10 Years After

Thanks to Slashdot Review I was reminded that August 24th was the Ten Year Anniversary of the release of Windows 95.

(Or, as those of us who are old enough to remember Redmond's previous iterations the minimally acceptable version. That being mostly due to the fact that, having one the appeal in the Apple Look-and-Feel lawsuit, the boys up in WA pretty much made the thing a clone of the Macintosh UI.)

And so, Redmond's seemingly unstoppable march into the Homes, Offices and pockets of the entire world jumped to light-speed.

It does little good to argue the superiority of OS/2. Redmond had pulled out of the deal and IBM was, at best ambivalent. By the time the Y2K issue came to a head 5 years later, only a few were tardy enough in the transition to require hunkering down with their well-proven OS/2 environments and, having weathered the storm, finally convert to the latest Mr. Bill had to offer. (To this day, I can't swear that every customer site at my day-job has transitioned every machine.)

Ten Years.

This is a HUGE number in the dog-years we use to measure technological devices.

Consider just how far we have come.

A quick Google (IBaNAaV) of "windows95 minimum" yields this info. on the second hit:
(Lord only knows WHY the U of IN thinks they still need this on their website...)

The minimum hardware requirements for Microsoft Windows 95 are:

* A personal computer with a 386DX, 20MHz or higher processor

* 4MB of memory (8MB recommended)

* At least 70MB of available hard disk space for installation

* One 3.5" high-density disk drive or a CD-ROM drive

* VGA or higher resolution graphics card

Think about that for a moment. How far we have come.

The PalmPilot I purchased the next year reminded me of my original Macintosh, both in user experience, capabilities and just plain fun.

And now, Dell Axim x50v in my pocket (well, to be technical, on my belt) blows the doors off that original Windows machine, many times over. And runs a superior version of the operating system, more akin to XP than 95.

Ain't this a GREAT time to be a Geek on the Go? ;-)