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Recalling Windows 1.0 At 25 Years
alphadogg writes "When Microsoft released the very first version of Windows nearly 25 years ago, on Nov. 20, 1985, it was late to the game and little used. Apple had already brought graphical user interfaces to computers with Macintosh more than a year earlier, while DOS systems dominated the market for IBM and IBM-compatible PCs. No one who used this first version was likely to have predicted that Windows would completely dominate the PC market 25 years later..."
Windows 1.0 was a complete joke - it didn't even support overlapping windows. Even Windows 2.0 in 1987 was pretty bad. About the only thing worth getting it for was the new Word-for-Windows, a WYSIWYG upgrade to Word 6.
Yep, it sucked then and it still sucks, kind of like network television.
Anyone remember IBM's TopView? I still have the floppies just because it was so bad, I hate to get rid of them. Might be worth something someday to the museum of dead end software.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
Apple? Lets not re-write history. Amiga OS was the DOMINATE gui of the 80s. Apple's GUI was complete garbage; AND IT DIDNT MULTI TASK.
A bit too late for a recall of 1.0 right?
Microsoft just rode the wave of open IBM hardware specifications for the business PC. A little knife in the back of things like DRDOS and Microsoft had no competition.
My brother has way too many old PCs and software. Here's a page with screenshots of all the old Widows stuff: http://www.selectric.org/winhist/index.html
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
It ignored the positioning of Windows as a stepping stone to OS/2 as well as the timing and feature migration between them.
On another note entirely, it would've been interesting of DesQView or GEM had won the "Better DOS than DOS" game.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
"Apple had already brought graphical user interfaces to computers with Macintosh"
More like stolen from Xerox, who was inspired by Alan Kay's ideas, who probably was at THE demo : DOUGLAS ENGLEBART
What's next? Apple invented the keyboard? The mouse? The bit? Gimme a break.
What about GEOS for the Commodore 64? GEOS
I mean when it came out it looked better than Windows and did more. Too bad Commodore was unable to get its act together on the hardware side.
Our office used Gem Desktop. We were amazed at how primitive Windows was by comparrison, with no overlapping windows, etc.
Had a few Radio Shack computers in the early 90's, and Tandy Deskmate was included. It wasn't too bad. Sort of clunky but usable.
Article was more than confused. On page 1 we've got "Windows 1.0", which is extremely rare, had a bunch of fatal bugs, and was quickly supplanted with 1.01. On page 2, we've got "Windows 2 was, I believe, still in DOS, [...] Windows 3 was the first GUI one that I remember seeing." which is catastrophically nonsense, and then the same 'expert' says "I preferred OS/2 back then. I thought it was a much better operating system. I think it was better technically."
:\ We also have people talking about Windows XP as if it were descended from Windows 1.0 and not OS/2. So crappy...
They just grabbed some random programmers off the street instead of going to actual experts
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Apple was not the first company to offer a computer GUI. Xerox offered the Star workstation in 1981 but it was not a commercial success. In exchange for Apple stock, Apple designers were granted a tour of Xerox PARC as well as rights to use some of the PARC research. Apple would use this know how along with their own research to build Lisa then the Mac.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
You mean, like Toyota recalls cars?
When talking about my technical history, I like to joke that I've been using Windows since version 3.0, and trying to use it since version 1.0.
I bought Win1 and really did try to make use of it, as a task switcher if nothing else. It had potential. So I upgraded to Win2 when it came out because it looked like a big step forward (it supported 286 protected mode!), but still fell back on DESQview, which lacked a GUI of its own, but handled task switching adequately. I only ran Win2 when I needed it for an app. But again I upgraded to Win3, because I could see it had potential. Win3 was the first version that I actually ended up running most of the time, because it finally had competent task-switching capabilities (thanks to the 386) to support my DOS apps, and enough Win apps to make it useful.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
The nice priest just baptized them... wait a minute, I don't think that was _water_!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I remember when I got into computers as a student. The campus labs were running off of a DOS menu that would allow you to go to your unix account to do all sorts of things, various DOS programs or go into Windows 3.0. The machines were a mix of 386 and 486 boxes. Windows 3.0 ran so poorly was such PITA and added so little value to what people were trying to accomplish most lab patrons stuck with DOS programs and their shell accounts. That was Windows 3.0. I can only imagine how frustrating using Windows 1.0 must have been.
(said items probably a hell of a lot more useful than the actual Windows 1.0 software ever was...)
A while ago, I scanned in a review of Windows 1.0 that I found in an old magazine. It's quite interesting to read - the subtitle is "brightening up MS-DOS", and it is described as taking only four seconds to switch applications, compared to 30 seconds to start Microsoft Word from scratch! Glad to see some things never change.
