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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.
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.
Uh... Apple's GUI was not complete garbage. I agree Amiga was better, but don't dismiss Apple entirely. And the Mac OS eventually did multitask (cooperatively) when Multifinder came out in 1987.
Also "dominate GUI of the 80s" is kind of like saying the Tesla is the dominant model of electric cars. It might be true (I have no idea), but the electric car market is a small slice of the larger automobile market. Most computers in the 80s were simply not GUI-run. The Amiga was cool but never quite got commercial traction.
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
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.
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.
"lets not confuse the facts with misty eyed nostalgia"
Says the one who can't check facts himself and indulges in wrong nostalgia instead.
Check the facts yourself: Amiga was launched in 1985.
Facts. Easy to check these days, Osgeld.
(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
Windows stopped crashing after windows 98. I'm not Microsoft's fault that you can't maintain an OS.
Remember that Commodore 64 program? :)
We might all be running a unix based AmigaOS and listening to our Apods ;-)
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
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.
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.
The Apple Lisa directly ripped off Xerox's PARC.
Back up a little further. You forgot the Apple Lisa. 1983.
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.
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.
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."
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.
The Atari supported 16 colours out of a palate of 512 (see here).
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?
Better yet, post the link to the “printable” version.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
"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.
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.
I loved the Amiga, but it didn't beat the Mac in market share, even in the '80s.
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/12/total-share.ars/5
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/12/total-share.ars/6
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