It was 24 years ago this week, on October 25, 2001, that Microsoft released Windows XP. I find it interesting that Microsoft released two of the most beloved Windows versions in the same week, 8 years apart, and another one of the worst Windows versions, Windows 8, in the same week, but after these two.
Windows how it ought to be
In some regards, Windows XP was the first version of Windows where Microsoft was firing on all cylinders. For business users, XP was a minor upgrade from Windows 2000. But for home use, it was a huge step up from Windows 98 or the enraging Windows ME. It was significantly more reliable than Windows 98 and especially ME. And since it was a consumer operating system, it was much more likely to have drivers for the type of hardware you would have in the home than Windows 2000.
Arguably, XP was a better operating system for gaming than Windows 2000, but that probably depends on what you were wanting to play. I never had much trouble getting the games I liked to play working on Windows 2000, but your experience with it may have been different. If your favorite game happened to be one of those titles that didn’t run under Windows 2000 but ran under XP, then the difference was significant to you.
XP was a huge step forward from Windows 98 because one misbehaving application probably wasn’t going to take down the whole operating system. I won’t say it never happened, but it was much more rare than it had been under Windows 98, because of the way the two systems were designed. A misbehaving process also generally could not cause another process to crash.
Windows XP was considerably more demanding on system resources than Windows 98 had been, but consider around 3 years had passed between the two releases. Back then, 3 years was a long time, and a top-end computer from 2001 was approximately three times faster than a top-end computer from 1998. The upgrade to XP was a heavy lift, but PCs were ready.
We liked Windows XP even better after Microsoft tried to take it away
But I don’t think anything cemented Windows XP in the hearts and minds of its fans as much as what came next did.
By 2007 or so, arguably, the market was ready for something new. Three years passed between Windows 98 and XP, and there was a big improvement between those two versions. So after a four years had passed, it was natural to be curious what else Microsoft could come up with.
What they came up was was Windows Vista, which overpromised, underdelivered, and arrived late. Microsoft does that a lot, and sometimes they get away with it. But Vista was slow and laggy. And it didn’t deliver enough new and useful functionality for people to forgive the lagginess. You really needed a new computer to run Vista, but even if you bought a new computer, XP ran noticeably better on it.
Windows XP still had significant market share when it went end of life. Fortunately for all involved, by then, Windows 7 was ready. Microsoft even produced a family pack that was a bundle of three Windows 7 upgrades at a discounted price to help encourage adoption.
Windows XP as a retro system
I have a hard time thinking of Windows XP as retro. But people younger than me, especially those who grew up using it, are nostalgic for it. And it completely makes sense. They saw the cycle of good Windows versions followed by bad ones, and for them, XP was at or near the beginning of that cycle. Between that and whatever games they remember playing during that timeframe, of course they are going to be nostalgic for it. And good XP-capable hardware is still reasonably affordable, which is not true of a lot of retro things. I remember being able to go out on a Saturday with $100 in my pocket, and I could come home with a cool retro machine and still have some money left over. About the only time you can do that now is with Windows XP- or Windows 7-era hardware.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
I love retrospectives like this one, and this makes me want to get a gaming PC with Windows XP! I already have a copy of Windows XP, so I’m halfway there! Having another PC with Windows 95/98 and MS-DOS would also be great.
The screenshot caption is not quite correct. It says: “Windows XP introduced consumers to fully pre-emptive multitasking with memory protection.” In reality, it was Windows 95 that did that. Windows XP’s main feature is bringing the stable NT 5.x operating system into the consumer realm.
Windows 95 absolutely did NOT have memory protection. It had pre-emptive multitasking, but lack of memory protection was the difference between 9x and NT and the reason NT was more reliable, as well as more secure.
32-bit applications in Windows 95 did have their own page tables and could not, by definition, write into other processes’ memory. And even though there’s a shared view into the first 64K of physical RAM and a shared view into the system DOS VM’s ~1 MB of V86-mode memory (including HMA), neither of those were easily accessible, because the default selectors forbid access.
Maybe we simply disagree on the definition of “memory protection” here? To me, memory protection starts when a system is making an earnest attempt at it, avoiding that a wild pointer (or null pointer) did something nasty to the system. And by definition, Windows 95 (and even Standard-Mode and Enhanced-Mode Windows 3.x, if you squint a bit) did that.
But yes, there were some loopholes which were only closed with NT. If your definition of memory protection includes that it must be watertight, then Windows 95 indeed falls short of that. Saying that it “absolutely did not have memory protection” is a bit of a stretch though 🙂
I think I’m one of the few people in the world who had little contact with XP at home during its heyday.
I jumped straight from 2000 to Vista (my machine was good enough and ran Vista perfectly), but outside the home, it was the main operating system for 99% of people.
I started using XP more in 2008 when I bought my first netbook. XP ran smoothly on the Atom, it was perfect. I kept that netbook until 2013.
One of the fascinating aspects of looking back at these old operating systems is the changing design aesthetic – something I never really noticed as a user at the time, but then again as Joni Mitchell once said “you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.” That whole 90s Y2K design language and the Frutiger Aero look which succeeded it in the early 2000s really were markedly different to what came before and how things have evolved since.