Windows at 30: My recollections – Part III

Today’s article will conclude my recollections on Windows at 30.  Of course, some basic rudiments of Windows haven’t changed much, such as the drop-down menus, the scroll bars, the icons, dialog boxes, and certain apps like Notepad and Paint. Even the pre-Windows command line, where you interacted with DOS (disk operating system) can still be […]

Today’s article will conclude my recollections on Windows at 30.  Of course, some basic rudiments of Windows haven’t changed much, such as the drop-down menus, the scroll bars, the icons, dialog boxes, and certain apps like Notepad and Paint. Even the pre-Windows command line, where you interacted with DOS (disk operating system) can still be found in today’s Windows – if you fish for it. In fact, as irony would have it, it is the requirement by users that some of the features of older Windows be preserved, that has led to the failure of a few Windows releases; notably Windows 8.
The increase in capacity of Windows is important, although we cannot attribute this development to Microsoft, but to, perhaps, the world’s leading chip (semiconductor) manufacturers. The top ten on the list of IHS iSuppli Semiconductor Preliminary Rankings by revenue in 2014, going from the first to the last, are: Intel Corporation (USA), Samsung Electronics (South Korea), Qualcomm (USA), Micron Technology (USA), SK Hynix (South Korea), Toshiba Semiconductor (Japan), Texas Instruments (USA), Broadcom (USA), STMicroelectronics (France, Italy), and Renesas Electronics (Japan). Notice that Intel and Samsung control more that 25% of the market, and that a disproportional number of these top chip manufacturers are U.S.-based. It is via these companies that Moore’s law has been realized. (Moore’s “law” is the prediction by Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors on a chip would double every year. This, effectively, translates into computing speeds doubling every 18 months – a trend that roughly held steady between 1975 and 2010.)
For the speed of PCs; take the Intel microprocessor as an example. In 1987, the theoretical maximum performance (TMP), aka, speed, was 16 MHz, where the “M” in “MHz” stands for “mega,” or one million, and “Hz” stands for “Hertz,” which is the unit of frequency named after Heinrich Hertz, a German physicist. Frequency stands for cycles per second (or Hertz), and is basically the reciprocal of time, or the “things” you can do in one second, implying speed. In 2002, the TMP was approximately 3000 MHz or (3 GHz). Today, Intel Core i7-6700K is rated at 4.9 GHz. Moreover, many cores are now packed into one computer CPU (central processing unit), giving you unparalleled processing speeds.
As far as memory is concerned, you have two main types: random-access memory (RAM) and the memory in a hard disk (HD). Hard disk space has always been available in abundance relative to RAM. On PCs, in the late 80s and early 90s, HD space was available in the millions of bytes, or megabytes (MB for short). Today, it is safe to say that HD memory is essentially unlimited, in the trillions of bytes. This explains why cloud companies are able to give them away for free.
The availability of RAM has also evolved.  In the days of MS DOS, the maximum amount of RAM in a PC CPU was around 640 kilobytes (KB); that is, less than 1 MB. RAM is a measure of the amount of memory that can be stored in-core. Thus in a scientific computation on a PC, the maximum size of an array that can be stored in the RAM is 160,000, assuming that one word requires 4 bytes for storage. Because realistic scientific/engineering problems typically involve much more data than this, the PC was not considered an appropriate platform for scientific/engineering modeling and simulations (M&S). Hence the lack of respect for PCs in the science/engineering M&S community. Writing codes for use on PCs in the late 80s and early 90s was hard: you had to implement out-of-core strategies when you had data that exceeded the RAM capability of your system. Today, you can obtain RAMS of the order of 32 GB, which is 50,000 times 640 KB. The foregoing evolution is hard to not notice and admire. We also now have virtualization, which was not the case in those days. Virtualization and clustering of servers are two technological feats that make “nanosecond” Google searches of billions of records possible. Although Google does this with Linux, there are facilities that use Windows.
Lastly, I remember Windows’s push into business computing very well, with the introduction of Windows NT. The second release of this was Windows NT 3.5, which came with Windows 95. Note that MS moved from a 16-bit OS to 32-bit with Windows 95, and has since offered the options for 64-bit.
In terms of Microsoft knocking-off competitors, WordPerfect and Netscape stay in one’s memories. The latter was replaced by Internet Explorer, which now has the name Microsoft Edge in Windows 10.
Are we going to see another 30 years of Windows? For the sake of human progress, I am hoping that something more revolutionarily different would have evolved by that time.