The Last Starfighter and Microsoft Whistle at the PDC (PCGH-Retro, July 13)

The Last Starfighter and Microsoft Whistle at the PDC (PCGH-Retro, July 13)


from Carsten Spille
The last Starfighter and Microsoft’s Whistler – that happened on July 13th. Every day, PC Games Hardware dares to take a look back at the young but eventful history of the computer.

… 1984: “The Last Starfighter” is coming to cinemas. One of the first films, along with Tron, to make extensive use of computer generated effects. Digital Productions contributes 27 minutes of CGI footage to the film, which was rendered on a Cray XM-P. The scenes contained the then enormous amount of polygons of 250,000 triangles per image.

… 1992: IBM, together with Toshiba and Siemens, forges one of the first international alliances in the chip business. The former competitors join forces for the production of memory chips. This development is significant because it marks the beginning of the era of international cooperation in the modern chip economy, replacing national solo efforts.


… 2000: At the Professional Developers Conference (PDC), Microsoft starts the quasi-public beta test of the new operating system and successor to Windows 2000, codenamed “Whistler” (from English: to whistle, to whistle). The new operating system has the build number 2250 and looks quite similar to 2000 and ME. However, version 2250 is the first version to include visual styles and a task-based control panel – and the new start menu. The operating system then comes onto the market as Windows XP – for ExPerience – and thus draws a wave of other XP products with it. During the development of XP, the upcoming Microsoft operating system was still codenamed “Kairo” in the rumor mills of this world – presumably from the Greek letters “chi” and “rho”, English spoken “Kai-Ro”, which in the typeface dem X and the P are similar.

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Reference-www.pcgameshardware.de