the.com/windows
a hole in the wall civilization spent millennia making transparent
means Glazed openings in a wall or vehicle that let in light and air while keeping the weather out — or, in computing, the rectangular framed regions an operating system uses to show separate programs or documents.
from From Old Norse 'vindauga,' literally 'wind-eye' — 'vindr' (wind) plus 'auga' (eye) — the early opening in a wall imagined as an eye through which the wind looked in. Norse settlers carried the word into English, where it displaced the older native term 'eye-thirl' (eye-hole). Notice the family resemblance: 'window' was once an eye, and we still speak of a window's 'eye' on the world. The computing sense — and the software brand — borrows the architectural idea of looking through a frame into another space.
- Glass tax
- Britain taxed windows; people bricked theirs shut
- Bird killer
- Up to a billion birds die hitting them yearly
- Defenestration
- Throwing someone out one started a whole war
- Royal view
- Medieval glass was rarer than the gems beside it
- Self-cleaning
- Modern coatings use sunlight to dissolve grime
windows operating system — microsoft's os, launched 1985, powers ~75% of desktop computers globally
windows of chartres cathedral — 12th-century stained glass in chartres, france, featuring 176 panels of biblical scenes