Concept in Definition ABC

When someone is asked about him operating system from his computer, the most normal thing is that you answer us by specifying the version of Microsoft's Windows, since it is the most popular, equipping 90% of the desktop computers in the world. But what is Windows? Windows is a group of operating systems designed and marketed by the Microsoft company.

As the most famous and widely used operating system in the world, Windows has laid the foundation and served as a model as family of OS (operating systems) since its inception. Windows has different versions through the years and different options for home, business, mobile devices and according to the variation in the processor. Most PCs are currently sold with some version of Microsoft Windows pre-installed.

Initially it was a graphical environment complementary to MS-DOS, which ran on said operating system, also from Microsoft.

Windows emerged at a time when the transition from the command line environment to the graphical mouse-driven environment was being made. Initially, it was not considered serious to work with a graphical environment, but Apple changed everything by introducing such an environment on its computers, thus creating a school.

Microsoft's new windows environment (Windows stands for windows in English, a metaphor for containers of elements in the environment) came into the world a year after Apple released the Mac OS.

The first versions of Windows were branded as a crude copy of the Mac OS

And, in fact, they traced some aspects, especially in what refers to the philosophy, but it is that, in the first place, there was not much room to innovate differently at the time (mid-eighties) and with the existing technology at the time, and, secondly, Steve Jobs was not the one to talk about plagiarism when he himself had taken the technology out of the graphical environment - receiving permission to do so, yes - from Xerox laboratories, where they considered it Irrelevant.

I still remember one of the first editions of the Pagemaker layout program that included a version of Windows 1 or 2, in case you did not have Microsoft's graphical environment installed, since it was necessary to work with it Program.

The initial versions of Windows followed each other until 3.0, released in 1990, which was the first to achieve palpable commercial success, thanks above all to the fact that it was endowed with improvements in both the Interface graph as in multitasking, although this success was improved by Windows 3.1, released in 1992, and which could become considered as universal since it was present in a very high percentage of home computers and corporate.

Microsoft only needed to take one step, and that was to turn Windows into a complete operating system, which it did for the first time in 1993. with Windows NT, a system aimed at professional tasks that booted directly in graphics mode and was based on the developed kernel jointly with IBM for OS / 2, although the association made water and each of the parties kept the technology for their own platforms.

In 1995, Microsoft took the next step with the release of Windows 95, the first operating system based on its windows environment. for the consumer audience, in which it was launched directly to a graphical interface (unlike the MS-DOS + Windows binomial of yesteryear).

Although it was presented as a revamped operating system, it still had a lot of code inherited from MS-DOS and the old Windows for compatibility reasons, a problem that Microsoft has always dragged along, but that would be diluted over time, so that in each new version of the system, some compatibility is lost towards behind.

Windows 95 laid the foundations for certain elements that are still used today, such as the taskbar or the minimize, maximize, and close buttons.

The next logical step was to drop the kernel (kernel) classic Windows, 16 bits, and pass all the technology to 32 bits of Windows NT, joining both branches of development, which would still be differentiated in some versions.

Windows XP was the first to introduce the complete switch to 32-bit, relying on the Windows NT kernel even for its consumer versions
and, from here, the history of Windows is already summarized in a single branch of the kernel, from which it is surrounded by different elements to create the versions for professional or consumer use.

Windows XP has been, perhaps, the most successful version of Microsoft's operating system. Behind it are failures like Windows ME (Millenium Edition) or Windows Vista (although this was later), but neither has managed to overtake it in terms of success.

Still at the end of 2016, and having released other versions such as Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 10, the XP still retained more than 9% of the market for desktop operating systems. A inheritance difficult to ignore.

If Windows Vista was a major fiasco (it was a platform without any stability, performance quite poor and criticized by all), Windows 7 fixed the problem, and Windows 8 saw the introduction of a new interface in useful, adapted for use on mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets.

For years, Microsoft also had a line of operating systems for mobile devices, PDAs and Pocket PC’s first, and smartphones later, although these systems were technically different and with very different functional aspects, keeping similarity in the graphic environment and preserving the name.

Starting with Windows 8, Microsoft unified its entire range of operating systems, a unification that was felt with all its force in Windows 10, which is already sold as a single platform that adapts to any type of device, although you cannot actually install the same Windows from a PC on a phone and vice versa.

What Microsoft has introduced as a novelty in Windows 10 and that allows us to tend towards said unification is the universal app, a program compiled only once but can be run on different platforms from hardware,

not yet sufficiently exploited by developers, but if all goes well, it will become a standard over the next few years.

For the future, Microsoft is adapting Windows to paradigm from the Internet of Things (IoT) and to virtual and augmented reality environments.

Themes in Windows