Windows XP was Launched in New York City on Oct. 25, 2001
BILL GATES: Well, it took more like six years, but certainly our users gave us a lot of reasons to say that Windows 95 simply isn’t good enough.
Well, let me herald the end of the DOS era here. I’ll just simply type exit for the last time in MS-DOS.
MS-DOS: Excuse me, Bill?
BILL GATES: Yes, DOS?
MS-DOS: Bill, I brought you the PC. I helped make Windows. And I’m running over 400 million PCs today. You aren’t going to do this, are you, Bill?
BILL GATES: Sorry, DOS.
BILL GATES: Well, that movie wasn’t called 2001 for nothing.
So in many ways this is a transition point. It’s the end of too many PC crashes. It’s the end of the static Web era and the start of an era where the Web will be dynamic. We’ll program against the Web. This new term, XML Web services, you’re going to be hearing about that more and more because Windows XP lays the foundation for that.
I also hope we’ll say that it’s the beginning of the end of the narrowband era, that people see with XP and it’s capabilities that broadband really should arrive not only for businesses but eventually for consumers as well.
You can say what we’ve done here is we took the best of Windows 95, the broad usage, the large number of applications and we took that compatibility and over all these years we’re able to build that into our high-end technology, the so-called NT kernel that’s at the heart of both the Professional and Home Edition here. It’s revolutionary to be able to do that, and yet we made it evolutionary. In terms of the user interface, the applications, we’ve allowed people to take that step up.
I was at the Marriot Marquee in NYC the day the Windows XP era began, by chance I found myself standing next to Bill and I congratulated him on the new OS as I was glad to get beyond Win 9X and DOS. I hope to see Bill back in NYC in 97 days when the Windows Vista era begins.