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
Considering that MS did not invent the GUI, Spreadsheet, Word Processor, Browser, Mobile OS, or anything else they might well known for, it would be more interesting to read about just what the heck these people *have* been doing for 25 years.
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
Remember that Commodore 64 program? :)
Finally. I think that they should have recalled it much earlier.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
We might all be running a unix based AmigaOS and listening to our Apods ;-)
After 25 years? I'm having trouble getting the point of this story...
My book: Friendly F#, fun with game development and XNA; my game: Galaxy Wars by VSTeam; my gamedev language: Casanova.
Windows 1 is 25 years old and what does Ballmer do? He sells a bucket load of MS shares
Coincidence ... or NOT!!!!!!!
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
What would be nice is if Microsoft would release every version of Windows up to but not including Windows XP for like $100 on a DVD. I had most on floppy disk but some of them don't work no more. Even though most Windows(DOS) could be considered abandonware.
I think the original Balance of Power game ran under Windows 1 run-time.
Write Only Memory: Another pointless blog.
I remember using GEM back in 1986. It was quite good.
Interestingly it looks similar to a Unix Window System I worked on for Siemens around the same time called Collage (I think). This ran on the Siemens Sinix variant of Unix. I wrote a spreadsheet for Collage and there was a word processor. The system ran on the MX2 / X20 mini computers as well as MX500 multiprocessor systems. One model was a dinky little desktop about the size of a small form factor PC and ran using the National Semiconductor 32 bit processor range. It is was a kind of NeXT Pizzabox before its time. The big advantage of Collage was that it didn't crash all the time.
There doesn't seem to be any Wikipage on Collage so I guess it is lost in the midst of time.
Programmers on the versions of the ARM platform without a MMU do OK today without that happening. The difference back then is the multiple programs were attempting to run without the OS being capable of letting them do so properly.
Abandonware! Love collecting old versions.
Well, that dominance was more due to how it was sold (making deals with OEMs to preload in order to keep users out of the decision-making process) rather than the product itself. And in the 1980s we were all younger (even you, my dear reader) and more naive, so the the idea of "the best" not winning, seemed kind of strange.
Back then it was all about tech, so by 1984, hackers weren't even thinking about the x86 platform anymore because the ones with real money to spend had all gone to 68k and the rest were still pushing the limits of their older (usually 65xx) 8-bit machines. In 1986 I had to get a job, and the one I found involved MSDOS programming. It surprised me because I didn't know those type of computers were around anymore; I thought they had been a brief item of interest 5 years earlier, quickly passed by all the wonderful innovation of the early 1980s.
Who knew, indeed, that we would throw it all away. It wasn't until the mid/late 1990s that x86 started catching up to mid 1980s tech -- except for clockspeed. x86 was all about clockspeed, a weird one-dimensional measure that ignored everything else that made, say the Amiga, so fucking great.
For me, the game-changer was "Windows for Workgroups." (Windows 3.11) With Win311, a collection of "NE2000" compatible network cards and some coax and terminators, you could easily set up peer-to-peer networks. Suddenly people were sharing printers, saving files to a network drive and the sneakernet started to fade... Of course it also killed the DOS peer-to-peer networks, but that's another story...
I remember Windows 1.0. The only thing that worked OK was Reversi. I remember to win against the computer by 63-0!!!
And I was on dual floppy drives until 1988.
Our office manager/tech manager got a copy of 1.0 but those of us who were using WordPerfect and dBASE III to the max didn't have a lot of slack in 640K to play with multitasking.
What an immensly wank article!
It is spread out over multiple pages[1], purely to spam people's faces with adverts. And if you are smart enough to not want to run code from unknown sources, and turn off Javascript, this article is unreadable (for 2 seconds). The article's content is hidden, and then JS is used to show the article. Of course, just turning styles off (view, page style, no style, in Firefox) makes the content visible.
Anyway, fuck those cunts at network world, and their immense desire to advertise. If the article is genuinely informative, interesting and insightful, the author will want it read. So here's the whole thing:
[1] Holy fucking shit, page 3 is one sentence!
Windows 1.0 turning 25: First experiences recalled
25 years ago, Microsoft released Windows 1.0, but it wasn't an instant hit
By Jon Brodkin, Network World
November 08, 2010 07:06 AM ET
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Do you remember Windows 1.0? Chances are, your answer is "no."
When Microsoft released the very first version of Windows nearly 25 years ago, on Nov. 20, 1985, it was late to the game and little used. Apple had already brought graphical user interfaces to computers with Macintosh more than a year earlier, while DOS systems dominated the market for IBM and IBM-compatible PCs.
