It all started on november 20th 1985 when Microsoft unleashed Windows 1.0 on the world. But did you know it wasn't even a real operating system. Instead of being a standalone os, Windows 1.0 was a graphical shell that ran on top of ms-dos to make it easier to use than a tedious command line. Even so though many reviewers didn't like it as windows 1.0 was quite demanding on the systems of the time and it relied so much on a mouse.

Windows 2.0 came on the scene in late 1987 and was quite a bit more polished. The Windows themselves could actually overlap for the first time and you could display a whopping 256 colors on your screen. Third-party application support was still spotty but word and excel for Windows both made their debuts on windows 2.0. The 2.1 variant released the next year, was actually the first version of Windows to require a hard drive as previous versions could run off of floppy disks.

1990s Windows 3.0 was a major change and not just because Microsoft dropped three million dollars on the launch event. Not only did it look a lot nicer it also enabled a much more seamless multitasking experience and featured a GUI based around icons for the first time making it far easier to use than previous versions. Windows 3.0 also brought a cd-rom support and sound playback. And Microsoft even sold some simple games like minesweeper for Windows 3.0, games that became extremely popular and got people thinking about the PC as a gaming platform. Windows 3.1 followed in 1992 and introduced drag and drop icons as well as truetype fonts meaning that what you saw on your screen would end up being what you get when you printed a hard copy.

The next year brought us Windows 3.2 which was just a chinese version of 3.1 as well as Windows nt 3.1 but despite the similar name nt represented a fundamental architectural change. Other versions of Windows were still running on top of dos but nt ran on an entirely separate kernel which allowed more advanced features. In fact modern versions of Windows are part of that same empty lineage. But that doesn't mean that Microsoft was ready to ditch dos-based Windows just yet although we did get nt 3.5 in 1994.

1995 brought us the blockbuster Windows 95 and although it still ran on top of dos, it marks the point where Windows really came into its own as an operating system with familiar features like the start menu and taskbar and support for usb in later updates. The nt series also got an update in 1996 with Windows nt 4.0 using basically the same GUI as Windows 95.

Windows 98 appropriately released in 1998 was a souped-up version of windows 95 that was supposed to integrate better with the internet but infamously 98 was quite buggy. In fact the bugs were so prevalent that it prompted microsoft to release windows 98 second edition in 1999 alongside another version of nt called windows 2000 which was much more stable than 98 but also resulted in microsoft getting egg on its face as it contained a boatload of security flaws despite Redmond billing it as the most secure windows ever. Microsoft wouldn't exactly write the ship in the year 2000 as we got an absolutely bad an operating system called windows me. I mean it did introduce system restore which is admittedly a very useful feature but the os was extremely unstable, leading people to say that me stood for mistake edition.

Following me's failure, dos based windows was axed permanently and in 2001 we got the legendary windows XP. Xp brought windows nt as well as the ntfs file system which supported large hard drives to home users for the first time. XP also came in professional and 64-bit editions as well as a stripped-down version for older systems. XP's stability, eye pleasing GUI, and powerful performance made it an extremely popular os, although users weren't thrilled with the anti-piracy scheme product activation which made its first appearance in XP. Nevertheless xp remained very popular all the way to 2009, thanks in part to the fact that the release of windows vista in 2007 was an unmitigated disaster. Vista attempted to modernize the windows GUI with arrow glass and patch security holes present in XP but it also featured very onerous drm schemes and had lots of hardware compatibility issues. Some people blamed this on just how different vista was from its predecessor while others pointed out that oem's just didn't update their drivers in time and mismarketed low-end systems as technically being ready for vista even though the experience was not very good.

In any event Microsoft released Windows 7 in 2009 which was visually similar to vista but significantly more stable especially since pc hardware had had some time to catch up to this revamped version of the os. Windows 7 became so popular that it held its own against its successor operating system well into the late 2010s and some editions of windows 7 are actually still supported through 2023.

Of course part of the reason Windows 7 remained popular was because 2012's Windows 8 was a rather confusing piece of software. I mean it wasn't a bad os in terms of stability or features or performance, it's just that many users disliked it because microsoft attempted to take an os geared towards tablets like their surface lineup that they were pushing hard at the time and then shoehorn it into a desktop environment with a new start screen instead of menu, live tiles, and metro apps that just didn't have a lot of purpose for existing for keyboard and mouse users. The major criticism from mainstream users centered around the fact that Microsoft took away the start button and start menu completely prompting the release of Windows 8.1 in 2013 which restored these features and added some new ones like miracast and support for 3d printers. 

8.1 proved to be more popular than 8 but in 2015 Windows 10 made its grand entrance which scrapped the start screen but has still proven to be usable on desktops and tablets alike. Unlike previous versions of Windows, Microsoft has said that Windows 10 will be updated continuously as a service making it the last version of Windows ever and therefore the point at which today's story ends. 

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