History of the Start button

With the latest release of the Windows Vista CTP build this week. I was doing some recap with some of the changes made in the history of windows and one of the things that I didnt pay much attention to lately is the Windows ‘start’ button. Most of you will probably know that the start button was a big talk within HCI for it’s inconsistency with user actions – clicking a button called start to shut down – end – a computer … etc. With a bit of search I found the following linkwith all the windows buttons from Windows 95 to Vista build 5259 (2 builds back I think) but the button in this build is still the same. So by the looks of it, in the last 3 builds of vista, including the one released this week 5308 the word ‘start’ is *finally *no longer going to be present. I think this will make HCI guys happy now 🙂

For a recap on the start button in the past 10 years I’ve included the images I found in the link above.

**Windows 95/98/NT 4** ![Windows 95/98/NT 4](https://www.wesbran.com/images/Win95.gif) **Windows 2000/ME** ![](/content/binary/Win2000.gif)
**Windows XP Build 2250** ![](/content/binary/WinXP2250.gif) **Windows XP Build 2257 **![](/content/binary/WinXP2257.gif)
**Windows XP Build 2410** ![](/content/binary/WinXP2410.gif) **Windows XP Beta 1** ![](/content/binary/WinXPBeta1.gif)
**Windows XP Beta 2** ![](/content/binary/WinXPBeta2.gif) **Windows XP** ![](/content/binary/WinXP.gif)
**Windows Server 2003** ![](/content/binary/Win2003.gif) **Windows Media Center 2005** ![](/content/binary/WinMediaCenter2005.gif)
**Windows Vista Build 3683** ![](/content/binary/WinVistaBuild3683.gif) **Windows Vista Build 3718** ![](/content/binary/WinVistaBuild3718.gif)
**Windows Vista Build 4008** ![](/content/binary/WinVistaBuild4008.gif) **Windows Vista Build 4015** ![](/content/binary/WinVista4015.gif)
**Windows Vista Build 4051** ![](/content/binary/WinVista4051.gif) **Windows Vista Build 4083 (64-bit)** ![](/content/binary/WinVista64Build4083.gif)
**Windows Vista Beta 1** ![](/content/binary/WinVista5048.gif) **Windows Vista Build 5219** ![](/content/binary/WinVista5219.gif)
**Windows Vista Build 5259-5308** ![](/content/binary/WinVistaBuild5259.gif)