5.5, Windows Media Player 7 and the then new Windows Movie Maker software which enabled basic video editing for the home user, also the graphical user interface was updated.

Windows XP released in October 2001 was by far one of the best versions of Windows, it was based on Windows NT with all the consumer comforts of ME, the Start menu and taskbar got a visual makeover bringing the well known green Start Button and blue task bar along with shadow and other visual effects. Cleartype was designed to make text easier to read on lcd screens. XP was the longest running of all past Operating Systems in its run there was three major updates and support for it up to April 2014 a massive 13 years from its original release date. before it was discontinued XP was thought to be used on around 430m PC's

Windows Vista the replacement for XP, it was doomed for failure just because it was replacing XP, everyone loved XP the comfy blanket of Operating Systems and Microsoft was asking users to give up there comfy blanket for a new one wasn't gonna happen for millions of users. UAC (User Account Control) was a security approval/disapproval for installs, as this prompted you on just about everything users were just clicking yes all the time or like myself turning it off altogether. Vista ran slowly on older machines even though they were meant to be 'Vista Ready' which caused lawsuits because not all versions of Vista could run on Vista ready PC's. Gamers were happy though with the DirectX 10 technology, Windows Media Player 11 and Internet Explorer 7 were on this version along with Windows Defender. Personally I did like Vista or the features in it.

Windows 7 released in October 2009 and was inevitably everything Vista should have been. It set out with the goal of fixing all the issues users hated in Vista, with minor tweaks in its appearance, heavy user friendly feature and less irritating prompting. Windows 7 was so easy to uses and very customisable to give it that more personal touch I personally can't remember having an issues with this OS and right up until 10 it was my favourite. Windows 7 was faster, stable and a lot easier to use meaning most users made this there upgrade of choice after moving on from XP. Snap was first introduced in Windows 7 allowing you to move windows to the top or side of the screen making for faster more automatic resizing. Windows 7 in Europe were hit with an antitrust investigation over the pre-installation of Internet Explorer so a browser selection screen was implemented giving users the choice of what browser they wanted to install.

Released in October 2012 Windows 8 was an OS that personally I couldn't stand, the idea of it appealed but removing the start button and forcing what looked like a mobile phone OS onto a PC was just silly. The pinning to start was a pain to if like me you have more than one hard drive it made using the other hard drive a total pain, I have an installed games and music drive and neither were liked by Windows 8. The introduction of metro the tiled interface adding app and programs onto one tiled screen. The positives for this were increased performance and improved security and better function for tablet users, gave support for the faster USB 3 interface it did also come with a traditional Windows 7 style desktop pain to find and access when you first used Windows 8.

Windows 8.1 the improved release reintroducing the start button bringing up desktop view, users could also bypass metro booting straight into windows which was more suitable for user using a desktop/laptop.

Windows 10 was release July 2015 and is the best of windows 7 and 8 it's fast secure and very easy to use. it gives you your friendly Windows desktop with the convenience of a metro style start menu. Upon installation you are prompted to input an email address and if you don't have one or are not wanting to input one it's not that clear as how to proceed. Once past there and Windows 10 is installed you are greeted with your desktop and start button, the taskbar has a few new features like cortana a search feature that allows you to type or verbally ask questions to Cortana, and Cortana on most occasion will verbally reply one of the most asked questions is "sing me a song" or "tell me a joke" and she will. The other noticeable change is internet explorer this is not your default browser it's been replaced by the new microsoft edge, windows media player has been swapped as default by groove, photos and videos have new default apps to all these can be easily changed to customise Windows 10 to your personal preferences. one of the intermittent problems iv had is the start menu and Cortana stops working first time this happened it was a huge pain to fix. In July 2016 Microsoft released an anniversary update for edge and cortana improvements. Overall Windows 10 for me is a brilliant OS and does everything i ask of it gives me all the security and freedom to have it just I want it.

World of Warcraft my first day on Legion

I have always liked World of Warcraft been playing since Lich King was released but after swift leveling and sadly losing interest in Warlords of Draenor I was in two minds about going back to WOW (World of Warcraft) but the voices began calling "Azeroth need you", me being easily led I gave in, I looked around for the best price on a copy of Legion.

The best one I found was on CDKeys.com it was for the standard edition and was priced at £24.99, bearing in mind that Blizzard are charging £34.99 for the same game version. But this wasn’t enough so I looked for any discount codes for CDKeys and seen that if you liked their Facebook page you would get 5% off your order; so final price was £23.74 a sweet saving of £11.25 better in my pocket.

Back to the game so you’ve purchase the expansion and game time now it’s time to play the game. Onto the character screen this is a list of alternative game characters you have made in WOW at the bottom of the list is a button to create a new character, most of my characters are Alliance so this is from an Alliance point of view. I created a new Demon Hunter character but did begin the game with an existing character.

