As my laptop was coming up from standby this morning, I was thinking that I
should think about rebooting it sometime this month or maybe next month. It
then occurred to me that I had never had a crash, freeze or abort with this
laptop and it is almost 10 months old. It has been booted maybe a dozen
times and that includes the time it was in for repairs, replacing a bad
inverter.
Ok, I exaggerate a little, it might have been 14 times, there was the time
the battery ran too low and I was away from the wall socket at the airport.
I remember the 1995 conference, it was in Toronto. Microsoft had placed a
huge banner on one of the buildings heralding Windows 95. I think this OS
was released the following week, August 20-something, 1995.
The archives of 3000-L had some of my postings about it as I loaded it the
day it came out. It was quite an improvement over Windows 3.11 and the
arguments with the Mac weenies intensified. One of these Mac aficionados
was Bruce Toback and I miss the arguments we used to have.
At any rate, to my mind, Windows 95 brought the Internet and the World Wide
Web to the masses and it did this in a fashion that even Microsoft did not
plan for; Windows 95 had an integrated TCP/IP stack and it was easy to
connect to an ISP. I believe that fact, more than anything else, is the
singlemost important reason why the Internet grew so quickly.
In those days, my desktop was a 486/100 with a whopping 4 megabytes of RAM
and an 800MB disk drive. My brand new laptop was a 486/50 with 4 MB, a 10
inch screen and 330MB of disk space. The CD-ROM was external and there was
no sound. The desktop would crash every day or so and was restarted at a
minimum once a day. My ISP was AOL and my connection to the outside world a
dial-up at maximum 24kb, usually less and that was through a PCMCIA card
modem. I could also attach to a LAN, but that required using another PCMCIA
card.
Windows 95 SR-1 in 1996, Windows-98 in 1998, Windows 92 SE in 1999, Windows
Me in 2000. The end.
Windows NT 3.1 in 94, Windows NT 3.5 in 1995, Windows NT 4.0 in 1996,
Windows 2000 in 1999, Windows 2003 in 1993.
And lest we forget, Windows XP in 2002 when the Windows 95-based OS came to
an end.
Nine years later (last year when I bought my current laptop,) my PC is
running Windows XP SP2, the disk drive is a smallish 80GB, the main memory
is 1GB, expandable to 2GB, the graphics card has 128MB of discrete memory,
more than one third as much space as the disk drive on my laptop nine years
earlier, and the CPU is a Mobile Pentium 4 running at 3.2 GHz and is
hyper-threaded. The on-board optical drive burns and reads everything shy
of a dual-layer DVD, yet it's so last year! The screen is 17 inches wide
and the whole thing weighs about the same as the 1995 laptop when you factor
in the external CD-ROM drive and its power supply. Plus there's USB 2.0,
Firewire, wired and wireless Ethernet, a modem and NO floppy.
The difference is astounding, both in hardware and in software. Whilst
Windows XP SP2 is by no means bug-free, it is very reliable and very easy to
use. As my office suite, I have Office 2003 and I have no issues with it at
all. The programs come up instantly and they work fine. Recently I was
working on a small 1000+ page document. Every time I would update or add a
heading, Word would automatically repaginate it for me so the table of
contents would be up to date. It took about 10 seconds to repaginate the
entire document. I can just imagine working on such a document a few years
back.
Oh and the access to the Internet is by cable modem and has been for about 5
years now, maybe a little more. The speed just keeps getting bumped up and
the last time I checked it was close to 3 Mb/second. And of course, we have
a wireless set up here.
And a parallel thread is about voice over IP!
While we have gained a lot over the last 10 years, we have also lost a lot.
Have a great weekend.
Denys
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