Recalling Windows 1.0 At 25 Years 384
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CmdrTaco
from the if-you-knew-then dept.
from the if-you-knew-then dept.
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..."
Article was confused (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
I remember the time (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Windows 1.0 was barely usable (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
Re:Windows 1.0 was barely usable (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Obligatory squeegee link (Score:5, Interesting)
(said items probably a hell of a lot more useful than the actual Windows 1.0 software ever was...)
The more interesting article (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Amiga (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Windows 1.0 was barely usable (Score:3, Interesting)
I never had to do punch cards... but I do remember the audio cassettes. Hard to believe we did things like that!!!
Windows 25th (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Open Hardware (Score:4, Interesting)
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. [proudlyserving.com]
1980s were a more romantic time (Score:1, Interesting)
Well, that dominance was more due to how it was sold (making deals with OEMs to preload in order to keep users out of the decision-making process) rather than the product itself. And in the 1980s we were all younger (even you, my dear reader) and more naive, so the the idea of "the best" not winning, seemed kind of strange.
Back then it was all about tech, so by 1984, hackers weren't even thinking about the x86 platform anymore because the ones with real money to spend had all gone to 68k and the rest were still pushing the limits of their older (usually 65xx) 8-bit machines. In 1986 I had to get a job, and the one I found involved MSDOS programming. It surprised me because I didn't know those type of computers were around anymore; I thought they had been a brief item of interest 5 years earlier, quickly passed by all the wonderful innovation of the early 1980s.
Who knew, indeed, that we would throw it all away. It wasn't until the mid/late 1990s that x86 started catching up to mid 1980s tech -- except for clockspeed. x86 was all about clockspeed, a weird one-dimensional measure that ignored everything else that made, say the Amiga, so fucking great.
Re:Open Hardware (Score:1, Interesting)
One other thing I would add,
4) They worked insane hours.
I just finished reading Hard Drive. Decent book, but a bit sensationalist. Anyway, one of the interesting things that I came across was how Microsoft was sort of the start of programmers working insane hours. Apple had it's share of people working 60+ hours, but Microsoft really had the lead with burning people out at 100+ hour work weeks. It worked. Gave them a huge competitive advantage.
Though, often times I wonder what computers would be like if we magically agreed to only work 50 hour work weeks. If nobody had to rush things to market. I envision a Utopian world where products would take twice as long to come out, but they'd last 5 times as long. What if hardware wasn't released until the drivers were flawless. Hell, then you could embed the driver itself into the EPROM of the device itself. Part of me feels like this is the only way we'll reach Star Trek level technology.
Re:Article was ridiculously bad (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Here's the whole article. Fuck networkworld (Score:1, Interesting)
What an immensly wank article!
It is spread out over multiple pages[1], purely to spam people's faces with adverts. And if you are smart enough to not want to run code from unknown sources, and turn off Javascript, this article is unreadable (for 2 seconds). The article's content is hidden, and then JS is used to show the article. Of course, just turning styles off (view, page style, no style, in Firefox) makes the content visible.
Anyway, fuck those cunts at network world, and their immense desire to advertise. If the article is genuinely informative, interesting and insightful, the author will want it read. So here's the whole thing:
[1] Holy fucking shit, page 3 is one sentence!
Windows 1.0 turning 25: First experiences recalled
25 years ago, Microsoft released Windows 1.0, but it wasn't an instant hit
By Jon Brodkin, Network World
November 08, 2010 07:06 AM ET
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Do you remember Windows 1.0? Chances are, your answer is "no."
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.
Windows 1.0 was a graphical front end for MS-DOS (Microsoft's version of DOS), but in some respects was out-of-date even by the standards of 1985. Windows 1.0, for example, didn't allow overlapping windows, a feature offered with Macintosh.
To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.
Do you remember Windows 1.0? Chances are, your answer is "no."
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.
Windows 1.0 was a graphical front end for MS-DOS (Microsoft's version of DOS), but in some respects was out-of-date even by the standards of 1985. Windows 1.0, for example, didn't allow overlapping windows, a feature offered with Macintosh.
Microsoft Windows after 25 years: A visual history
Related Content
No one who used this first version was likely to have predicted that Windows would completely dominate the PC market 25 years later.
Shortly after Windows 1.0 was released, Nathaniel Borenstein was working at the Carnegie Mellon University IT Center when Microsoft representatives stopped by to demonstrate their new operating system.
"What's interesting in retrospect was we laughed, just laughed them out of the place," Borenstein says. "Because we had a vastly superior window manager of our own, and these guys came in with this pathetic and naïve system. We just knew they were never going to accomplish anything."
Borenstein went on to create MIME, the Internet standard for sending and receiving multimedia data. The lesson here is that even the most accomplished technology experts can be wrong. "Never underestimate the value of persistence," Borenstein says.
Although Windows 1.0 wasn't widely used, Microsoft did sell the OS at retail preloaded on PCs and in the box, adorned with the words "Microsoft Windows Operating Environment For IBM and COMPAQ Personal Computers."
Today, 25 years later, more than nine out of 10 desktop computers run some version of Windows. Windows XP, released nearly a decade ago, is still the most widely used. But XP is starting to give way to Windows 7, which has sold a whopping 240 million licenses in its first year of av
Re:Windows 1.0 was barely usable (Score:3, Interesting)
VisiCorp Visi On (Score:3, Interesting)
Differentially Remembered (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Here's what it looks like (Score:3, Interesting)
Not Steve Wozniak (Score:4, Interesting)
The actual story is here [folklore.org]
Re:Windows 1.0 was barely usable (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Windows 1.0 was barely usable (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:Windows 1.0 was barely usable (Score:4, Interesting)
Xerox didn't patent it from before?
Re:There is an important lesson for people to lear (Score:3, Interesting)
"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.
Re:Windows 1.0 was barely usable (Score:1, Interesting)
I rather liked TopView ... anyone remember that?