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For Dummies is a registered trademark of Wiley Publishing, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Used here by license.Where Windows Has BeenUnlike Windows Me (which is a barely warmed-over remake of Windows 98) and Windows 2000 (which should’ve been called Windows NT 5.0), Windows XP is quite different from any operating system that has come before. To understand why Windows XP works so differently, you need to understand the genetic cesspool from which it emerged. Let’s start at the beginning: Microsoft licensed the first PC operating system, called DOS, to IBM in late 1981. MS-DOS sold like hotcakes for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it was the only game in town. None of this sissy graphical stuff; DOS demanded that you type, and type, and type again, in order to get anything done.
The rise of WindowsThe ’Softies only started developing Windows in earnest when the company discovered that it needed a different operating system to run Excel, its spreadsheet program. Windows 1.0 shipped in November 1985. It was slow, bloated, and unstable — some things never change, eh? — but if you wanted to run Excel, you had to have Windows. Excel 2.0 and Windows 2.0 shipped in late 1987. This breathtaking, revolutionary new version of Windows let you overlap windows — place one window on top of another — and it took advantage of the PC/XT’s advanced computer chip, the 80286. Version 2.1 (also called Windows 286) shipped in June 1988, and some people discovered that it spent more time working than crashing. My experience was, uh, somewhat different. Windows 286 came on a single diskette. Windows 3.0 arrived in May 1990, and the computer industry changed forever. Microsoft finally had a hit on its hands to rival the old MS-DOS. When Windows 3.1 came along in April 1992, it rapidly became the most widely used operating system in history. In October 1992, Windows for Workgroups 3.1 (which I loved to call “Windows for Warehouses”) started rolling out, with support for networking, shared files and printers, internal e-mail, and other features you take for granted today. Some of the features worked. Sporadically. A much better version, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, became available in November 1993. It caught on in the corporate world. Sporadically.
eNTer NTAt its heart, Windows 3.x was built on top of MS-DOS, and that caused all sorts of headaches: DOS simply wasn’t stable or versatile enough to make Windows a rock-solid operating system. Bill Gates figured, all the way back in 1988, that DOS would never be able to support an advanced version of Windows, so he hired a guy named Dave Cutler to build a new version of Windows from scratch. At the time, Dave led the team that built the VMS operating system for Digital Equipment Corp’s DEC computers. When Dave’s all-new version of Windows shipped five years later in August 1993, Windows NT 3.1 (“New Technology”; yes, the first version number was 3.1) greeted the market with a thud. It was awfully persnickety about the kinds of hardware it would support, and it didn’t play games worth squat.
NT and the “old” WindowsFor the next eight years, two entirely different lineages of Windows co-existed. The old DOS/Windows 3.1 branch became Windows 95 (shipped in August 1995, “probably the last version of Windows based on DOS”), Windows 98 (June 1998, “absolutely the last version of Windows based on DOS, for sure”), and then Windows Me (Millennium Edition, September 2000, “no, honest, this is really, really the last version of Windows based on DOS”). On the New Technology side of the fence, Windows NT 3.1 begat Windows NT 3.5 (September 1994), which begat Windows NT 4.0 (August 1996). Many companies still use Windows NT 4 for their servers — the machines that anchor corporate networks. In February 2000, Microsoft released Windows 2000, which confused the living daylights out of everybody: In spite of its name, Windows 2000 is the next version of Windows NT and has nothing at all in common with Windows 98 or Me. Microsoft made oodles of money milking the DOS-based Windows cash cow and waited patiently while sales on the NT side gradually picked up. Windows NT 5.0, er, 2000 still didn’t play games worth squat, and some hardware gave it heartburn, but Windows 2000 rapidly became the operating system of choice for most businesses and at least a few home users. Still is, for many of them.
