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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.
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.
(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? :)
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.
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.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
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.
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 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?