The turn of the century OS was more of a stop-gap than anything else while plans were afoot to merge the Windows business line, Windows NT, with the consumer stream (this happened with Windows XP).Įssentially, ME had the same core as Windows 98 but adopted many of the features of the latest entrant in the NT range - the very popular Windows 2000.
Windows ME - Millennium Edition - never received a lot of love and has to be marked out as a failure. The system allowed for automatic detection and installation of hardware with considerably less faff than ever before on PCs. The great addition from the user end was Plug and Play which made the previous driver hunts a lot less important along with a lot of CD-ROMs that came with various bits of peripheral kit. Through these two advances, Windows was now much more stable than before. Every 32-bit program was now also given a separate address space meaning that one bad program wouldn't bring the whole system crashing down. It's possible because of an interrupt mechanism which can suspend apps already in execution and order their power resource demands. It introduced pre-emptive multitasking into the operating system which was a way to ensure that each application gets a fair chunk of the CPU while it's trying to run. Windows 95, originally codenamed Chicago, saw a significant step change in the user interface with the Start menu and taskbar as well as offering impressive under-the-hood improvements too. Of those, 179 were dismissed and the last 10 were deemed ideas that were simply non-copyrightable.ġ0 years after the launch of the initial version of Windows and it was time for a serious facelift. Over the same period, Microsoft had been added more and more Mac OS-style features to their OS until the former employer sued the company under 189 charges relating to the Apple "look and feel" of Windows. By the time 3.11 came out Microsoft had made sure they'd seen off the threat from IBM and Windows had gone 32-bit. It contained the same bug fixes and multimedia support. Windows 3.0 sold 2 million copies in its first six months rising to 10 million over the next 18.ģ.1 was released in reaction to IBM's OS/2 2.0 operating system software that had initially been a joint venture with Microsoft. The system was also flexible at the same time, meaning that if you would rather offer applications the protection of running in one block them you could automatically assign specific space for that too. It meant Windows could successfully run more programs at once. Virtual memory was able to trick applications into thinking that they were using large blocks of address space when it was actually fragmented and often spilled into the storage disk rather than just using the RAM.
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