Out With The Old, In With The New

At last, it’s over.  It’s the end of an era that we all remember with varying degrees of amusement, frustration, love and loathing.

I’m not talking about the eight-year car crash that was the Bush Administration or the campaigning of the candidates whose goal it was to take over from Dubya; I’m talking about the end of something that most people thought had finished years ago.

As Barack Obama convincingly swept to victory in yesterday’s polls, defeating John McCain with a convincing 51.3% of the votes at the time of writing, Microsoft announced that it was finally going to stop issuing licenses for their long-standing Operating System, Windows 3.x.

Many computer users will remember the Windows 3.11 system on early home computers.  Launched in 1990, it was just about the only Operating System you could have unless you wanted the complex Unix or the niche Mac systems and its simple, icon-driven user interface (which many recognised as having plagiarised the Apple operating interface anyway) made navigating to your applications and documents easy.

Clunky in comparison to today’s Windows Vista system, Windows 3.x was not the prettiest of interfaces, but its light payload meant that it only required an 8086 or 8088 processor operating at a speed of 10mhz and just 640k of RAM.  It only took up 7mb of hard disk space.

Compare that to the Home Basic version of today’s Windows Vista, which needs a 32-bit processor running at a speed of at least 1ghz, 512mb of RAM and 20gb of hard-disk space, along with a graphics card with at least 32mb of RAM all to itself, and it’s easy to see why 3.x was still an operating system in use today.

True, it is no longer powerful enough to launch the Space Shuttle, but this tiny operating system can still be found aboard the computer systems of long-haul jet aircraft and is embedded in many Point of Sale machines, including retail tills.

Most people today are still using Microsoft’s Windows XP package, fearful that Vista is still not reliable enough to run their day-to-day applications, but as applications become ever more powerful and nefarious hackers around the world become increasingly nastier, Windows 3.x is no longer powerful enough to either run the packages people need in their computer-driven lives nor protect itself from the viruses and security-compromising worms that are about today.

So, as George W. Bush prepares to hand over the keys of the White House to Barack Obama, we say goodbye to Microsoft’s favoured son after almost nineteen long and loyal years.