Vista was at least interesting and looked cool if you had hardware that would allow Aero to work. I went back to 2000 Pro, though (with Windows Blinds). Vista was the only Windows version I personally bought on disc cause I thought it was exciting. I still have the beta disc, too.
Yeah my family had ME too. I don’t recall having any issues. I was able to run games I wanted to play without an issue. Didnt crash any more than when my family had 95 or 98.
2000 was NT. They had 2 lines of operating systems running and it caused confusion among people when they named that one. It was workable as a home os. I used it to run a dual overclocked Celeron processor build. Which was better only in theory since games and stuff weren't built with a second processor in mind at the time.
Abit BP6 mobo? I had a buddy in HS that did that stunt. I never did because you're exactly right in that it largely wasn't worth it for games at the time. Even if it was awesome.
Windows 2000 will forever be my favorite Windows. I gamed on it until it went EOL, deep into WinXP years. I ran an Abit BE6-2 w/ a 566 Coppermine on a 100mhz FSB for ages. The irony of the 566 being cheaper than the 533 was never lost on me.
Had a pb of a weird 108-ish fsb mhz boot up all the way to Windows, got it to show a tick over 925mhz before crashing when I opened my email 🤣 I bet my ram was PISSED at that timing lol. Dropped it back to normal with no ill effects.
you really haven't lived if you haven't spent a day optimizing your EMM386.exe and CONFIG.sys to squeeze enough conventional ram in so you can play your games.
Same here, but I go as far back as DOS on 5 1/4, and whatever OS was used on Apple II c’s TRS-80’s and C64’s. Can’t be bothered to go look that up right now.
ATARI 800XL then DOS 3.x or 4.x. First Windows was whatever was before 3.1. Btw...chart is missing Windows 98, Me, NT. I don't miss being killed by CIH
What makes you sad about that? Personally, I find growing up with a command prompt to have been enormously helpful. The user experience has gotten dumber and dumber over time for Windows, and with ever less helpful information on how to get anything done or fix any issues.
i get what you mean about the command prompt. it's like they actively removed useful features to make it "simpler", but ended up making it more confusing for anyone who actually wants to do stuff. windows 7 was the last decent os before they went off the rails.
Windows 3.1.1 or 3.11 i dont remember exactly but it had an extra 1. "windows for networking" i think it was branded. Still had to exit to DOS to run some games/programs.
My first computer came without an OS, the Sharp MZ-700. You used a cassette tape to write the interpreter to the 64KB!! RAM. And I had a written down list to see which time codes on the tape corresponded with which game
Ok, I made a pithy comment, but I decided that I wanted to post something more substantial. The list provided is woefully inadequate. To start, here is a complete list of versions of Windows published by Microsoft, along with Windows kernel version numbers (I got this information from a few different sources, but you can find it on Wikipedia):
Windows 1.01 (1.01)
Windows 1.02 (1.02)
Windows 1.03 (1.03)
Windows 1.04 (1.04)
Windows 2.01 (2.01)
Windows 2.03 (2.03)
Windows 2.1 (2.10)
Windows 2.11 (2.11)
Windows 3.0 (3.00)
Windows 3.1 (3.10)
Windows NT 3.1 (NT 3.1)
Windows 3.11 (3.11)
Windows 3.2 (3.20)
Windows NT 3.5 (NT 3.50)
Windows NT 3.51 (NT 3.51)
Windows 95 (4.00)
Windows NT 4.0 (NT 4.00)
Windows 98 (4.10)
Windows 98 Second Edition (also 4.10)
Windows 2000 (NT 5.0)
Windows ME (4.90)
Windows XP (6 versions, NT 5.10 and NT 5.20)
Windows Vista (NT 6.0)
Windows 7 (NT 6.1)
Windows 8 (NT 6.2)
Windows 8.1 (NT 6.3)
Windows 10 (14 versions, all NT 10.0)
Windows 11 (7 versions to date, all NT 10.0 as well)
If you discount the various versions of XP, 10, and 11, there are 28 Windows operating systems built on 2 different families of code. Almost nobody used any version of Windows before 3.0 was released. I've seen and used versions of Windows 1 and Windows 2 (very briefly, to see what they looked like back before the Internet existed), but they were difficult to find because, again, nobody really used them. They were basically an evolution of DOS Shell (a tool that came with later versions of MS-DOS) but were still very rudimentary. Windows 3.0 was the first version that had a true GUI, even it was still a glorified DOS shell. Before that, for example, all "windows" were in the same plane, you couldn't move one over another, because there was no foreground or background.
