Recalling Windows 1.0 At 25 Years 384
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 barely usable (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Windows 1.0 was barely usable (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Windows 1.0 was barely usable (Score:4, Interesting)
Xerox didn't patent it from before?
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Re:Windows 1.0 was barely usable (Score:5, Informative)
The software was crap not the hardware (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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
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3.0 was where I came in, and it wasn't that much worse than 3.1 (I dimly recall that the first practical application we had that required Windows was the control and analysis software for a lab instrument). This site has a nice history of GUIs, including early versions of Windows:
http://toastytech.com/guis/index.html [toastytech.com]
http://toastytech.com/guis/indexwindows.html [toastytech.com]
My first GUI was actually Suntools, several years before I tried a Mac (or Windows 3):
http://toastytech.com/guis/sv35.html [toastytech.com]
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Even at 3.1, Windows was a bit clunky. That's what my first PC came with (I jumped to Win 3.1 from a Commodore 64), and honestly, I just didn't use it much. I set the system to just boot to a prompt by default.
All good games back then were for DOS. I spent a lot of time on BBS systems where the best terminal programs were for DOS too. My word processor? I'll admit that I had a pirated copy of Wordperfect 5.1 that I used for years after getting my Windows system - also in DOS.
Multitasking on Windows bac
Re:Windows 1.0 was barely usable (Score:5, Informative)
Agreed. I remember trying out Windows 1.0 and thinking: this is it? Yuck. Even the initial releases of GEM [wikipedia.org] were better than Windows 1.0. It wasn't until 3.0 that Windows started being usable.
Re:Windows 1.0 was barely usable (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, but the thing that makes Windows Windows [angband.pl] was already there, even if it looked less organized than in later version.
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Damn, you could view the Matrix directly with Windows 1.0?
Re:Windows 1.0 was barely usable (Score:4, Funny)
...there's way too much information to decode the Matrix. You get used to it, though. Your brain does the translating. I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead.
GEOS was better than windows 1.0 (Score:4, Informative)
Remember that Commodore 64 program? :)
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I had it on a disk (my C64 was bought USED and game with a huge box full of software for me to play around with and sort through), but after loading it and looking at it I quickly found that I couldn't find a use for it.
Of course, a major reason behind that was likely that I didn't actually have the C64 mouse add-on :D.
Re:GEOS was better than windows 1.0 (Score:4, Insightful)
GEOS was great on the C64, but the PC version was excellent. I used Geoworks Ensemble as an undergrad on my 286. It had a functional word processor and desktop tools. And it allowed DOS applications to run under it pretty smoothly...I remember using the symbolic math program Derive under DOS and then writing up the results in the word processor. It was significantly better than Microsoft's (or even Apple's) offerings at the time. Too bad it didn't catch on.
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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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There is an important lesson for people to learn. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:There is an important lesson for people to lear (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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"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
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.
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Windows 1.0 was a complete joke - it didn't even support overlapping windows.
Personally I have learned to HATE overlapping windows and would love to have a tabbed & tiling window manager for Windows. (Need to use it at work) I now find that I work with two monitors with one application maxed on each.
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What happens if you need to run more than two applications? Do you buy another monitor?
Must be costly to browse deeper than two directories with the explorer and separate windows...
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1) I don't ever need to see more than 2 explorer windows at a time. (SRC and DESTINATION)
2) This is why I want a tabbed and tiling WM! :)
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Re:Windows 1.0 was barely usable (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows 1.0 was a complete joke
Mayhaps it was mayhaps it wasn't; but one thing I do know: This article is a joke.
"Windows 2 was, I believe, still in DOS," Easterling says. "Windows 3 was the first GUI one that I remember seeing."
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. Kind of like Apple and BSD w/ their shiny UI.
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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.
The guy was probably just misremembering, and thinking of MS-DOS Executive. See this page [wikipedia.org]. It wasn't until Windows 3.0 that the Program Manager made its appearance. Until that point, you basically got a file manager, and had to navigate, find your executable, and run it, at which point the
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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:4, Insightful)
I'm not going to disagree with the premise you make - that Windows 1.0 was a complete joke - but your 'supporting evidence' is a bit of hokum, IMO.