Windows 1.0 was a graphical front end for MS-DOS (Microsoft's version of DOS), but in some respects was out-of-date even by the standards of 1985. Windows 1.0, for example, didn't allow overlapping windows, a feature offered with Macintosh.
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Do you remember Windows 1.0? Chances are, your answer is "no."
When Microsoft released the very first version of Windows nearly 25 years ago, on Nov. 20, 1985, it was late to the game and little used. Apple had already brought graphical user interfaces to computers with Macintosh more than a year earlier, while DOS systems dominated the market for IBM and IBM-compatible PCs.
Windows 1.0 was a graphical front end for MS-DOS (Microsoft's version of DOS), but in some respects was out-of-date even by the standards of 1985. Windows 1.0, for example, didn't allow overlapping windows, a feature offered with Macintosh.
Microsoft Windows after 25 years: A visual history
Related Content
No one who used this first version was likely to have predicted that Windows would completely dominate the PC market 25 years later.
Shortly after Windows 1.0 was released, Nathaniel Borenstein was working at the Carnegie Mellon University IT Center when Microsoft representatives stopped by to demonstrate their new operating system.
"What's interesting in retrospect was we laughed, just laughed them out of the place," Borenstein says. "Because we had a vastly superior window manager of our own, and these guys came in with this pathetic and naïve system. We just knew they were never going to accomplish anything."
Borenstein went on to create MIME, the Internet standard for sending and receiving multimedia data. The lesson here is that even the most accomplished technology experts can be wrong. "Never underestimate the value of persistence," Borenstein says.
Although Windows 1.0 wasn't widely used, Microsoft did sell the OS at retail preloaded on PCs and in the box, adorned with the words "Microsoft Windows Operating Environment For IBM and COMPAQ Personal Computers."
Today, 25 years later, more than nine out of 10 desktop computers run some version of Windows. Windows XP, released nearly a decade ago, is still the most widely used. But XP is starting to give way to Windows 7, which has sold a whopping 240 million licenses in its first year of av
here's the complete text of the third page:
"But with Windows you click over here and you're in the program. It definitely was a revolutionary change in terms of the experiences people had and the accessibility it brought to so many more people."
so glad they didn't try to cram that wall of text on to the second page. it might have bumped one of the 50 ads off the screen.
i could live a little longer in this prison
When Windows 1.0 came out you had a lot of options. ,TurboC , TurboBasic, and QuickBasic. You also had a lot of code like Borlands TurboEditor Toolbox, DatabaseToolbox, and Communications Toolbox.
The Commodore Amiga was right around the corner. It was much more advanced and had real multitasking, stereo sound, and advanced graphics.
The Atari ST was also just coming out. It was inexpensive and also had a good UI.
Better doesn't all ways win.
People stuck with DOS because it ran Lotus 123 and DBase, and WordPerfect.
People used PCs to develop vertical applications because you could use TurboPascal
The other reason was marketing and Press coverage. The magazines of the day couldn't afford to offend the PC market. Would you rather get ad revenue from 30 PC makers or Commodore, Atari, and Apple?
People will talk all about the benefits of the PCs openness but that was pretty much bull back then. The Amiga and ST where cheaper and more powerful than the average PC. Commodore and Atari at the time published all the pin outs and software specks needed to do anything you wanted much like Apple did back in the Apple II days.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
It's silly and childish. He doesn't even work for Microsoft anymore.
And yet, you speak of 30 PC makers, and only a single vendor for the other options. Almost by definition, it was a more open platform. Indeed, if I dug around in my parent's basement I might just find my commented copy of the original PC BIOS source in the IBM PC Technical Reference manual.
I do agree that the other platforms were much more open at the time. That was almost a necessity, however, as you don't have all kinds of OS APIs to isolate hardware. If you wanted to draw a line on the screen you just edited the video RAM, or sent IO calls to the video chipset. That is, unless you wanted to write your whole app in BASIC or whatever the vendor supplied in ROM.
n/t
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
So many people comparing Windows 1.x to GEM, GEOS, Mac, and not one mention of VisiCorp Visi On, the first GUI for the IBM PC, released in 1983.
I think the weirdest thing I ever did was run the real-mode Windows 3.0 in a DOS box under Windows 95.
I blame Steve Jobs stupidity for this... The story is repeating itself with the Iphone vs. Android debacle. The arsehole has not learned anything and history is about to repeat itself...
I was in the Air Force when this came out; I remember getting access to a MicroVAX and a Mac at a meeting in Colorado Springs (ever see a Tempest-Certified Mac - u-u-u-ugly box) and getting to see a demo of 1.0 about the same time. We all thought the Mac and Vax were the future - and that Windows seriously sucked. The Microsoft guy spent the whole time in the demo apologizing. When we were done, I remember another attendee opine that Microsoft would win the desktop battle. "Why" we all wanted to know. "Ever hear an Apple rep apologize for anything? Ever hear a DEC employee apologize for anything. These guys are tossing their stuff down from Mount Olympus. Microsoft actually seems to know they need to improve."
