What is the most innovative release(s) of Windows, In your opinion?

My vote goes for 95 and 2000
95 - Because this was a huge leap from 3.1, it made the whole thing better.
2000 - Switching to an NT base was a great thing, and Windows 2k showed and still shows this.

 

98/2000 > XP, it paved the way to alot of new features

 

I had to go with 2k. Even though it didn't have all of the bells and whistles it was IMHO the first OS that was stable for business and home use. It was also a great foundation for the future...

 

Vista - The kernel is entirely re-written, making it the most secure Windows ever.

 

Vista's kernel wasn't rewritten....
Its based on XP.

 

To me, no version of Windows has been innovative at all. Windows 7 may change this but for now Windows is just plain old uninspiring.

 

Windows 95 was pretty big. There were all kinds of crowds rushing out to get it when it come out.

 

Probably either Windows 2.1 or NT3.1

 

+1

Loved me some Windows 2000 back in the day, especially once Creative released proper Sound Blaster Live drivers for it.

 

I'm not sure about innovative, because I think there were some very innovative things in lousy OS's. Windows ME was actually sort of innovative at the time.

I'll use the word "pivotal" instead. I think there are 3 very pivotal Windows versions. First was Windows 3.1, because that's really the first widely adopted version. Until Windows 3.0/3.1, there were competing GUI interfaces...GEM, I think Tandy had one, OS2 of course, and some others long forgotten. Windows 3.1 finally closed out the rest and made Windows the standard it is today.

Second was Windows 95, which was huge at the time. And it introduced the basic interface that we still see today.

The last big pivotal release was 2000, both on the desktop and the server side. On the desktop it brought the 95 and NT platforms together into a single OS, and on the server side (with the introduction of Active Directory) Windows 2000 Server could finally compete with Novell Netware. Actually, it pretty much killed Netware.

Windows 3.1/3.11, Windows 95, Windows 2000. Those are the ones that ultimatey mattered. The rest are just dressing.

 

It's gotta be Windows 95; it set the whole graphical structure (start menu, taskbar, etc.) that is still used in later versions (XP, Vista, etc.). It even drove other DOS-compatible OSes out of a business it was so successful.

 

I have to agree with Arkit3kt. Win 3.x -> Win 95 was the biggest leap -- not only in terms of the UI, but there were also a lot of other key improvements, such as long filenames, protected memory and pre-emptive multitasking.

 

I think ME was the first OS to use system restore which was copied by Apple ala Time Machine.

 

That's correct. Windows ME also introduced Windows Update, which obviously was a huge step forward from relying on Joe User to manually seek out and patch his OS.

 

I think my vote would go for Windows 95.

 

Windows ME! It had the most crashes!

And also, Microsoft Bob. Easy to use!

Oh, most innovative... Oops!

 

Windows 95. Before that the only two computers I used was an '87 MAC SE and an IBM running DOS... 95 has colors??!! Magic .

EDIT:

The MAC SE had a much cooler voice thing that would say what you type much earlier than Microsoft

 

Well, it did set a new low. That's pretty innovative.

 

+1 Thomas, great thread!

 

Thanks lol, same to you

 

Exactly...

 

95 and 2000 were definitely the most innovative releases: 95 moved the computing world fully and irreversibly into the 32-bit world, as well as giving us the Windows UI we know today, and myriad other new features (although it also gave us IE, which remains a pox on the internet to this day).

2000 moved to the much faster, more stable, and more secure NT kernel, finally giving DOS the boot for good, while miraculously maintaining backwards compatibility, and gave us another slew of new features to make lives easier.

Vista deserves an honorable mention here as well. Not because of anything revolutionary at the kernel level, but it is the first major OS to make the 32-bit -> 64-bit move fairly painless (yes, there was XP Pro x64, but "stable" and "painless" are not words I would associate with anything related to that release). It also gives us a lot of useful new features: BitLocker, vastly improved networking and file/device sharing, embedded Windows Update a la OSX's software update, and a slew of security improvements (for better or for worse *cough*UAC*cough*).

 

XP gets my vote most stable and easy to use. hardly any crashes at all. its just awesome. unlike 95/98 it was the foundation but XP just pulled it all together.

vista also gets my vote. not only did it look better but it was more easier and feature packed for me.
a little thing to the vista users, if u gotta bunch of pictures theres the kickass slideshow button thats great for quick showoff in a creative way. WMP 11 is fast and gorgeous and so function, i love the monitoring folders and how it syncs with any mp3 player.

my 2 cents

 

Actually, 9x didnt build the foundation for anything, except maybe ME
XP is based off the NT line(Actually, its Windows 2k), and vista is based on XP.

 

i could not have said it better....
but can't believe all the votes for VISTA... what is so innovative about it... aero is just eye candy... and DX10 can be implimented into XP if a person really needs it!!

 

IMO 95 was the most "innovative". I personally like 3.1 cuz of the stability. If I could figure out a way to get that OS to run on my 1520, I would do it.

 

This was very well-written and insightful. Oh yeah, and I agree totally.

 

I was blown away by Luna when I first used XP, leap in useablity.

 

I remember getting a beta of windows 95, it was called Chicago then, it was on 40-50 floppy disks!

cd drives were just coming in, my first was 2 speed, 300k a second.

Think how much fun it was installing them.

