User blog comment:For love and happiness!/I'm writing a book/@comment-26250025-20170520170837

I wrote this in my spare time once:

Once upon a time there was a guy named Bill Gates. Bill Gates worked at Microsoft and made some stuff. Before Windows was released, Microsoft had MS-DOS. MS-DOS is what Command Prompt is nowadays, and back then, it was the simplest computing could get. Well, Bill Gates thought that was stupid, so he made Windows 1. What was special about Windows was that its user interface was more visual. All the programs you were running were in boxes called windows, hence the name Windows. But no one cared about that, everyone bought it just for Reversi. If it weren’t for Reversi, 500,000 people wouldn’t have bought it.

            So now Microsoft is kind of rich and want to make more money, so they decide to make a sequel to Windows and call it Windows 2.0. Windows 2.0 was exactly like Windows 1.0 but with more colors and overlapping windows. Other than a few changes in the text, that was pretty much it. But apparently, those few changes were enough for it to sell over 1 million copies. By the way, this whole concept of “reselling” the same operating system and getting more money from it is going to be a running trend.

            Now that Microsoft was making money off Windows, they made Windows 3.0 and Windows 3.1 The best way to describe it is Windows 95 but with less freedom. But at the time, it was very innovative. Windows 3.0 also introduced a full version of MS Paint and added Solitaire. And yes, Reversi was still here. There were also a lot of improvements in the memory and stuff like that. Windows 3.1 then released, and added TrueType, more support for multimedia, and better stability. These two versions sold about 7 million copies.

            Bill Gates was super rich now and could do anything. He thought the current user interface of Windows was too complicated, so he hired some psychologists to help make it simpler. These people made the Start button and taskbar, and Bill Gates was pleased and made Windows 95. It also introduced the famous Microsoft Sound. Fun fact: I used to be scared of it when I was younger. There was also some other stuff like plug and play, but that’s boring so I won’t talk about it. Also, Plug and play had nothing to do with games, despite the word play in the title, so I think it’s false advertising. Speaking of games, Windows 95 got rid of Reversi! How could Microsoft do such a thing?! Despite this, Windows 95 was a hit, selling 40 million copies in one year. Very impressive, Microsoft.

            But you know what’s not impressive? Windows 98. Windows 98 was just Windows 95 but with Internet Explorer 4.0 and some web apps. There were also some minor improvements in the shell and stability, but that was really it. Apparently, consumers didn’t care, as it sold 530,000 copies in just four days…somehow.

            Windows 2000 is what you would get if you made a bunch of patches to Windows 98 and released it as a new version of Windows. Microsoft made a bunch of small updates here and I can’t really go through them all. Generally, though, they updated Plug and Play, the Shell, NTFS, Encrypting File System, accessibility, system utilities, networking, and Windows Scripting Host. They also added new languages and a Logical Disk Manager. I also grew up with this version of Windows. Apparently, a lot of other people did too, as it sold over 1 million copies in less than a month.

            Windows ME was trash.