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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..."
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.
Our office used Gem Desktop. We were amazed at how primitive Windows was by comparrison, with no overlapping windows, etc.
We had Windows 2.
It seemed utterly pointless at the time. Dad had his office suite (Symphony for DOS!) that didn't need it, games didn't run out of it. The only time I ever loaded up windows was when I wanted to play reversi. And that wasn't very often because let me tell you, I sucked at reversi when I was 9.
I guess I didn't really get the point of windows until we got our next PC, years later, which had a P75 in it and ran Win 3.11
And I still used DOS more often because you had to boot into DOS mode to get Mechwarrior 2 running...
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.
Windows only became truly useful once the Windows/386 variant of Windows 2.1 came out. I hardly ever used the GUI part of it, but its support for multiple virtual DOS sessions with built-in EMS was a great feature at the time. The early Windows GUI apps were generally a joke. I used mostly DOS apps in virtual consoles until Windows95 came out.
(said items probably a hell of a lot more useful than the actual Windows 1.0 software ever was...)
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
Mac OS was great, much better than Amiga OS until Workbench 3 anyway. Workbench 3 worked well, but Mac OS still looked better. I used to play about in Mac OS on my A1200 using Shapeshifter.
I once had a program that allowed you to texture the windows in Workbench (each new window you opened would have a random texture in its borders). It was slow as ass, but it looked great. Wish I has something similar for Ubuntu. I haven't really looked into alternative window managers or anything yet.
which is totally what she said
I never had to do punch cards... but I do remember the audio cassettes. Hard to believe we did things like that!!!
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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.
The old classic phrase from the 80's is the major example: "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run."
Read Raymond Chen's blog to see how ludicrous this idea is. Microsoft put a lot of effort into backwards compatibility, often at the expense of good design. This slogan is complete nonsense: Lotus 1-2-3 was the killer app for MS DOS and if they'd shipped a version where it didn't work then it would have been commercial suicide. Lotus was on the beta program for DOS and bugs that prevented 1-2-3 from working were considered show-stoppers for new DOS versions.
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If you've ever programmed on both NT and OS/2, and I mean really programmed, down to the level of what OS/2 called "Control Program", the similarity between NT and OS/2 is far more than striking.
All the subroutines in "Control Program" started with "Dos", as a primitive namespace set-up. All Dos* subroutines in OS/2 use a pass-by-name parameter to provide storage for the result of the subroutine, and the return from the subroutine is the error code. (So quite unlike the UNIX libc convention, for the most part.)
In NT, all the corresponding subroutines have had their "Dos" prefix removed (so "FindFirstFile" instead of "DosFindFirstFile"). But just to make porting really painful, on NT, most subroutines return the result, and you have to do a separate call to get the error code. (Much like UNIX libc and errno, only it's GetLastError().)
Which is really annoying: semantically, the two are close enough to equivalent that you want to #ifdef the differences. (But they're so different from UNIX, you don't try to mix the support code for the two.)
But syntactically, they're different enough that just about every single line needs to be #ifdef'ed.
And I really doubt that was by accident. Microsoft helped write OS/2, after all, and retained the rights to OS/2 V3 and up: which is why IBM's OS/2 Warp Connect was really 2.3 under the covers, and Warp 4 was 2.4 under the covers.
I remember borrowing games on cassette then fiddling with the bass and trebel knobs on a dual-deck to make them copy. The casettes included DRM, in the form of a 'do not copy' flag the CPC firmware respected, so you couldn't copy them on the CPC itsself. Today, such protection would be broken in minutes - but this was before the internet, so you couldn't just download a crack. You had to write your own. In machine code. I wasn't that good, so I used the tape decks.
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 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 like how MS PAINT has only the exact same options it had back in Windows 1.0.
The actual story is here
Why even write the article if you're going to be talking with people so unfamiliar with the software. You're arguing semantics whether it was in or on DOS for it wasn't until XP that the consumer line stopped using it.
I'm pretty sure he meant "text mode" instead of "in DOS", since he contrasts it with the later GUI version. And I'm almost certain he's wrong about that, but not for the reason you were quick to jump on him for.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
too funny. especially sine 25 years later every mobile device has shifted to full screen apps with no overlap support.
ie. iPad, all smartphones and small display netbooks.anything with less then 14" display needs to use apps in fullscreen mode to be usable
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Xerox didn't patent it from before?
"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.
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