Kodak DCS 520: He Pays the Landlord's Wage

Today we're going to have a look at the Kodak DCS 520, a digital SLR from 1998. Aeons ago in digital photography terms. In its day it was the most advanced portable digital camera that money could buy, and you needed a lot of money because it retailed for $14,995. Nowadays it's essentially scrap, a big heavy professional camera body perpetually welded to a tiny obsolete digital imaging sensor. Does Mickey Mouse have a surname? That would be like calling a person John Human Being or something.

Before I go on, here's some music from 1998, which jumped out at me because (a) it's excellent (b) it's cold, futuristic, and black, just like the subject of this post and (c) the picture is a compositional echo of the photo of the camera, just underneath it:

What do you call an echo that comes first? Here's what the camera looks like:

A Kodak DCS 520 with a Contax Zeiss 50mm f/1.7, and some accoutrements - an original Kodak battery, a 520mb Callunacard (essentially a hard drive in a PCMCIA enclosure), and a 1gb Sandisk PCMCIA card. In 1998 the Callunacard sold for $620. It still works, but the double-height, Type III enclosure is awkward unless you have a very old laptop.

See what I mean about the composition? It's a very different subject, but the composition is basically the same. I love the word accoutrements. Here's a photo of a lady stroking a fox tail. The DCS 520's top half is most of a Canon EOS-1n film SLR, which was shipped from Japan to Kodak's facilities in Rochester, New York, where Kodak took it apart and grafted the remains of slain officer Alex Murphy onto it. In theory the camera had no recollection of its past life as a policeman on the mean streets of Detroit, but in practice the human spirit is unquenchable, and before long it set out to find the people who killed it so that it could knock them off their motorcycle, throw them through some glass windows, and stab them in the throat with a metal spike! That bit was always censored on TV. On VHS you saw a fountain of blood.

No, Robocop didn't kill the melting acid guy. Emil. "College boy? Think you can outsmart a bullet?" What a little shit he was. Clarence drove into him, which caused Clarence to crash his car, because the windscreen was covered in Emil. I was 11 when that film came out, and it was the best film ever - it had robots, guns, more robots, explosions, and some of the most creative deaths in the cinema. The brutality didn't affect me in the slightest, because I had seen so much violence already that I was basically incapable of feeling anything at all. Which is good, because we live in a brutal world, and unless you toughen up at an early age you'll be crushed.

London is full of places always opening. Eventually they close and something else opens in the same space, and over time the city churns and regenerates.

Well, he was, wasn't he?

The DCS 520 has a two megapixel APS-C sensor, and in common with all the old Kodak DCS cameras it has a strange mixture of features - an intervalometer, Firewire, audio memory recording, batch JPG processing, and a serial port that could hook the camera up to a GPS unit or a Nokia 7110 in order to transmit photos back to home base. It seems that this was by no means a straightforward operation and I suspect that only a handful of photographers ever bothered. Thank God I don't have to put Morrissey references into this post.

Another quirk of the DCS range was the relatively naked sensor. The 520 has a thin infrared blocking filter mounted on the CCD, but there's no integral anti-aliasing filter, so the images tend to be very sharp but prone to moire:

The camera has a combined infrared/antialising filter just behind the lens mount:

It can be unscrewed and taken out. Contemporary reviews suggest that most press photographers didn't bother with it, and neither did I. Take it out and the camera becomes passable for black-and-white infrared if you mount an IR filter on the lens and work out proper infinity focus:

On a brighter day than this a combination of ISO 400, 1/60th, and f/2.8 would give much less grainy results.

The old Kodak DCS cameras could only shoot RAW, although the DCS 520 has a very slow built-in JPG converter with options for sharpening, file size, and tone control. The EOS-1n supported TTL flash, whereas the DCS 520 has been modified to support E-TTL as well; it communicates and works perfectly with my 550EX. The DCS 520 was launched when the E-TTL system was in its infancy and the manual only mentions the 380EX and 220EX, which were very basic units. Surprisingly, Kodak still hosts a support page for it.