I got Windows 1.0 bundled with a 2 MB Intel AboveBoard RAM expansion card. And, yes, that was my impression. For one, calling it a GUI would be a grevious mistake: instead, it was more like a graphical text-based interface. In a nutshell, very little worked well, and there was absolutely no driving reason (Reversi aside) to consider leaving good ol' DesqView -- or even DOS. DesqView, which had no real pretentions to GUI, did a vastly nicer job of task handling. In truth, looking back, I think it's nothing more than dumb luck (and maybe Reversi?) that got Windows on top. And believe you me: CGA did *nothing* for the "GUIness" of Windows 1.0.
Nor, for that matter, did the fact that nobody had mice at the time. Except, of course, for those self-satisfied Mac users.
Thank GOD for the Amiga in '87. Finally, a real OS, with both GUI and command line components. Oh, yeah: and real color.
What was awesome was getting a free copy of Windows 1.01 with an Intel AboveBoard, and then installing all the 5.25in floppies to make it work on my green-phosphor IBM monitor with a Hercules graphics card - the ghosting was incredible. It was cool ... for about 10 minutes. Then I deleted it ...
The bad ol' days ...
The actual story is here
How exactly is the Nintendo DS OS (whatever it could be) any different from plain old DOS.
The OS code is basically the same:
1) This is the machine
2) You know the memory addresses
3) You will be the only program running
4) Do whatever you want
The problem of Windows 1.x -> 3.x is that it tried running multiple programs and had no ways of preventing one program damaging another.
Take a PC with sane hardware (less than 50% of those sold in the 80s) with MS-DOS and NO strange drivers (SCSI, whatever). A program could run for weeks. Does this make it a stable platform?
It took about seven years for MS to create a WIndows People stayed with DOS for the same reason they stay with XP. The new solution is not superior enough to change. I was writing my own GUIs in DOS because the MS GUI was so unusable. The memory constraints with the Intel solution made the software unusable. The focus on cost meant that the critical graphics coprocessor was usually not present.
In terms of toolkits, the Mac has a superior toolset. MS Excel with intra-sheet linking and scripting made it a superior solution on the Mac. There were many data base solutions that could be combined for a superior workflow, glued together with Apple Script. Businesses that had existing automated workflows did not necessarily have a need to upgrade, but many business at the time were on a manual paper system. Since vertical market solutions were key, and many solutions were eventually ported to MS Windows 3.11, that became the dominant single vendor OS.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
You forgot to mention that UNIX XWindows and NeWS workstations were available and common at the time.
"That was almost a necessity, however, as you don't have all kinds of OS APIs to isolate hardware. If you wanted to draw a line on the screen you just edited the video RAM, or sent IO calls to the video chipset. That is, unless you wanted to write your whole app in BASIC or whatever the vendor supplied in ROM."
Ummm No you didn't. The Amiga and ST actually had a fully documented API and it included all sorts of things like blitter objects, sprites, playfields and draw line at least on the Amiga side I didn't code on the ST.
Only on that piece of festering dung called a PC did you have to write to the video RAM to do something as simple as draw a line.
For the Apple, Commodore, and Atari bits you are correct. For the more advanced systems at least the Amiga actually had a real OS.
But even then you really had only a single PC vendor. It was Microsoft and Intel.
Plus what real benifit did you get with that openness at the time.
The Amiga 1000 was about $1000 less than an AT. It was faster, had better graphics, sound, and a real OS for the price as well.
It all came down to Lotus, WordPerfect, and Dbase as well as the Borland development tools. What it really came down to was the illusion that the PC was serious when Commodore and Atari where "home computers".
I even remember a very smart friend of mine telling me that he thought that the plain green screen was more professorial looking than Amiga, ST, or Mac OS.
I wonder what he would have thought of XP if he had lived.
It is all about the marketing.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
About time.
you had me at #!
Windows 1 was developed by people that had been with Microsoft and worked on MSDOS 1-3. IBM's Topview was considered to be the real competition, so Microsoft bought a company named Dynamical Systems (Nathan Myhrvold and Chuck Whitmer). This company had created a TopView clone named Mondrian that was smaller and faster than IBM's product. These are the guys that drove the effort that eventually became Windows 3.0, generally acknowledged as the first one that was good enough to use.
