The other CD I remember was Encarta 95 which was an absolute godsend for homework. It meant less time in the library checking out Encyclopedia Britannica. The start up "ident" takes me back to about the age of 10 years old:
The other CD I remember was Encarta 95 which was an absolute godsend for homework. It meant less time in the library checking out Encyclopedia Britannica. The start up "ident" takes me back to about the age of 10 years old:
Damn, we had Encarta 95 too! Don't know what happened to the disk though, seeing as I still have a load of floppies of games from our first computer.
Encarta 95 really was the forerunner to the internet for me. I spent hours and hours on it doing research for homework and looking up useless information about various topics. I seem to recall I might have updated to Encarta 97 at one point but that was the last version I had. I suspect it got relegated and eventually binned once I got the internet in about 1999. Although I didn't think much about it at the time, Encarta was pretty revolutionary really, for me as a child at least. It was the first time I was really able to bring up lots of information at the stroke of a few keys. I think that whetted my appetite and I probably nagged my parents to let me have the internet.
Incidentally, on the subject of my early forays into the internet - I was recently clearing out my loft and sorted through a load of old school books and found something very historic - a copy of TV Home's BBC News 24 page that I printed off on 5th October 2000. I think that might have been when I first discovered Asa's website. I think we had very recently had Sky Digital installed in September 2000 and that was when I first saw BBC News 24 and must have been taken with the idents and logged on to the new-fangled internet to see if I could find out more. I then went on holiday to Rome later in October and saw the new corporate branding on BBC World and that was that - I became hooked on TV Home and a few months later, TV Forum!
When The London Studios was decomissioned more than two summers ago, we found loads of old service machines running various flavours of Windows - right back to NT4, which was running the backend of a few legacy application servers!
A lot of broadcast software was specifically written for NT4/2000 Professional/XP. Indeed, the SpotOn Grams machines ran XP and then for a short period on Windows 7 until TLS closed in April 2018.
ITV ran a highly customised Windows XP environment until the late 2000s, which Novell Netware sat on top of. Then at the beginning of the 2010s the whole lot was replaced with Apple Mac. All staff are standard issued a MacBook Air. Crazy to think how everyone was tethered to a desktop Windows machine once upon a time!
When The London Studios was decomissioned more than two summers ago, we found loads of old service machines running various flavours of Windows - right back to NT4, which was running the backend of a few legacy application servers!
A lot of broadcast software was specifically written for NT4/2000 Professional/XP. Indeed, the SpotOn Grams machines ran XP and then for a short period on Windows 7 until TLS closed in April 2018.
ITV ran a highly customised Windows XP environment until the late 2000s, which Novell Netware sat on top of. Then at the beginning of the 2010s the whole lot was replaced with Apple Mac. All staff are standard issued a MacBook Air. Crazy to think how everyone was tethered to a desktop Windows machine once upon a time!
Marks and Spencer were still using XP machines up until a couple of years ago. Their main stock software was programmed for that OS.
Bought a desktop from Currys a few years back, Hard drive failed within 2 weeks, took it back in for repair and for some reason they installed 8 Pro on it.
So never had to deal with it booting into the tiles, and when 10 came out, it upgraded to Pro alongside it so now it never tries to install updates whenever it feels like it. It always asks me if I want to download them.
Windows 8 wasn't bad as in it crashed a lot like Me, in fact it had a lot of good technical improvements from Windows 7, it's just the interface. They created a touch first interface for an OS that most people only ever use with a mouse/trackpad and keyboard (let's ignore the fact that even if you did use Windows 8 on a tablet, the app ecosystem was virtually non-existent). Most people had no need for the new Store apps or interface, and just wanted to disable it and be in the old 'Desktop' environment where the programs they actually used were.
Marks and Spencer were still using XP machines up until a couple of years ago. Their main stock software was programmed for that OS.
That was more likely XP Embedded rather than full blown XP. XP Embedded was still supported long after XP wasn't. It was quite often found in ATM machines, cash registers and various other places and was more prolific than it might appear. It's just basically a very cut down version of Windows XP.
Windows 8 wasn't bad as in it crashed a lot like Me, in fact it had a lot of good technical improvements from Windows 7, it's just the interface. They created a touch first interface for an OS that most people only ever use with a mouse/trackpad and keyboard (let's ignore the fact that even if you did use Windows 8 on a tablet, the app ecosystem was virtually non-existent). Most people had no need for the new Store apps or interface, and just wanted to disable it and be in the old 'Desktop' environment where the programs they actually used were.
The issue with Windows 8 was that Microsoft was trying to a one size fit all approach which for PCs and laptops doesn't work.
Windows 98 was my first, then the pretty terrible Me. Vista and 8 were absolutely awful. When they restored the start button for 8.1 it got a little better. Windows 10 is currently stable - I’ve never had any issues with it.
Windows 8 wasn't bad as in it crashed a lot like Me, in fact it had a lot of good technical improvements from Windows 7, it's just the interface. They created a touch first interface for an OS that most people only ever use with a mouse/trackpad and keyboard (let's ignore the fact that even if you did use Windows 8 on a tablet, the app ecosystem was virtually non-existent). Most people had no need for the new Store apps or interface, and just wanted to disable it and be in the old 'Desktop' environment where the programs they actually used were.
The issue with Windows 8 was that Microsoft was trying to a one size fit all approach which for PCs and laptops doesn't work.
Although it could be argued it came too soon, because the same functionality is in Windows 10 when you put it in Tablet Mode, which was the same as Windows 8 did by default.
The main stumbling point with Windows 8 (and 8.1 after it) from a user point of view was the lack of a Start Menu, a key part of every version of Windows since the days of Windows 95. Perhaps if it had had a Start Menu it may have been more successful and booted to the "normal" desktop from the off (as was the default behaviour added much later on if you had a mouse connected), but by that point Windows 7 was gaining market share again.
Windows 8 wasn't bad as in it crashed a lot like Me, in fact it had a lot of good technical improvements from Windows 7, it's just the interface. They created a touch first interface for an OS that most people only ever use with a mouse/trackpad and keyboard (let's ignore the fact that even if you did use Windows 8 on a tablet, the app ecosystem was virtually non-existent). Most people had no need for the new Store apps or interface, and just wanted to disable it and be in the old 'Desktop' environment where the programs they actually used were.
The issue with Windows 8 was that Microsoft was trying to a one size fit all approach which for PCs and laptops doesn't work.
Although it could be argued it came too soon, because the same functionality is in Windows 10 when you put it in Tablet Mode, which was the same as Windows 8 did by default.
The main stumbling point with Windows 8 (and 8.1 after it) from a user point of view was the lack of a Start Menu, a key part of every version of Windows since the days of Windows 95. Perhaps if it had had a Start Menu it may have been more successful and booted to the "normal" desktop from the off (as was the default behaviour added much later on if you had a mouse connected), but by that point Windows 7 was gaining market share again.
I remember getting a new laptop around the time Windows 8 launched and it did get some getting used to after using Windows 7.