Microsoft dragged kicking and screaming

Windows to enter late eighties by 2006?

By Lester Haines • Get more from this author

Posted in Letters, 26th January 2001 15:03 GMT

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Andrew Orlowski was most impressed with Chris Ross's erudite musings on his recent article. So were the letters department, so here you go:

That'll be Microsoft "innovating" then. This is an area that has been explorered a lot, especially on Unix. Most notibly in "Rooms: The Use of Multiple Virtual Workspaces to Reduce Space Contention", a seminal UI project from 1986 and many, many projects since which reference it.

My favourite on this theme has to be the "psDoom" project, which is developing a general purpose GUI based on the now open source Doom engine.

Seems that Microsoft are finally being brought kicking and screaming into the State of the Art of the 1980s. I'd like to know when Windows will finally get to be as good as its competitors from the late 80s such as the Acorn Archimedes, Commodore Amiga and NeXT Machine. At their present rate, presumably sometime after Windows 2006.

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