Why would 'overlapping windows' be a good thing, exactly? Tiling I can see - just now, Windows is finally getting the ability to effectively tile windows. But overlapping? That begs the introduction of features to help deal with display short-comings - like the tear-off corners a person has to use to resize said window.
Aside from this fact, why would the ability to overlay or tile windows be of any importance when your resolution is negligible and your screen even less so? We're talking about displays only slightly larger than what we find on tablets today, and at significantly lower resolution.
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Why would 'overlapping windows' be a good thing, exactly? Tiling I can see - just now, Windows is finally getting the ability to effectively tile windows. But overlapping? That begs the introduction of features to help deal with display short-comings - like the tear-off corners a person has to use to resize said window.
And yet the other popular consumer GUI OSes of the time, namely AmigaOS and MacOS, had no trouble with it.
Aside from this fact, why would the ability to overlay or tile windows be of any importance when your resolution is negligible and your screen even less so? We're talking about displays only slightly larger than what we find on tablets today, and at significantly lower resolution.
I don't even know how to properly respond to this. Had you never used any of the contemporary OSes that supported such things? I promise you that it was very handy, even on a 640x200 (!!!) Amiga with an ancient monitor. It never would have occurred to me that someone would have described the lack of that ability as a feature.
PageMaker (Score:3, Informative)
I think the original Balance of Power game ran under Windows 1 run-time.
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Agree totally. I'm glad they're finally issuing a recall for it, even if it's 25 years too late.
Hmmm (Score:2, Insightful)
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Windows stopped crashing after windows 98. I'm not Microsoft's fault that you can't maintain an OS.
Recalling Windows? (Score:5, Funny)
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A bit too late for a recall of 1.0 right?
I know! At this rate, it'll be 2031 before Vista is finally recalled...
Open Hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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No one who used this first version was likely to have predicted that Windows would completely dominate the PC market 25 years later...
It wasn't that far-fetched to predict that a MicroSoft product would dominate, since, as you say:
Microsoft just rode the wave of open IBM hardware specifications for the business PC
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I dunno - the knives weren't just pointed at DR-DOS. All this came out in the first antitrust trials - any OEM wanting to sell so much as a single box without Windows either paid for Windows anyway or had to pay full price. And the OEM price was such a deep discount that foregoing that discount would effectively block that OEM from selling Windows PCs at a competitive price.
Before Microsoft went all-out on the "let's kill everything on the PC that isn't DOS/Windows" crusade, there was a thriving market fo
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Rode the wave as in was hired by IBM because negotiations with Digital Research for a CP/M license (saying this as charitably as I can) went nowhere. Digital Research wasn't backstabbed - they were arrogant idiots who lost by purposefully pointing their nose at the ground and applying full thrust.
MS actually had a lot of competition, they just had three things that let them win:
1) They were good enough (not necessarily or often better)
2) They were very persistent
3) They had very good marketing/business-savv
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I don't think he was really alluding to the CP/M license debacle. That was several years earlier.
During that they did KINDA screw over the creator of QDOS (the source that became MS-DOS), but that's business.
What was worse was the intentional compatibility errors Microsoft introduced over the years to keep competitor's software and/or OS's from being compatible, hence further driving the purchase of MS software.
The old classic phrase from the 80's is the major example: "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run
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]
Re:Open Hardware (Score:5, Informative)
If you bought IBM's technical manual for the PC, you got full schematics and source code for the BIOS. It might not be free, but it was very open.
Here's what it looks like (Score:5, Informative)
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orly? [amazonaws.com]
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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.
Article was ridiculously bad (Score:4, Insightful)
They just grabbed some random programmers off the street instead of going to actual experts
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Windows XP was descendet from Windows NT which in turn has its roots in VMS and BSD.
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Your history is off too. The VMS roots are even on their face only very lightly there (no code, they just hired a kernel team composed significantly of ex-VMS kernelfolk and some aspects of the VMS design went in), the BSD roots are hardly there at all, and the OS/2 roots were predominant.
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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
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It is possible. Windows 2 was the first Windows I saw. I saw a computer with Windows 1 a bit later on.
Oh God, more revisionist history? (Score:2, Informative)
"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 [youtube.com]
What's next? Apple invented the keyboard? The mouse? The bit? Gimme a break.
