Today, The Grandma has been readingabout Herman Hollerith, the German-American inventor whodeveloped an electromechanical tabulating machine for punched cards and patented on a day like today in 1889.
Herman Hollerith (February 29, 1860-November 17, 1929) was a German-American statistician, inventor, andbusinessman who developed an electromechanical tabulating machine for punched cards to assist in summarizing information and, later, in accounting.
His invention of the punched card tabulating machine, patented in 1884, marks the beginning of the era of mechanized binary code and semiautomatic data processing systems, and his concept dominated that landscape for nearly a century.
Hollerith founded a company that was amalgamated in 1911 with several other companies to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company.
In 1924, the company was renamed International Business Machines (IBM) and became one of the largest and most successful companies of the 20th century. Hollerith is regarded as one of the seminal figures in the development of data processing.
Herman Hollerith was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1860, where he also spent his early childhood.
At the suggestion of John Shaw Billings, Hollerith developed a mechanism using electrical connections to increment a counter, recording information.
Hollerith determined that data in specified locations on a card, arranged in rows and columns, could be counted or sorted electromechanically. A description of this system, An Electric Tabulating System (1889), was submitted by Hollerith to Columbia University as his doctoral thesis, and is reprinted in Brian Randell's 1982 The Origins of Digital Computers, Selected Papers.
On January 8, 1889, Hollerith was issued U.S. Patent 395,782.
Hollerith had left teaching and began working for the United States Census Bureau in the year he filed his first patent application. Titled Art of Compiling Statistics, it was filed on September 23, 1884; U.S. Patent 395,782 was granted on January 8, 1889.
Hollerith initially did business under his own name, as The Hollerith Electric Tabulating System, specializing in punched card data processing equipment. He provided tabulators and other machines under contract for the Census Office, which used them for the 1890 census. The net effect of the many changes from the 1880 census: the larger population, the data items to be collected, the Census Bureau headcount, the scheduled publications, and the use of Hollerith'selectromechanical tabulators, reduced the time required to process the census from eight years for the 1880 census to six years for the 1890 census.
In 1896, Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company (in 1905 renamed The Tabulating Machine Company). Many major census bureaus around the world leased his equipment and purchased his cards, as did major insurance companies. Hollerith's machines were used for censuses in England & Wales, Italy, Germany, Russia, Austria, Canada, France, Norway, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines, and again in the 1900 U.S. census.
He invented the first automatic card-feed mechanism and the first keypunch. The 1890 Tabulator was hardwired to operate on 1890 Census cards. A control panel in his 1906 Type I Tabulator simplified rewiring for different jobs. The 1920s removable control panel supported prewiring and near instant job changing. These inventions were among the foundations of the data processing industry, and Hollerith's punched cards (later used for computer input/output) continued in use for almost a century.
In 1911, four corporations, including Hollerith's firm, were amalgamated to form a fifth company, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR). Under the presidency of Thomas J. Watson, CTR was renamed International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) in 1924.
By 1933, The Tabulating Machine Company name had disappeared as subsidiary companies were subsumed by IBM.
Herman Hollerith died November 17, 1929. Hollerith is buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in the Georgetown neighbourhood of Washington, D.C.
Hollerith cards were named after Herman Hollerith, as were Hollerith strings and Hollerith constants.
Today, The Grandma has been reading about IBM, the American multinational technology company that was founded as the Computing TabulatingRecording Company on a day like today in 1911.
International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York and present in over 175 countries.
IBM is the largest industrial research organization in the world, with 19 research facilities across a dozen countries, having held the record for most annual U.S. patents generated by a business for 29 consecutive years from 1993 to 2021.
IBM was founded in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), a holding company of manufacturers of record-keeping and measuring systems. It was renamed International Business Machines in 1924 and soon became the leading manufacturer of punch-card tabulating systems.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the IBM mainframe, exemplified by the System/360, was the world's dominant computing platform, with the company producing 80 percent of computers in the U.S. and 70 percent of computers worldwide.
IBM entered the microcomputer market in the 1980s with the IBM Personal Computer, which soon became known as PC, one of IBM's best selling products. Due to a lack of foresight by IBM, the PC was not well protected by intellectual property laws. As a consequence, IBM quickly began losing its market dominance to emerging competitors in the PC market, while at the same time the openness of the PC platform has ensured PC's longevity as the most popular microcomputer standard.