Depending upon where you were when you last played the game you will need to make your way to Stormwind or i'm assuming 'Ogrimmar as horde', once there head to Stormwind harbour and speak with ‘Recruiter Lee’ who will give you "The Legion Returns" quest. You run a few errands then you head to the docks. You hand in your quest to Knight Dameron who give you another quest "Battle for the Broken Shore", which leads you onto your ship to speak with Captain Angelica.

After talking to Captain Angelica you are queued for a scenario and a cutscene of your fleet setting sail sailing. You now find yourself on the Broken shore where you will have to battle your way past countless Legion minions finally making your way to Gul'dan.

  

For player like myself who were not clued up on Legions Broken Isle below is a little info on it.

The Broken Isles is a mysterious continent and chain of islands that has been around since the Sundering, with the exception of one island that was raised from the seafloor by Gul'dan. 

They are located northeast of the raging Maelstrom and Southeast of Northrend.

They are located in the Great Sea and include about four large islands and a few small islands. Many ancient ruins can be found on these islands including the once-mighty Night Elf city of Suramar. Notably, the long-lost Tomb of Sargeras is also located on one of these islands. However, Illidan Stormrage recently stole the Eye of Sargeras from the tomb.

The History of Windows….Microsoft that is. Pt2

One GUI to rule them all…

Xerox a company more known for Business printers and photocopiers, and are not the first, second or even third company that springs to mind when you think of the pioneers of the GUI (Graphical User Interface) aka the fancy stuff on your computers and gadgets. Back in the mid 70’s Xerox created a division of its corporation named PARC (Palo Alto Research Centre) a research and development centre, some of their more know achievement through the years are Laser Printers, Bitmap Graphics and the GUI. In 1973 PARC created their first functional Personal computer named Alto it came complete with three button mouse and a graphical user interface.

Parc were asked to show their research to Xerox, Xerox weren't aware just what they had. Apple at the time was one of the hottest tech companies in the country, and everyone wanted a piece of it, Jobs heard of PARCS achievements and wanted the tech, so he proposed that he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars if PARC gave him full access to the GUI. Steve Jobs took a group of Apple engineers and executives on a tour of PARC, Jobs was given full access to view and try the Alto, he then used the PARC GUI he saw to create the Apple Lisa which was the original Macintosh OS. In 1981 PARC introduce the Star the successor to the Alto this came with double click mouse function and overlapping windows functions what we take for granted on our devices now.

Mac I see Windows….

The next project of Apple was to be the Macintosh, from the success of Lisa the Mac would be even bigger and better which is why Steve Jobs took personal control overseeing the Macintosh development process. Jobs was a bit of a slave driver working his Mac team up to 90 hours a week. The Macintosh was about a year from completion when Jobs met with Microsoft, he showed gates and his team the pre-production Mac computer and Gates went to work selling to Steve Jobs that Microsoft would be a great asset with their software they could develop for Apple Jobs then gave Microsoft a loan of 3 of the new Macs. 

Microsoft were trying to create their own version of the Mac OS, Steve Jobs was getting suspicious of Microsoft and called Bill Gates in for a meeting, Gates convinced Jobs that nothing untoward was going on. At a Mac conference Jobs and Gates had a meeting in Jobs’s conference room, he confronted Gates with an NEC PC running windows OS.

Gates found himself surrounded by ten Apple employees who were eager to watch their boss assail him. Jobs didn’t disappoint his troops. “You’re ripping us off!” he shouted

“I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us!” Gates just sat there coolly, looking Steve in the eye, before hurling back, in his squeaky voice, what became a classic zinger. “Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbour named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it. 3 months after this Steve Jobs was fired from Apple and Windows was the OS of the PC.

The History of Windows….Microsoft that is. Pt1

In the Beginning there was…

On Friday October the 28th 1955 Microsoft was born, or to be more accurate Bill Gates was born. At school Gates met Paul Allen soon to be co-founder of Microsoft. There first endeavour came about after Allen showed Gates an article in a computer magazine about an Altair computer. Gates rang Mits the company who made the Altair informing them that he had a programming language for their computer (though he didn’t), they accepted his offer so he set out to write a programming language for the Altair called BASIC.

And Gates created…

After writing BASIC for the Altair Gates redistributed it onto other computers such as the Apple II and commodore 64, enabling it to be a widely used Operating System.He then sold the programming language and Started up Microsoft.

The Name itself was the idea of Bill Allen the mix of Microcomputers and Software name done and the company took off. For the next five years Bill Gates worked tirelessly building up Microsoft working constant 16 hour days and personally checking each line of code created.

The first big opportunity for Gates under the Microsoft banner was with IBM (International Business Machines), Microsoft wanted to work with IBM to deliver their BASIC programming language for the IBM PC, but were contacted first by IBM to create an operating system for their in-development IBM PC, IBM wanted an OS similar to the CP/MOS. IBM and Microsoft formally signed a contract but the genius of it was Microsoft did not have an Operating system for IBM.

