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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..."
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.
Agreed. I remember trying out Windows 1.0 and thinking: this is it? Yuck. Even the initial releases of GEM were better than Windows 1.0. It wasn't until 3.0 that Windows started being usable.
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3.0 wasn't bad. I ran it on my 8086 for a while. It was pretty easy to break, but most of that was due to the machine not having an MMU, so even the best written program couldn't prevent other code from breaking it. It ran moderately well in 640KB of RAM, as long as you didn't try running too many programs at once (where 'too many' is more than 2-3, or more than one large program). My father's company got their first license for free with a program called MetaDesign, a diagramming program. The company that made it decided that it was easier to write it for Win16 and bundle a copy of Windows than it was to write their own 2D graphics and windowing toolkit.
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The first Macintosh was released in 1984, Windows 1.0 and Amiga each came out in 1985. When Windows 1.0 came out, which is the context of this article, Apple was the dominant force and the Amiga had still only moved a handful of units.
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.
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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!
Remember that Commodore 64 program? :)
Yup, I used Dosshell (ascii menuing system) on my IBM-Compatible (MS-DOS of course, not PC-DOS) rather than use anything that needed a mouse until I got my 286. Still, this was a vast improvement over the old 1983 Commodore64 and the tape drive, where a saved game or document was accessed by fast forwarding a standard audio cassette to a preset number you had written down, then type load" and play! Which in turn beats a stack of punch cards, typing blind with no monitor and asking an nice operator to pop your disk pack into a large washing machine for you :-)
Happy days.
Tell the young people of today that, and they won't believe yer!
If you bought IBM's technical manual for the PC, you got full schematics and source code for the BIOS. It might not be free, but it was very open.
I think the original Balance of Power game ran under Windows 1 run-time.
Write Only Memory: Another pointless blog.
More like stolen from Xerox, who was inspired by Alan Kay's ideas, who probably was at THE demo : DOUGLAS ENGLEBART
By stolen, do you mean that Apple paid Xerox with IPO shares for a tour and a private demo with Q/A session with Xerox engineers? For most people, when you pay for something it's not "stolen". Xerox engineers did not like the idea but was directed by Xerox corporate to show their research with Apple. Even then, Apple did not blindly copy the Alto but took ideas and concepts from Xerox but made their own implementation with some of their own research.
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Xerox did all the hard work, mostly sinking cash into developer/human/computer/child interaction. They really worked hard with human testing and code. Apple got hold of most of that due to Xerox been a paper pusher and not really having a final digital vision after an expensive effort trying to master the emerging paperless digital world.
My research says that Apple also did not merely copy Xerox's work. If you've looked at the Alto and the first Mac, you'd see that they are not copies. Apple paid Xerox for their ideas but did their own implementation of those ideas based on their own research as well.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Actually, Apple did a lot more - they took the idea from Xerox, but they made it better. Apple never got any source code, they just got the concept from Xerox. It was not only reimplemented from scratch, but implemented better - the Alto demo did not have overlapping windows, for example. Steve Wozniak banged his head around how overlapping windows worked and invented clipping regions (which he got a patent for). He also got into a plane accident with his Piper during that time (and was known for telling Jobs "I still know how to do regions" when Jobs visited him in the hospital).
Eventually he contacted Xerox to find out how they did overlapping windows and found out their system didn't.
As for Windows 1.0, I believe it made it into DOS 5 as "DOS Shell" - if you look at it, the graphics are remarkably similar, and DOS Shell even had multitasking.
You need to look at the history properly rather than repeat a myth. The Xerox system used tiled windows, had modal text 'buttons' at the bottom of each window (so no visual memory of where commands are) and a whole lot of things that are different to a modern GUI. During the development of the Macintosh and Lisa, Apple invented pull-down menus and dialog boxes, to name two things that are totally central to modern GUIs. You're right that Xerox got the ball rolling (although really they were derivative, see Douglas Engelbart's video for what he was doing in the 60's), but claiming that Apple simply ripped Xerox off is utter rubbish.
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?