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Class Two: The Windows Operating Systems
I. Survey/History of Operating Systems
The Operating System (OS) is, at minimum, a program for running other programs and manipulating files. It provides an interface for the user to interact with the computer. It may also contain various small applications and utilities. Windows 95 had everything but the kitchen sink added in as part of the OS, which is part of the current antitrust suit against Microsoft.
The first popular OS for PC's was DOS, which stands for Disk Operating System. There were a number of competing versions, IBM DOS, Digital Research DOS, and MS (Microsoft) DOS. DOS is a character-based system, which means that you just type in commands at a prompt. (C:\>) You have to learn the commands, so it is not a simple OS to use, but it is very powerful in what it can do. In Windows, you can still access DOS prompts to do things that Windows itself can't do without special software, provided you know the DOS commands.
The Macintosh Operating System, which only works on Macintosh computers, was the first to break with the character-based model and introduce a Graphical User Interface (GUI - pronounced "gooey") where you use a mouse to click on little pictures, called icons, rather than typing at a prompt.
A number of companies then came out with programs, called shells, that ran in DOS and imitated to one degree or another the Mac interface. The shell from Microsoft was called Windows. The first two versions of Windows were not very popular. In version 3, however, they managed to incorporate the ability to run more than one program at a time, and switch back and forth between them. This is called multitasking, and it was a major step forward for personal computers. Windows 3, and its successors Windows 3.1 and 3.11 (collectively referred to as Windows 3.x) became very popular, and this is the basis of Bill Gates' rise to world ownership. Because of this origin, many of the features - and limitations - of Windows can be traced back to DOS.
DOS and Windows 3.x are what are called 16-bit Operating Systems. What this means is that they send data and instructions to the CPU 16 digits at a time. But before long, computers came out with CPU's that could handle 32 bits at a time, allowing for the possibility of being much faster and more reliable. IBM and Microsoft teamed up to develop a 32-bit Operating System. They soon dissolved the partnership, however, and came out with two competing systems, IBM's OS/2 and Microsoft's Windows NT (for New Technology, although it really wasn't new). Both were targeted mainly at large businesses.
Both OS/2 and Windows NT were backwards compatible, which means they could each run DOS and Windows 3.x programs as well as 32 bit programs designed for them. (However, they could not run each other's 32 bit programs.) In this, they learned from Apple's mistake, that a new OS would not catch on if users had to dump all their old software and start from scratch to use it.
However, Windows NT, while it would run 32 bit software very fast, ran 16 bit software very slowly, compared to Windows 3.x. So Microsoft decided to come out with a compromise system (actually, another shell running in DOS, although Microsoft doesn't like to hear it described that way) that would be a kind of hybrid 16/32 bit system, running 32 bit software more slowly and less reliably than a true 32 bit system like NT, but running 16 bit software as fast as Windows 3.x. This OS was called Windows 95, and the idea was that it would serve as a bridge; people would buy it to run their old 16 bit software, gradually replace their old programs with 32 bit programs, and then move up to NT to run them faster and better.
Sometimes, when you go to a website to download software, you will be offered the choice of 16 bit or 32 bit; remember that 16 bit are for Windows 3.x and 32 bit are for Windows 95/98, NT/2000, or XP.
Because the next major version of Windows NT was seriously delayed (it was supposed to come out in early 1998, but eventually became Windows 2000), Microsoft had to come out with a new version of the "bridge" program, with a few minor improvements (but mostly as a marketing measure) called Windows 98. Windows 98 was promised to be the last of the "bridge" programs, with Windows 2000 being the convergence of the two lines, but there was a problem. In addition to its basic strategy of using Windows 95 as a bridge to NT, Microsoft also decided to give it a new, easier to use interface (which also got added to NT in version 4.0) and market it as the consumer version of Windows, with the more expensive NT as the business version. For this reason, many consumer-oriented features like advanced multimedia capabilities were only designed for 95/98, while many business-oriented features like improved security and networking capabilities were only put into NT. As a result, they had technical problems trying to fit everything into the same system, so the two lines were continued for a while, with Windows 2000, based on NT, as the business version and a "Millennium" or Windows ME, based on 95/98, as the consumer version. The two lines were finally merged in Windows XP - the Pro and Home versions are both based on NT.
Meanwhile, new chips are out which support 64-bit data, so new 64-bit operating systems will follow - again, first for business use.
