Just before Vista officially launched in January, I was approached by a public relations company desperately searching for copy of “Windows 1” to use at a launch-day event for a “large retail chain”, as people call PC World these days. Someone had told the PR company that I was likely to have it, presumably because I’ve become known as an inveterate hoarder of antique IT products.
And, of course, that person was right. I said I didn’t have version 1.0 (as far as I know it was never released), but could email the company a copy of 1.01 straight away – all 1.40MB of it. More than that, I had it pre-installed on a vaguely contemporary machine that the company could borrow to save it also having to find a working machine running MS-DOS.
The machine was an early 1990s Compaq Portable 486c. This luggable monster actually runs Novell DOS, and I have Windows 3.11 on there as well somewhere, plus a copy of Wolfenstein 3D just for old time’s sake.
Firing up this machine to check it was still working OK, I watched the various messages scrolling rapidly down the screen as it tried in vain to initialise the network card, and remembered the grief I used to suffer fiddling about with DOS batch files, Windows INI files and so forth. But the machine worked, and loaded up DOS and Windows 1.01 pretty quickly.
People sometimes wax lyrical about the golden days of personal computing, but to my mind there was little that was golden about early DOS and Windows. Have you tried filling a floppy disk with data recently? You’d be amazed that you ever managed to stay sane. And more recent incarnations aren’t as nice as I remember either.
At home I have a few old laptops of assorted vintages, and in the interests of research I fired them up. Windows 95 on a 233MHz Pentium MMX Fujitsu Lifebook is painful, and always was. Windows 2000 on a 500MHz Pentium III-powered ThinkPad 240X isn’t quite so bad, and at least it’s fairly quick, but when I t ried to install a service pack (only about four years too late), it decided enough was enough and spewed out a torrent of indecipherable error messages.
But the real surprise was my old 8MHz 8088-based Zenith MiniSport HD, running DOS 5. This was much, much slower than I recall, with even a simple DIR command taking an age. WordPerfect was only just usable, and the As-Easy-As spreadsheet was not much better. Yet I recall that when I bought it in about 1991, I was absolutely delighted with it. It’s a totally different experience to the 486-based Compaq Portable, which is roughly contemporary.
Progress rarely happens in leaps and bounds, and gradual change can be hard to notice. It’s only when you take a step back that you realise how far computing has come in such a short time. I can’t wait to see what the next 10 years will bring.