Let There Be DOS…

Allan knew of a small company named Seattle Computer Products that had developed an operating system called QDOS, Microsoft bought this OS for $50000 reworked it and turned it out as Microsoft DOS. Microsoft cleverly included a clause in the agreement that allowed them to sell the operating system to other companies under the name MS-DOS. It was this clause that changed the course of technology history, opening the door for Microsoft to become the dominant technology company of the PC era. Microsoft seemed to understand that by controlling the operating system, the underlying hardware became less relevant.

Briefly MS-DOS is short for Microsoft Disk Operating System, this is a non-graphical command line operating system derived from 86-DOS that was created for IBM compatible computers. MS-DOS originally written by Tim Paterson and introduced by Microsoft in August 1981 was last updated in 1994 when MS-DOS 6.22 was released. MS-DOS allows the user to navigate, open, and otherwise manipulate files on their computer from a command line instead of a GUI like Windows. Today, MS-DOS is no longer used; however, the command shell, more commonly known as the Windows command line is still used by many users.

My budget PC build Pt.2

Now that the cards working time to put it to work. First I did some spec checks comparing the old and the new.

As you can see the new card is double the speed and performance also four times the memory plus the all important DirectX know it says 12 on the image, just means it will work with next generation games too. As I said before i'd explain what ASUS Strix was, well i'm not as id make a hash explaining it so I went to the experts they know all about this stuff.

ASUS Graphics Cards – No.1 Gamer's Choice

Taken from the ancient Roman and Greek word for owl, Strix means the keenest hearing and sharpest eyesight. Strix means feeling your environment so that you detect and react to the slightest movement. Strix means survival on the very edge of instinct. Strix is in your blood, as it is in ours.

ASUS Strix gaming graphics cards packed with exclusive ASUS technologies, including DirectCU III with Triple Wing-Blade 0dB Fan Design for maximum air flow with 30% cooler and 3X quieter performance. This card features exclusive ASUS AUTO-EXTREME Technology with Super Alloy Power II for premium quality and best reliability. It also has GPU Tweak II with XSplit Gamecaster, provides intuitive performance tweaking and lets you stream your gameplay instantly. And there you go explained much better than I could thank you ASUS.

So the first game I played using my new card was World of Warcraft a game i've been playing and some would say addicted to since 2009, the game itself was released in 2004 and for the majority is highly addictive.

As stated in the images the view on the left is of my old cards settings and the right is the new card. From the images the main differences are the increased depth of view and improved detail, the game is much much better graphically now, though Blizzard the game creator did put a big pre-expansion patch update out at the same time.

I bought some new directX 11 games well I say new they were from Ebay same game but cheaper, I'm all about the money. The games I choose were:-

I have just began playing these games and have all the display setting just about at max. Visually as you can see from the images below they all look outstanding and gameplay is as you would expect enveloping with a hint of challenging.

So overall the short time I have had my new ASUS GTX 960 it has performed brilliantly and done everything I have asked of it, next is to begin saving for the next item on my budget PC build.

My budget PC build Pt.1

Warning this post contains Geek Speak that some non geeks may find incredibly boring. 

Everyone would love to have a £2000 - £3000 PC budget but most of us are not that mental to fork out that kind of money for a luxury item. So I decided to try and build a mid to high end gaming PC for as little money as possible. The first part of this project I choose a graphics card, partly because I was desperate for one as old faithful was a bit dated and didn't support DirectX 11, so was not capable of running any graphically half decent games from the past couple of years.

As this is a budget build money isn't on tap so saving for each part is the only way to do this. Choosing a new graphics card was a bit of a task, specs and price being the main factor. I came to the decision to save for an AsusGeForce GTX 750 Ti OC 2GB priced at £115.44, this was a good mid ranged card and suitable for what I needed so I set about saving for the card.

About a month ago Id saved enough to buy my new card but seen a much better one that was out of my price range originally but had been reduced from £219.98 down to £159.99 knew this was a better buy altogether so saved a little more and bought it. The card was an Asus GeForceGTX 960 Strix DCII OC 4GB GDDR5 bought from ebuyer.com.

Delivery day and the arrival of my new card I awed in the awesomeness of it, its still in the box by the way. Opened the box removed it only to find another box a very nice black box with gold ASUS logo on front which I kept, this was feeling like pass the parcel opened that box and there it was a vision of fan turning wonder, in a moulded foam frame and anti-static bag like i said pass the parcel, removed it and have to say its a pretty good looking card 'tech porn'.

Now for the installation, I opened the case side panel and removed the old card from the motherboard, then fitted the new card which is wider than my old card taking up two bays in the case something I checked before buying it not a fool. The swapping out of the cards took all of 5 mins give or take dropping the screws numerous times. New card fitted side panel back on power up time normally this is when things go wrong and I begin raging, pressed the power button so weird the silence and not seeing the fan blades turning this is the strix part of the card explained later, boot screen showing always a good sign windows logo and into the logon screen entered the pin and wow it all went smoothly, I have graphics but no graphics driver so swiftly onto Nvidia's website selected the correct card and operating system and downloaded the driver, after it was downloaded I installed the the driver and voila one new graphics cards ready to be used to the max.