The Amiga was already out in June '85, not "Right around the corner". Mine was home and plugged into the TV in June, not November. It preceded windows 1.0. And I was further ahead than the Mac (Classic...they didn't call it classic, it was just the Mac) because the Amiga could put out color graphics at a much higher resolution. I didn't bother with PC's because DOS had 16 colors, no sound (beeping isn't sound), Amigas could play near cd quality music and could display 4096 colors simultaneously. There was no comparison. Sadly, the Amiga stood still, and 10 years later, the PC caught up to it, then passed it.
The Commodore Amiga was right around the corner.
"Was right around the corner" isn't an option. It was a year off.
The Atari ST was also just coming out. It was inexpensive and also had a good UI.
It was inexpensive, but not compared to most PCs. And the killer for it was the serious lack of applications. The problem was that the company was good at games, but they were trying to release a business based PC without any compelling business software.
People will talk all about the benefits of the PCs openness but that was pretty much bull back then.
Actually, it was pretty much true. PC vendors also published the pinouts and entry points (some vendors, like Heathkit, published the source code of their BIOS), and some didn't.
The problem with the Apple, Amiga and the Atari ST was that they were single sourced. The PCs were competing not only with Apple/Atari/Commodore but with each other. So no matter what level of technical specs you wanted, there was always at least one vendor who'd run with it.
Man, it takes Microsoft AGES to finally recall their crappy software. I, for one, am now saving my Windows 98 disc and box for 2023, when they recall it for being the buggy piece of crap that it is. Hello, refund!
Nintendo DS doesn't run multiple programs at one time. It's a one-at-a-timer.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Funny you assume me to be some fanboy, as embedded and portable device development is what I do for a living and for most stuff I pretty much use Linux exclusively, and fondly remember using 386/BSD back in the day.. amongst other things (so much for being some Windows 1.0 fanboy, or even a Linux fanboy, or whatever the fuck you are insinuating).
Doing development for the newest multicore TI OMAP processors as well as supporting pretty much now legacy ARM7 stuff, and even contributing once in a while to Rockbox ports, ARM silicon implementations are not exactly something I'm completely in the dark about. But of course this issue had little to do with ARM specifically.
Anyway, you didn't address the point I made at all, which is how without an MMU or something that serves a similar purpose in hardware you can develop a rogue application tolerant multitasking OS (without of course resorting to full emulation)
Your Nintendo DS example is the lamest thing I have heard.
And the use of a managed execution environment, which is basically just emulation, I didn't even consider Why? Because I thought we were all adults here and realized that doing this for most applications just wasn't realistic given the technology of the 1980s.Blaming a 1980s software design for not taking advantage of 2000s era hardware (for microprocessors at least) is quite stupid, at the least.
Additionally, in addition to core speed, the modern MMU itself is very very useful to get managed execution and/or emulation with minimal performance penalty. So even in a managed environment, the MMU stuff is arguably essential.
The Amiga OS was also much cleaner and more modern than MS-DOS, which was a messy and needlessly complex series of tacked-on workarounds and hacky modifications to what was basically a 16-bit ripoff of an 8-bit operating system (CP/M), with a separate GUI glued on top.
The fact that the Amiga supported proper pre-emptive multitasking which Windows didn't do for the better part of a decade is one glaring example. Even when the raw PC hardware caught up with and eventually passed the Amiga's in the early 1990s, it was still let down by a messy, anachronistic OS.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Ok, on one of the platforms that was around you didn't need the details. Of course having a blitter isn't the same as having a full graphics API at the OS level, but perhaps the Amiga really had that. In any case, my point still seems to stand in that most computer manufacturers still need to supply specs to make things work at that point in time.
I'm not sure that you can really call Intel the vendor of the PC - unless you're willing to concede that Motorolla was the vendor of the Amiga, and that the smartphone competition isn't really a competition at all since ARM makes 99% of them.
I'm not sure I ever claimed that the PC was better than its competitors. I just pointed out that it was fairly open in comparison.
The Nintendo DS does not have an operating system - all games are kernels. Same for the PSP. The PS3 and 360 use lightweight 'hypervisor' kernels that do some basic system security. The Wii is... weird - it has two chips, one (PPC) which runs the game or system menu in kernel mode, the other (ARM) performs access control to the flash filesystem and other hardware. In almost all cases kernel-mode software is executed with rather high stability.
Memory protection is required for multitasking, however, for obvious reasons. Especially for Windows developers, who have been known to do stupid things like hardcode the memory addresses of DLL functions.
A friend found Windows 1 (or was it 2?) useful. He used it to run and switch between multiple DOS sessions. One session to edit source, a second session to compile and run. Occasionally there was a third session being used to work on documentation. Not quite what Microsoft had in mind but useful none the less.
