A sentimental trip down memory lane

A presentation of the first graphical work environment in the Microsoft Windows family was given in November 1984. At the time, it was a graphical operating system shell for MS-DOS and it had been developed in answer to the growing popularity of graphical user interfaces like those presented on Macintosh computers, for instance. With time, the shell, and later on, the Windows operating system, came to dominate the global personal computer market. The first stable version to be released was Windows 1.01.1
In the beginning, the Microsoft Windows system offered little in the way of functionality and it failed to win broad recognition. Subsequent versions caught on slightly better among users. Windows 3.0, which was released in 1990, was the first to achieve a wider-reaching success. The improvements it introduced primarily affected the user interface and multitasking capabilities. Then, in August 1995, Windows 95 came out… and, undoubtedly, many of you reading this will remember it well.
The next version, Windows 98, was criticised for its slow operation. It was followed by Windows 2000. However, it was Windows XP, released in 2007 in two versions, ‘Home’ and ‘Professional’, which achieved genuine commercial success. Here at Insights, we remember what a hit it turned out to be! In fact, assertions that it was the best operating systems of the Windows family can be encountered to this day.
Its successor, Vista, shared the fate of other versions which received no more than faint praise. In fact, it confirmed what was, by then, an opinion commonly held among users, namely, that every second version of Windows received worse reviews than its predecessor. At the time, the changes were mainly confined to cosmetic improvements of the interface and new graphic effects.
Vista was followed by Windows 7 and then, in turn, Windows 8, 9, 10 and 11 were released. Windows 8, which introduced tiles and was created primarily with the thought of touch screens in mind, was a breakthrough moment. Nonetheless, a great many users held that the system had lost its intuitiveness and that a large number of the previous functions were no longer available to them. As a result, the next version returned to a more traditional appearance and the classic menu.
In addition to the system itself, the history of the Microsoft Office suite, inseparable companion to so many of us in our daily work, is also worth revisiting. At Insights, we look back nostalgically on those first experiments with creating ‘visuals’ using the Paint programme! And let the person who never spent hours fiddling around with fading and other effects for PowerPoint presentations cast the first stone!
Most probably, for a good number of you, one of the most difficult decisions in your youthful years was what to choose from WordArt!

Another one right at the top of the list of tricky decisions was selecting the best clip art for ornamenting a text…
Now, who here remembers Clippy the Paper Clip, more formally known as the Office Assistant? Clippy was capable of answering just about any question!

Coming back to the operating system, how could we not mention the most famous green field in the world? That’s right! We’re talking about this wallpaper…

…and they say that the landscape can actually be found in reality!
Another thing that simply screams ‘Windows’ to everyone who remembers are the systems’ start-up and shut-down sounds. As the opening line to a novel puts it, “The past is a foreign country” and we’re convinced that these sounds will take you right back there!2 Windows start-up & shut-down sounds.

1 https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows.
2 L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between, 1953.

Translated from the Polish by Caryl Swift