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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..."
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
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The actual story is here
Xerox didn't patent it from before?