Because of Microsoft's problems with the government, and because people are dissatisfied with the quality of Windows and its frequent crashes, there is much interest today in alternative Operating Systems. The Macintosh made a surprising comeback with the iMacs, which are less expensive than the usual Mac, although still costing more than a comparable PC. OS/2 is still around in version Warp 4, but not being marketed aggressively and with little consumer software. Much interest is now being generated by a free OS called Linux, which is supposed to be much more stable than Windows. It is character-based, like DOS, but there are GUI shells for it which imitate Windows the way Windows originally imitated the Mac. The main problem is that there is still less consumersoftware for it than for Windows and it does not yet support the same wide range of hardware. It is also more difficult to learn, in part because it gives the user so many choices about things which Windows decides for you. These problems are gradually being overcome, however, and it will be interesting to see if any of these OS's, or some others that are coming out, will be able to emerge as a real challenger to Windows over the next few years.
But for now, the only real choices for most average users are the various recent versions of Windows.. In terms of the user interface, which is what the rest of these classes are concerned with, these are all very similar, from Windows 95/NT 4.0 on; in what follows, I will use the name "Windows" to mean any of 95, 98, ME, NT 4.0, 2000, or XP, unless I specifically mention the version..
II. The Windows Desktop
The screen which you end up with on your computer after you boot up, but before you start any programs, is called the desktop. It usually has a pattern on it or a picture called wallpaper (desktops with wallpaper are what is known as a mixed metaphor) which you can change by right clicking (clicking with the right mouse button) anywhere on the desktop and choosing Properties from the context menu. (One of the best new features introduced in Windows 95 was the context menu. You can right click on almost anything in Windows, including files and folders, or in various programs, and get a little menu with choices which are useful for that particular item. We will see various examples of that as we go along.)
If you notice, the dialogue box - the window which comes up to ask you for input - has tabs along the top, which take you to other windows where you can change other settings. For example, you can set up a screen saver. This is an animation which starts when the computer is idle for more than a set period. (On older monitors if you left it sitting for a long time with the same picture, it could "burn in" and leave a permanent trace on your screen, hence the name screen saver. Today the main purpose, beyond fun or personal expression, is privacy in an office setting where you don't want coworkers wandering by and reading what you're doing while you're in the rest room or at the coffee machine.) You can also change the color scheme of your Windows (the Windows default is pretty ugly.) This can be useful if you have visual disabilities and need a larger or higher contrast display.
Most importantly, you can also set the resolution and color depth of the monitor (how big things are on the screen and how many colors it can show.) For most purposes, if you have a 15 inch monitor, you want to use a resolution of 640x480 (everything is large, not much fits) or 800x600 (things are smaller and more fits); with a 17 inch, you might want to go to1024x768; I wouldn't go higher than that unless you have a very large monitor or are doing very fine photo editing. Colors are expressed in bits; the number of digits you use to specify colors determines how many you can have. 1 bit color is black and white (0 or 1); 4 bit is 24 or 16 colors, which is fine if you only use programs without photo-type graphics and stay off the Internet (remember the 16 crayon Crayola boxes?); 8 bit is 28 or 256 colors (the BIG box of crayons!) which is fine for most purposes, unless you're editing photos; 16 bit is called "high color" and has more than 64,000 colors; and 24 bit is called "true color" and has 16.8 million colors, more or less, which is about what the human eye can distinguish. The higher the number of colors, and the higher the resolution, the more resources you use and the longer it takes to redraw the screen, but this shouldn't be a problem on newer computers which have plenty of speed and power (Many graphics cards don't even give you the 16 color option anymore). These terms will come up again in the last class when we discuss graphics formats.
Besides the pattern or wallpaper, there are some very important items on the desktop:
A. Icons: The little pictures. These represent shortcuts (usually) to programs or documents. A shortcut is a small file that redirects the computer to the actual location on your disk of the program or document. If you were to look into your desktop folder with Windows Explorer, you would see small files with the extension .lnk. A shortcut icon has a little white arrow in it to let you know that it represents a shortcut and not the actual program or document. (Shortcuts are equivalent to aliases on the Macintosh.)
Programs may add these icons when they are installed, or you may add them manually (I will show how when we discuss installing programs.) Two special icons on the desktop that are always present are My Computer and the Recycle Bin. These will be discussed later, but for now I want to point out that if you have icons on your desktop you don't want, you can remove them by dragging and dropping them on the Recycle Bin icon. (To drag an icon - or anything else - from one location in Windows to another, you hold down the left mouse button over it, move it where you want it to go, and then let go of the button. To copy something to another location, or put a shortcut to it, you use the right mouse button and when you let go a context menu comes up asking if you want to move, copy, or create a shortcut.)
