Thoughts on a PC Purchase, Part III
In the first installments: Thoughts on a PC Purchase, Part I and Thoughts on a PC Purchase, Part II, the focus was exclusively on hardware and machine customization to maximize raw computing horsepower. This installment focuses on operating systems and applications. Because users today have multiple choices in selecting Operating Systems, a little history is in order, followed by a focus on Windows. Future installments will cover Linux and Mac OS.
History of the Graphical User Interface (GUI)
With over 90% market share, various flavors of Windows are ubiquitous on the desktop and on servers in businesses. MS Windows goes back to the late 1980s, when the first implementations, Windows 286, Windows 386, and 3.x were actually operating environments that installed atop DOS.
In 1995, with the release of Windows 95, the product became a full-blown operating system and DOS became obsolete.
The GUI that underpins Windows and other OSes is actually over 30 years old. Back when the Commodore 64 reigned supreme, an operating system called GEOS – Graphical Environment Operating System ran within the machine’s 64K memory space. A foreshadowing of things to come, GEOS came complete with a word processor, spreadsheet, and database application. You could have multiple windows open and multitask. The User Interface (UI) was remarkably similar to what would later be the first series of Windows. When GEOS crashed, the OS presented you with a white screen and a very straightforward dialog box, which contained a button. The text in the button read, “Reset. Redo from Start.” For young and budding geeks, “Reset. Redo from Start” would prove to be one of life’s painful lessons, because even outside IT, at some point in our lives we have to do precisely that.
From the two screen shots presented above, we can see that GEOS and Windows 286/386 were contemporaries.
A little over 14 years ago, the Windows 95 interface became the de facto standard for most Operating Systems moving forward. Most everyone today is familiar with the task bar at the bottom of the screen with a start button to the left, a clock and system tray to the right, your open applications in the task bar and a screen full of icons, many of which are standard. This is the interface you see not just on Windows products but on KDE and LXDE – two windowing systems for Linux. GNOME and XFCE also both windowing systems for LINUX and Mac OS X locate the menu at the top of the screen, but the concept is otherwise the same.
Continued on the next page
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