>Windows 95 Back in 1995, people lined up at midnight to get Microsoft’s latest release of Windows, and it was the first version, alongside the enterprise-focused Windows NT 4, to introduce the Start menu. It was designed to make Windows easier to use, and group or organize applications in a list. Before it arrived, Windows users could access apps through Program Manager. It was largely a basic list of apps, with no real organization.

Clearly not even looking at how the start menu works from a file structure layout is kind of funny if you're going to waste your time writing an article about it.

Program Manager in Windows 3.x would actually store its "program groups" in .GRP files that were stored directly in C:\WINDOWS\. If any of those files were corrupt, Program Manager would give an error and simply not show you the group. New program groups were created using an DDE interface to PROGMAN.EXE, which could be guaranteed to be running at all times. (Unless you changed your shell= setting in SYSTEM.INI, of course.)

In addition, you couldn't nest program groups, nor could you have program items outside a program group. It basically was a flat list of groups (which were listed in the PROGMAN.INI file - you couldn't just copy over a .GRP file and have it show up!), and each group was a flat list of program items. And although there were program groups, it was true that many users would simply put most of their apps into a single program group for ease of access.

Windows 95 changed all that. Now the Start Menu was stored in C:\Windows\Start Menu\ (user profiles weren't really a thing on the 9x line of OSes; they existed in some form if you used an enterprise network setup, but that's beyond the scope of this comment) and were now plain folders and files, with all the advantages that entails. Although the Start menu has changed locations (and, on the NT lineage, was split into two locations - All Users and the current user), it still retains this filesystem layout today.

The cleverness in Windows 95/98/NT4 came from the fact that the old DDE interface that was used to create new program groups and items programmatically (used by installers) stuck around, even while Program Manager itself was relegated to a sideline and no longer guaranteed to be running. (Windows would launch it invisibly when the interface was used.) When they were used, a little window with a picture of a beating drum and a progress bar would appear to show the user that the group and items were being created, as the process could take several seconds and the installer might otherwise appear to be hung.

Of course, programmers were encouraged to simply use the new folder interface; it was much easier and quicker to use, and more flexible. The location of the Start Menu/Programs folder was exposed as an environment variable, so it was easy to write to the correct location.

Program Manager itself stuck around and could be used (and in the Windows 95 setup could even be selected as the primary shell instead of Explorer), but it looked very different as minimised groups were no longer shown as icons but as what basically amounted to a tiny title bar.

Program Manager was eliminated entirely with Windows XP (IIRC) and I suspect the DDE interface went at the same time, though I honestly don't know - I haven't had a program that would use that interface for ages.

Also, non-NT windows supported multiple user profiles at least since 3.1. At first only thing that was per-user was password store for networking, and with W95 essentially everything that is per-user today. (I suspect that the common myth that there were no user profiles in w95 comes from the fact that by default there was no prominent "log off" entry in start menu). Obviously, there was no FS-level security, so only thing that was protected by profile password was the aforementioned password store for SMB.

[edit: I just tested and the DDE interface works still even in Windows 10. Wow.]

Edit: essentially only thing that you would get by joining to domain was logon scripts

XP SP2 actually.

I never had issues because the standard procedure for me is "hit windows key" "start typing" and it behaved the exact same in windows 8. If you were on the start screen, you could start typing to search, which is easy, and the QUICKEST access you could ask for, but unintuitive for normal users to start typing with no prompt.

Ctrl-Alt-Delete logouts/shutdowns is what I feel like theyve always wanted people to do (for security reasons? no idea). But then again, how often do I shutdown my computer. If something needs me to reboot, theres almost always a prompt.

I imagine that classifies me as a power user. Not minding to do things the "right" way and not needing prompts to guide me along.

I haven't used windows 10 yet, but I get the vibe that everyone loves it again, because they made the start menu not fullscreen and added some simple prompts to gain access to the functionality that was already there.

They made fullscreen-ing the Start Menu an option (as post 8/8.1, some of us now prefer the fullscreen even on a desktop; with well chosen Live Tiles it becomes a better version of something like Mac OS X's "widget expose", IMNSHO).

Also, I think the biggest UX deal that makes Win 10 seem so much superior to non-Power Users is that they moved the search bar from the bottom of Start Menu onto the taskbar itself. (In hindsight, this seems like something that should have happened sooner, and was why people would install some of the nastier adware out there just to get a search box on the taskbar...) Ever since Vista added it, most average users and many Power Users still haven't seemed to pick up on the press the Windows key and start typing thing (which I too have used since Vista), so prominently showing the search box is a big deal in Windows 10.

    Before it arrived, Windows users could access apps through Program Manager.
    It was largely a basic list of apps, with no real organization.
    While Program Manager did have smaller menus, most Windows users
    simply launched apps and used it as a list. 

But tiles reversed this recommendation, so after installing something a user would not easily find it in the large, seemingly unorganized list of tiles. That's part of why there was a demand for the return of the Start Menu.

