Chapter 12. What Is Windows 7 Anyway?

WINDOWS 7 is the latest edition in a series of desktop operating systems and graphical user interfaces (GUI) from Microsoft. Windows 1.0 was released in 1985 as a GUI that sat on top of Microsoft’s popular DOS disk operating system. Over the years Windows has been changed and refined, finally subsuming DOS and becoming a full operating system in its own right with the launch of Windows 98.

Windows 7 was released in October 2009. It is not exactly the seventh version of Windows. Rather it is the seventh version from its particular branch of the software. There have been two branches of Windows: the original consumer ...

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