Windows turns 30, but will it reach 40?

I was 19 years old, working in downtown Manhattan for Goldman Sachs, when I first saw Windows. The WordPerfect for DOS master in me was floored. Windows and the Office suite, first released in 1990, were about to become my future.

Pre-Windows 95, we were working with 16-bit applications in a cooperative multitasking world. "Cooperative multitasking" meant that if Word crashed while you had Excel and PowerPoint open, everything was toast. Saving your work every five minutes became routine. Imagine being on the night shift in the document processing department at an investment banking firm and having to tell a banker (who hasn't slept in days) that the document he needs sent to Hong Kong is missing your last two hours of work thanks to a crash while cooperative multitasking.

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