I think I've been reading too many DooM novels, playing too much DooM3 and reading too many articles about the evils of Microsoft. But hey, I like to blab sometimes...
It all started long ago with the establishment of the Operating System DOS. It was stolen from another company that was writting the same OS, but well... that's life I guess.
Anyway, so MS-DOS came into existance. And was miserable. There was no such thing as a directory. There were only files. I guess this wasn't so much of a problem because at the time PC's were rather limited (I mean, how powerful is an 8086 Intel compared to todays standards?) But that's beside the point.
Eventually MS-DOS pushed out all competitors. And that's when Microsoft became a superpower.
As the years progressed, so did DOS. It was eventually capable of a directory heirarchy with the 8.3 filename standard. It soon came with great tools and applications and GAMES.
IBM and Microsoft worked together for awhile on OS/2. What did Microsoft do? They stole OS/2 also and spat out Windows. Whoopdeedoo. Microsoft Windows, a true nightmare for PC programmers and PC users alike.
Win3.1, however, was very well designed for a 16-Bit operating system. It rarely crashed and was, for the most part, very stable. It even had the ALT+TAB functionality.
But then came Windows '95. Wow. Talk about hell on earth. Win95 was the beginning. With great new features but far more bugs included, Windows '95 began to develop a mind of its own and would find any possible way to annoy its user to no end. After a series of fixes, Win98 was released! Year-2000 ready! Whatever that meant...
And the troubles only grew worse! Along with the development of DirectX (of which version 1 was nothing more than a mere joke), Windows 95/98 paired together to make a users life miserable. With '95 lacking all the 'features' of '98 and '98 being one of the least stable operating systems in existance, users began to switch to Linux systems.
While Linux is one of the greatest Operating Systems available today, the horrors of setting up and installing a *wirking* Linux distribution kept the PC world stuck with Windows while Microsoft sits there in Maine (or wherever it is) with its fingers interlocked, grinning like an imp.
Soon after Win98 was released, another horror show was distributed, this one known as Windows Me. Millenium Edition was by far *the most* awful garbage released by Microsoft at the time. And after many fixes and upgrades, it remains completely broken.
So, Microsoft, in an effort to reclaim its market shares, released Windows 2000 and XP along with a new version of DirectX, version 6.
So, DirectX was now the way for programmers to write great games for the Win32 platform. Lovely... we're stuck.
But, Windows 2K/XP made many things right, to some degree. As Microsoft later took over a large share of the home-console genre with their xBox, Windows XP continued to dominate the PC world, and to this day still does.
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Now, explain to me if any of that made any sense. Heh... probably not. Ah well.
ranting is good sometimes!
Leeor
