Pop the Champagne, its time to celebrate! The Windows operating system has turned 22. That's right, considering the fact that Windows 1.0 was made available on November 20, 1985, the platform is 22 years old this week. The event passed almost unnoticed, and certainly the Redmond company failed to linger on the past. With every effort poured into pushing Windows Vista into the foreground, Microsoft simply left the 22nd anniversary of Windows slip by unnoticed. The fact of the matter is that there is no Champagne to pop.

"Windows provides unprecedented power to users today and a foundation for hardware and software advancements of the next few years. It is unique software designed for the serious PC user, who places high value on the productivity that a personal computer can bring", these are the words of Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft, marking the release of Windows 1.0.

By 1985, Microsoft has already moved out of Albuquerque, New Mexico and into Bellevue, Washington, and was now extending the DOS operating system with the "Windows operating environment". Windows 1.0 came to the table with a price tag of $99 and signaled the birth of the user interface delivering such programs as Windows Write and Windows Paint.

22 years later, Windows Vista is a barely manageable mammoth release, and Microsoft assured of its commitment to produce Windows 7, currently planned for 2010. Vista shipped to businesses in November 2006 and to the general consumers in January 2007. One year after the latest Windows client was released to manufacturing, and 22 years after Windows 1.0, Microsoft sold over 88 million copies of Vista, and is looking to achieve the 1 billion install base with Windows by mid 2008. Now, that will be a real reason to celebrate, although it will be somewhat synonymous with Bill Gates stepping down from his day-to-day role at Microsoft.