 

Ha ha. I'd forgotten about that. I first installed Windows 95 on a Packard-Bell 486 SX25 o ) that didn't even have a CD-ROM. Floppy after floppy after floppy. It had some crappy Headlands video adaptor in it that wouldn't display more than 16 colors until I bought an additional 512k of video RAM. Then I got the full 256 colors. Not to mention the upgrade from 4 MB to 8 MB of RAM...at a cost of $200+.

People today who think that moving from XP to Vista is problematic ought to hop in the wayback machine and experience the jump from Windows 3.1 to 95.

 

Actually, no it can't. You can run DX10 librairies under DX9. You don't get DX10 randering. Proof? It works with DX9 cards.

 

Windows for Workgroups was the most inovative Windows. It introduced networking and graphically based file manipulation. All the later versions have done is bloat up with a pretty face. They are 'Evolutionary' not 'Revolutionary'...

 

Excellent thread

ahh ME, although I've never used it, I heard plenty of horror stories from friends who had it on old machines, although indeed System Restore and Automatic Updates were excellent features, not to mention Windows Movie Maker.

I also liked Windows 98/98 SE. Now granted, it wasn't exactly innovative (I'll give Win 95 and XP/2000 that credit) but it refined what was good about the Windows 9x UI (animations, more colorful and realistic icons) and was also very "forward thinking" (remember WebTV for Windows, ICS, and the Active Desktop?) Now those weren't very practical features in the dial-up age but they still were pretty cool

IIRC, Vista was first based on XP, but then after Microsoft thought that it was becoming too bloated, they did a massive code rewrite based on Windows Server 2003.

 

To sum it all up it goes like this.

Win95

Win2000

WinXP

Vista does not even qualify as innovative in any way.

Thread closed!

 

My vote was for Win 98/se , win 2000, and Windows XP

Win 98/SE because of Having a good balance of Internet services without all the bloatware that some future OS' included - simply it;s simplicity and ease of use

Windows 2000 because it removed the 4GB limit for a disk partition that limited NT from being a far better OS. It also included as has been noted before. it was plain and simply - STABLE. I still use this on my dell and I wouldn't trade this for all the windows Vistas in the world. By far my favorite OS. Sleek and good for managing my music. the service packs were very welcome. Automatic Updates were one of the key things for me.

XP because of the added security and a greater ease of use for those new to the Windows family of OS'. Decient stability which is still showing till today.

 

No NT in the options?

3.1/95 were solid OS's, but I still spent more time in DOS until 98 came out. But NT is the Windows that everything later has grown from, and I liked that transition more than any other. 98 SE was a good, stable OS that I used for a long time, and 2K was also very solid. I think that XP was where it all started going horribly wrong. There was some justification for tying IE to the operating system, but the ability to remove crap like Windows Media Player, Messenger, and all of the other bloat has been taken away. I might even like Vista if I could install the core operating system without the s***load of programs that I have no desire to use.

 

Windows Workstation 2008 sounds like what you want.

Google it if you've not run across it before. I've done it, and it's a great "Vista."

 

I managed to get 3.11 to run natively on my Inspiron 1520, as well as dual-booting it with Vista. See this thread at Neosmart forums; I outline how to do the DOS part in Post #12. It requires reformatting your hard drive - which means you'll have to back up all your data first - but it is possible to run MS-DOS 6.22 natively on the Inspiron 1520. The only inconvenience I noticed was that the HIMEM check took quite a long time. But it ran, as far as I could tell, perfectly.

Installing Windows 3.11 after you get DOS isn't too bad - just install CD-ROM drivers for DOS and then put in a CD-ROM with all of the Windows 3.11 install disks - you can install Windows 3.11 without changing disks four times if all the information from all the disks is in one directory. And fortunately, there's just few enough files that they all fit in a root directory.

As to 3.11, it seemed to run fine. I could add files to it from Vista or CD ROM, and take them off from Vista. I never did get Internet working, but it may be possible - from what I gathered, Internet probably never was easy in Windows 3.11, especially ethernet-based broadband. The only program I had that claimed to measure memory use also said most of it was being used, but I have no idea how reliable that was - it didn't seem to run slow.

Neither Windows 95 nor Windows 98 installed natively. 95 seemed to install, but would not start thereafter and messed up the DOS partition. 98 froze partway through the install. I wouldn't advise trying to install them.

And, to others curious about trying this: I don't guarantee this works. Some stuff, like step #11 that has to do with the phantom partition you can reach from the Vista Repair command prompt, worked for a reason that I do not know and maybe be configuration-specific. I don't see any reason in particular why it wouldn't work, but neither do I understand exactly why it does work. I'm more confident that it will work on another Inspiron 1520 than on some other computer. ThunderCat69, the only differences I can see between our configurations are 5400 vs. 7200 RPM HDD, 200 MHz in CPU, and Vista x64 instead of the x86 Vista I had at that time. I don't see any reason why those would cause this not to work.

Oh, and Dell vs. Intel wireless card - but I never got that working in 3.11 anyways.

 

As one of the few people (here or anywhere) who's used Windows in all its incarnations since 1.0 was an API with a glorified shell tacked on, I'd probably say Windows 95 was the biggest leap forward. It offered some rich functionality at the time along with an excellent user interface that otherwise didn't much exist for x86 systems. OS/2 and NT were far too slow, and Geoworks was dying. Windows 95 offered up useful memory management, superb driver support and indeed that driver model was essentially the gun that put a bullet in Wordperfect, Lotus, etc.

I don't know if I'd all its technology as innovative as its strategic handling. It's pretty unique to create a product that everyone wants, achieves both consumer and business success, puts a bullet in multiple competitors and does so all within a few months of release.