Windows: A Family History

Windows 1.0 — November 1985
In the beginning was the MS-DOS Executive. That was the name of a small program that ran on top of MS-DOS 3, let you zip around lists of filenames, and run one by pressing Enter or clicking on its name with a mouse, lightpen or joystick. MS-DOS Executive had a scroll bar along the bottom. It had one colour scheme, seemingly borrowed from the flag of a small equatorial republic. It had a tiny selection of applications included — MS-Write, Notepad, Calendar, Reversi, Paint — and a control panel that let you load a new printer driver. There wasn't much else to control: graphics topped out at 640x350 pixels and 16 colours, there was no audio, networking, virtual memory or, well, anything.

Nonetheless, it got a cautious welcome. The bundled applications stood up well against their equivalents, especially at the all-in price of around £70, and the multitasking worked — after a fashion. It was very crude with no way to stop any application taking as much time as it liked and starving the others, but it did work well enough to effectively kill off the eight other multitasking DOS add-ons that were around at the time. Likewise the windowing system was hopelessly restricted by any modern standard — it only let windows tile against each other with no overlap. There weren't many of them.

There was one third-party Windows application at launch and for some time thereafter: In-A-Vision, by Micrographx. A CAD program, it shipped with a run-time version of Windows months before Windows itself was separately available. It cost thousands of dollars but was still seen as the best going for the price — and there was always that rumour that Micrographx was working on something a little more mainstream.

First use of: Virtually nothing. Graphics, menus, pointers and multitasking applications were all innovations in the MS-DOS world when announced in 1983, but had all appeared in other forms by the software's arrival in 1985.
Mainstream use of: The word 'vapourware'. Back then, a two year delay between announcement and launch was generally seen as eighteen months too long. Little did we know.
Last use of: an operating system that, when loaded, used less than 200k of memory.

Windows 2.0 — December 1987
[? /*CMS poll(20004068) */ ?]This was more like it. Icons, overlapping windows and better DOS application support might look like minor innovations from the hindsight of 2005, but they were big news in a world where the Apple Macintosh was starting to make a cult of itself. Still only 16 colours — the total multimedia support — which caused raucous laughter among the Amiga owners (They may yet be able to raise a chortle with Microsoft's excitement over transparent windows in Vista).

The really exciting thing, and one that made Windows 2.0 strictly an interim product, was the announcement of Microsoft OS/2 — an operating system that provided "the power of minicomputer systems" to PCs. And it was more than just that — it was the next stage in Microsoft's partnership with IBM. "With IBM's announcement of the availability of IBM Operating System/2(TM) to end-users in the first quarter of 1988, this toolkit will be extremely important to developers," said Steven Ballmer, vice-president of systems...

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