Oh Windows 3.0, I hardly knew ye.
Actually... I didn't know ye at all. When Windows 3.0 released in 1990, I was still rocking Zug the Megasaurus on my Tandy 1000, which used MS DOS Shell. Those were good times... spelling words like "Pteranodon", drawing pictures in 16 colors, and making the computer repeat swear words with its text-to-speech capabilities.
Getting to the point of this blog: today, May 22nd is the 19th anniversary of the Windows 3.0 launch! Its successor, Windows 3.1, happens to be the earliest version of Windows able to run within a Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac virtual machine. Not too shabby for legacy support, right?
This event urges computer users across the world to stop what they're doing and wonder for a moment about what our lives would be like had Windows 3.0 never launched at all. For one thing, panda bears would no doubt rule the skies, leaving the Human race confined to Earth's caverns. We'd all look a bit like Gollum from Lord of the Rings. That's just how alternate realities work: the smallest difference (like a harmless OS release) can dramatically change the outcome of the future. On the plus side, I'm thinking there would be a whole lot more Macs floating around instead of PCs.
And I mean literally floating around. To battle the pandas, our scientists would need to develop anti-gravity devices instead of silly things, like segways and digital cameras, which for the most part perform horribly in caves.
That's not how things turned out, obviously, but the next time some PC user raises an eyebrow at you and your MacBook, remind him or her of the terrible price Mac users paid to keep the pandas at bay... then go ahead and show off how much more flexible a Mac running multiple operating systems can be, running not just OS X but Windows and Linux as well... at the same time! Quite impressive, compared to their oh-so-fragile and limited netbooks (wouldn't shield against the force of a panda attack even if you had two of them stacked on top of each other).
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