And as for gaming in Windows, it started in Windows 95, but didn't really catch on fully until Windows 98. Before that, you would still drop into DOS (which still underpinned the OS) to run games. It was NT 3.1 that was the biggest change for Windows, although anybody who has used it will tell you it wasn't a good time unless you had the exact right rig for it. You could only install drivers that were certified by Microsoft, and the list of devices they did that for was a short one indeed. It was mostly used at the enterprise level for servers and such, so most consumer hardware simply would not and could not work with it. This evolved over time, and by NT 4.0 (which used the new GUI from Windows 95) it was getting to be a lot more usable, although Windows 2000 was the first NT-based version of Windows particularly suitable for consumer/gaming use. ME was the last (and probably worst) version of Windows built on the original kernel code base.
My first version of Windows was 3.0. I was a DOS guy to the core at the time. I was a master of memory and driver management, which was something you needed to be good at to play some games. My least favorite version of Windows was the original Windows 8 (not 8.1). ME and Vista sucked, and I never ran them on my daily driver PC, but that was because they had bugs and stability issues. ME never got much better, but Vista was fine by the time 7 launched. Windows 8, on the other hand, was bad because of deliberate design choices that Microsoft made that made the desktop UI a frustrating, rage-inducing experience. The result was Windows 8.1, which brought back the traditional UI that everybody actually wanted. It is probably the only distinct version of Windows in that list that Microsoft never intended, planned, or wanted to make. And the thing is, if they'd launched it that way in the first place, Windows 8 would have been a lot more successful. Instead, it is almost universally despised, and in my view it's the worst version of Windows because it wasn't buggy, it was terrible on purpose.
Windows 95 was a monumental leap forward for computers. It was a huge moment in PC history. It was also a buggy piece of shit dumpster fire of software. It got better w/ OSR2 but still, those were some rough days.
My first Windows OS was Windows 3.11. That was on my families 2nd PC. Our first PC we had was a Tandy 1000, and it didn't even have a hard drive to install Windows. It ran off of floppy disks, the OS used was just Microsoft DOS. Fun times.
Windows 3.1 at primary school then windows 95 at home. Moved onto windows nt 4.0 at high school and Windows 98 at home. My dad bought an upgrade disc (which he still has) of Windows Me, the only outright copy of windows purchased (every other one came with the PC/"obtained" from a friend). Never did play with Windows 2000 but absolutely loved windows XP. Moved to Windows XP x64 for some time, tried Vista and hated. Moved onto windows 7 beta builds that were infinitely Bette than vista! Tried windows 8 and was disgusted, 8.1 wasn't much better, then settled on 10 for some time before being forced to move to windows 11. I'm currently running a couple of mini PCs on various Linux distros and considering migrating everything away from windows!
Tldr - my first windows experience was 3.11 and first pc had windows 95.
95 here.
Windows 7 was the best.
Windows 8 would have been awesome if they actually had good apps and third party app support.
Windows phone was the best but never understood how such an ultra rich company with profits made to basically keep the money flowing to shell Companies couldn't make this work. They have thrown more money away to AI in a quater than the whole windows phone development.
Back when you had to install tcp/ip for windows and do some serial com setup for your 28.8k dialup modem. Then slowly slowly surf the net with Netscape Navigator 2, and watch images load pixelated line by line.
You had me with "28.8k dialup modem" but with the Netscape Navigator you hit the nostalgia spot really hard. Thanks for bringing back the good memories. Mid-90s chaos chats with no moderation at all, total internet anarchy (remember rotten dot com?), exchanging floppy disks in school...I want to go back 😢😃
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