The revelation of Microsoft Windows with their logos and a bit information about them from [1985 - 2013]

Microsoft Windows is a series of graphical interface operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Microsoft.

Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as a graphical operating system shell for MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces (GUI).Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal computer market with over 90% market share, overtaking Mac OS, which had been introduced in 1984.

As of April 2013, the most recent versions of Windows for personal computers, mobile devices, server computers and embedded devices are respectively Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, Windows Server 2012 and Windows Embedded 8.

Microsoft Windows is the most popular operating system in the world, the development and experience of Windows products is always one of the most popular topics that people are talking. Here we are focusing on the icons that most of the Windows versions produced. To compare or to see a revolution, it doesn’t matter. Most of the old icons can be seen as very classical icons that Microsoft has brought to us.

I am a Windows user and I have been using Windows since the very early stage. The first Windows I have ever used was Windows 3.0, and unlike an operating system, it was to me a kind of fancy application running on DOS (disk operating system). I clearly remember that to install a Windows 3.1 took about more than an hour on my 80386 PC and it was stored on 12 separated 5 inch floppy disks. Now let’s have a look at the revolution of Windows icons.

Logo

First, it needs to be the logos, each product of the Windows family has its own logo. Here are the logos from the very first version until the latest one. I didn’t show some of the server version of Windows (e.g. Windows NT and Windows Server 2003).

with the note and calculation of Wikipedia this pic is uploade

Early Icons

As in the early version like Windows 1.0 or 2.0, there are hardly any icons in the user interface (UI). But from windows 3.0, icons were widely used and in Windows 3.1, they became more colourful (it was 16 colours at that time).

The Common Icons

From Windows 95, Microsoft introduced start menu and it was a revolutional concept. Of course, icons are widely used in everywhere since then. on the start menu, task bar, file explorer, etc. Here we selected a number of the most common icons in Windows system and see how did they changed during the 15 years.

I didn’t put Windows 7 icons on the list as they are too close to the icons in Vista. In Windows 95, icons are in 16 colours. They were upgraded into 256 colours in Windows 98 although the design are almost the same. In Windows 2000, MS change some of the icons designs especially desktop icons like My Computer, Network Place, etc. Windows 2000 supported to use icons in 16M colours. From Windows XP, more colours are used and the alpha blend channel was enable which means the icons are in 32-bits with alpha channel transparency. Normal icon size are changed into 48×48 pixels rather than 32×32 pixels previously. When Windows Vista released the fresh design of Windows icons was really an impress to everyone and the larger icon sizes are supported (e.g. up to 256×256 pixels)

Here let’s have a look at the Control Panel icons in Windows Vista which contains very good detail in a large size of 128×128 pixels.

sorry my Pc cann't support windows-8 so i am unable to upload things about Windows 8 . and most probable i do upload those too

Summary

To me, Windows made a good effort in improving the quality of their icons. However, if you look very carefully, you will find in the latest windows, some old icons are still being used in some where which to me is a kind of incomplete transfer or upgrade. Hopefully, Microsoft can produce more and better icon design in the future products.