Beginning in the 1990s, the company began downsizing its operations and divesting from commodity production, most notably selling its personal computer division to the Lenovo Group in 2005. IBM has since concentrated on computer services, software, supercomputers, and scientific research. Since 2000, its supercomputers have consistently ranked among the most powerful in the world, and in 2001 it became the first company to generate more than 3,000 patents in one year, beating this record in 2008 with over 4,000 patents. As of 2022, the company held 150,000 patents.
As one of the world's oldest and largest technology companies, IBM has been responsible for several technological innovations, including the automated teller machine (ATM), dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), the floppy disk, the hard disk drive, the magnetic stripe card, the relational database, the SQL programming language, and the UPC barcode. The company has made inroads in advanced computer chips, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and data infrastructure. IBM employees and alumni have won various recognitions for their scientific research and inventions, including six Nobel Prizes and six Turing Awards.
IBM is a publicly traded company and one of 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It is among the world's largest employers, with over 297,900 employees worldwide in 2022. Despite its relative decline within the technology sector, IBM remains the seventh largest technology company by revenue, and 67th largest overall company by revenue in the United States. It is also consistently ranked among the world's most recognizable, valuable, and admired brands.
IBM originated with several technological innovations developed and commercialized in the late 19th century. Julius E. Pitrap patented the computing scale in 1885; Alexander Dey invented the dial recorder (1888); Herman Hollerith patented the Electric Tabulating Machine (1889); and Willard Bundy invented a time clock to record workers' arrival and departure times on a paper tape (1889).
On June 16, 1911, their four companies were amalgamated in New York State by Charles Ranlett Flint forming a fifth company, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) based in Endicott, New York. The five companies had 1,300 employees and offices and plants in Endicott and Binghamton, New York; Dayton, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; Washington, D.C.; and Toronto, Canada.
IBM has a large and diverse portfolio of products and services. As of 2016, these offerings fall into the categories of cloud computing, artificial intelligence, commerce, data and analytics, Internet of things (IoT), IT infrastructure, mobile, digital workplace and cybersecurity.
IBM Cloud includes infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) offered through public, private and hybrid cloud delivery models. For instance, the IBM Bluemix PaaS enables developers to quickly create complex websites on a pay-as-you-go model. IBM SoftLayer is a dedicated server, managed hosting and cloud computing provider, which in 2011 reported hosting more than 81,000 servers for more than 26,000 customers. IBM also provides Cloud Data Encryption Services (ICDES), using cryptographic splitting to secure customer data.
Hardware designed by IBM for these categories include IBM's Power microprocessors, which were designed into many console gaming systems, including Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo's Wii U. IBM Secure Blue is encryption hardware that can be built into microprocessors, and in 2014, the company revealed TrueNorth, a neuromorphic CMOS integrated circuit and announced a $3 billion investment over the following five years to design a neural chip that mimics the human brain, with 10 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses, but that uses just 1 kilowatt of power.
In 2016, the company launched all-flash arrays designed for small and midsized companies, which includes software for data compression, provisioning, and snapshots across various systems.
We can learn from IBM's successful history that you don't have to have the best product to become number one. You don't even have to have a good product.
The Grandma loves chess and today she has decided to visit the Chess Catalan Federation, FederacióCatalana d'Escacs, to play a little against some of the most intelligent brains of the city.
She wants to commemorate when a computer won a human playing chess. It was Deep Blue against GarryKasparov and it was a dangerous advertisement. Be careful with the Artificial Intelligence...
Chess is a two-player strategy board game played on a checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an 8×8 grid. The game is played by millions of people worldwide. Chess is believed to be derived from the Indian game chaturangasometime before the 7th century. Chaturanga is also the likely ancestor of the Eastern strategy games xiangqi, janggi, and shogi. Chess reached Europe by the 9th century, due to the Umayyad conquest of Hispania.
Play involves no hidden information. Each player begins with 16 pieces: one king, one queen, two rooks, two knights, two bishops, and eight pawns. Eachpiece type moves differently, with the most powerful being the queen and the least powerful the pawn.
