Wait, did I write 250? I meant 25. It just feels like 250 -- especially when you add up all the time collectively spent waiting for our Windows PCs to reboot.

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As anniversaries go, this one comes with more than the usual number of caveats. Windows 1.0 and 2.0 weren't really fit for human consumption. It wasn't until 1990, when Windows 3.0 debuted, that the GUI began to find its way onto the desktops of (relatively) normal humans, and Windows 3.1 (1992) before it was stable enough for business folk to rely on -- just barely. And it wasn't until Windows 95 arrived that the Microsoft OS juggernaut began in earnest.

When you've been around 2,500 years -- er, 25 -- you wrack up a lot of history, not all of it pleasant. So the "celebrations" of this milestone on the Web have been low key and mostly bittersweet.

Computerworld's (only five?) in Windows' history, including when Microsoft introduced falsified evidence at one of its antitrust trials, Windows ME, , and the labels, which included some choice emails from Microsoft's own executives trashing the disaster that was Vista.