A different mindset
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@StuartJordan said in A different mindset:
I've worked with computers since I was 16, I'm now approaching 38, starting from a break fix environment, I just feel the last couple of years I've lost some enjoyment working within IT, has anyone else experienced this feeling?
I've definitely felt Windows in a continuous decline since 1999 with the late released of NT 4. NT 4 was an absolute joy to work with and really felt like MS knew what they were doing and cared. Windows 2000 changed all that and Windows got slow, flaky and felt... amateur. It got harder to use, and less powerful, and less stable. Sometimes they get things right, but overall so much of their product line has just felt like it has been in continuous decline for a long time.
I'm lucky, in a way, I started on UNIX and was a UNIX guy for years before I ever touched Windows for the first time. So Windows has never felt like my native environment, not even in the 3.1 or NT4 eras, it was always a "quirky, amateur alternative" to the "serious, standard" UNIX stuff that was older and used more in business. Windows always seemed like it was for end users and really small shops and never for "real business". Obviously MS pushed Windows into serious places over the years, but that came later. As someone that's been around for forever, I've seen Windows go from a novel idea, to it rising to being a serious contender, to becoming an absolute joke. It feels like it will likely just fade away pretty quickly. It is amazing how quickly NT4 popped up out of nowhere, squished Novell who had been the SMB leader before them, and how quickly it appears it is going to fade away.
I've rarely had Windows as a main driver in all that time. I didn't start using Windows in any real sense until 1995 and by 1997 was back to UNIX. I've had Windows focused jobs, and I have the MCSE+I, but NTG only used Windows exclusively for about 18 months in the early days, and only because it was our development platform. Our internal servers have been Linux since day one. Our desktops have nearly always been Linux.
In my professional life, once in a while I'd be put into a place that pushed Windows on us. But from the oil company to Wall St. to the K12 private school to NTG to IBM all of my major jobs were Linux as my daily driver. The non-profit I worked at was Mac (eww, so awful.) I've certainly used Windows a lot, and while NTG is Linux internally exclusively, the majority of what we support is Windows so I touch it so much every day. And all day long it amazing me that anyone, ever uses Windows by choice. It's not "bad", it's just... so unproductive. Everything is flaky and slow and just... sloppy.
So I'm lucky, I managed to start in the industry before Windows existed, got to enjoy it at its peak, and now that it is rapidly in decline I honestly barely notice. It feels like it is going out with a whimper. I would be pretty unhappy if I was tasked with working on Windows day in and day out, though. I would definitely find my career a lot less rewarding.
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@StuartJordan said in A different mindset:
I'm now even thinking changing my main desktop to a Linux based distribution.
Why not? I switched my main desktop in 1997 to Caldera Linux and haven't looked back. If you aren't absolutely trapped on Windows for your daily use machine, I can't imagine spending an extra second on it.
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@StuartJordan said in A different mindset:
in the past when vista or Windows Me were launched we was able to stay on the previous OS and Microsoft soon launched a better replacement causing us to eventually move on.
That's not actually quite true. A few things about that statement...
- Windows ME was part of the DOS/Windows family, not part of the Windows NT family that you are discussing. Windows ME was the successor to Windows 98 SE, not to Windows 2000. Windows ME was garbage, but never had a replacement. Windows 98 users were told no further release of DOS was going to happen, but so many people demanded one that ME was created to punish them, and punish them it did. But it was never replaced, it just died.
- The notion that some releases, like 2000 and Vista and 8 were crap and you quickly got something fixed is really a myth. None of those were actually that bad, all of them were just big changes that people didn't like to swallow. Their replacements (XP, 7, and 8.1) were all better, yes, but only in the normal incremental way that you would expect. If you go back and look at the originals now in a direct time line, the only real problems with them, much like Office 2007 with the Ribbon, is that they presented new interfaces and people hate change. Microsoft didn't "fix" problems for the next releases, it was the end users having accepted the changes getting the same thing release "again" and feeling better about it the second time around that gives that weird impression. If you go back and use Vista today, honestly, it's almost identical to 7. They aren't really different things. And nearly all the problems with 8 are the same in 10 still. Nothing was ever addressed for real.
There has never been a good reason to avoid the latest Windows release. Avoiding Windows entirely? Yes, always an argument available for that. But once you were on Windows, if you skipped even the worst releases, you were simply not keeping up and not getting the latest features and having to make bigger jumps later.