The objective is to checkmate the opponent's king by placing it under an inescapable threat of capture. To this end, a player's pieces are used to attack and capture the opponent's pieces, while supporting each other. During the game, play typically involves exchanging pieces for the opponent's similar pieces, and finding and engineering opportunities to trade advantageously or to get a better position.
In addition to checkmate, a player wins the game if the opponent resigns, or in a timed game, runs out of time. There are also several ways that a game can end in a draw.
Deep Blue was a chess-playing computer developed by IBM. It is known for being the first computer chess-playing system to win both a chess game and a chess match against a reigning world champion under regular time controls.
Garry Kasparov vs. Deep Blue
Deep Blue won its first game against a world champion on 10 February 1996, when it defeated Garry Kasparov in game one of a six-game match. However, Kasparov won three and drew two of the following five games, defeating Deep Blue by a score of 4–2.
Deep Blue was then heavily upgraded, and played Kasparov again in May 1997. Deep Blue won game six, therefore winning the six-game rematch 3½–2½ and becoming the first computer system to defeat a reigning world champion in a match under standard chess tournament time controls.
Kasparov accused IBM of cheating and demanded a rematch. IBMrefused and dismantled Deep Blue.
Development for Deep Blue began in 1985 with the ChipTest project at Carnegie Mellon University. This project eventually evolved into Deep Thought, at which point the development team was hired by IBM. The project evolved once more with the new name Deep Blue in 1989. Grandmaster Joel Benjamin was also part of the development team.
The project was started as ChipTest at Carnegie Mellon University by Feng-hsiung Hsu, followed by its successor, Deep Thought. After their graduation from Carnegie Mellon, Hsu, Thomas Anantharaman, and Murray Campbell from the Deep Thought team were hired by IBM Research to continue their quest to build a chess machine that could defeat the world champion.
Hsu and Campbell joined IBM in autumn 1989, with Anantharaman following later. Anantharaman subsequently left IBM for Wall Street and Arthur Joseph Hoane joined the team to perform programming tasks. Jerry Brody, a long-time employee of IBM Research, was recruited for the team in 1990. The team was managed first by Randy Moulic, followed by Chung-Jen (C J) Tan.
After Deep Thought's 1989 match against Kasparov, IBM held a contest to rename the chess machine and it became Deep Blue, a play on IBM'snickname, Big Blue.
After a scaled-down version of Deep Blue, Deep Blue Jr., played Grandmaster Joel Benjamin, Hsu and Campbell decided that Benjamin was the expert they were looking for to develop Deep Blue's opening book, and Benjamin was signed by IBM Research to assist with the preparations for Deep Blue's matches against Garry Kasparov.
The team that created Deep Blue
In 1995 Deep Blue prototype,actually DeepThoughtII, renamed for PR reasons, played in the 8th World Computer Chess Championship.
Deep Blue prototype played the computer program Wchess to a draw while Wchess was running on a personal computer. In round 5 DeepBlue prototype had the white pieces and lost to the computer program Fritz 3 in 39 moves while Fritz was running on an Intel Pentium 90 MHz personal computer. In the end of the championship Deep Blue prototype was tied for second place with the computer program Junior while Junior was running on a personal computer.
Deep Blue
employed custom VLSI chips to execute the alpha-beta search algorithm
in parallel, an example of GOFAI (Good Old-Fashioned Artificial
Intelligence) rather than of deep learning which would come a decade
later. It was a brute force approach, and one of its developers even
denied that it was artificial intelligence at all.
Deep Blue and Kasparov played each other on two occasions. The first match began on 10 February 1996, in which Deep Blue became the first machine to win a chess game against a reigning world champion, GarryKasparov,under regular time controls. However, Kasparov won three and drew two of the following five games, beating Deep Blue by a score of 4–2, wins count 1 point, draws count ½ point. The match concluded on 17 February 1996.
Deep Blue was then heavily upgraded, unofficially nicknamed Deeper Blue, and played Kasparov again in May 1997, winning the six-game rematch 3½–2½, ending on 11 May. Deep Blue won the deciding game six after Kasparov made a mistake in the opening, becoming the first computer system to defeat a reigning world champion in a match under standard chess tournament time controls.