This here balloon - looo-ooon

The DCS 520 was the first ever digital SLR with an LCD preview screen. The earlier Kodak DCS models had a tiny pocket calculator-style LCD that simply showed the frame count, and the Nikon E2 didn't even have that. It's surprisingly fast, although it's very grainy and blocks up the shadows:

The same basic interface appears to have been carried over for Canon's 1D. The extent of Kodak and Canon's relationship remains a mystery to me. Kodak's first DCS cameras were based on Nikon camera bodies, a practice that continued while the DCS 520 was on sale - its Nikon equivalent was the DCS 620, which had the same electronics grafted onto a Nikon F5. There was also a Canon-badged version of the DCS 520, which was sold as the Canon D2000. Although Kodak continued to upgrade its Nikon-bodied SLRs, the DCS 520 (and its six-megapixel cousin, the DCS 560) was the last of the Kodak/Canon collaborations.

The DCS 520 originally used NiCad batteries, which had a memory effect; later Kodak switched to NiMh.

Canon seemed to drag its heels when it came to devising its own professional digital SLR, and so the DCS 520 remained on sale for an unusually long time. It was still on sale in 2001, for $7,995 (or $6,995 for the camera body without a charger), by which time it was poor value compared to the Nikon D1, which was cheaper and generally superior. Kodak sold a final batch of refurbished bodies in October 2002, by which time the DCS 520 was an antique. Kodak itself was becoming an antique in 2002, although the company still had ten years left before it declared bankruptcy. As recently as 1996 Kodak had been bigger than Canon; at that time its arch-rival was Fuji of Japan. Nowadays there are still Kodak billboards here and there.

BOXOUT: Processing the DCS 520's files
Kodak's DCS series predates Adobe RGB and sRGB; the DCS 520 seems to have used NTSC or some Kodak-specific colour space. Although modern versions of Photoshop still open the DCS 520's files, the colours often look odd. Here are two shots, the top one rendered with the camera's JPG engine, the bottom one output with the most recent version of Kodak's DCS Photo Desk (click white balancing on the white outline):

Photoshop seems to do a terrible job, at first, but this can be fixed in CS4 at least by changing the camera profile from ACR 4.4 to ACR 2.4. The following two images were output with default settings, ACR 4.4 at the top and ACR 2.4 at the bottom:

The reds are blown-out, but tweaking the exposure produces this, which is much more pleasing:

It's hard to tell whether the Kodak that made the DCS 520 still exists. The digital imaging sensor part of Kodak was sold in 2011 and now exists as a separate company, Truesense Imaging, which makes digital sensors for movie cameras. The professional digital camera part of Kodak was shut in 2005; the consumer digital camera part of Kodak - which dominated the volume market for a while, to no effect - was shut in 2012. The film part of Kodak is now called Kodak Alaris, and it's nice to hope that it will survive in much the same was as Ilford. Ironically, Kodak Tri-X outlasted Kodak's digital cameras. The rest of Kodak is called Eastman Kodak and sells printers and scanners and "imaging solutions".

On the other hand, the DCS 520 had a very simple game of Pong, whereas the D1 had nothing of the sort:

On a more serious level Kodak was generous with its software, and gave away DCS Photodesk - which could process the camera's images and also do tethered shooting - for free, whereas Nikon made people pay extra for Nikon Capture.

The camera has dual PCMCIA slots, which work fine with FAT32 Compact Flash cards and the old IBM Microdrives:

Despite being older than the hills the DCS 520 has surprisingly wide coverage on the internet (it was the first digital SLR reviewed by Digital Photography Review, for example). The most interesting article was a contemporary review hosted at Rob Galbraith's website, here, although sadly it has long since been deleted. Luckily a chap seems to have uploaded it to Scribd:

Pixelcount Feb March 98

Did you get your money's worth, way back then? Presumably most of the people who used DCS 520s didn't actually pay for them, and Rob Galbraith's article makes a case for it being a worthwhile update of the DCS 3, so I imagine that photographers were thrilled by it. $15,000 would have bought a lot of film, but then again photojournalists shot a lot of film, which had to be processed and scanned and couriered about.

I have no idea if the DCS 520 was used outside the context of sports and spot news. The only photo I have seen of a Kodak DCS being used for the macho business of war reporting is in this blog post, which shows a man called John Costello editing images he shot with a Kodak DCS 620 in Kosovo. It's a fascinating glimpse of digital photojournalism at the turn of the millennium - Costello is surrounded by power packs, flash units, and cameras, and he's using an original G3 PowerBook to edit a photo with presumably Photoshop. One of the images he shot seems to have been used here.