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For those not familiar with DOS/Windows any more, for most of us that's what Windows always referred to. It's weird that there were two product lines that at different times were known as Windows. The one we have today is the offspring of OS/2, not DOS, and has no relationship to DOS or Windows as it was traditionally known. So the current system called Windows was traditionally called Windows NT and once DOS died out, it kind of took over the name Windows before getting renamed formally to Windows 10. But everyone thinks of it as NT because its kernel keeps that in the name and nothing else.
But the original system from the 1980s was DOS. Then Windows was a desktop environment that you ran on top of DOS. Not unlike Gnome on Ubuntu today. DOS was the OS, just as Ubuntu is the OS. And Windows was the desktop environment just like Gnome or Cinnamon are desktop environments.
Windows 1 released, then Windows 2, Windows 3, Windows 3.1, Windows 3.11, Windows 95, Windows 95 SE, Windows 98, Windows 98 SE, Windows ME
That was it. That was the entire run of traditional Windows. The Windows NT family split from OS/2 and release its first product about the same time as Windows 3.1. So at one point there was Windows 3.1 and Windows NT 3.1 on shelves and you could pick the Windows family or the Windows NT family. Windows was always 16bit code. Windows NT was a big deal because it was 32bit native. Windows NT had an emulator built in that could run a 16bit mode and could run most Windows apps, but only most, and not always very well.
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Thank your for your informative reply Scott, I'm not bashing Microsoft in general. I think have done very well with their azure platform, but I feel they don't give a shit about windows anymore. Windows XP with sp3 and windows 7 felt like they finally made a decent OS, vista was just a pain from the memory requirements increase. Then along comes windows 8, a joke of an operating system to say to users we want to cater for mobiles and tablets, but don't give a shit about work environments that require a practical desktop environment.
I personally thought windows 2000 was quite decent. -
So the CMD.exe in Windows that we all know and love is not DOS. This is why people always say "that's not DOS" and are amazed that people think that it is related to DOS. It shares some command names and such, but Ubuntu 19.10 shares command names with System IV in the early 1970s, but we don't assume that they are sharing anything, it's just useful command names.
The Windows NT family that we use today (aka Windows 10) has never had any form of DOS on it, under it, with it, nothing. Even going back to the summer of 1993 there was zero DOS in that first release. DOS is an operating system, not a shell like CMD, so different things conceptually. DOS and NT were competing OSes.
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@StuartJordan said in A different mindset:
I personally thought windows 2000 was quite decent.
Did you use NT4 before it? Windows 2000 wasn't bad on its own. It was bad, IMHO, in comparison to NT4. As far as I am concerned, NT4 SP6a was the shining example of the best of the best of Microsoft's product development. It was fast, it was light, it was stable, it was secure-ish, it was easy to use and easy to maintain. Every release before and since paled in comparison to it. Windows 2000 especially was slow and bloated compared to it. But way more flashy.
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It was a big advantage, I think, coming from the CP/M and DOS days, seeing Windows layered onto it, then seeing NT come along. Getting to see all of that, step by step, really helped to teach what was the OS, what was the shell, what was the desktop environment, how the pieces got put together.
Later on, everything is so heavily abstracted its impossible to tell what you are looking at. But all of it was so raw back then.
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Here is something funny to think about...
Windows 1 through Windows ME, the entire run of the Windows family, was only 16 years: 1985 - 2001. That's all. The entire legacy of the Windows world was created over such a short time frame.
Also weird, more weird I think, is that the legacy of DOS - that iconic picture of the 1980s businessman or programmer typing away on that IBM PC with just text on the screen. That era lasted a total of just four years. 1981 to 1985 when Windows was added. Of course, you could keep running DOS after 1985, but people really didn't, the move to Windows was essentially ubiquitous and instantaneous. Once you had a 16bit Windows layer with multi-tasking, the uni-tasking 8bit DOS system seemed pretty lame.
Only four years, but boy does it stick in our minds!
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I used to be part of a computer club after school when I was young, due to my interest in computers. I was taught how to use MS-DOS, at the time I believe it was windows 3.00 and ms-3.2. I had been given computers by my uncle as he worked in London for some big companies, my first computer I got when I was in my teens was a olevetti 486dx2 66. That was running Windows for workgroups 3.11 and MS-DOS 6.2.
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Windows NT release in 1993, DOS was only 12 years old, Windows only 8 years old! Windows NT is still going (but not so strong anymore) and is now 27 years old!! Windows NT has already gone 3.5x as long as Windows did from beginning to end and certainly isn't going to vanish anytime soon. Yet DOS and Windows remain more iconic even with their tiny life spans. And Windows had to contend with having been "already replaced" for its last eight years. 50% of the run of Windows, it was already the deprecated technology!
