I thoroughly enjoyed scrolling through this interesting article on Tech Radar which catalogues the many faces of the Microsoft Windows brand over the last 24 years. The packaging and indeed the whole computing experience have gone on quite a journey.
I never owned a copy of Windows 1.0 but I fondly recall traipsing half the way across a snowy London to buy a 5.25” floppy disk drive for my Amstrad computer (running at a dizzying 12MHz and sporting a massive 20MB hard dick) so I could make use of those rubbish programs that came taped on the covers of early computing magazines:
And thankfully I somehow managed to skip the design (and software) abomination that was Windows ME:
But I’m very pleased to be a contented owner of the new slimmed down (both packaging and software) Windows 7 operating system. I take mine black, like my coffee.
Take a read through the Tech Radar article. It’s revealing to see how much computer-related graphic design has changed over such a short period of time. I wonder, what will our lives look like in 2034?