Oh yeah, just to emphasize your doltishness... The ARM includes processor core IP that is integrated or implemented both with and without an MMU. That is MY ENTIRE POINT. Since the option is there, if your plan is so well thought out, why do integrators EVER use the MMU if it is merely an option and according to you seems to be unnecessary?
flipping through these:
http://www.networkworld.com/slideshows/2010/110810-microsoft-windows-visual-history.html#slide2
i just realised:
1. Windows 1.0
2. Windows 2.0
3. Windows 3.0 / NT 3.1
4. Windows 95 / 98 / 2k / Me
5. Windows XP
6. Windows Vista
7. Windows 7
numbered by interface
yes but that is not windows 1.01 to 2.x and dos and windows 95 and 98(se). it would be nice to just have them all ready to be installed in to a vm to play old games or just flash back to the beginning of windows. this would put a extra $100 in microsofts pockets and all they have to do is put some disclaimer that there is no support for these os'es or something like that. i know of allot of people that would be willing to pay $100 for a dvd of all copies of windows.
...but Microsoft kept working on it doggedly and tirelessly, refining it and improving it and never giving up, until today it has become the universally beloved Clippy.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The Mac also had a full graphics API and I am pretty sure that the ST did as well. I never worked on the ST just the Amiga, PC, Mac, and C64.
So all the more advanced machines had a full graphics API while the PC was stuck with MS-DOS and software trying to figure out what graphics card was installed and where the video ram was located and what you could and could not do with it.
Heck the PC was so bad that you couldn't even use the OS to read and write to the serial port over 300 baud!
The PC was only more open in that there was nothing to it and it was easy to copy. After Pheonix reverse engineered the bios you could get a PC compatible that may or may not run your software. It actually took a while before they got the compatibility down and programers learned what they could and could not do an have the software work on most machines. There was no real standard back then to be honest. Compatibility at that time was so hit and miss that all the magazines more or less came up with a test. If a machine would run Lotus 123 and Microsoft Flightsimulator it was PC compatible. Also you couldn't be 100% sure that a card would work in every machine. The ISA buss had a lot of wiggle room in the speck. It was supposed to run at clock speed but that caused no end to problems so later machines clocked it at 6, 8, or 12 MHZ.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I still have windows 1.0, still in the box. The only thing missing is Bill Gates autograph.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
windows 1 & 2 were pretty awful, even by the standards of the time. compared to MacOS 5 & 6, they were sucktacular.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Umm, you're incorrect about it being a single PC vendor, unless you're holding to the 8086 code (and it's successors). AMD and Cyrix made compatible chips, so you didn't have to only buy Intel. Digital Research and IBM had differing views on the OS you ran on a PC. (And that doesn't count CP/M or GEOS or..)
Marketing had something to do with it - but frankly, it was the applications that were available for the systems and the powerhouse that IBM was in helping businesses select computers.
True, I agree the Mac had a graphics API. That I do remember firsthand.
Your assessment seems about right to me. Sometimes being open compensates for not being better. That seems to be the story of the PC architecture.
I've been waiting for them to recall that POS. Now, where can I get my money back?
Don't forget that outside of the microcomputer world we already had GUIs at that time. On very expensive workstations, or via a Tektronix terminal, etc. I used a Sun 1 system in Dec 82, before the Macintosh came out. The irony to me seems to be that for a very long time the DOS world tried to resist this, since they considered the PC a professional computer that had no need for graphics, whereas the "toy" Macintosh was just copying higher end professional systems.
Another reason GUIs took so long to take off was that it really was expensive to have. You needed a fast CPU you needed a lot of memory you probably also wanted an OS to manage that memory and to multitask and you certainly wanted decent resolution. These just weren't around on the cheap microcomputers for a long time.
"No one who used this first version was likely to have predicted that Windows would completely dominate the PC market 25 years later..."
I did.
-Bill Gates
But that is so not right. The PC really wasn't more open at all. People don't know what open really means. The PC was at best documented and people could copy it but it wasn't more open.
The Amgia and the ST both where just as well documented. The ST was probably just as as easy to clone as the PC "It used GEM for goodness sakes".
It had nothing to do with open vs closed at all.
It all had to do with Marketing.
That is all.
Now the Mac at that time was about as closed you could get as far as hardware goes but that was post Woz Apple way.
What it came down too was the illusion that the ST and the Amiga where "game machines" or "home computers". The PC had the advantage that a lot of big companies had a relationship with IBM.
And that lock in back in the day was a humdinger.
To give you an example. A hospital I worked with wanted to bring in desktop publishing. First I suggested that they get a Mac. Not a chance they where an IBM shop.
Okay they picked out an IBM laser printer that they wanted to use along with the a Linotype typesetter.
The IBM laser printer used and ISA interface card and not a standard connection.
