A Short Review of the Evolution of Operating Systems, Applications and Personal Computers

When we refer to the human brain as an organic carbon-based analog computer in comparison to a mechanical silicon-based digital computer, we’re reversing the natural order of precedence, as the human brain had to exist before the computer, in order to invent it. This reminds of when I first showed my eldest stepson an old copy of Windows 1.0, which he remarked looked like the DOS Shell which first appeared in Microsoft DOS V4.0.

That earliest version of Windows was only good for playing Solitaire and Minesweeper, and running Aldus PageMaker, one of the first bonafide desktop publishing programs introduced on the personal computer in the 1980s. Shortly thereafter, Ventura Publisher came out including its own built-in graphical user interface: the GEM (Graphical Environment Manager) Desktop Environment (GDE). This was unlike PageMaker, which required you to buy Windows separately from Microsoft.  

Back then, the government was selling discounted Zenith Z-248 286 class desktop computers to its employees. These  came with one 5-1/4" floppy, a 5-1/4" half-height hard drive, and were bundled with Zenith branded MS-DOS and Zenith MS-Windows.

Just as Adobe bought PageMaker from Aldus (and Flash from Macromedia), Microsoft ultimately bought Visio from Shapeware (although at that point they had changed their name to Visio Corporation).  I distinctly remember the Visio purchase, because I had (and still have) a copy of Visio V4.0 from Shapeware. I keep it because it contains stencils that are no longer available elsewhere—and at least in Visio, the stencil format has remained mostly compatible throughout the years (unlike in many, many other products).

When, those many years past, I was using the first version of PageMaker on the first version of Windows, Microsoft Word was a very high-priced character mode program running on MS-DOS.  

MS-DOS wasn't the only PC DOS around back then, though. IBM had a version of DOS, and after several years, Digital Research Incorporated (DRI) came out with their superset of DOS called DrDOS. Later DrDOS became Novell DOS, and  Novell priced their NetWare NOS (Network Operating System) out of the market.  Novell is now a SUSE Linux VAR.

The irony of this is that Novell released the first stable, commercial X.500 implementation with NDS (Novell Directory Services) starting in NetWare V4.0. Microsoft didn’t have an X.500 implementation until years later when they Added AD (Active Directory) to their product line.

Novell also had the more efficient messaging and scheduling software in GroupWise, which maintained pointers to multiple copies of email messages in different mailboxes while storing but a single copy of each message on their server. By comparison, Microsoft Exchange Server (as Exchange Client predated Outlook) instead would physically copy a message with multiple addressees to every single recipient’s mailbox.

Novell has managed to at least salvage GroupWise from their old product line, and have re-coded it to run on the value-added SUSE Linux platform they now support.

We’ve all seen how historically the first and/or the best technology doesn’t always survive: Sony’s Betamax, Sony’s Minidisc…maybe we should call that the "Sony Syndrome"? Great technical innovations, but lousy marketing? Oh, that’s right—they also brought the first rootkit to worldwide attention on their music CDs…

My first experience with email (1987?) was dialing up with a 1200 baud phone modem to connect from my 8088-based 8-bit PC to the CompuServe Information Service (CIS), and using CompuServe text-based electronic mail to communicate with other subscribers to CIS. CompuServe—often written Compu$erve, because it was really easy to max out your credit card if you were a heavy user of the service.  CompuServe soon added email gateways to other information services of the era like Delphi, BIX (BYTE Information Exchange, run by BYTE magazine), Prodigy and ultimately, the Internet.  Flat-rate services weren't common back then, and when available, they usually provided somewhat limited access to the resources of the system. AOL was actually a latecomer to this game, although they did make Internet connectivity easier for Joe and Jane Sixpack.

Most of us back then communicated online by using our modems to dial into computer Bulletin Board System (BBS) that were run by people out of their homes—hobbyists who really enjoyed setting up their personal computers as a host to other computers. That was also our primary source for shareware. The person who ran a BBS was known as its SysOp (System Operator).

Mail was "tossed" from one BBS to another using an add-on product called FidoNet. Each BBS that supported FidoNet was identified as a FidoNet node, so that the software could keep track of which messages came from where, and where each message ultimately needed to end up. FidoNet was international (just like HAM radio operators before them), but only a few were bold enough to pay the high international land-line rates of the time to toss mail to BBSes in other countries. Those who would do so, would schedule for their computers to dial up the remote overseas node at regular intervals late at night or early in the morning, when phone rates were cheapest.

I remember that the first regularly-used office email solution I encountered was Lotus Cc:Mail running on a Novell 3.11 network. It was interoffice only, because the organization didn’t want to pay the licensing fee for the Internet gateway component which would have allowed us to exchange emails with outside organizations. WordPerfect V4.1 was the word processing software we were using there at the time, and yes, everything was still in character mode. We were using "stone knives and bearskins" (to quote Spock from the ST:TOS episode City on the Edge of Forever, which guest-starred a young Joan Collins of later Dynasty fame).

DRI actually wrote the first stable 8-bit operating system, Control Program for Microcomputers (CP/M). Kaypros and Commodore 128s could both run this OS, before PC/MS-DOS became popular. This was a few years after the introduction of the first programmable calculators by HP, Timex Sinclair build-it-yourself computer kits, and Commodore VIC-20s.  Instead of a built-in display, VIC-20s required connections to TV screens to use as their monitors, at a 40 character screen width, and with cassette tape recorders as their storage medium.

