Bloated middle age beckons: Windows 1.0 turns 35 and is dealing with its mid-life crisis, just about
- Reference: 1605956469
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/11/21/windows_35_birthday/
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Tottering atop MS-DOS, Windows 1.0 was released on 20 November 1985. A graphical multitasking shell, it would usher in an era of dominance on the PC that lingers on today. The secret sauce was IBM support, which brought a huge chunk of the business world along, for better or worse.
Not that dominance was a sure thing back then. Windows 1.0 was by no means the only game in town: this hack has fond memories of GEM (Graphics Environment Manager) which turned up in computers from Amstrad to the Atari ST. At the time Windows was one among many, and it would take a good few iterations before the 3.x line began to dominate.
Start Me Up: 25 years ago this week, Windows 95 launched and, for a brief moment, Microsoft was almost cool [1]READ MORE
First shown off two years previously, Windows 1.0 would run on 256KB of RAM and a pair of floppy drives (later versions would require a hard disk) and, most significantly, require the user move a mouse-pointer to make things happen in the 16-bit shell.
At least 512KB was needed before performance improved beyond dragging Notepad through treacle. Windows 1.0 also suffered from an initial paucity of apps, with the likes of Calculator and Paint coming in the box while many MS-DOS applications would fire up in full-screen mode. The GUI also insisted on tiling the windows - no overlapping was allowed other than dialogs.
After a number of incremental improvements, Windows 1.0 was replaced by Windows 2.0 in 1987, although it lingered on until support for it (as well as versions 2.0 and 3.0) ended in 2001.
Golden goose
Windows was the mainstay of Microsoft profits in the 90s, thanks to some sharp elbows on the OEM front from its legal department. The money rolled in, and Redmond wanted more.
When smarter mobile phones started kicking off in the late 90s, Microsoft made its first of many failed attempted to break into the mobile market with Windows CE, or WinCE as it became known. It didn't last long, despite some notable handsets, but Microsoft kept trying.
Enthused by then-CEO Steve Ballmer, who had originally dismissed the iPhone, Microsoft tried again with Windows Phone 7, launched in 2010. Despite excellent hardware from Nokia, which Redmond bought and then gutted, the OS never caught on with developers and a lack of backwards compatibility with new kit killed demand.
As for tablets, Redmond first dipped Windows' toe into the market in 2003 with the Microsoft Tablet PC. Redmond has kept up its interest in this area - and the latest Surface fondleslabs are very nice, if expensive, pieces of kit.
Now Windows has evolved into a cloud operating system, and is maintaining its position in the mainstream. Microsoft has managed to make the transition from in-box code to cloud better than most, albeit a bit late.
Ray Ozzie, hired as Microsoft's cloud guru in 2006, saw the writing on the wall and warned Redmond that Windows would have to get cloudy. He was forced out, although not before founding Azure, but the smart folks took note - not least Satya Nadella, who is cloud to the core.
Better than DOS
It seems odd that senior Windows coders now weren't even a glint in the milkman's eye when the first build of the OS came into being. But the effect of the operating system is undeniable.
Looking back, Windows 1.0 was a curiosity in spite of the enthusiasm for the product by Microsoft boss, Bill Gates. Business users were content to stick with DOS while consumers looked to alternatives, including the likes of Atari or Commodore, for their home computing fun.
However, Windows 1.0 marked a change for Microsoft and an attempt to focus more on applications. APIs for video and mouse hardware moved things on from the DOS environment and PC software and hardware makers would flock to the platform as the decades rolled by. For better or for worse.
Windows is, for many, a daily part of life. And so join us in a celebratory (or commiseratery) toast to the 35th anniversary of the arrival of the very first version. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/windows_95_25_years/
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Who is
Cristina Ronaldo?
Re: Who is
Cristiano's weird twin sister they keep locked in a basement.
And who were they trying to copy, Apple, as usual. Apple launched the far superior Mac in 1984, and it wasn't until 1995 that Windows became half-way useable.
And they both ripped off the Xerox Alto environment.
No ripping off involved..
Xerox refused to invest any serious resources in commercializing what PARC had invented. A $100K plus kinda workstation with no serious marketing effort behind it is not exactly a serious effort. So Jobs was invited to a demo in 1979 of what the guys at PARC had and offered them a chance to turn it into a mass market technology. People at PARC like Larry Tesler jumped at the opportunity and went to work at Apple to turn this into reality.
That's where the Lisa desktop and applications actually came from. Which begat the Mac the following year.
Whereas Windows 1 was a straight rip-off from Visi On. By VisiCorp. Win 1 was demo-ed in 1983 as ready to ship "real soon now" but only shipped anything stable in 1985. A year after the Mac made it completely obsolete. It took MS another 5 years to even start ripping of the Mac in a half assed way, Win 3.0 and over a decade before they got anything usable. Win95. The best description of Win 3 I ever saw was - MS read Inside Mac very carefully from cover to cover copying what the saw but completely and totally missed the point. Which is why Win16/Win32 was always complete incoherent. Both at the UI and API level. MS just never got it.
No.
Windows ripped off MacOS.
The Mac team paid for or were freely given the handful of core concepts first seriously implemented by Xerox PARC.
The MacOS team then did maHOOsive work on translating them into something which actually fit how humans thought and saw and moved. Have a look just at the huge range of experimentation on window structures, on menu structures, on feedback mechanisms. Just the surviving pencil sketches I've seen are a tribute to the intelligence and human-centric focus of the MacOS team.
Next time you choose a menu option, pay attention to the feedback you're given. Be aware the MacOS team went through dozens of iterations' testing before settling on that one as the best.
Look up Fitt's Law.