Double-clicking (clicking twice very quickly without moving the mouse) on an icon will open the program or document it refers to.
B. The Taskbar: This is on the bottom of your screen, between the start button and the little icons. Little rectangles will appear here when you open a program, with the name of the program. You can switch from one open program to another by clicking on its name. You can also close or maximize a program by right clicking on its name and choosing close or maximize.
C. The System Tray: This is the section that has the clock and usually some icons. If you hold your mouse over the time for a second, the date and day of the week will show up. The icons represent programs that are running in the background, such as the volume controls for your audio, your antivirus program, and perhaps a schedule program or a resource meter.
D. The Application Toolbar: this is only in Windows 98 or 2000 on, or in Windows 95 with Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher. It contains icons for frequently used programs, so they are always available even when the desktop is covered. One of them minimizes all open windows to show the desktop, and give access to your other icons. You should be very sparing in what you put here, since it takes up important space all the time. To add an icon to this area, just drag it from the desktop. Unlike the taskbar and tray, the programs here are not necessarily open. To open a program just click its icon (you don't need to double-click here).
E. The Start Menu: The most important part of the desktop. When you click on this, you have a pop-up menu with the following items (this has been changed somewhat, not in my opinion for the better, in XP):
1. Very frequently used items at the top. You can drag them here from the desktop. Use this sparingly; you wouldn't want more than four or five items. Good choices might include the Windows Explorer, your web browser and your word processor, for example.
2. The programs menu. This is where you want to have all the programs on your computer listed, arranged in submenus if you have a lot of them. I will explain how to organize the start menu and add or remove items after we cover Explorer, when it will be easier to understand. To start a program from the programs menu, just click on it.
3. The documents menu. This has the names of last fifteen documents you have opened from My Computer or Explorer, or in some programs which use the list. To open a document in the list, just click on it.
In Windows 98 and 2000, there is also a permanent link to My Documents. This is a very important folder. First, it is the default data folder for the Microsoft Office programs and many other recent programs. (The term default is very important in working with software. It means the value that the program uses for anything that you haven't changed the settings for yourself.) Many, perhaps even most of the older, programs put their default data folder - the folder they save your work in - in their own directory; sometimes they just use their directory itself, the one they have their program files in. This is a very bad idea. If your data files are mixed in among the programs own files, it is very easy when deleting old data files to accidentally delete a program file needed for the program to run, which means you will have to reinstall the program. But even if the program creates a separate subfolder, this arrangement makes backups of your data - which I will talk about later - more difficult, as you have to remember to include all the data subfolders in all the program folders. (It's even worse if the data is mixed with the program files, as you either have to waste time and space backing up program files, or set up your backup file by file rather than folder by folder.) So you want to change your default working directory for any program that saves data to a separate data folder. You do this by right clicking on the program file in Explorer, choosing Properties, and changing the "works in" line to the path of your data folder. (In many programs, you can also change the default folder through the program's own preferences.) The obvious choice is the My Documents folder, since it already exists. This way, the programs also go right to that folder when you choose open or save as from the menu in the program, which is very convenient for many reasons. Also, you only have one folder which needs to be regularly backed up. You can set up subfolders within My Documents by program, or by job, or type of file, or however you like. (Windows 2000 on adds a My Pictures subfolder, with a built in viewer for a few common image formats like TIF, JPEG and GIF. These formats will be explained in the last class.)
4. Settings: This includes:
a. Control Panel: This is where you find the dialogue boxes to control nearly everything on your computer, including adding and removing hardware, adding and removing programs, setting the clock and calendar, setting your mouse click speed (and changing it to a left-handed mouse, if you are left-handed), and much more. Using Control Panel could easily be a class in itself; but most of the choices are fairly obvious.
b. The Taskbar settings: This is where you go to organize your start menu, as I will show later. This is also where you go to clear the Documents menu.
c. Printers: This is where you go to add a new printer, or to control your printer's settings.
5. Find (95/98) or Search (2000): This is a tool for finding files or folders on your hard disk (or any other disk). You can search for files using the name, the date created, or the size. This is very useful when you have a large disk, and you can't find something that you know you saved (or that you downloaded from the net.)
6. Favorites: This contains your favorites from Internet Explorer, which will be covered in the class on the Internet. You can also use it to keep links to documents, the way the Program menu does with programs, but it takes a little bit of work.