Along came the ColecoVision home video game system, which had the best graphics by far at that point. It was supposed to have an optional upgrade to become what was dubbed the ADAM personal computer. Soon after, the Atari ST (which ran its own version of the GEM Desktop) and Commodore Amiga, which was the first true multitasking-multimedia computer, were introduced to the market.  The Apple IIgs and Apple IIc were the lower-end consumer computers from Apple.

The first Macintosh I remember seeing was a monochrome graphic one piece "uniputer" with a built in 3-1/2" microdiskette drive (those disks had hard plastic shells and metal shutters, so we didn’t call those floppies) and a built-in HDD. It also was a great multimedia computer, being the first to use vector fonts inspired by a calligraphy course Steve Jobs once had taken.  The Amiga ("female friend" in Spanish) was the first of these to get beyond 4-bit (CGA) and 16-bit color EGA), and go to millions of colors. The MACs of the day were out of the price range of most average consumers.  They found their market primarily among professional graphic artists.

Windows at the time also ran on top of DOS, as at that time it was a separate GUI (Graphical User Interface) program. It wasn’t until Windows 95 was released that Windows became a real stand-alone operating system, and not just a pretty visual environment riding on top of the OS. Windows 95 actually came out after Windows NT was released.

This was because NT (standing for "New Technology"—while most of the pundits of the era jibed that it really stood for "Nice Try")—although it was a genuine, stable multitasking OS, it broke practically the entire baseline of the Windows legacy desktop applications. It was only initially usable as a server OS.  

This was unlike products such as the popular Quarterdeck DesqView, which allowed us to task switch on 16-bit processors—which meant you could launch multiple programs, and switch between them, but only one would actually run at a time—the others were frozen until one of them was switched back in to the ‘foreground’.

It was after the failure of Windows NT to capture a significant share of the desktop personal computer market that Microsoft went back to the drawing board and essentially reverse-engineered elements of Windows NT along with greater Windows 3.1 application compatibility to create Windows 95—which was a multitasking OS (almost, but not quite, like NT) but which added what was referred to as the "thunking" layer.  This "thunking" layer would allow 16-bit legacy applications to run in the new 32-bit OS environment.  I think a more apt moniker for that would have been the "kludging" layer, but I suppose that probably wouldn’t have sounded as cool in marketing materials and manuals for Windows 95.

Windows Object-Oriented Pre-Emptive System (WOOPS) probably wouldn’t have done well either as a name, but Microsoft kind of had their next "whoops" when they released Windows ME (Millenium Edition), which should have been more candidly dubbed Windows NR (Not Ready).

The interesting thing about Microsoft Word in the Windows 1.0 era was that it was the only word processor at the time (still character-based) where all of its formatting commands were fully compatible with PageMaker: you could write text in Word, import and flow it into PageMaker frames, and all the italics, bolding, columns, etc., would transfer in pretty much seamlessly. This was long before the WYSIWIG (What You See Is What You Get) word processor was invented. Within a few years, some of the text-based word processing programs had a graphical page preview mode (like WordStar 7. Remember WordStar?) which would allow you to see an onscreen image on the page with all of the varying fonts and their characteristics, but that view was static—to edit you’d have to exit preview and return to character mode.

WordStar was a touch-typist’s dream—because you could execute every command in the program without your fingers ever leaving the home row. It’s because of these that I came to hate when WordPerfect came to the fore, because to me it felt like every function required finger-contortions to access those keys. This significantly slowed down the flow of my typing compared to the smoothness of the control-key command combinations in WordStar.

Back in the character-mode DOS days at the end of the last century, I also had the opportunity to work on some downright bizarre "office productivity software" such OfficeWriter and Enable in the course of my work.  There were some, like Ashton-Tate's Framework II, which seemed to have quite a bit of potential.  I was also quite a fan of Dbase (XBase) III and IV.  Unfortunately, by the time DBase finally ported over to Windows, Access had taken hold for PC database management.

With the frequent change of word processing software that was continuously occurring in the DOS days, it seemed that every couple of years that we’d have to convert all of our archival documents to the a new word processor format, and those conversion engines left a lot to be desired. In some cases, it was actually faster to retype a longer document than to reformat it.

The reason this all came back to mind was because I recently had an interview for a cyber-security position where one of the questions the interviewer asked me was how long I’d been using Windows—and I essentially responded that I have been using MS-Windows since its inception, even though Windows didn’t begin to get realistically useful until Version 3.0, and didn't take off until they built networking capabilities into it with Windows for Workgroups (V3.11). For a while—probably prior to the release of Windows 3.0—there were even separate versions of Windows for 286 processors (16-bit) and 386 processors (32-bit).

I started working with computers in an 8-bit, text-based monochrome 40-character CRT (cathode ray tube) tape cassette storage world. I haven’t even mentioned the electric typewriters and dedicated word processors that I started my professional career with (’8-inch single-sided floppy disks? Was that when Charles Babbage was in diapers??’)  I would expect that some younger readers might be thinking, "how could you even work like that"? Well, it was new and exciting at the time. 

Back then, "Spam" was a trademarked food product composed of processed meat by-products sold in squarish-rectangular pop-top cans (and back then it only came in plain Spam flavor.)  It managed to inspire a silly song of the same name by the Monty Python comedy troupe. Come to think of it, the opening chorus of that selfsame song might be a good notification tone for today’s endless flow of junk/phishing emails (especially the interoffice broadcast emails to the world. Why don’t most people set up selective and targeted group address lists? Why would I need to know that a person I've never met who works  in another department that I never deal with is having a baby shower?)

I sometimes wonder if these people who seem to feel the need to blast every bit of trivia to the entire organization via email could perhaps be the very same folks who look at you like have a third eye when you ask them about the agenda for your weekly meeting….?