Serendipity35

Recently, my laptop crashed, and I had to return to an old one that had been sitting on a shelf for a few years. It had Windows 8 from back in 2012. No updates available, and lots of websites and tools did not work. The laptop that crashed has Windows 10 and that will fade away from support in October 2025.

It got me thinking about the now 50-year history of Microsoft.

The company was at the top early on, then went through some tough years and is again near the top. It has been the first or second most valuable business on Earth for the better part of five years.

Microsoft is betting on AI to carry it into the next generation of computing. However, Microsoft's most enduring legacies may be the marks it left on society long ago via Windows. It's not a point of pride for the company or many of its users that much of our world still relies on aged, sometimes obsolete Windows software and computers. This ghost software is still being used, though it is somewhat crippled.

Here are all the versions of Windows so far:
Windows 1.0: November 20, 1985.
Windows 2.0: December 9, 1987.
Windows 3.0: May 22, 1990.
Windows 95: August 24, 1995.
Windows 98: June 25, 1998.
Windows ME (Millennium Edition): September 14, 2000.
Windows 2000: February 17, 2000.
Windows XP: October 25, 2001.
Windows Vista: January 30, 2007.
Windows 7: July 22, 2009 (released to manufacturing), October 22, 2009 (generally available).
Windows 8: October 26, 2012.
Windows 8.1: February 13, 2013.
What happened to Windows 9? (see below)
Windows 10: July 29, 2015.
Windows 11: October 5, 2021.

According to an article on bbc.com, many people and services still use outdated Windows versions.

"Many ATMs still operate on legacy Windows systems, including Windows XP and even Windows NT," which launched in 1993, says Elvis Montiero, an ATM field technician based in Newark, New Jersey. "The challenge with upgrading these machines lies in the high costs associated with hardware compatibility, regulatory compliance, and the need to rewrite proprietary ATM software."

What happened to Windows 9? 

120 years ago, divers discovered a shipwreck off the island of Antikythera in Greece. What they found changed our understanding of human history, and the mysterious Antikythera Mechanism has captured the imagination of archaeologists, mathematicians, and scientists ever since.

The Antikythera Mechanism (c. 50 BCE) was found in a shipwreck off the coast of the island of Antikythera and is now in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens.

It even inspired the plot for the 2023 film Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. The ancient Greek device was used to track celestial movements. In the fictionalized film version, it is called the Archimedes Dial and is said to locate fissures in time. The real Antikythera Mechanism was more of an early astronomical calculator. Not surprisingly, the movie takes creative liberties, turning the artifact into a tool for time travel rather than its historical function of predicting eclipses and tracking planetary positions

Using the latest 3D x-ray and modelling technology, experts are still unravelling the secrets of what else this machine may have been capable of calculating.

Could it be considered an early computer? Yes, it is sometimes regarded as the world’s first analog computer. Designed to predict astronomical positions, eclipses, and even track the cycle of athletic games similar to the Olympic Games. It uses a complex system of gears to model celestial movements, functioning much like a mechanical calculator.

Its sophistication was unmatched in its time, and nothing as advanced appeared again for over a thousand years.

Take a glimpse of the mechanism as it appears in this Hollywood version.

 

Originally posted at Kenneth Ronkowitz – poet, teacher, designer

Some newspapers around the country, including the Chicago Sun-Times and at least one edition of The Philadelphia Inquirer, have published a syndicated summer book list that includes made-up books. Only five of the 15 titles on the list are real. 

Of the books named on this reading list, Brit Bennet, Isabel Allende, Andy Weir, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Min Jin Lee, Rumaan Alam, Rebecca Makkai, Maggie O'Farrell, Percival Everett, and Delia Owens' titles are all books that do not exist. That doesn't mean the authors don't exist. For example, Percival Everett is a well-known author, and his novel, James, just won the Pulitzer Prize, but he never wrote a book called The Rainmakers, supposedly set in a "near-future American West where artificially induced rain has become a luxury commodity." Chilean American novelist Isabel Allende never wrote a book called Tidewater Dreams, which was described as the author's "first climate fiction novel."

Ray Bradbury wrote the wonder-filled summer novel, Dandelion Wine and Jess Walter wrote Beautiful Ruins, and Françoise Sagan wrote Bonjour Tristesse.

The list was part of licensed content provided by King Features, a unit of the publisher Hearst Newspapers, but the Sun-Times did not check it before publishing. So, who is most accountable for the error? Writer Marco Buscaglia has claimed responsibility for it. He says it was partly generated by AI. and told NPR, "Huge mistake on my part and has nothing to do with the Sun-Times. They trust that the content they purchase is accurate, and I betrayed that trust. It's on me 100 percent."

The fake summer reading list is dated May 18, two months after the Chicago Sun-Times announced that 20% of its staff had accepted buyouts "as the paper's nonprofit owner, Chicago Public Media, deals with fiscal hardship."

Another education question is how, where, and why AI created this list? Where was it getting its information? How did it come up with detailed descriptions, such as on set in a "near-future American West where artificially induced rain has become a luxury commodity" for books that are not out there?  How and why did it think these were real books?

Sounds like a good AI lesson to have students investigate and learn how AI operates and why it often creates "hallucinations" (errors and factual mistakes).

A post on https://thehistoryoftheweb.com posits that 1995 Was the Most Important Year for the Web. That's a debatable claim, but they have a point. It was a fascinating and turbulent year in general, as well as for the fairly new Web.

Look at some numbers. At the close of 1994, there were around 2,500 web servers. T the end of 1995, there were almost 75,000 and 700 new servers were being added to the web every day.

The web got a mention in The New York Times because it was new news. But the OJ trial was a bigger story. The White House got a website, but Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky was also happening there. The Oklahoma City bombing was the major story of domestic terrorism. Windows 1995 was launched. The Palm Pilot was released.

The US Department of Justice was building a case for the 1998 lawsuit against Microsoft for what they called "monopolistic corporate maneuvering" because the company's Internet Explorer (trying to overtake Netscape Navigator) was free and bundled into Windows and didn't leave much incentive for competition.

If you're too young to remember Netscape know that by early 1996 that company had made a deal with America’s largest single online services provider, AOL Netscape pulled a Microsoft move and bundled a version of their browser directly into AOL’s platform and also did that with another big player at the time, CompuServe. In six months, Netscape had 10 million new users.

It was the start of the first of two "browser wars," but Internet Explorer ruled for almost a decade. Opera was released in April 1995, making it one of the oldest desktop web browsers to exist, but it never grabbed a large portion of potential users. Firefox 1.0 wouldn't appear until 2004, and Chrome came in 2008. Apple's Safari was released in 2003 but was limited to Apple devices, so it wasn't as big a threat.