Windows 11. Anyone going to install it? Plus discussion and observations, experience etc.

[Reorte]

20 minutes ago, melmerby said:

Win 95 was built on the back of DOS7, however IIRC Win98 used NT as a starting point (i.e. no seperate DOS system)

98 is also built on top of DOS. The first widespread consumer version of Windows that wasn't was XP, which was an evolution of the NT product line (and which current versions are also descended from). Windows Me was the last version derived from the Windows 95 background.

Edited September 14, 2021 by Reorte

[GoingUnderground]

2 minutes ago, melmerby said:

Win 95 was built on the back of DOS7, however IIRC Win98 used NT as a starting point (i.e. no seperate DOS system)

You're wrong about Window 98. It was still a DOS program at heart as were the two versions that followed it, 98SE and Windows ME (Millenium Edition). The DOS based versions were 1, 2. 2.1 (286 and 386), 3, 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, 98SE (Second Edition) and ME. Unlike earlier versions, ME didn't let you boot into DOS but it was still built on DOS.

 

Windows 2000 was NT based, and the NT versions according to Wikipedia were NT 3.1, NT 3.5, NT 3.51, NT 4 and 2000.

 

XP was the version that replaced the DOS product line, and it used NT as its basis and in doing so replaced Windows 2000 as well.

 

Since XP we've had 7, 8, 8.1 , 10 and now 11 is about the burst on an unsuspecting world.

[raymw]

windows NT came out of the 'collaboration' of M$ and ibm. They sort of joined forces to develop OS2. Until recently, windows still had a folder labelled  OS2 in the system, in there was all the stuff that M$ used, but didn't understand.

 

[GoingUnderground]

54 minutes ago, raymw said:

windows NT came out of the 'collaboration' of M$ and ibm. They sort of joined forces to develop OS2. Until recently, windows still had a folder labelled  OS2 in the system, in there was all the stuff that M$ used, but didn't understand.

 

The co-operation between MS and IBM goes right back to IBM's first personal computer. They needed an OS for it and asked MS to build them one as IBM didn't think there was a huge market for a personal computer and were trying to develop it on the cheap. But MS didn't have an OS as they were all about programs and applications and advised IBM to contact Digital Research (DR) who did have an OS. IBM went to DR, which  Ithin kwas a larger company than MS at the time, but DR couldn't give them an answer within IBM's timeframe. So IBM went back to MS who didn't turn down an opportunity like that twice and went and found someone to write the OS, which is reputed to have been based on another OS knocking around at the time, sorry, can't remember which one.

 

IBM took delivery of DOS and said thank you very much, but thinking that the market for the OS would be quite small left the rights to develop DOS with MS. Microsoft got lucky, the IBM PC took off, clones started appearing, again because IBM hadn't locked everything up in patents, the clone makers used MS-DOS and the rest is history.

 

As an aside, it always makes me laugh when I see folks referring to Microsoft as M$ when App£e extracts far more profit from the buyers of its products than does Microsoft. Microsoft has become the whipping boy of the IT industry and folks just turn a blind eye to other major IT companies who are at least as exploitative as Microsoft, if not more so.

Edited September 15, 2021 by GoingUnderground

[D9020 Nimbus]

The operating system Microsoft purchased was QDOS — "Quick and Dirty Operating System" — developed by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products. Gary Kildall of DR believed QDOS was a knock-off of their own CP/M 86.

 

CP/M 86 later became DR-DOS — it was supplied with the early Amstrad PCs in addition to MS-DOS. A version of it is still available in the form of FreeDOS..

[Hroth]

8 hours ago, GoingUnderground said:

IBM went to DR, which  Ithin kwas a larger company than MS at the time, but DR couldn't give them an answer within IBM's timeframe.

 

The story was that Gary Kildall of DR didn't turn up for a meeting with IBM because he was playing golf, which may be pure urban legend. 

 

After sending IBM off to see DR, Microsoft had an attack of sense and initially licensed QDOS before buying the company, as they could see, even if IBM initially couldn't, that the IBM PC was going to be a money machine.

 

I had an Amstrad PC 1512, I think I ran DR-DOS once, out of curiosity, then went back to MSDOS 3.2. Despite having GEM, which worked well over MSDOS, I only used it for a toe-dipping into DTP using Timeworks Publisher.  The main problem was that while we had inexpensive PCs, decent printers were eye-poppingly expensive!

[GoingUnderground]

3 minutes ago, Hroth said:

 

The story was that Gary Kildall of DR didn't turn up for a meeting with IBM because he was playing golf, which may be pure urban legend. 

 

After sending IBM off to see DR, Microsoft had an attack of sense and initially licensed QDOS before buying the company, as they could see, even if IBM initially couldn't, that the IBM PC was going to be a money machine.