Resolution-wise, two megapixels is quite a way behind the curve. Here's what it looks like, superimposed on the same scene shot with a twenty-one megapixel 5D MkII:

If we size the DCS 520's image to match the 5D, it's quite obviously not nearly as sharp:

If we go the other way, and size the 5D's image down to match the DCS 520, it seems that the DCS 520's two megapixel sensor was pretty efficient way back in 1998:

What does it feel like to use the DCS 520 nowadays? It's big and heavy although less bulky than the Nikon F5-bodied DCS cameras. People will think you're a tourist with a big camera rather than a voyager from the past. ISO goes from a clean 200 to ugly 1600, which suffers from a mixture of banding, amp noise, and inconsistent colour response. The blue channel is much noisier than the red and green channels, which has the effect of putting yellow splotches over the image where the blue channel didn't "stick". Batteries are still available on the internet, and the modern units I have last for several hundred shots.

If there's one lesson the cover of Oasis' "What's the Story" teaches us, it's that you should invest in buildings, not shops.

Colour-wise the camera seems to love red. Red was its first child; it doesn't love the others as much, but it tries not to show it. Exposure-wise the camera tends to err on the side of overexposure, which in my experience is a Canon-y thing. The autofocus system has five points arranged horizontally across the frame; the middle point is extra-specially precise with lenses that have an f/2.8 or wider maximum aperture, although in practice in daylight I had no problem autofocusing.

On an emotional level, using it felt exactly like using a modern digital SLR. It has a standard APS-C crop and shoots at 3.5fps with a 13 frame buffer, which is almost exactly the same as the more modern 5D MkII (vs 6fps with a 36-shot buffer for the EOS-1n film camera). Unlike the CoolPix 990 that I covered a couple of posts ago it's no slower or more awkward than a modern digital camera. The only obvious difference is that you can't zoom into the image to check your focus. As with the CoolPix 990 it's essentially pointless nowadays - not enough quirks, not objectively superior to anything, and it's very heavy. But, again, for one day I was probably the only person in London, perhaps even the world, using that camera.

It seems that the DCS 520 had a fairly limited afterlife once it was no longer current. Kodak pulled out of the professional digital imaging business in the mid-2000s, by which time the digital SLR market was booming and prices were crashing down, and any mid-decade six megapixel digital SLR outperforms the DCS 520 by a considerable margin. Today it's in the odd position of being a big, impressive-looking piece of equipment that's essentially worthless. Much like Eastman Kodak itself! I thank you.

Windows 8.1: Candy and a Currant Bun

And so it came to pass that on the day Morrissey's autobiography was released, Microsoft chose to update Windows 8. The company has added a couple of arrows and a button that doesn't do much and point one. Windows 8 was a shock when it was new, and some people thought it should be bludgeoned in its bed, but I've grown to mostly forget about it. Has it changed, or have I changed?

I'm looking forward to the next edition, Windows 8.11, which will add support for Workgroups. What are Workgroups? Well, Workgroups are a kind of peer-to-peer network along the lines of Apple's AppleTalk. Imagine this scenario - you've got a room full of PCs, and a very expensive laser printer in the corner, and you want to send something to it for printing. Ordinarily you'd save your work to a floppy disc and transfer it to the machine connected to the laser printer, but what if you could hook all the PCs to the laser printer with a cable, wouldn't that be great? You wouldn't have to walk across the room any more. You could be in another room. You could print out a sheet of paper that says YOU ARE A POOPY-HEAD and no-one would know it was you.

Tomorrow morning we'll be miles away / on another continent and another day

In theory you could buy a room full of Macs instead, but they're expensive. And different. Now imagine that instead of being connected to a laser printer, your Workgroup is connected to the telephone line - and on the other side of the world there is a room much like your own, and your Workgroup is connected to that Workgroup, and you can share files and things with people on the other side of the world. Which is Australia. Right now, the cost of international telecommunication is too expensive for this to be a reality, and of course there are political barriers, but one day all of humankind will be one race, one creed, and information will be free. In the far future we won't need to transmit things to the other side of the world any more, because they will already know everything we know, but until that comes to pass, information will be clumped, and unevenly spread.

The future of humankind will not be a boot stamping on a person's face forever, because all complex systems fall apart, and the world of 1984 was a very complex system. Good and evil both require energy to keep going, and the more extreme the regime the more energy is required, until the energy that might have gone into advancing the regime is instead wasted on perpetuating it. Tyranny and utopia are doomed to fail, in the long run; the future of humanity is a kind of middling averageness, which is at least preferable to a nightmare of torture and brutality.

