Remembering Windows 2000

By far the best GUI experience. I will also attest to its rock solid stability.

Next to BeOS (#1), it's on my top list of favorite OS's

On both OS's ATI's TV Wonder ran like a dream!

The memories this brings back!

I turned 18 midway through 1999 and since I was deeply interested in multiprocessor OSes (chiefly, BeOS) I asked for (and was lucky enough to get) a dual PIII-450 system as an 18th birthday/high-school graduation gift.

I dual booted BeOS 5.5 and Windows NT 4.0. Windows 98SE would work, but it didn’t have support for SMP, so one of the processors would be deactivated. On the other hand, it NT 4.0 didn’t support USB, and I had several USB peripherals (my very first digital camera, a Canon IXUS, and a flatbed scanner).

That’s why in June 1999 I joined the Windows 2000 beta programme. It was amazing to have the full power of the dual processors, the “interesting” new GUI, and USB support all rolled into one system. I remember being quite smitten with Windows from just about then until a couple of years after the release of XP (the fabled “XP SP2” being when I jumped ship and switched to Mac OS X 10.2).

Anyway, yes, Windows 2000 (or “Win 2k” as it was affectionately known in those millennial years) was a true monument, a watershed, a massive accomplishment when compared technically to its immediate predecessor Windows NT 4.0 (SP6a) and an immense effort bring the NT line to “functional parity” with the Windows 9x line. I was stunned that it was replaced so soon by Windows XP (and also, stunned that XP endured for so long thereafter, but that’s another story).

Win 2000 was a revolution for me, back then I was a heavy delphi user and it's debugger crashing would kill Win98, like straight BOOM gone.

Win 2000 just shook it off and kept going, that alone was worth the upgrade.

Windows 2000 also represents the zenith of UI design for Microsoft software. I'm still rather baffled about how people look back fondly on XP, it looked like a toy for toddlers, and installing the Zune theme was the first thing I did after a fresh install to try and tone it down.

The in-your-face over decoration of UI's thankfully hasn't persisted, but instead we're seeing a similar kind of decadence among our supposedly minimal and flat interfaces. The misuse of space and screen real-estate has gotten pretty bad as of late, and I'm all for an appropriate amount of whitespace (I keep railing against certain linux DE's for not getting this right) but modern software seems to be devoid of any kind of efficiency with layout or a sensible information density.

I have many not so fond memories of hitting a specific key sequence to allow loading an hdd controller driver or something like it when installing win2k. But it was miles better than 98se. And wow the contemporaneous ME was such an enormous disaster at the time— still remember one of the other computer nerds in high school espousing the benefits of what he saw as the soon to come “made for Windows ME” games.” Thankfully my dad knew better and saw through the ME hype, sparing the expense and the terribly buggy UX.