Etc.etc.etc.
Breakthrough/turning point
MS Office (1.0) (Win3.1 iirc)
That was when MacOS's advantage over MSWindows collapsed to near negligible for 99% of business purchasers.
It essentially imitated all the casually visible interface of MacOS for 99% of normal business applications. OK, so it was application(suite)-specific. Who cares if that's 100% of the applications you use every day? I can copy-paste words n pictures n graphs n do everything -- what's Mac got that this hasn't?
..."well you can't do that for/between any _other_ apps..." "Why would I need to do that, these are everything I ever need."
MacOS's marketshare was growing strongly despite the massive You can't get fired if you buy IBM syndrome. But from that point on, it turned over and collapsed.
I remember seeing MS Office on Windows for the first time Jan 1993. My blood went cold. "Mac's lost."
I was right.
Re: Breakthrough/turning point
MacOS's marketshare was growing strongly despite the massive You can't get fired if you buy IBM syndrome
MacOS was growing in several markets, but Windows was growing faster. The entire market was growing; home computers were becoming less of a curiosity and more acceptable. They still weren't necessities, by any means, but they were no longer oddities.
A PC in 1987 was still the price of a used car, and Macs were considerably more expensive. And that's what did MacOS in.
A person with a $3,000 PC might invest $99 to buy Windows to try it out, but he wasn't going to spend $5,000 to try out a Mac.
Even then, that $99 was a hurdle, and Microsoft recognized it. That's why they included a copy of Windows with pretty much everything they sold. You bought a Microsoft Mouse? Here's a runtime copy of WIndows with some graphics programs. You bought a Microsoft game? Here's the DOS and the Windows versions, together. Oh, you don't have Windows? That's okay, it comes with a Windows runtime.
Sure, those runtime Windows ran like a dog, and needed more memory than the user had, but he could afford to buy more memory a lot more than he could afford a Mac.
There was a push at the time to get MacOS on PCs, one that Jobs fought against. He railed against "crap PC hardware", and he was right. PC hardware quality was all over the map, as was pricing. Macs were stable, because they were single-source. But that came at a cost that most people weren't willing to pay.
And by the same token, if you spend the same amount of money a Mac cost and put it into a high end PC, then the gap between MacOS and Windows narrowed considerably.
Mac still won a lot of markets, notably education and graphics, but the expected educational followup never happened. There was a lot of talk that parents of kids with Macs at school would buy a Mac for home, and some did. But most walked into the computer section of the department store, saw the Mac and the PC next to each other, and got sticker shock and the cost of the Mac, and went home with a PC.
MacOS made some inroads with the " Hackintoshes ", as they were known, but one of Jobs' first actions when returning to Apple was to kill them, so that was that.
Re: Breakthrough/turning point
You're jumbling a lot of things, markets, concepts, and timeframes here.
Also, look up "marketshare" -- I used the word precisely; you seem to have read it as market size. And note all your points are re the retail personal micro-segment -- essentially ignored by MS in favour of locking up the 800lb gorilla of the business segment.
In the timeframe I referenced:
Apple got a few big but lucky wins in education, but primarily held post-MSOffice just the DTP/graphics micro-segment and a diminishing portion of retail personal (max.maybe 1-2% of the market, Apple's share of even that diminishing as the 90% average people just bought what they were using at work: MSWin+MSOffice).
MacOS had a stranglehold on DTP/graphics (a then extremely high premium segment) entirely due to Postscript being only available on MacOS. Because Warnock loved MacOS, disliked MSWindows, and despised what Gates was doing to the industry.
Then Jobs eliminated that by announcing at a major joint presentation that he & MS had signed a deal to develop a replacement for Postscript (only MS fulfilled their end of the bargain, and we still use it today; you're probably looking at it right now). John Warnock was sitting right behind Jobs at the time...
He was white and shaking when it was his turn to get up and speak.
When he got back to the office, he was spitting feathers re Jobs's backstabbing and kicked off the port of PS to Windows immediately.
And that was the beginning of the end for MacOS's last safe market segment.
MacOS peaked but died with 8.6.
.
MacOSX makes me cry. Better with large font-sets but less functional than MacOS 4.
Avi Tevanian (Jobs II's head of devel for Mac) went on public record as stating his goal was to destroy Macintosh, and he succeeded.
Always loved RISC OS in 87 on the Archimedes - one of the first to have a task bar (may be the first, i'm sure someone will correct me on that). Personally thought that was a better interface than either Windows or the Mac
What do Cristiano Ronaldo, Bruno Mars and Windows have in common?
They're all flashy, massively self regarding media products that make loads of money, despite also being widely disliked.
It's 25 years this Autumn since I waved goodbye to the old monochrome dumb character terminal on my desk at work and excitedly put together and booted up a Windows 3 PC for the first time. On saving my first Word document, the machine crashed completely then spontaneously rebooted.
And it apparently took 10 years to reach this level of reliability.
PrestoChangoSelector...
...and burger master.
There was some insanely clever shit in the early versions of Windows.
Just research out how Microsoft's coders got a page-based memory manager reliably working in Intel's 'real mode' with next to no help from the processor; and then read how they uplifted this to protected mode without breaking anything. Google (or Bing, whatever) thunks and stack walking. Look at how small the Windows kernel was; read about how BitBlt built custom blitters on the stack and then executed them. Next, read about how all those mysterious VxDs were demand-loaded components for a brand new 32bit multitasking OS that wasn't Windows that we didn't even know we were running at the time, because it virtualised DOS and Windows so well.
Then wonder how a company with coders like this came up with IE, Teams and ShitePoint.
Baffling.
Old?
I’m not old, you’re old!