And this poison has made it over to Mac OS X, as well. Bundles should be installed directly in /Applications, because you know, they're bundles that can contain as many files as the vendor wants! But no, there's always somebody like Cisco that has to go ahead and create a stupid subfolder anyway.

Compare and contrast

Step 1: Install AwfulSoft. Step 2: Cool! Let's run it: START -> Program Files -> Uhh... where the hell is it? Browse, browse, browse, browse... What's that folder? "RogerSoft LLC"? Nope that's some shareware I installed a few weeks ago... Browse, browse, browse, browse... Oh, of course! "WorkerWare Inc." I think that was the company's name... Oh, another nested folder, "AwfulSoft", found it! Finally, the program launcher is a single icon inside yet another nested folder. So five clicks plus some browsing just to find this damn program......

Step 1: Install GreatSoft. Step 2: Cool! Let's run it: START -> Program Files -> GreatSoft. BAM!

† ...which was never a real requirement anyway. Unlike Windows' Program Files, Mac applications (both before and after the transition to being NeXTStep bundles) are meant to just live wherever you want them to live. There were some really interesting application locations in the past—putting a Font Manager in your Fonts folder, for example. And you've always been meant to be able to keep programs that'll have a short lifespan directly on the Desktop, without that making a mess of anything.

Also, vendor names aren’t stable. What about when Flash was installed by Macromedia (but is now Adobe)? It makes no sense for products to shift around because of the company of the week.

Could have sworn that new stuff got a highlight, never mind that every icon was in named groups that matched the folders of earlier menus.

Nah, what most people complained about was that it "ate" their screen. Rather than a small menu off the the side, it swallowed whatever they worked on, and could be a pain to get back out of it they were not accustomed to the keyboard shortcuts or familiar with the new corner navigation.

8.1 fixed most of that by having the bar show all programs, added minimize and close buttons to the new UI programs (metro?), and made the bar be accessible everywhere.

But by that time Windows 8 had gotten a rep to rival Vista.

Huh, I didn't know they officially recommended it. Why? In my experience, the practice is counterproductive and based on publisher vanity--I have nearly as many program vendors as I do programs, so it doesn't reduce the length of the list much, and I don't generally bother memorizing who makes every one of my apps, so it makes it much harder to find anything. These days I wind up rolling my eyes and editing the destination every single time I install something.

Back during the Maemo years, i recall someone had asked Nokia about opening the source of their power management daemon. The answer was no, because the execs believed that it was part of their differentiation from other mobile device vendors.

End result was that said devices died a slow death once Nokia abandoned them.

I probably should have put it that way, but that's what I meant, yeah. Either way, it's pushing their own image at the expense of their users.

A little off-topic, but here's my current start menu appearance with Classic Shell: http://i.imgur.com/sRXiINp.png

Another noticeable separation was in windows switching: Win+Tab or the corner hover action (top left corner,I think? I disabled it so not 100% sure) only showed metro apps, plus a "Desktop" app. I believe Alt+Tab only listed desktop apps (I may be remembering that wrong, pretty sure 8.1 added all apps to the Alt+Tab switcher).

None of that would be so terrible, except that it felt so half-finished. You had to use Explorer (Desktop app) to browse folders, but if you loaded an image, it would "flip" and open the metro image viewer app. Same for PDF files, and a handful of others. Worse was Control Panel: parts of it were updated to use metro, but not all. It would do the "flip" animation as you navigated around. That was pretty jarring.

I ended up disabling everything "metro" in Win8 and installing an alternate start menu, and after that, to me, it really just felt like an incremental improvement to Win7 with a beta optional full-screen UI on top that could be safely ignored.

I stopped using Windows when Ubuntu became the popular Linux flavour of choice. I haven't looked back although I didn't really like the switch to Unity that much. I have adapted rather than go some Linux Mint or other route. I learned how to 'alt-tab' again but still find Unity a tad compromised when it comes to easily switching between terminal windows.

Nonetheless I am glad the Ubuntu dash is a 'drop-down' affair rather than the anti-pattern 'drop-up' menu.

Maybe now that Apple have all those icons in the bottom and Windows has the 'drop-up' menu the 'frame' of interaction is understood that way, to be as natural as a 'QWERTY' keyboard.

With Windows mostly you used the start menu to launch stuff and that was it. for all the rest the menus were still drop down, but embedded inside the relevant window rather than nail to the top of the screen (not sure how much of that was to neuter the Apple lawsuit back in the day).

Personally, I never really liked either -- and that got more pronounced with the modern trend of widescreen monitors. So I usually keep the taskbar on the left.

Didn't NT 3.51 have the Shell Technology Update that included the start menu? http://everything.explained.today/Windows_NT_3.51/

One theory[1] is that during testing, much old apps were found to use:

    if (version.StarstWith("Windows 9") 
    {
        // windows 95/98
    } else ....

Due to possible confusion, Windows 9 never existed. If one were to search Windows 9, there may be resualts of Windows 95/8 instead of the proper result.