Windows at 30: My recollections – Part I

One cool and quite satisfying thing about aging is the opportunity to watch things grow from infancy to maturity. You see babies being born, and can watch them as they develop from little, tiny helpless entities a few minutes after they come into the world, to when they crawl, take their very first step, and […]

One cool and quite satisfying thing about aging is the opportunity to watch things grow from infancy to maturity. You see babies being born, and can watch them as they develop from little, tiny helpless entities a few minutes after they come into the world, to when they crawl, take their very first step, and eventually walk.
You notice when they begin to babble, and when they eventually talk; pretty soon they start arguing with you! You remember their first day in kindergarten or primary school, and the excitement and promise in their faces when they return home on that memorable first day at school. You remember the first time they leave home to go to secondary school or to college, as the case may be. (Some parents, including this columnist, even shed tears when their oldest child leaves home the very first time. They weep of the uncertainty that their child could face in the real world outside – where people are usually not as loving and forgiving as the parents, coupled with a complex feeling of joy that their kids are finally becoming adults.) Eventually, the children get their first full-time jobs as graduates; they get married, leave home – another opportunity for the parents to shed tears – and start having children of their own – allowing the cycle to continue as another generation evolves.
There is a proverb in ancient Yoruba language that essentially translates into the statement that a child “cannot have more rags (of clothes) than his parents!” Of course, it does not mean that the parents have more clothes, in terms of the number. But rather, it means the parents have rags that are just older, giving the parents a historical advantage and leverage over the child. This is obviously another reason to respect people, particularly those who are much older than you – as they are usually in the know. Microsoft has more “rags” than most of the IT companies out there! Two teenagers were able to gallantly upstage the great IBM. Incredible!
This past week marks the 30th anniversary of the Windows operating system. Specifically, Microsoft launched its first version of Windows on November 20th, 1985, as a replacement for the Microsoft Disk Operating System, aka, MS DOS. The latter operating system, like UNIX, was based on command-line instructions. That is, if you wanted the computer to do anything for you – such as listing the names of the files in a folder (directory in those days), opening a file and printing the contents of the file, you had to write special strings of characters (on the command line) that were parsed into instructions to the computer. So, in a sense, you had to learn to write some codes and type in commands. Windows changed all that; in that you only need to point a cursor to, and click on, commands, which could be graphical entities that are strategically displayed on the screen of your computer. This development began the democratization of computing. Of course, Apple – via its Macintosh PCs – adopted a mouse-based OS earlier than Microsoft, but it was Microsoft that popularized the use of a mouse, and today approximately 92% of all PCs use Microsoft Windows.
One of the most memorable events for me regarding the evolution of Microsoft Windows was at a Dallas, Texas, restaurant in 1989. I had come to Dallas to present a research paper on the project I was working on at the time. To unwind after the first day’s hectic schedule; I, together with my colleagues from the same organization where we developed advanced computer software to solve complex engineering problems, went to this steak house in Dallas. There, I saw an attendant taking our order on the computer with the user interface of Microsoft Windows. That must have been Windows 1.0 (1985) or Windows 2.0 (1987). I was awed by the experience, which explains why I am still filled with excitement when I remember the event. It was really “out-of-this-world” and cool, as it contrasted deeply from the hardcore approach we use in our engineering codes.
Actually, it wasn’t because of the beauty of the Windows interface at the time – although it was okay – but rather the fact that the system was so easy to use that an essentially illiterate person could manage our orders on it.
Being old school, I was always reminded by one of my daughters, that is an aerospace engineer – of the archaic programming languages and operating system commands that I, and people of my age, had learned. Yes, we were UNIX and MS DOS command-line programmers and system administrators, which our kids know very little about. But life-long learning demands that older people have to constantly pick up the new stuff along the way, as well; otherwise they will be left behind in more ways than one.
This article continues next week…