When someone is asked about the operating system of their computer, the most normal thing is for them to answer us by specifying the version of Microsoft's Windows, since it is the most popular, equipping 90% of the desktop computers in it. world. But what is Windows? Windows is a group of operating systems designed and marketed by the Microsoft company.
As the most famous and widely used operating system in the world, Windows has laid the groundwork and served as a model as a family of OS (operating systems) since its inception. Windows has different versions over the years and different options for home, business, mobile devices and according to the variation in the processor. Most PCs are currently sold with some version of Microsoft Windows pre-installed.
Initially it was a graphical environment complementary to MS-DOS, which ran on said operating system, also from Microsoft.
Windows emerged at a time when the transition from the command line environment to the graphical mouse-driven environment was being made. Initially, it was not considered serious to work with a graphical environment, but Apple changed everything by introducing such an environment on its computers, thus creating a school.
Microsoft's new windows environment (Windows stands for windows in English, a metaphor for containers of elements in the environment) came into the world a year after Apple released the Mac OS.
The first versions of Windows were branded as a crude copy of the Mac OS
And, in fact, they traced some aspects, especially with regard to philosophy, but in the first place, there was not much room to innovate differently at the time (mid-eighties) and with existing technology. at that time, and, secondly, Steve Jobs was not the one to talk about plagiarism when he himself had taken the technology out of the graphic environment - receiving permission for it, yes - from the Xerox laboratories, where they considered it irrelevant.
I still remember one of the first editions of the Pagemaker layout program that included a version of Windows 1 or 2, in case you didn't have Microsoft's graphical environment installed, as it was needed to work with the program.
The initial versions of Windows followed one another until 3.0, launched in 1990, which was the first to achieve palpable commercial success, thanks above all to the fact that it was endowed with improvements in both the graphical interface and multitasking, although this success was improved Windows 3.1, released in 1992, and which could come to be considered as universal since it was present in a very high percentage of home and corporate computers.
Microsoft only needed to take one step, and that was to turn Windows into a complete operating system, which it did for the first time in 1993 with Windows NT, a system aimed at professional tasks that started directly in graphical mode and was based on the kernel developed jointly with IBM for OS / 2, although the association made waters and each one of the parts remained with the technology for their own platforms.
In 1995, microsoft took the next step with the launch of Windows 95, the first operating system based on its windows environment for the consumer public, in which it was launched directly into a graphical interface (unlike the MS-DOS + binomial). Windows of yesteryear).
Despite the fact that it was presented as a renewed operating system, it still had a lot of code inherited from MS-DOS and the old Windows for compatibility reasons, a problem that Microsoft has always dragged, but that would be diluted over time, so that in with every new version of the system, some backward compatibility is lost.
Windows 95 laid the foundations for certain elements that are still used today, such as the taskbar or the minimize, maximize, and close buttons.
The next logical step was to drop the kernel (kernel) classic Windows, 16-bit, and pass all the technology to 32-bit Windows NT, joining both branches of development, which would still be differentiated in some versions.
Windows XP was the first to make the complete switch to 32-bit, relying on the Windows NT kernel even for its consumer versions
and, from here, the history of Windows is already summarized in a single branch of the kernel, from which it is surrounded by different elements to create the versions for professional or consumer use.
Windows XP has been, perhaps, the most successful version of Microsoft's operating system. Behind it are failures like Windows ME (Millenium Edition) or Windows Vista (although this was later), but neither has managed to overtake it in terms of success.
Still at the end of 2016, and having released other versions such as Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 10, the XP still retained more than 9% of the market for desktop operating systems. An inheritance that is difficult to ignore.
If Windows Vista was a major fiasco (it was a platform without any stability, poor performance and criticized by all), Windows 7 fixed the problem, and Windows 8 meant the introduction of a new interface in useful, adapted for use on mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets.
For years, Microsoft also maintained a line of operating systems for mobile devices, PDAs and Pocket PC’s first, and smartphones later, although these systems were technically different and with very different functional aspects, keeping similarity in the graphic environment and preserving the name.
Starting with Windows 8, Microsoft unified its entire range of operating systems, a unification that was felt in full force in Windows 10, which is already sold as a single platform that adapts to any type of device, although in reality You cannot install the same Windows from a PC to a phone and vice versa.
What Microsoft has introduced as a novelty in Windows 10 and that allows us to tend towards such unification is the universal application, a program compiled only once but that can be run on different platforms. hardware,
not yet sufficiently exploited by developers, but if all goes well, it will become a standard over the next few years.
For the future, Microsoft is adapting Windows to the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm and virtual and augmented reality environments.
