Windows 8 Launch: Quiz Of The Week

Microsoft will launch Windows 8 and the Surface tablet in New York today. As the world waits with bated breath, we present the perfect way to while away the remaining hours – a quiz on the history of Windows.

Commentators are asking: can Surface take market share away from Apple’s iPad? Can Windows 8 really satisfy both tablet and PC users in a single product? And, if you include mobile devices, Windows has shrunk from 70 percent of systems ten years ago to around 40 percent now. Can Windows 8 halt the slide in Windows users?

But these are not the questions uppermost in our minds. As a new version arrives, we ask: which Windows version was the first to include Minesweeper? And which version left Bill Gates on stage in front of a Blue Screen of Death?

Windows 8? Great!

Windows 8 has been heralded as a renaissance for Microsoft – admittedly not by everybody. Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff says it marks the end of Windows, as users migrate to the cloud.

Gabe Newell of game company Valve Software describes Windows 8 as a “catastrophe”, and surveys of users suggest that few will take the plunge onto the new operating system, with predicted rates of acceptance that would make it more of a failure than Windows Vista.

However, though Microsoft is taking a risk, the new OS, like the new Windows Phone OS, is a serious effort to adapt to new methods of use, and it’s way too early to write it off.

In London, the shops will open at midnight – or at least Currys on Tottenham Court Road will – to let enthusiasts get their hands on a copy of the new operating system right away. TechWeekEurope will be there to join the celebration, and we will be watching as the new product develops and grows.

Do you want to show off your knowledge of Microsoft Windows?

Try our quiz!

And if you like it, we have plenty more, including a whole quiz on Microsoft…