Friday, June 15, 2012

First look at Windows 8

Today at a Conference in the College where Microsoft have an Exhibitors stand I had my first view of Windows 8. The new version is not as radical as I thought it would be - many applications work in the same way as before - but the whole concept of what Windows is has changed dramatically.

My demo was on a Dell touch-screen laptop - it reminded me very much of my iPad when it is attached to its keyboard. The new Metro style App screen works well for me now that I am used to the iPad and iPhone. Everything works very smoothly, and as I have discovered with the iPad and keyboard - it is very easy to get used to switching from touch the screen to typing on the keyboard. I wonder will this be the end of the mouse?

Every new version of Windows always reminds me of the first version I worked with - v3.0. This would have been back in 1990 when it was released. I had been familiar with the use of windows on the Apple Mac Classic, but when I joined CBT Systems in 1989 the OS we used was MS-DOS. Windows 3.0 seemed like a world apart, and soooooo like copying the Mac. At the time I recall showing a colleague - "Look, you can have two applications open at the same time!". The reaction was "who would ever want to do that?". So for us old-timers, see what you can remember from the screen-shot of Windows 3.0 below:

Windows 3.0 - a long way from Windows 8.
Image link to Wikipedia.
Confess - how many hours did you spend playing Reversi?

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