 

I had an Amstrad PC 1512, I think I ran DR-DOS once, out of curiosity, then went back to MSDOS 3.2. Despite having GEM, which worked well over MSDOS, I only used it for a toe-dipping into DTP using Timeworks Publisher.  The main problem was that while we had inexpensive PCs, decent printers were eye-poppingly expensive!

The story that was given in the documentary "Triumph of the Nerds, the rise of accidental empires" some years ago was that when IBM tried to contact Kildall, he was unavailable and the IBM folks ended up talking to his wife, Dorothy who was also on the board of DR having been one of its co-founders. She couldn't give IBM an answer until she'd spoken to her husband. I can't remember what Kildall was supposed to be doing, or how long it took for him to get back to IBM, but they didn't wait and went back to Gates and Allen at Microsoft.

 

IF I remember correctly QDOS was an acronym for Quick & Dirty Operating System. 

[raymw]

The story I heard was that Kildall was out flying his plane. At the time, every user of an ibm mainframe was waiting for ibm to bring out a pc, because folk were breaking company rules and buying any pc, no continuity or control within the companies. The ibm pc put progress back by two or three years, Zenith and others had far better pc type machines. i remember reading in Byte ,  how ibm selected the machine, and the two guys in the garden shed making the first colour screen driver, green and black text and brown smoke. You never made a mistake if you bought ibm, except a few years later, if you bought the 'luggable'.

[GoingUnderground]

8 hours ago, raymw said:

The story I heard was that Kildall was out flying his plane. At the time, every user of an ibm mainframe was waiting for ibm to bring out a pc, because folk were breaking company rules and buying any pc, no continuity or control within the companies. The ibm pc put progress back by two or three years, Zenith and others had far better pc type machines. i remember reading in Byte ,  how ibm selected the machine, and the two guys in the garden shed making the first colour screen driver, green and black text and brown smoke. You never made a mistake if you bought ibm, except a few years later, if you bought the 'luggable'.

I think the expression at the time was that "You never got fired for buying IBM" or something very similar.

 

 

[melmerby]

19 hours ago, GoingUnderground said:

 

As an aside, it always makes me laugh when I see folks referring to Microsoft as M$ when App£e extracts far more profit from the buyers of its products than does Microsoft. Microsoft has become the whipping boy of the IT industry and folks just turn a blind eye to other major IT companies who are at least as exploitative as Microsoft, if not more so.

Hear hear!

IMHO Apple products are grossly overpriced, just to maintain their "kudos"

And more recently we have seen that the OS is not invunerable either as more hackers target them as MS has become more secure.

[raymw]

I'm pleased that M$ causes amusement. In the current era of wokeism, thought police, whatever, it is rare to find much humour. On some fora, they are so 'up themselves' that they edit such abbreviations out of the posts, perhaps you should join in there. fwiw, a search for 'M$' using Bing, brings no obvious result, google has a reference to stack overflow, maybe more, but  in any sort of technical context, most folk understand the acronym. To me, MS would possibly mean Marks and Spencer, or most likely the first hit on Bing - Multiple sclerosis.

.

[melmerby]

42 minutes ago, raymw said:

I'm pleased that M$ causes amusement.

 

I just find it Passé. Something that was amusing once but has been overdone.

[Michael Hodgson]

4 hours ago, GoingUnderground said:

I think the expression at the time was that "You never got fired for buying IBM" or something very similar.

 

 

It was a saying among (American) IT Managers (or DP Managers as they were called back then) vs other mainframe computer manufacturers when it came to making a big hardware purchase decision.

The alternative was "the BUNCH" (Burroughs, Univac [later Unisys], NCR, CDC and Honeywell).  When RCA & General Electric were also competitors, the expression had been "IBM & the seven dwarves".

 

It meant that IBM always offered you a workable upgrade path when new products came out, albeit at a price - the others could leave you in the lurch a few years later facing a much bigger bill.

 

 

[Free At Last]

18 minutes ago, melmerby said:

I just find it Passé. Something that was amusing once but has been overdone.

Like 'Farcebook' and 'a big boxshifter in Merseyside'. Childish.

Edited September 16, 2021 by Free At Last

[raymw]

Or like grown men wanting to put sounds in toy trains that they play with, if you're talking about childish. Maybe getting a bit off the topic, this was a windoze thread..

[RFS]

3 minutes ago, raymw said:

Or like grown men wanting to put sounds in toy trains that they play with, if you're talking about childish. Maybe getting a bit off the topic, this was a windoze thread..

 

Indeed, perhaps we need to get back on topic once there's any news about Windows 11.  Seems to have all gone a bit quiet now .....

