What was the first Microsoft operating system you ever used?

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It depends on your definition of "used".

If you mean used as in used daily then the answer is none.

If you mean used as in owned a licence to use to then the answer is Windows XP SP3 because it came with the netbook (MSI Wind U100) that I bought which is now running Linux at the moment, although I've installed both Windows XP on it as well; just not using it for much more then updating the firmware. Tomorrow I will be attempting to install Windows 7 beta on a spare partition (the second MS licence key I ever owned).

Personally I consider Microsoft and Windows to be an aberration: In the end, Microsoft will have to accept reality that software-only business are not sustainable in the long run. In time they will be forced to shift to the same model that Apple uses: Selling computer systems (optimised unity of hardware/software) and offer subscription based services.

Last edited by Meta on 02 Jul 2009, 4:17 am, edited 1 time in total.

MS DOS 4.0

Yes, the ME of the DOS era.

DOS 2.1

the first version of windows i used was windows 2.1 (windows 286 as it was sometimes called)

there are not many videos of that operating system, but here is one.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuaGY13sNDA[/youtube]
click on it while it is playing, and you will be taken to that youtube page and you can see the video in full size.

it is hilarious to me in many ways.

Hmmm... let's see: the assemblers I wrote in 82-3 knew the CP/M and MSDOS macro languages - building the operating systems was part of their acceptance tests.

I suspect that doesn't really count though - our development environment in those days was usually CP/M and Wordstar. Using MSDOS for serious work didn't start until the IBM machines hit the market, by which time I was seriously immersed in the Apple III - the finest 8 bit business machine ever built

The first computer I owned was a 20 Mhz 486SX running DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 then I rebuilt the computer a year or two later to a 120Mhz AMD 486DX running DOS 6.0 with the same windows version in one partition and
Windows NT Workstation 4.0 in another and I had another hard drive for experimenting with earlier versions of
Linux...Slack-ware and Red hat were the predominant ones at the time. This was in the early to mid 1990s.

Prior to all this I used RT-11 on a vibration test rig and the occasional VAX mainframe whenever I needed to look up things in the company database....This was the mid to late 1980s.....

One company I worked for in the late 1970s to mid 1980s used TRS-80s for their automated test set-ups.

MS-DOS 3.2 it was pretty cool.
I'd used DOS 2.2 before that but it was PC-DOS, the IBM Branded version.

The first Windows OS I used was Windows /286

Shows my age.

Windows 3.11 when I was three years old. Don't remember it that well though. Although it isn't the first, the oldest OS I've used is IBM PC DOS 6.3. A few months a go someone gave me some random parts (which happened to be the right ones to build something that actually works) and I built an old DOS computer. I believe it is a 386. Someone else gave me the floppies for the PC DOS so I went and built an actual working computer! I was amazed when it boot up. I spent hours in the BIOS figuring out the configuration for the hard drive (which is 120 MB, not GB). Figured it out, threw PC DOS on there, and it installed with little hassle! Since I wasn't around back in the DOS days, I never found much to do with it. I'm looking for old floppy based DOS games, but can't really find any. Any ideas of fun stuff I could do on this old machine? I've always been fascinated by old computers for some reason.

Old Compaq LTE Laptop w/ Windows 95A,

an old DOS computer - a 386 - that was Windows ...

DOS was mostly PCXT/AT and 286.



Go to the abandonware sites and get some stuff.
http://www.abandonia.com/
http://www.xtcabandonware.com/

Some good ones;
F19 Stealth Fighter (simulator)
King's Quest (most of them - though with a 386 consider KQ4 and above) (Adventure)
Any other Sierra and Lucasarts games
Ultima IV (RPG)
Doom, Wolfenstein (FPS)
Commander Keen, Captain Comic, Duke Nukem 1 and 2 (Platform)
Lemmings, Populous, Tetris (puzzle/strategy)

Also go to the Apogee Site and find some FREE games there
http://www.3drealms.com/downloads.html

and

have a look through the Classic DOS Games site.
http://www.classicdosgames.com/

There are heaps of great things you can do in DOS.
In a lot of ways, it's better than windows (unless my memory is just cheating me).

Memories do tend to do that.

I still remember the Space Invaders I lovingly transcribed from Fortran to 8086 assembler as a test case for the first native code Intel standard 8086 assembler / linker / librarian on the planet.

I remember teaching my primary-school aged children how to mug tourists in Ultima II on a little Mac.

I remember the sheer joy of that first fully responsive user interface on an Apple III

I remember the delight - and the wtfai consternation - of that first 3D flyover on the Silicon Graphics

None of it, though, feels the same when you go back over it. There's something about that first time feeling that is gone forever once its happened.

3.2

ruveyn

Well it's probably 286 then. I don't really know my old CPUs.



Well thanks for the suggestions. I'm an RPG guy and I've heard a lot about the Ultima series. I actually did play Doom a few times, but I believe it was the slightly newer Doom95 (The new Doom 3 for Xbox and Windows sucks in my opinion. I like the older Dooms a lot better.



I believe that to be true. That's why I'm interested in it...otherwise, I would treat it like everyone else does.


I kind of believe that and if I was around in those days I probably would be saying the same thing. The only reason why people don't use it is because technology has advanced to where you have to use modern operating systems to keep up with society. I was born into Windows so most people my age are oblivious of this stuff.

XP. I was 30 before I had a modern computer (only other one I had was an old C64.)

Dos 2.1 on an IBM XT (and Leading Edge Model D). I ran things like Zork 1-3 (I hated the mazes..., lounge lizard larry, leather goddessess of Phobos (ok, I didn't get very far in that..., and something like paint, for EGA monitors (all pastels, the horror!... Dos 1.0 couldn't support hard drives, so I never bothered getting it.

First Windows I used was 3.0, although there were some kludgy GUIs that preceded it. I seem to remember IBM made one, but it was a bear to use, and got locked up...a lot...

See someone else suffered through RPG (no, it's not just a weapon.... One letter in the wrong place on the forms, and you got a line per page, vs line per line...

I used an old pentium 133MHZ Packard Bell pc that ran Win 95 (me and the rest of the family just called it a packard HELL because it was using an unstable OS at that time) And that was WAY before i heard ANYTHING about linux! now after XP (and using Win Vista for all of month since it came with my laptop i've switced to li ux for good! No more BSOD's for me. I have been using linux mint since version 5 Elyssa and i haven't even BOOTED into Windows except to help my mother with Winblows Vista. Once i tried linux and it had gotten user friendly enough i haven't even messed with a Windows OS since. If i want to play games i just boot up my Xbox 360 for that. Anyway sorry for this monolithic novel for a post and i hope i don't bore people to death!

Sincerely: aspiewhostandsalone

That meets the exact description of the computer my family had after the Windows 3.11 computer that I used when I was three (see my above post). It was packard bell, 133 MHZ, pentium, and Win 95 just as you described! I can almost guarantee it was the same model. I think we kind of liked ours until we tried connecting it to internet. It didn't handle that at all and we ended up getting the third family computer which was an eMac(rap)hines with Win 98.