The system derived its playing strength mainly from brute force computing
power. It was a massively parallel, RS/6000 SP Thin P2SC-based system
with 30 nodes, with each node containing a 120 MHz P2SC microprocessor,
enhanced with 480 special purpose VLSI chess chips. Its chess playing
program was written in C and ran under the AIX operating system.
It was capable of evaluating 200 million positions per second, twice as fast as the 1996 version. In June 1997, Deep Blue
was the 259th most powerful supercomputer according to the TOP500 list,
achieving 11.38 GFLOPS on the High-Performance LINPACK benchmark.
The Grandma visiting Deep Blue nowadays
The Deep Blue chess computer that defeated Kasparov in 1997 would typically search to a depth of between six and eight moves to a maximum of twenty or even more moves in some situations. David Levy and Monty Newborn estimate that one additional ply, half-move, increases the playing strength 50 to 70 Elo points.
Deep Blue's evaluation function was initially written in a generalized form, with many to-be-determined parameters. The optimal values for these parameters were then determined by the system itself, by analyzing thousands of master games. The evaluation function had been split into 8,000 parts, many of them designed for special positions.
In the opening book there were over 4,000 positions and 700,000 grandmaster games. The endgame database contained many six piece endgames and five or fewer piece positions. Before the second match, the chess knowledge of the program was fine tuned by grandmaster Joel Benjamin. The opening library was provided by grandmasters Miguel Illescas, John Fedorowicz, and Nick de Firmian.
When Kasparov requested that he be allowed to study other games that Deep Blue had played so as to better understand his opponent, IBM refused. However, Kasparov did study many popular PC games to become familiar with computer game play in general.
Writer Nate Silver suggests that a bug in Deep Blue's software led to a seemingly random move, the 44th in the first game of the second match, which Kasparov misattributed to superior intelligence. Subsequently, Kasparov experienced a decline in performance due to anxiety in the following game. Kasparov rejects this interpretation.
Computer scientists believed that playing chess was a good measurement for the effectiveness of artificial intelligence, and by beating a world champion chess player, IBM showed that they had made significant progress.
Checkmate, the King is dead
After the loss, Kasparov said that he sometimes saw deep intelligence and creativity in the machine's moves, suggesting that during the second game, human chess players had intervened on behalf of the machine, which would be a violation of the rules.
IBM denied that it cheated, saying the only human intervention occurred between games. The rules provided for the developers to modify the program between games, an opportunity they said they used to shore up weaknesses in the computer's play that were revealed during the course of the match.
Kasparov requested printouts of the machine's log files, but IBM refused, although the company later published the logs on the Internet. Kasparov demanded a rematch, but IBM refused and dismantled Deep Blue. Owing to an insufficient sample of games between Deep Blue and officially rated chess players, a chess rating for Deep Blue was not established.
In 2003 a documentary film was made that explored these claims. Entitled Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine, the film interviewed some people who suggest that Deep Blue's victory was a ploy by IBM to boost its stock value.
One of the cultural impacts of Deep Blue was the creation of a new game called Arimaa designed to be much more difficult for computers than chess.
One of the two racks that made up Deep Blue is on display at the National Museum of American History in their exhibit about the Information Age; the other rack appears at the Computer History Museum in the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics gallery of the Revolution exhibit. Reports that Deep Blue was sold to United Airlines appear to originate from confusion between Deep Blue itself and other RS6000/SP2 systems.
Feng-hsiung Hsu later claimed in his book Behind Deep Blue that he had the rights to use the Deep Blue design to build a bigger machine independently of IBM to take Kasparov's rematch offer, but Kasparov refused a rematch.
Deep Blue, with its capability of evaluating 200 million positions per second, was the fastest computer to face a world chess champion.
Today, in computer-chess research and matches of world-class players against computers, the focus of play has often shifted to software chess programs, rather than using dedicated chess hardware.
Modern chess programs like Houdini, Rybka, Deep Fritz or Deep Junior are more efficient than the programs during Deep Blue's era. In a November 2006 match between Deep Fritz and world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik, the program ran on a computer system containing a dual-core Intel Xeon 5160 CPU, capable of evaluating only 8 million positions per second, but searching to an average depth of 17 to 18 plies in the middlegame thanks to heuristics; it won 4–2.
