Do you remember the days gone past with Windows? We thought you might enjoy a moment to rewind the clock with Microsoft.
If you have one of the older operating systems by Microsoft, you should check out the Product Lifecycle Dates. This Microsoft site provides dates for how long support will be offered on the product. Very interesting site worth looking at. The general term of support is ten years from the release date.
TimeLine
DOS 1.0 ~ 1981
DOS 1.1 ~ 1982
DOS 1.25 ~ 1983
DOS 2.0 ~ 1984
DOS 2.1 ~ 1984
DOS 3.0 ~ 1984
DOS 3.1 ~ 1984
DOS 3.2 ~ 1986
DOS 3.3 ~ 1987
DOS 4.0 ~ 1988
DOS 4.01 ~ 1988
DOS 5.0 ~ 1991
DOS 5.0a ~ 1992
DOS 6.0 ~ 1993
DOS 6.1 ~ 1993
DOS 6.2 ~ 1993
DOS 6.21 ~ 1994
DOS 6.22 ~ 1994
DOS 7.0 ~ 1994
Windows 1.0 ~ 1985
Windows 2.0 ~ 1987
Windows 286 ~ 1988
Windows 386 ~ 1988
Windows 3.0 ~ 1990
Windows 3.1 ~ 1992
Windows 3.11 ~ 1992
Windows 95 ~ 1995
Windows 95 SP1 ~ 1995
Windows 95 OSR2 ~ 1996
Windows 95 OSR2.1 ~ 1996
Windows 95 OSR2.5 ~ 1997
Windows 98 ~ 1998
Windows 98 SE (Second Edition) ~ 1999
Windows 2000 Me (Millennium Edition) ~ 2000
Windows XP Home Edition ~ 2001
Windows XP Professional ~ 2002
Windows XP Media Center Edition ~ 2002
Windows XP Media Center Edition ~ 2004
Windows XP Media Center Edition ~ 2005
Windows Vista, was codename "Longhorn" ~ 2006
Windows 7, codename Vienna & Blackcomb ~ 2009? (just our guess)
There are several other products in the Windows family, however they
are specialized editions for consumer electronics, like phones,
pocket pc's, servers, and other computer products. They run off one
of the platforms listed above and are not considered "operating
systems".
I would like to mention the fact that computers did exist before Microsoft, but the consumer versions were very basic systems. They were advanced for the times and very useful. Some of the computers were: Tandy Level II-TRS-80, Commodore Basic 1.0, and the MITS Altair 8800.
A look back at Ram Memory Usages
This is the minimum required to operate. More ram is recommended. The future of ram will be gigabit and terabyte!
Windows 95 ~ 4mb
Windows 98 ~ 16mb
Windows 2000 Pro ~ 32mb
Windows XP Home ~ 256mb (ideal 2gb)
Windows XP Pro 32bit ~ 256mb (ideal 2gb)
Windows XP Pro 64bit ~ 256mb (ideal 2gb)
Windows Vista ~ 512mb (ideal 4gb)
Windows 7 ~ 512mb (ideal 2gb)
*see the binary table below for a explanation of mb and gb.
Binary Table
The word "byte" is a acronym from the words "binary table."
The primary specifications of hardware are rated in bytes. 40-gigabyte (40GB) disk holds 40 billion characters of data. A 512-megabyte (512MB) memory allows 512 million characters of data (character = one letter or number, a, b, c, 1, 2, 3)
b = byte = 1 character
mb = megabyte = 1,048,576 bytes
gb = gigabyte = 1024 megabytes
tb = terabyte = 1024 gigabytes