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@StuartJordan said in A different mindset:
That was running Windows for workgroups 3.11 and MS-DOS 6.2.
That would have been DOS 6.22. Windows 3.1 (not for workgroups) was shipped with 6.2. And 6.22 went as an update to go with 3.11. So goofy.
DOS 7 shipped with Windows 95.
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I was lucky, I learned DOS 2 I believe that it was on a first generation IBM PC before Windows had been released. So I really learned both a small amount of IT and a lot of programming in the real DOS era. I did the first large amount of learning to program on straight DOS. I miss those days.
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I feel quite happy that I have saw a lot of history of how hardware and software has developed to this day, and you have seen more then I have. Like people today won't know what a ps/2 mouse is or a serial based mouse lol.
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@StuartJordan said in A different mindset:
I feel quite happy that I have saw a lot of history of how hardware and software has developed to this day, and you have seen more then I have. Like people today won't know what a ps/2 mouse is or a serial based mouse lol.
I still end up with those from time to time!
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@scottalanmiller said in A different mindset:
@StuartJordan said in A different mindset:
I feel quite happy that I have saw a lot of history of how hardware and software has developed to this day, and you have seen more then I have. Like people today won't know what a ps/2 mouse is or a serial based mouse lol.
I still end up with those from time to time!
I use one almost every day - a Keytronic keyboard. About 20 years old.
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@Pete-S said in A different mindset:
@scottalanmiller said in A different mindset:
@StuartJordan said in A different mindset:
I feel quite happy that I have saw a lot of history of how hardware and software has developed to this day, and you have seen more then I have. Like people today won't know what a ps/2 mouse is or a serial based mouse lol.
I still end up with those from time to time!
I use one almost every day - a Keytronic keyboard. About 20 years old.
And PS/2 is the "new" stuff. Original PC keyboard uses a 5 pin DIN connector.
PS/2 is of course named so since it was introduced on IBM's PS/2 computer.
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@Pete-S said in A different mindset:
@Pete-S said in A different mindset:
@scottalanmiller said in A different mindset:
@StuartJordan said in A different mindset:
I feel quite happy that I have saw a lot of history of how hardware and software has developed to this day, and you have seen more then I have. Like people today won't know what a ps/2 mouse is or a serial based mouse lol.
I still end up with those from time to time!
I use one almost every day - a Keytronic keyboard. About 20 years old.
And PS/2 is the "new" stuff. Original PC keyboard uses a 5 pin DIN connector.
I had a nine pin "joystick" connector in 1987.
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@scottalanmiller said in A different mindset:
@Pete-S said in A different mindset:
@Pete-S said in A different mindset:
@scottalanmiller said in A different mindset:
@StuartJordan said in A different mindset:
I feel quite happy that I have saw a lot of history of how hardware and software has developed to this day, and you have seen more then I have. Like people today won't know what a ps/2 mouse is or a serial based mouse lol.
I still end up with those from time to time!
I use one almost every day - a Keytronic keyboard. About 20 years old.
And PS/2 is the "new" stuff. Original PC keyboard uses a 5 pin DIN connector.
I had a nine pin "joystick" connector in 1987.
That was called the gamepad connector. Can't remember what kind of gamepad it was from though.No, wait. It was probably the game port.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_portOnly 9 pin connector was the dsub connector which was the serial port, where the mouse was connected. I don't think the PC ever had any serial keyboards.
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@Pete-S said in A different mindset:
@scottalanmiller said in A different mindset:
@Pete-S said in A different mindset:
@Pete-S said in A different mindset:
@scottalanmiller said in A different mindset:
@StuartJordan said in A different mindset:
I feel quite happy that I have saw a lot of history of how hardware and software has developed to this day, and you have seen more then I have. Like people today won't know what a ps/2 mouse is or a serial based mouse lol.
I still end up with those from time to time!
I use one almost every day - a Keytronic keyboard. About 20 years old.
And PS/2 is the "new" stuff. Original PC keyboard uses a 5 pin DIN connector.
I had a nine pin "joystick" connector in 1987.
That was called the gamepad connector. Can't remember what kind of gamepad it was from though.No, wait. It was probably the game port.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_portOnly 9 pin connector was the dsub connector which was the serial port, where the mouse was connected. I don't think the PC ever had any serial keyboards.
Nope, nine pin. Wasn't a PC.
