Windows ME

Maybe in years to come we'll look back on the history of the mainstream Desktop Windows platform and decide it was the platform that would never die. Microsoft has said that the current version of the Windows 9x code would be the last, only to release another one later on with Windows ME (Millennium Edition) -æthe latest version charged with maintaining this honourable tradition.

Despite repeated claims otherwise, Windows ME has the appearance of an aged film star who has received one too many facelifts. The unarguable reality is that backwards compatibility is a horrible cross to bear, and that it can act like a thick mud engulfing your feet if you're not careful. To understand how we've got to Windows ME as a product, we need to go back and examine the historical record.

From its humble beginnings

Right back at the start of family tree is Windows 1. You may well be surprised that I've dared to go back to the mid 1980s, but many of the core API's of Windows were cast in stone at that point; and they're still there today inside ME. The Windows family moved from the single document non-overlapping window model of Windows 1.x to the more familiar 'look and feel' of Windows 2.x. But under the covers, more important changes were afoot. Windows 2.x had gained real memory management, and there were early tinkerings with full protected mode memory support in the rarely-seen Windows 2.1 386 product of the late 1980s. This was the precursor to the full protect mode memory management version of Windows 3 in 1990, at which point Windows moved into the mainstream and started to conquer the world. In the usual way, Windows 3.x went through a number of subversions, including gaining TCP/IP and networking client/server support until we arrived at the big Windows 95 release some five years later. Despite Microsoft's protestations to the contrary, it was clear that Windows 95 did still have MS-DOS underneath the product. You could still load 16-bit real-mode MS-DOS device drivers via the familiar config.sys file, and you could happily use 16-bit drivers from the Windows 3.x world too.

This was possible because it was the same codebase, the same core APIs and systems that stretched back into the days where the Neolithic DOS dinosaurs of Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect ruled the planet.

Be in no doubt that Windows 95 added a whole raft of capability to the core platform - plug and play, power management, support for a huge range of hardware were just the starting points. The rapid adoption of Internet protocols meant that HTML and TCP/IP were no longer optional components, but core foundations. In the usual way, 95 went through a few Service Release subversions, gaining USB support along the way.

Then came Windows 98, which promised to be the first of the last releases. It had built-in Web functionality, more Wizards and better setup and management facilities. After all, remember that we were supposed to be on a unified Windows platform based around the NT core by then. Remember that 98 could happily still load those old real-mode DOS drivers and pretend to play in a Windows 3.x space too. The driver model had been somewhat improved with the introduction of the WDM (Windows Driver Model), which meant that drivers could be targeted at both Windows 98 and the forthcoming Windows NT 5, subsequently called Windows 2000. It was clear that Microsoft needed to get the legacy code support for old hardware out of the Windows platform, if it was going to succeed in moving off the DOS/Win3.x/9x platform on to the NT/Windows 2000 kernel.