For all their novelty, most ‘graphical user interfaces’ still appeal to the imagery of the study or office: desktops, wastepaper bins, filing cabinets, keyboards. Behind all the push-button gee-whizzery is the ancient tradition of the bureau, of bureaucracy. Anyone who has worked with existing versions of Windows knows there is a nether world beneath all the dayglo design. A small error, a misplaced cue, and one is kicked out into the brutal darkness of DOS (the Disk Operating System), a Kafkaesque world filled with hieratic symbols, incomprehensible commands and dangerous executions. DOS echoed all the alienation of complexity of the corporate or state hierarchy. A moment’s lapse and you could lose could lose everything, your work, your place, your livelihood. The silicon chip may count time in nanoseconds, but its human use was often measured in ohno-seconds.

By dispensing with DOS, Windows 95 has effectively shed the old bureaucratic model. Even the filing cabinet icon has been gone. Instead of working from a hierarchical file structure, you’re presented with magical folders which can contain documents, or more folders within folders. The desktop now floats in a fully fledged virtual world with its own spatial logic and flow.

This change in imagery also reflects a profound shift in working practices. In every aspect of white-collar life, accounting, engineering, design, video editing to photographic design, the PC has accelerated the crumbling of old divisions of labour. And it’s not only work that has been affected. Go into any office with Windows installed and you’ll find employees furtively playing games such Minefield or Solitaire. In the evening, many computer networks slow down to a crawl because so many people stay on to play multiplayer Doom.

Microsoft are gambling that the biggest future growth in computing will be in Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) market, and that we shall use the same operating system for consulting an encyclopaedia, for play and entertainments, or working from home. Windows 95 acknowledges this with an add-on package - Microsoft plus - which allows you to ‘theme’ your desktop. You can change images, sounds, fonts and animations to the tune of Dangerous Animals, fractal Science, classic Mystery stories, or the sketches of Leornardo da Vinci. One theme, named ‘Sixties’, gives you a psychedelic backdrop, programmes that open and close to a guitar riff or bongo drum. When active, the mouse changes to an animated peace symbol. Such additions bring Microsoft closer to Disney than IBM.

This blurring of the boundaries between entertainment, work and education, is not without its costs - particularly when the anxieties of work are brought back home - and it begs a bigger question about the individual’s connection to collective life. Where has the socialibilty of the workplace gone?

An answer can be found in one of the biggest innovations of Windows 95, and one that sets it apart above the Mac. Evident in every aspect of it architecture is the ability to connect to other computers, to newgroups, to e-mail, to the diversions of the World Wide Web. Microsoft clearly believe that, if you’re not on a local network, you’ll soon be on the global one. All roads lead to the information superhighway.

In Windows 95 you can log on to the Microsoft Network almost before you know it - connect to the company’s computer which in turn connects to other users like you. Of course, this connection isn’t without its toll in phone bills and membership. It also breeds a new neurosis. Recently, there have been rumours the Microsoft Network searches your hard disk for rival software. Behind the brave new world of the network, some see the invisible hand of Bill Gates, God in the machine.

Ultimately, fears of conspiracy are as irrational as breathless hype. The truth is much more provisional and profane. One of the reasons for the success of Windows has been that it thrived (and often crashed) on third party hardware. Hundreds of small software houses sprouted up writing add-ons to fill the programme’s insufficiencies and gaps. Microsoft has clearly learned from these countless small voices, and incorporated the best of them in the new interface. In the end, the wit, skill and invention of Windows 95 is the effort not just of one man, or one corporation, but of an entire community.

In the 50s, Roland Barthes described the modern motor car as an exact equivalent of the Gothic cathedral, created with passion by anonymous artists, and consumed by whole populations. With Windows 95, the architectural comparison is even more apt. To those who believe ‘culture’ is kept in art galleries and museums, the comparison may seem blasphemous. After all, the ‘Graphic User interface’ is just a piece of (information) technology. But the gothic arch was only a piece of technology too. And just as an atheist can praise the vaulting achievement of Chartres without believing, one does not have to embrace all the assumptions of Microsoft to appreciate this impressive new mental monument.

Published by New Statemen August 1995