Merging the branchesWindows XP — in my opinion, the first must-have version of Windows since Windows 95 — officially shipped in October 2001. Twenty years after Microsoft tiptoed into the big time with MS-DOS, the Windows XP juggernaut blew away everything in sight. Some people think that Windows XP (the XP stands for eXPerience, according to the marketing folks) represents a melding or blending of the two Windows lineages: a little Me here, a little 2000 there, with a side of 98. Ain’t so. Windows XP is 100 percent, bona fide NT. Period. Not one single part of Windows Me — or any of the other DOS-based Windows versions, for that matter, not to mention DOS itself — is in Windows XP. Not one. That’s good news and bad news. First, the good news: If you can get Windows XP to work at all on your old computer, or if you buy a new PC that’s designed to use Windows XP, your new system will almost certainly be considerably more stable than it would be with Windows Me or any of its progenitors. The bad news: If you know how to get around a problem in Windows Me (or 98 or 95), you may not be able to use the same tricks in Windows XP. The surface may look the same. The plumbing is radically different.
Windows XP evolvesThe original Windows XP, for all its faults, came shining through as a workhorse of the first degree. If you could get it installed, it almost always worked right. Microsoft waited nearly a year — until September 2002 — to release its first Service Pack, a massive collection of 300 bug fixes and security patches to the original version of Windows XP. Actually, Microsoft released two “Service Pack 1” versions, and therein lies a legal story of clashing titans, Microsoft and Sun. The original version of Windows XP didn’t include Sun’s programming language, Java (otherwise known as JVM, or the Java Virtual Machine), which is used on many Web sites. Sun was miffed: In order to run Java programs on Web pages, original Windows XP users had to download and install a copy of Java, separately, and Sun felt (rightly) that Microsoft was using its monopoly on the desktop to hinder the spread of Java. After a series of legal wranglings that made the Keystone Cops look staid, Microsoft decided to put Java in Service Pack 1, and the version of SP1 that went out in September 2002 included Java. Sun was miffed again — something about oral orifices on gift horses, I think. Back to court. In February 2003, Microsoft released Service Pack 1a, which only differed from Service Pack 1 in that it didn’t include Java. If you wanted Java, you had to download it from www.java.com. ’Course that happened eons (well, okay, 14 months) before Microsoft agreed to pay Sun $2 billion to settle all its open disputes and improve “interoperability” between Sun and Microsoft products — including Java and Windows. Go figger. Microsoft continued to improve on Windows XP, with new versions of Windows Media Player, Windows Movie Maker, Windows for telephones, Windows for toasters, Windows for telephones attached to toasters with integrated roasters and coasters and more. But, hands down, the most impressive new product to come out of Redmond in the post-Windows XP era has to be Windows XP Media Center Edition, a program that runs on top of Windows XP and gives you tremendous control over your television, cable, satellite, stereo system — everything for the couch potato except the couch. Simultaneously, black-hat cretins all over the world discovered that PCs attached directly to the Internet running Windows XP had “Kick Me” signs posted all over them. Microsoft responded with security patches and patches to patches and patches to patches to patches. Bill stopped all the work at Microsoft to run a month-long “security lockdown.” The net result: more patches and patches to patches and . . . well, you get the idea. Thus, nearly two years after Service Pack 1, Windows XP users got treated to Service Pack 2, a huge roll-up of new features and patches, and patches disguised as features. Some things never change.
The Future of WindowsWhen Windows XP got beaten to a pulp by a few dozen relentless virus and worm writers, and courts around the world found Microsoft guilty of all manner of egregious behavior, the company’s tune changed quickly. We stopped hearing so much about Microsoft’s breast-beating plans to dominate every nook and cranny of computerdom. In some cases — Microsoft’s decision to stop keeping financial information in .NET Passports, for example — Microsoft stopped sounding so much like a convicted monopolist bull in a china shop and more like a socially responsible, trustworthy team player. I remain skeptical. The next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, remains a great unknown. This much is certain: It will be very different from the Windows XP you know today. Between a new user interface, bolted-to-the-walls security, greatly improved storage and retrieval capabilities, searching and indexing from the get-go, DVD support par excellence, and a new communications subsystem, Longhorn improvements look great. On paper. At the same time, Microsoft is moving out of the business of selling software into the business of renting it — and charging for the “glue” that binds companies, individuals, buyers, and sellers together. Whether either of those shifts makes the lives of Windows users easier remains to be seen. But the profitability of it all beckons, loud and clear. Now’s a great time to dig into Windows XP and get to know it. Future versions of Windows may well seem anticlimactic, compared to this one.
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For Dummies is a registered trademark of Wiley Publishing, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Used here by license.