The Grandma and her friends have said goodbye to Sardìnnia. They are flying from Casteddu to Barcelona where they are going to continue with their normal lives. Visiting Sardìnnia has been an unforgettable experience, something that they will never forget it.
During the flight back to Barcelona, The Grandma has been studying a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 18) while Claire Fontaine has been reading an interesting report about Windows 1.0 which was released on a day like today in 1985.
Windows 1.0 was a graphical personal computer operating environment developed by Microsoft. Microsoft had worked with Apple Computer to develop applications for Apple's January 1984 original Macintosh, the first mass-produced personal computer with a graphical user interface (GUI) that enabled users to see user friendly icons on screen.
Windows 1.0 was released on November 20, 1985, as the first version of the Microsoft Windows line. It runs as a graphical, 16-bit multi-tasking shell on top of an existing MS-DOS installation. It provides an environment which can run graphical programs designed for Windows, as well as existing MS-DOS software. Its development was spearheaded by the company founder Bill Gates after he saw a demonstration of a similar software suite known as Visi On at COMDEX.
Despite positive responses to its early presentations and support from a number of hardware and software makers, Windows 1.0 was received poorly by critics.
Bill Gates & Microsoft Windows 1.0 in 1985
Critics felt Windows 1.0 did not meet their expectations. In particular, they felt that Windows 1.0 put too much emphasis on mouse input at a time when mouse use was not yet widespread; not providing enough resources for new users; and for performance issues, especially on systems with lower computer hardware specifications.
Despite these criticisms, Windows 1.0 was an important milestone for Microsoft, as it introduced the Microsoft Windows line. Windows 1.0 was declared obsolete and Microsoft stopped providing support and updates for the system on December 31, 2001.
Microsoft began developing a graphical user interface (GUI) in 1981. The development of Windows began after Microsoft founder Bill Gates saw a demonstration at COMDEX 1982 of VisiCorp's Visi On, a GUI software suite for IBM PC compatible computers. In 1983 Microsoft learned that Apple's own GUI software, based in part on Xerox PARC technology, was much more sophisticated, and decided that its own product would be different.
Microsoft first presented Windows to the public on November 10, 1983. Requiring two floppy disk drives and 192 KB of RAM, Microsoft described the software as a device driver for MS-DOS 2.0.
By supporting cooperative multitasking in tiled windows when using well-behaved applications that only used DOS system calls, and permitting non-well-behaved applications to run in a full screen, Windows differed from both Visi On and Apple Computer's Lisa by immediately offering many applications. Unlike Visi On, Windows developers did not need to use Unix to develop IBM PC applications; Microsoft planned to encourage other companies, including competitors, to develop programs for Windows by not requiring a Microsoft user interface in their applications.
Many manufacturers of
MS-DOS computers such as Compaq, Zenith, and DEC promised to provide
support, as did software companies such as Ashton-Tate and Lotus.
Microsoft Windows 1.0
After previewing Windows,BYTE magazine stated in December 1983 that it seems to offer remarkable openness, reconfigurability, and transportability as well as modest hardware requirements and pricing. Barring a surprise product introduction from another company, MicrosoftWindows will be the first large-scale test of the desktop metaphor in the hands of its intended users.
From early in Windows' history Gates viewed it as Microsoft's future. He told InfoWorld magazine in April 1984 that Our strategies and energies as a company are totally committed to Windows, in the same way that we're committed to operating-system kernels like MS-DOS and Xenix. We're also saying that only applications that take advantage of Windows will be competitive in the long run.
IBM was notably absent from Microsoft's announcement, and by late 1984, the press reported a War of the Windows between Windows, IBM's TopView, and Digital Research's Graphics Environment Manager (GEM). Microsoft had promised in November 1983 to ship Windows by April 1984, but subsequently denied that it had announced a release date, and predicted that Windows would ship by June 1985.
Deemphasizing multitasking, the company stated that Windows' purpose, unlike that of TopView, was to turn the computer into a graphics-rich environment while using less memory. After Microsoft persuaded IBM that the latter needed a GUI, in April 1987 the two companies announced the introduction of OS/2 and its graphical OS/2 Presentation Manager, which were supposed to ultimately replace both MS-DOS and Windows.