This was when the PS/2 line was just out. So they had to run Pagemaker on windows on a 8086 or a 286 and not a 386!.
Why? Because that was the only way to use the IBM laser printer on an IBM PC at that time!
The only 386 that was around Microchannel and IBM didn't have a laser printer that would work with it.
Their layout artist used the Very expensive PC and very expensive typesetter to create fonts. She would then use wax just like the old days and pasted up the documents!
It had nothing to do with open vs closed. That is just a modern myth. It was 100% marketing.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"and the powerhouse that IBM was in helping businesses select computers."
And that is pure marketing.
The applications where a driver.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Does this involve drawing pentagrams and chicken blood?
I'm sure marketing was a big part of it was well. However, the fact that more than one company produced PCs was probably a big factor as well.
Perhaps IBM didn't intend for it to be that way, but that is how it ended up. If it didn't end up that way, I'm not sure the PC would have won out.
How many amiga or Mac clones were around back then? Note that when Apple allowed Mac clones they started taking off. Now, that wasn't good for Apple, but it was good for the architecture.
In the end, IBM didn't really get to capitalize on the PC, but the architecture was successful. It isn't all that unlike android in many ways - it doesn't matter if iOS is better or whatever, when it is one vendor vs 50, the 50 will win.
People cloned the PC because they could make money off them. The same reason they cloned the Apple II. The Atari ST was cloneable but it wasn't worth cloning. They where too inexpensive to be worth the effort.
Maybe you don't remember but IBM sued many people for coping the BIOS and making compatables. It Compaq had to create a team to make a clean room copy of the BIOS. Phoenix later did the same and I think they both ended up in court over it.
As I said the Myth of the Open PC. Their was no standard to follow and no easy way to make a clone. It was only the huge marketing power of IBM that made it worth doing and the pressure IBM was facing from the US government for antitrust that allowed it. IBM even tried to close the PC after the fact with the PS/2. Now their you could argue that it was Open vs closed.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I remember starting up a 286 running Windows 1.0. All it would do was boot. You couldn't run anything. That counted as a victory for Microsoft at the time.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
They are RECALLING Windows 1.0? What no security patch?
It does with uClinux on it.
An MMU is very useful but that is no excuse for poorly written software that effectively hopes something else will handle memory for it when it is on a platform where there is nothing to do so. If you don't have anything in hardware to manage memory you are supposed to write the software accordingly - otherwise you see things like the utter crapware we are talking about here.
Let's try again with a clearer post.
Back then that environment was crap due to NOT EVEN ATTEMPTING to stop applications from overwriting the memory other applications were using.
Now is it clear?
My second point is that programmers in similar situations now (and before) take care that such things do not happen. Not having hardware to do it for you is no excuse for ignoring the problem and hoping, which is what happened on the platform. It makes it harder but that doesn't mean you don't try when your selling point is running several bits of code in the same environment.
Now you could take that at face value or try to get another completely irrelevant insult out of reading between the lines to find something that is not there.
Also, why do you find my example "lame"? The lack of MMU was one of the challenges in porting uClinux to that platform.
And finally FFS get a login so we can see you above the noise.
The Amiga and ST actually had a fully documented API and it included all sorts of things like blitter objects, sprites, playfields and draw line at least on the Amiga side I didn't code on the ST.
AmigaOS had an API, but the calling convention was optimized for maximum performance, with the result that AmigaOS was forever stuck without memory protection and virtual memory (third party hacks don't count "in the real world")
Only on that piece of festering dung called a PC did you have to write to the video RAM to do something as simple as draw a line.
Assuming you were using DOS.
For the Apple, Commodore, and Atari bits you are correct. For the more advanced systems at least the Amiga actually had a real OS.
What exactly is a real OS? You could get a variety of OSes on the PC, and two on the Amiga (AmigaOS and AmigaUX).
If you had no need for multitasking a Disk Operation System was just fine though.
But even then you really had only a single PC vendor. It was Microsoft and Intel. Plus what real benifit did you get with that openness at the time.
You could design your own compatible model without having Commodore try to sabotage you.
The Amiga 1000 was about $1000 less than an AT. It was faster, had better graphics, sound, and a real OS for the price as well.
The AT had a faster CPU and the option of a floating point CPU. Text mode also looked better on the PC since the Amiga 1000 used either low res or interlaced high res.
It all came down to Lotus, WordPerfect, and Dbase as well as the Borland development tools. What it really came down to was the illusion that the PC was serious when Commodore and Atari where "home computers".
The PC had backing of many big companies. That was what made it a serious computer. Commodore/Atari/Apple could never hope to offer the needed variety as desired by the marked.