And if life cannot be a dream, at least we might get a good night's sleep. But that is enough of Morrissey's autobiography. Sorry about the "Windows 8.11" gag up there, by the way, that joke isn't funny any more. Ere long gone last year I do done did stick Windows 8 on an old ThinkPad X61, a 2ghz Core II Duo machine from 2006. Despite the generally horrified reaction that Windows 8 received in the specialist press it works surprisingly well in a mobile context - it's easy to forget that it was touted as a faster, slimmer alternative to Windows 7, and it feels fast even on such elderly hardware. Windows 8.1 doesn't add much of substance, but at least it doesn't hurt. Let's see what it's like.

But first, Windows 8. Look at it:

Let's imagine that I'm on the desktop, and I want to launch Windows Paint, so I fuck around with the Charms menu and there's a search box and let's try that and oh shit it tries to open the fucking store:

Well, Windows 8.1 is better, because it doesn't fuck around. It just takes you to the store straight away and fails to find Paint slightly quicker than before:

So how do you find Paint? Please, Windows 8, let me get what I want. This time. The odd relationship and interrelationship between the start screen and the desktop and the search functionality were a concern that lots of people discovered when the pre-release versions of Windows 8 came out, and unfortunately Windows 8.1 does very little to fix them. It's as if Microsoft really didn't care about the criticism. Windows 8 wasn't like any other post-95 incarnation of Windows, it was different.

But first, let's install Windows 8.1, as an upgrade from Windows 8.0. Windows 8.1 is also available as an official stand-alone DVD, unlike 8.0, which was only available as an OEM product. This was problematic; it seems that the OEM installation was tied in perpetuity to the machine on which it was first installed[1], but I am not a lawyer.

8.1 is available via the store, rather than Windows Update:

At this point the machine needs to restart. Linux fans will probably chuckle, because Linux never needs to be rebooted, which is important if you're running a nuclear reactor. Less so otherwise. Installation is really nothing. A rush and a push and it's finished. It would seem that Windows downloads a complete fresh operating system rather than a big patch, which might explain why you can't simply download the update on one of your machines and then transfer it to different machines.

By default Microsoft acts a bit like Overly Attached Girlfriend, which is worrying, because where do Microsoft's intentions lie? It's good that Oscar Wilde died a long time before he had a chance to see "let apps use my advertising ID for experiences across apps". He would have given up with writing if he had known that this was the future of the English language.

Microsoft should stop trying to make Bing happen. It's not going to happen.

Here's the new start screen. During installation it bugged me about my Microsoft account, but I've forgotten my password, and I guess that it reset my visual settings in retaliation. Hey, what's this thing in the corner?

There's a new arrow. Is it new? I can't remember it from before. Let's click on it:

Well, that certainly makes it a lot easier to get to the Apps view that I will never use. Let's see if we can find Paint from here:

I was looking for Paint and then I found Paint, and heaven knows I'm actually quite pleased. Well done, Microsoft! Seriously, this is frustration for no reason, and frustration for no reason is irritating.* An upgrade to 8.1 reinstalls all the apps you deleted, so that you can delete them again. I kept the calculator, because the thought of an app that turns my sophisticated dual-core laptop - the X61 is still a good piece of design, even seven years later - into a calculator amuses me.

* Sorry, that one was awful.

There used to be a group called The Lovin' Spoonful. Snap view is now slightly more flexible. As before, it doesn't work on the X61's old 1024x768 LCD, but with higher resolutions you can have have up to four apps per screen (as opposed to two beforehand), and you can position them arbitrarily across the screen rather than fixing them in a 75/25% ratio. Nonetheless it's still a usability nightmare and of dubious use.

It makes a bit more sense with multiple monitors, shown here with my ThinkPad X61's screen on the left, an external monitor on the rise right, two Snap apps at the top, desktop+Snap at the bottom:

It looks as if Paul McCartney is coming out of a psychedelic coffin. If we're being honest - I would never be anything less than honest with you, dear reader - this is the kind of thing that people do once, so that they can illustrate a blog post about doing it.

