TURN YOUR PC INTO A 1980s COMPUTER
If the world today seems depressing, why not revisit the fun and excitement of computing in the 1980s? The operating system you’re probably using now has its roots all the way back in 1981, when MS-DOS first hit the scene (see more on this story in Retro, p123). Their established competitor, CP/M, had been shipping since the middle of the previous decade, but it never caught on in the same way – although it would later make its way into many British homes as the OS that underpinned the Amstrad PCW range of word-processing computers.
Running any of these text-based OSes today feels like a dry and limited experience, but you don’t have to skip ahead very far to get to the birth of Windows. Version 1.0 shipped in 1985, followed up later the same year with 1.01 – and then in 1987 by Windows 2.0, which introduced the radical new feature of overlapping application windows. Radical for PCs, at least.
After that, of course, came Windows 3.0, which was the first edition to really gain mainstream appeal – a success that Microsoft built on with the significantly updated Windows 3.1. Those editions weren’t released until 1990 and 1992 respectively, however, so don’t qualify if you