I even remember a very smart friend of mine telling me that he thought that the plain green screen was more professorial looking than Amiga, ST, or Mac OS.
Sure it did, it was what the pro's used at the time.
I wonder what he would have thought of XP if he had lived.
Fisher price?
It is all about the marketing.
And having the right feature set. Windows could integrate into existing environments and had a good selection of features.
Amiga OS had preemptive multitasking as it's claim to fame. Windows had fully functional Copy&Paste and much better printer support.
Absolutely correct, and only in recent years have the quality of the OS even attempted to approach the way things used to be. Sure, in the old days there was much less need for protecting the use from rogue apps (back then, the only malware you ever heard of were viruses and trojans which were easy enough to protect from - I don't remember hearing about a rash of "rogue antivirus" tools back then).
I wonder how the computing landscape would have turned out if Commodore had actually done the smart thing with the Amiga in the long run. We could all be running AmigaOS 5.0 or 6.0 or some shit on a high end PPC architecture with GB of RAM and storage space, but with fully supported and integrated classic Amiga emulation for old hardware-bangers.
FC Closer
DOS had 16 colors, no sound (beeping isn't sound)
No, it was possible to play other sounds on the internal PC speaker. The sound quality wasn’t great and you had to write your own driver, but it could be done.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
When Windows 1.0 came out you had a lot of options. ,TurboC , TurboBasic, and QuickBasic. You also had a lot of code like Borlands TurboEditor Toolbox, DatabaseToolbox, and Communications Toolbox.
The Commodore Amiga was right around the corner. It was much more advanced and had real multitasking, stereo sound, and advanced graphics.
The Atari ST was also just coming out. It was inexpensive and also had a good UI.
Better doesn't all ways win.
People stuck with DOS because it ran Lotus 123 and DBase, and WordPerfect.
People used PCs to develop vertical applications because you could use TurboPascal
The other reason was marketing and Press coverage. The magazines of the day couldn't afford to offend the PC market. Would you rather get ad revenue from 30 PC makers or Commodore, Atari, and Apple?
People will talk all about the benefits of the PCs openness but that was pretty much bull back then. The Amiga and ST where cheaper and more powerful than the average PC. Commodore and Atari at the time published all the pin outs and software specks needed to do anything you wanted much like Apple did back in the Apple II days.
When Windows 1.0 came out you had a lot of options. ,TurboC , TurboBasic, and QuickBasic. You also had a lot of code like Borlands TurboEditor Toolbox, DatabaseToolbox, and Communications Toolbox.
The Commodore Amiga was right around the corner. It was much more advanced and had real multitasking, stereo sound, and advanced graphics.
The Atari ST was also just coming out. It was inexpensive and also had a good UI.
Better doesn't all ways win.
People stuck with DOS because it ran Lotus 123 and DBase, and WordPerfect.
People used PCs to develop vertical applications because you could use TurboPascal
The other reason was marketing and Press coverage. The magazines of the day couldn't afford to offend the PC market. Would you rather get ad revenue from 30 PC makers or Commodore, Atari, and Apple?
People will talk all about the benefits of the PCs openness but that was pretty much bull back then. The Amiga and ST where cheaper and more powerful than the average PC. Commodore and Atari at the time published all the pin outs and software specks needed to do anything you wanted much like Apple did back in the Apple II days.
When Windows 1.0 came out you had a lot of options. ,TurboC , TurboBasic, and QuickBasic. You also had a lot of code like Borlands TurboEditor Toolbox, DatabaseToolbox, and Communications Toolbox.
The Commodore Amiga was right around the corner. It was much more advanced and had real multitasking, stereo sound, and advanced graphics.
The Atari ST was also just coming out. It was inexpensive and also had a good UI.
Better doesn't all ways win.
People stuck with DOS because it ran Lotus 123 and DBase, and WordPerfect.
People used PCs to develop vertical applications because you could use TurboPascal
The other reason was marketing and Press coverage. The magazines of the day couldn't afford to offend the PC market. Would you rather get ad revenue from 30 PC makers or Commodore, Atari, and Apple?
People will talk all about the benefits of the PCs openness but that was pretty much bull back then. The Amiga and ST where cheaper and more powerful than the average PC. Commodore and Atari at the time published all the pin outs and software specks needed to do anything you wanted much like Apple did back in the Apple II days.
When Windows 1.0 came out you had a lot of options.
The Commodore Amiga was right around the corner. It was much more advanced and had real multitasking, stereo sound, and advanced graphics.
The Atari ST was also just coming out. It was inexpensive and also had a good UI.
Better doesn't all ways win.
People stuck with DOS because it ran Lotus 123 and DBase, and WordPerfect.
People used PCs to develop vertical applications because y