[GoingUnderground]

8 hours ago, raymw said:

I'm pleased that M$ causes amusement. In the current era of wokeism, thought police, whatever, it is rare to find much humour. On some fora, they are so 'up themselves' that they edit such abbreviations out of the posts, perhaps you should join in there. fwiw, a search for 'M$' using Bing, brings no obvious result, google has a reference to stack overflow, maybe more, but  in any sort of technical context, most folk understand the acronym. To me, MS would possibly mean Marks and Spencer, or most likely the first hit on Bing - Multiple sclerosis.

.

I'm delighted to say that I have absolutely no idea what "woke" or wokeism" might mean. And don't bother explaining it to me as I don't want to know.

 

There are lots of acronyms that have multiple uses and you need the context to know which applies.

 

MS could be Microsoft or Multiple Sclerosis, it all depends on the context, but never, ever Marks & Spencer because that's always been "M&S" or "MnS" or "Marks".

 

MP could mean Member of Parliament or Metropolitan Police.

 

H&M means the frock shop Hennes & Mauritz to women and also clothing to some men as I'm told that they also sell menswear, but use H&M on RMWeb and the vast majority will know that it refers to Hammant & Morgan, especially those of us of a certain age.

 

Context, context, context.

[zarniwhoop]

On 14/09/2021 at 11:25, Hroth said:

Win286/386 was a development of Win 3.11, running on top of MSDOS. They were an interim version of Windows to allow 286 or 386/486 processors to run in their most efficient configuration.  I think that when running Win386 you started under DOS, which then was completely displaced when you ran Win. They were rendered obsolete when Windows 95 displaced them.

 

As I remember, the difference between Windows on 286 and 386 processors was due to operating modes on the chips.  The Intel 80286 had an incomplete memory access architecture, so essentially wasn't much more than a faster 8086/8, though it could address more than the 1Mb of its older siblings (16Mb?), but there was probably still some degree of memory paging. The 80386 chip could engage a flat memory mode that directly addressed all the installed memory without paging.

 

Win286 was also appropriate for older systems using the 8086/8 processors.

 

So "Win286" was for paged memory Intel chips and "Win386" was for flat memory Intel chips.

 

Something like that, anyway!

 

 

Sounds unlikely that the 286|386 versions came that late! But it's a long time ago. I had windows-3.0, and then 3.1, and I think both ran on top of DOS and on 386 or later. 3.10 was officially "windows for workgroups", more commonly referred to as "windows for warehouses". I think it had some proprietary form of networking to connect local machines.

 

I had a 286 before that - ok for single DOS programs, but barely better than a Z80A except it could access more memory and had what had become a standard 5.25" disk format - I had some form of Z80 with a 5.25" drive before I got a the 286, the only way to get software was from the CP/M user group, with someone converting the many different disk formats.

 

I think that win286 and win386 were both before windows-3.0.

[melmerby]

6 hours ago, zarniwhoop said:

 

I think that win286 and win386 were both before windows-3.0.

486's were fairly common by the time 3.1 came out, the 286 & 386 were on the way out.

In fact Wiki says they were both versions of Win 2.1

[GoingUnderground]

7 hours ago, zarniwhoop said:

Sounds unlikely that the 286|386 versions came that late! But it's a long time ago. I had windows-3.0, and then 3.1, and I think both ran on top of DOS and on 386 or later. 3.10 was officially "windows for workgroups", more commonly referred to as "windows for warehouses". I think it had some proprietary form of networking to connect local machines.

 

I had a 286 before that - ok for single DOS programs, but barely better than a Z80A except it could access more memory and had what had become a standard 5.25" disk format - I had some form of Z80 with a 5.25" drive before I got a the 286, the only way to get software was from the CP/M user group, with someone converting the many different disk formats.

 

I think that win286 and win386 were both before windows-3.0.

I can assure you from personal  hands-on experience that Windows 286 and 386 were definitely several years before Windows 3.

 

From late 1987 we were using 286 based portable clamshell design machines at work, I think they may have been Honeywell badged Zenith machines. I left that job in 1989 so I am absolutely 100% certain about the dates.

 

It was after changing jobs that I went to a presentation in Birmingham in 1990 about then then newly launched Windows 3.

 

 

[RFS]

MS have now released an updated Health Check tool that will tell you if your PC is capable of running Windows 11. It can be downloaded from the MS website.

[Miss Prism]

Will the update to Windows 11 preserve the items on the task bar?
 

[melmerby]

Today is the official launch of Win 11.

[RFS]

1 hour ago, Miss Prism said:

Will the update to Windows 11 preserve the items on the task bar?
 

 

Yes it did for me. The taskbar is centred by default but it's easy to put it back to the left. 

[Miss Prism]

Apparently, Windows 11 does not reinstate desktop icons, except for the recycle bin. Win10 desktop icons can however be restored:

https://gearupwindows.com/restore-old-desktop-icons-windows-11/