7. Shut down: This is very important. You should always shut down Windows from the shutdown menu (if possible - that is, if your system hasn't frozen up, which happens frequently in Windows 95 and 98.) If you turn off your computer without shutting down properly, you will have to go through Scandisk before you can restart it (this is automatic, and can take several minutes if you have a large hard disk.) You can also lose data on your disk.
III. Getting to Work
There are two approaches to working in Windows, Application Centered and Document Centered. Application Centered is the older way, inherited from DOS, in which you open an application (a program) and the application opens your documents. Document Centered is the goal of Windows, in which you just deal with documents and the OS opens the appropriate applications itself. The idea is that the programs should be transparent to the user, so you wouldn't even have to know what applications you had or were using to do work. Windows is far from really making that possible, so most users use a combination of the two approaches.
The ways of opening applications are:
1. From Start menu, programs
2. From an icon on the desktop or application bar
3. From My Computer or Explorer
4. From the Run line or a DOS prompt
The ways of opening documents directly are:
1. From Start menu, documents
2. From an icon on the desktop
3. From My Computer or Explorer
Application Windows
Applications open in application windows. All standard windows applications have certain features in common, which make it easier to learn new programs. These include:
A. The title bar. This is the bar at the top of the program which tells you what program you are in, and usually what document you are working on.
B. 3 little buttons in the right hand corner. The first, a minus sign, minimizes the program to the taskbar. The program is still open and may still be doing work. Minimized programs use less of the computers resources than programs which are open in windows, even if the windows are covered up with other windows, so you should always minimize programs which can work on their own without your input; for example, if you are playing background music from CD player while you type, the CD player should be minimized. The middle icon will have either a picture of a big window, if you are in a small window, or two small windows, if you are working full screen. This toggles between the two views: if you are in a window, it will make it the size of the screen; if you are working full screen, it will shrink it to a smaller window. The last icon, with an X on it, closes the window (and the program or document you are working in.)
If an application can use more than one document open at a time, the document window may have its own three little boxes, right underneath those for the application window. They work the same way, for the document.
C. The menu bar. This is the bar with the names of the various drop-down menus you can choose items from. It will vary from program to program, but nearly all programs have at least the following menus:
1. File - this is always the leftmost menu item. It will typically have items to Open, Close, and Save Files; usually to Print files; and to Exit the Program.
2. Edit - this will have at least the Cut, Copy and Paste commands, for moving things around in a document, between documents, and even between programs. Cut removes something from your program and stores it on the clipboard; Copy stores it on the clipboard without removing it; and Paste inserts into your document whatever is currently in the clipboard. The clipboard is part of the Windows OS. Every time you use Cut or Copy, the contents of the clipboard is replaced, so you can only use one item at a time; the clipboard is also erased whenever you shut down Windows. You can view the contents of the clipboard with the Clipview utility in Start, Programs, Accessories, and save items manually into the Clipbook for future use. There are free utility programs available online which can allow the clipboard to save items automatically.
3. Windows - this allows you to switch between open documents in the same program; it also allows you to tile or cascade document windows within the application window. (You can also tile and cascade application windows by right clicking a blank space on the taskbar.)
4. Help - this has information on how to use the program. You should use it! Help menus vary from the very skimpy to virtual online manuals. You can also print out the Help files, if the manual is not very good or you didn't get one with the program.
5. Many programs keep their preferences under a menu item called Options; others keep them under the File menu, the Edit menu, or somewhere else.
Menu items will generally have a letter underlined in each command; they may also have something like Alt + w or Ctrl+z next to each one; these are the keyboard shortcuts for that command. If it is something like Alt+s, you can access that function just by pressing that combination on the keyboard. If it is an underlined letter, you have to press Alt to open the menu, press the underlined letter for the particular menu, then press the underlined letter for the command. If you are a fast typist, it is sometimes easier to memorize the keyboard shortcuts for the commands you use most often so you don't have to take your hand off the keyboard to use the mouse.
D. A toolbar. This is usually a row of icons under the menu bar (a few programs put it vertically on the left, and Lotus Smart Suite perversely puts it at the bottom), which usually duplicate the most often used functions of the menus. Some programs allow you to customize the toolbar, controlling which icons appear. The way this is done varies from program to program, so check the manual or the Help menu to find out how to do it.
E. Many programs have a status bar at the bottom which gives you information about what the program is doing, what options you have selected, and other information.