Back in those days I had a copy of Dashboard and I loved it. It was my favorite Win 3.1 shell. So much quicker to use and less cluttered than the Program Manager, lots of cool modules to customize it, and workspace support. It was really great.
Imagine, if you will, a guest on the show that Stewart doesn’t feel the overwhelming urge to cut short, and talk over, time and time again. That guest, simply does not exist.
LOL🤣 Yeah, his guests might as well be shop dummies. See how he swiftly cold shoulders his guests after their well prepared speech at 13:40. He always has the urge to move on. I'm surprised all the computers don't have a photo of him for the wallpaper 😂
there is a somewhat recent interview of Stewart and he said if he didn't cut them off, the company representatives would just sit an fillibuster about their product.
Man, Windows was so clunky back then! Even Win98, though a vast improvement in terms of UI, was still quite rickety. I remember Windows 2000 being the first version that truly "felt" different to me. Sure, it _looked_ like 98, but it behaved so much better that it actually didn't feel like a Windows OS!
One factor may have been that Win2K had more in common under the hood with the "industrial strength" NT than the "presumed end-user" deals of WFW3.x, W95, and W98
With Windows, pretty much every other version has been good/bad since the beginning. 95 was good, 98 first edition sucked, 98 SE was good, ME sucked, XP was good, Vista sucked, etc, etc, etc.
Legend has it someone made an early Windows app that prevented the presenter from being cut off by Stuart when presenting new hardware/software. It was however not featured on any episode of Computer Chronicles.
Windows 7 has this as an official downloadable option from Microsoft even, supposedly so you could run XP in a VM if you needed to for some reason. Well, what of it anyway. I just use VirtualBox. Makes sense for Windows 10 though as they're closing in the ecosystem with that OS. Maybe good for some people, but also the beginning of the end of the PC as we might care to know it. You know, for "safety," etc., etc. lol
@@WR3ND There was a PowerToy for XP that added virtual desktops. Similar to the one for 7, and both are pretty similar to how they worked in 10. There was also a XP PowerToy that added full window previews to Alt+Tab, which is something that became standard with Windows Vista (if you used Aero Glass).
Using Autocad (r12-13 versions mostly) those days, redraw and zoom change was unbearable slow, if the draw was to complicated, took ages to redraw it on the screen, many people destroy their eyesight only to avoid changing the zoom, and it was in a 14-15 inches screen, 17, 21 inch screens were rare and pretty expensive, also the object references weren't that good either.. a true eyesight destroyer
Microsoft:"These utilities seems really useful, it would be a shame if a large computer software company happen to integrate them into their operating system and make their competitors versions largely obsolete. "
If you ask me, the show lost some of its charm when guests such as Jan Lewis and Gary Kildall stopped appearing. The change in formats didn't help much either.
The target audience changed in this rapidly evolving market. The show became more of a churn and burn on what new products were coming out, mostly done by professional marketing staff vs when they had actual engineers on the show do the demonstrations in the very first few years.
Win 3.1(1), ugh. Never did like it as it was so ungainly and crude looking. Much better alternatives existed, e.g. Mac, BeOS, GEM. But it was of course Gates' his powerful network all the way to his high influential powerful parents (his dad's lawfirm PG&E, his mum's powerful top corporate positions) who also profoundly paved the way. PG&E received millions alone for lobbying. Clever marketing campaigns on top and Gates simply muscled any competition out, except Apple, Next and high-end tech, as he felt that they were needed for inspiration and future business. Microsoft played with competition as well by not disclosing specifications and standards up to a very late point where certain competition would be evidently lagging behind creating Microsoft's big advantage. The best tech for mankind for that reason never wins, most sadly. Here we are still bound to MS Windows for the majority of us.