In November 1987, Windows 1.0 was succeeded by Windows 2.0. Microsoft supported Windows 1.0 for 16 years, until December 31, 2001, the longest out of all versions of Windows.
Windows 1.0
offers limited multitasking of existing MS-DOS programs and
concentrates on creating an interaction paradigm (cf. message loop), an
execution model and a stable API for native programs for the future. Due
to Microsoft's extensive support for backward compatibility, it is not only possible to execute Windows 1.0 binary programs on current versions of Windows to a large extent, but also to recompile their source code into an equally functional modern application with just limited modifications.
Microsoft Windows 1.0
Windows 1.0 is often regarded as a front-end to the MS-DOS operating system, a description which has also been applied to subsequent versions of Windows. Windows 1.0 is an MS-DOS program. Windows 1.0 programs can call MS-DOS functions, and GUI programs are run from .exe files just like MS-DOS programs.
However, Windows .exe files had their own new executable (NE) file format, which only Windows could process and which, for example, allowed demand-loading of code and data. Applications were supposed to handle memory only through Windows' own memory management system, which implemented a software-based virtual memory scheme allowing for applications larger than available RAM.
Because graphics support in MS-DOS is extremely limited, MS-DOS applications have to go to the bare hardware or sometimes just to the BIOS to get work done. Therefore, Windows 1.0 included original device drivers for video cards, a mouse, keyboards, printers and serial communications, and applications were supposed to only invoke APIs built upon these drivers.
However, this extended to other APIs such as file system management functions. In this sense, Windows 1.0 was designed to be extended into a full-fledged operating system, rather than being just a graphics environment used by applications. Indeed, Windows 1.0 is a DOS front-end and cannot operate without a DOS environment, it uses, for example, the file-handling functions provided by DOS. The level of replacement increases in subsequent versions. The system requirements for Windows 1.01 constituted CGA/HGC/EGA (listed as "Monochrome or color monitor"), MS-DOS 2.0, 256 KB of memory or greater, and two double-sided disk drives or a hard drive. Beginning with version 1.03, support for Tandy and AT&T graphics modes was added.
Windows 1.0 runs a shell program known as the MS-DOS Executive, which is little more than a mouse-able output of the DIR command that does not support icons and is not Y2K-compliant. Other supplied programs are Calculator, Calendar, Clipboard Viewer, Clock, Notepad, Paint, Reversi, Cardfile, Terminal and Write. Windows 1.0 does not allow overlapping windows. Instead all windows are tiled. Only dialog boxes can appear over other windows, but cannot be minimized.
Windows 1.0 was released to mixed reviews. Most critics considered the platform to have future potential, but that Windows 1.0
had not fulfilled expectations. Many reviews criticized its demanding
system requirements, especially noting the poor performance experienced
when running multiple applications at once, and that Windows encouraged the use of a mouse for navigation, a relatively new concept at the time.
Microsoft Headquarters, Redmond, Washington
The New York Times compared the performance of Windows on a system with 512 KB of RAM to pouring molasses in the Arctic, and that its design was inflexible for keyboard users due to its dependency on a mouse-oriented interface. In conclusion, the Times felt that the poor performance, lack of dedicated software, uncertain compatibility with DOS programs, and the lack of tutorials for new users made DOS-based software such as Borland Sidekick, which could provide a similar assortment of accessories and multitasking functionality, more desirable for most PC users.
In retrospect, Windows 1.0 was regarded as a flop by contemporary technology publications, who, however, still acknowledged its overall importance to the history of the Windows line.
Nathaniel Borenstein, who went on to develop the MIME standards, and his IT team at Carnegie Mellon University were also critical of Windows when it was first presented to them by a group of Microsoft representatives. Underestimating the future impact of the platform, he believed that in comparison to an in-house window manager, these guys came in with this pathetic and naïve system. We just knew they were never going to accomplish anything.
The Verge considered the poor reception towards the release of Windows 8 in 2012 as a parallel to Microsoft's struggles with early versions of Windows. In a similar fashion to Windows 1.0 running atop MS-DOS as a layer, Windows 8 offered a new type of interface and software geared towards an emerging form of human interface device on PCs, in this case, a touchscreen, software which, coincidentally, also could not run in overlapping windows, and only snapped to the side of the screen, running atop the legacy Windows shell used by previous versions.
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