Here's the desktop, with the much-anticipated (cough) "start button":

Windows 8.1 takes away the Windows Experience Index score, by the way. The "about this computer" screen no longer has it. It was nice as a rough guide, at least to check if my system had acknowledged installing an SSD (for example). You can run it by opening an administrator's DOS prompt and entering winsat formal but there's no obvious way of actually seeing the results.

But let's click on the new (cough) "start button". Let's see the old start menu pop up! Yay! I can't wait. Deep in the cell of my heart I really would like to see the start menu again.

It's not strange, Microsoft just wants you to live your life this way-hey

Oh. No start menu. The new (cough) "start button" (air quotes) just duplicates the functionality of the Windows key. What a swizz! For most people the other reason for updating to 8.1 is that it can bypass the Start Screen entirely, although it's not obvious how you go about this. You need to right-click on the taskbar, like so:

And then you select "when I sign in or close all applications on a screen, go to the desktop instead of etc".

At this point it's a good idea to install Classic Shell. The combination of booting-to-the-desktop plus Classic Shell basically gives you The Windows 8 You Always Wanted. Classic Shell could boot to the desktop beforehand, but in my experience it wasn't as smooth as 8.1's implementation.

There are already a few updates:

Microsoft, so much to answer for. I wanted so badly to include more of Morrissey's solo lyrics, but not enough of his songs lend themselves to garnishing an article about Windows 8.1. Why does Windows bury its options away when Microsoft knows it makes things hard for people?

For a lark I decided to see if 8.1 knocked the machine's performance at all, so I loaded up HyperPi, and it actually took seven seconds less time to calculate Pi to two million digits than before. I'm guessing that this is down to shoddy testing on my part - I ran it once each time - but my subjective impression is that there is at the very least no obvious drop, no bloat, no juddery windows and constant fan noise.

Is there any point to 8.1 in that case? The (cough) "start button" is a LIE, there are updates to the apps that you will never use, and as before you have to install Classic Shell to get back the start menu, at which point you have something pretty good, faster than Windows 7 but not really worth the money. Unless you have a touchscreen PC, but I haven't got one. I haven't got one. I was tempted to buy one but a strange fear gripped me.

'cause it's not £25 any more. Back when I installed Windows 8.0, I upgraded from XP Professional - all the above malarky is actually built on an XP-Windows 8.0 upgrade - and the cost was £25. The kind of pricing model that Apple uses for OSX. Sadly it was a short-lived thing, and it's now £75 for an upgrade or £125 for the gooey kablooie full thing.

Put another way, if you have an old Windows 7 PC and you want to give it a new lease of life and you have £75 to spare, you can either upgrade to Windows 8.1 or you can buy a decent 120gb SSD for the same money, and install that instead. It'll be fussy depending on how your computer is set up, and you might have to spend a while shifting things off your boot partition to make space - assuming you have a boot partition - but unless and until Microsoft abruptly ceases support for Windows 7, I know which option I would prefer.

Postscript: Five Things Microsoft Could Do to Get Back its Mojo
In the words of The Pet Shop Boys' Neil Tennant, successful pop groups tend to go through an "imperial phase", during which they are at the height of their powers. It can only be recognised when it has passed, and it always passes.

The group puts out a much-anticipated, hugely popular album, preceded by a string of top singles, and then there's a cash-in film which has a limited cinema release. Slade had a film, Slade in Flame, the Spice Girls had Spice World, even the Pet Shop Boys had one (It Couldn't Happen Here, written about at great and fascinating length here for The Quietus). Usually the film is the high water mark, the peak of folly, and although the band might remain popular after that point it never recaptures its imperial phase.

The imperial phase becomes a pesky ghost, like Jacob Marley from A Christmas Carol. Or Krapp's younger self, captured forever on tape. You can't go back and it will never be the same again. The mighty fall. Skip back to the previous post, and the Kodak-Fuji film price war of the 1990s; they were masters of the world, but the world changed.

Microsoft had an imperial phase too. There was a time when Microsoft was the company that everybody loved to hate. Bill Gates was both the richest and most evil man in the world. Windows was the worst thing ever. But Microsoft was top bastard. The company saw off IBM and Lotus and Corel and everybody and it was master of the world. Nowadays Microsoft is still massively successful and wealthy, and only a fool would write the company off, but the imperial phase has passed.

So how could Microsoft make something of Windows 8, and perhaps regain some of its mojo? Some of the evil glamour it used to have. Let's imagine that I'm completely amoral. When I see a device with a screen on it, my first thought should be "does that run Microsoft software? If not, why not? If it runs something else, how can I change that?"