What about GEOS for the Commodore 64? GEOS [wikipedia.org]
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.
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More like stolen from Xerox, . . .
Actually, IIRC, Apple paid (un-necessarily, as it turns out) for the use of Xerox Parc ideas.
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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.
MS was gifted the IBM OS side, 'bought' an OS and dumped a GUI over it after seeing Apple's and Xerox's efforts.
The MS magic was in IBM's name, marketing and 'listening'
Re:Oh God, more revisionist history? (Score:4, Informative)
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 [cognitivevent.com] 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.
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Re:Oh God, more revisionist history? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [fool.com] 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.
Re:Oh God, more revisionist history? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Not Steve Wozniak (Score:4, Interesting)
The actual story is here [folklore.org]
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These platforms weren't providing some crappy pretense at a windowing system. Except for degrees of eye candy, these were as capable as anything we're using today. Microsoft c
I remember the time (Score:5, Interesting)
Siemens Collage (Score:2)
I remember using GEM back in 1986. It was quite good.
Interestingly it looks similar to a Unix Window System I worked on for Siemens around the same time called Collage (I think). This ran on the Siemens Sinix variant of Unix. I wrote a spreadsheet for Collage and there was a word processor. The system ran on the MX2 / X20 mini computers as well as MX500 multiprocessor systems. One model was a dinky little desktop about the size of a small form factor PC and ran using the National Semiconductor 32 bit proces
Tandy Deskmate FTW (Score:2)
The grandfather (Score:5, Informative)
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The BBC did a doco on this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNnbP6igAGY [youtube.com]
Xerox ideas are at about the 3.00 point.
Recalling Windows? (Score:2)
You mean, like Toyota recalls cars?
Yes, I recall (Score:2)
When talking about my technical history, I like to joke that I've been using Windows since version 3.0, and trying to use it since version 1.0.
I bought Win1 and really did try to make use of it, as a task switcher if nothing else. It had potential. So I upgraded to Win2 when it came out because it looked like a big step forward (it supported 286 protected mode!), but still fell back on DESQview, which lacked a GUI of its own, but handled task switching adequately. I only ran Win2 when I needed it for an
Wow (Score:2)
I remember when I got into computers as a student. The campus labs were running off of a DOS menu that would allow you to go to your unix account to do all sorts of things, various DOS programs or go into Windows 3.0. The machines were a mix of 386 and 486 boxes. Windows 3.0 ran so poorly was such PITA and added so little value to what people were trying to accomplish most lab patrons stuck with DOS programs and their shell accounts. That was Windows 3.0. I can only imagine how frustrating using Win
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...)
Windows 1.0 review (Score:5, Informative)
A while ago, I scanned in [flickr.com] 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.
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.
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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.
Money. Apparently that's good enough for them and the shareholders...
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Generally speaking, playing catch-up with what everyone else was doing 3-5 years previously while furiously marketing their product so heavily that unless you went to great lengths to inform yourself, you'd never know it.
Wndows Recalled? (Score:2)
And Ballmer's response: Sell sell sell! (Score:2)
Windows 1 is 25 years old and what does Ballmer do? He sells a bucket load of MS shares [reuters.com]
Coincidence ... or NOT!!!!!!!
Windows 25th (Score:2, Interesting)
Windows for Workgroups (Score:2)
Remember what RAM cost in 1985? (Score:2)
And I was on dual floppy drives until 1988.
Our office manager/tech manager got a copy of 1.0 but those of us who were using WordPerfect and dBASE III to the max didn't have a lot of slack in 640K to play with multitasking.
great 300-word "article" split over 3 pages. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
VisiCorp Visi On (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Amiga (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
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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 [arstechnica.com]
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/12/total-share.ars/6 [arstechnica.com]
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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.
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Imagine if Commodore had licensed AmigaOS (Score:3, Insightful)
We might all be running a unix based AmigaOS and listening to our Apods ;-)
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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.
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"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. [wikipedia.org]
Facts. Easy to check these days, Osgeld.
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Re:Amiga (Score:5, Informative)
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What, it was so bad that you dare not get rid of it lest it fall into the wrong hands?
I know that feeling.
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Better yet, post the link to the “printable” version [networkworld.com].