1. Pricing and Editions. Windows 8 upgrade £15. Boxed retail copy £24.95. Boxed Windows 8 Server £175.50. No excuse not to have it. Have two editions of Windows 8 - Windows 8, which duplicates the current Windows 8 Pro, and Windows 8 Server, with extra functionality available as downloadable content from the store. The ultimate goal is to move to a model where Windows 8 is a modular system fed with downloadable content, so that over time £15 becomes £50, and £24.95 becomes £75, and £175.50 becomes... well, no upper limit for the server edition, the client is paying for it. DLC has been a smashing success in the computer gaming world, it can be a smashing success in the operating system world as well. You want to print a bunch of RAW files you've downloaded from your camera just by right-clicking on them and selecting send to printer? That'll be £4.95 please, for the Camera RAW Media Suite.

2. Own the Platform. Get on the phone to the world's motherboard manufacturers. The long-term goal is to come up with a standard UEFI BIOS interface that has a kind of cut-down Windows 8 start screen, that boots instantly and has basic internet functionality. Some motherboard manufacturers already make something similar - they call it a pre-OS environment - why not slap a Windows 8 Start Screen interface onto it? In fact this is something that Windows 8's Start Screen interface should have been written for in the first place. People wouldn't mind if it booted instantly and was sold explicitly as a taster of the "real" desktop. Gigabyte, Asus etc could sell motherboards with Windows 8 Start! Ready stickers on the packaging. The long-term goal is to either control or at least become the driving force behind the UEFI BIOS and thus the hardware. Microsoft seems to have started something like this already, with Secure Boot, which is more like the old Microsoft that we knew and loved.

3. Linux: Sleeping with the Enemy. Too far gone to destroy. Instead try to associate the free software movement with Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and the like, so that businessmen and system builders are suspicious. One classic tactic used by guilty-as-hell politicians is to accuse their accusers of the exact same crime. Make it so that free software advocates come across as hysterical clowns who can't be trusted. Hippies who hate the world of business, who want all information to be free - including your company's private information. Imply very loosely that if the choice is between the inevitability of having your data tapped by the NSA, e.g. Jack Bauer, Jason Bourne, James Bond, upstanding professionals, versus a bunch of badly-dressed Judean Popular People's Liberation Front of Judea types who will sell your stuff to The Guardian, you'd be mad not to go with the former. Okay, Linux might be secure; but Linux people... can you trust them? NB This approach would go down well in the US and the UK, where the population are pro-US; in France it would be a bad idea. France is a big market but on the other hand it costs money to translate Windows into French, besides which what's the point? Spanish is the language of the future, not French.

4. Embrace and Extend Steam. Get on the phone to Gabe Newell of Valve. Pretend to be his friend. Be humble, tell him that the Windows games store is okay but Steam is even better, and you want to make the two of them compatible with each other. So that people can buy games from either the Windows games store or Steam and have the game appear in both stores. And you'll share revenue and perhaps let Steam use XBox hardware for the Steambox. Microsoft will need to know a bit more about how Steam works, of course, and will need a seat on the board whenever decisions are made. The ultimate goal here is to latch on to Steam, add things to Steam, and eventually either gain control of Steam or push it over a cliff - the classic embrace, extend, exterminate model. Mr Newell is no dummy and this is unlikely to work, but it gives some of Microsoft's people something to do, and perhaps they might learn something.

5. Windows 8. Last and least, make it so that Microsoft's salesmen can tout Windows 8 without having to qualify their statements or lie. Take a look at Ubuntu, and try to make it so that the general public associate all of Linux with Ubuntu, because Ubuntu's interface is just as problematic as Windows 8 (look, they're fighting amongst themselves). As for Windows 8 itself, rejig it a bit. At installation the user is given the choice of booting either to the Start Screen or the desktop, with prominent instructions given on how to change this. If the user decides to boot to the desktop, the Start Screen will become a bit like the Windows Media Centre or full-screen Steam, e.g. a portal that desktop users dive into. Give a team of half a dozen developers a week to copy Classic Shell, but strip out most of its functionality. Make a big song and dance about this in the media. Make it look as if you're "de-Stalinising" Microsoft now that Steve Ballmer has left. Make it so that installing Windows 8.2 disables an existing installation of Classic Shell.