Posted on 11/20/2020 8:31:22 PM PST by dayglored
The PC revolution started off life 35 years ago this week. Microsoft launched its first version of Windows on November 20th, 1985, to succeed MS-DOS. It was a huge milestone that paved the way for the modern versions of Windows we use today. While Windows 10 doesn’t look anything like Windows 1.0, it still has many of its original fundamentals like scroll bars, drop-down menus, icons, dialog boxes, and apps like Notepad and MS paint.
Windows 1.0 also set the stage for the mouse. If you used MS-DOS then you could only type in commands, but with Windows 1.0 you picked up a mouse and moved windows around by pointing and clicking. Alongside the original Macintosh, the mouse completely changed the way consumers interacted with computers. At the time, many complained that Windows 1.0 focused far too much on mouse interaction instead of keyboard commands. Microsoft’s first version of Windows might not have been well received, but it kick-started a battle between Apple, IBM, and Microsoft to provide computing to the masses.
[LOTS of pics and text and whatnot at the link...]
(Excerpt) Read more at theverge.com ...
I remember the guy at the W 95 launch...he went up to the cashier with a big stack of a dozen or so copies ... he was going to make a fortune scalping them.
Wonder how much he netted?🤣
Not Microsoft Bob?
That was actually pretty cool Dayglord. Thank you!
Very first computer I ever operated had MS-DOS 2.1.
“Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME also were all still siting “on top of DOS”. What exactly is your point? “
Before Win95 your machine started up in MS-DOS and you had to type in the command to start Windows 1, 2, 3.X.
That went away with Win95.
It booted Windows when you started your machine.
Probably what Signalman was getting at.
“My real first at home computer was a 386 Dx 40.”
Mine was a 386 Sx, second hand.
Had a 20 mb hard drive, the drives for floppies or diskettes, no modem, and a third hand daisy wheel printer.
I thought I was the cats meow!
“My real first at home computer was a 386 Dx 40.”
Mine was a 386 Sx, second hand.
Had a 20 mb hard drive, the drives for floppies or diskettes, no modem, and a third hand daisy wheel printer.
I thought I was the cats meow!
The first point-and-click “windowed” graphical user interface was invented by a subdivision of Xerox known as the Palo Alto Research Center. DARPA created Inter Network Routing (the Internet) using Xerox Alto workstations linked by Ethernet cables invented by Xerox PARC. In fact PARC also had invented the computer mouse, the bitmap, the graphical icon, object-oriented programming, and the WYSIWYG text editor, to name but a few. Essentially everything a fledgling personal computer industry would need to get started.
But Xerox’s management was so invested in photocopiers that they didn’t put much store in PARC’s inventions so they thought it would be a sound business proposition to offer Steve Jobs a tour of their R&D facility in return for Jobs agreeing to sell some stock in his company to them.
They even didn’t flinch when Jobs made copious notes and sketches while on the tour. Then he went home and had his staff jump in with both feet on producing their own “windowed” operating system, which led to Apple’s Lisa. Jobs even hired away some of the top PARC execs, who were eager to go because Jobs saw the promise in their creations that Xerox brass was overlooking.
As it happens, Bill Gates was also taking the PARC tour along with Jobs but the experience didn’t light the fire under his feet as it had for Jobs.
But just as imponderable as Xerox giving Jobs a “look behind the curtain” at their R&D labs, some time later Jobs outsourced some developmental work (that would lead to the first Macintosh) to Bill Gates at Microsoft under the condition that Gates not make a GUI interface for anyone other than Apple for one year.
And Gates immediately broke that agreement, claiming he had got his ideas not from Apple but from the same place Apple had got them: the tour of Xerox PARC R&D.
So then Apple sued Microsoft and Xerox sued Apple and a whole bunch of lawyers made lots of money.
But Microsoft didn’t invent the concept of “Windows” or the point-and-click user interface and in fact came by it bu ... questionable means.
In fact MS didn’t even invent the product that truly put it on the map, MS-DOS. Gates had sold it as vaporware and then rushed out bought an OS he already knew existed that fit the customer’s requirements called 86-DOS (because it was created to run on 8086 CPUs) from Tim Patterson at Seattle Computer Products. Gates paid him $75,000 for product that made him a multimillionaire.
I’d go nuts if I fed that many disks into it, and it died!
Back in the day, I would have tried to just copy all the files off the floppies into a Win98 directory, and fired it off from a Windows DOS bootdisk.
I think Win10 can still be installed from a DOS partition, with all the installation files placed into a directory -— but I haven’t kept up, and not 100% sure.
The laptop I am on now will probably go Linux sometime in the near future. I don’t want to do it before Thanksgiving since we are heading to the beach (if Dare County doesn’t close down again for the ‘Rona), I don’t want to battle my Sierra Wireless card to get it to work.
Linux is “good enough” now. I don’t hotplug a terrible lot of peripherals (just mice and such), and the good peripherals are all networked now, so have protocols that Linux programmers can hack (technically, I am a Linux engineer myself). This is thanks to the craze of connecting every blasted thing in the world to our iPhones.
Linux? heck, I think I would stick with that!
Yep, they were quite expensive. Back in 1989 a 40 MB hard drive set me back about $370.
Yeah, .ini and .pif files too. It used to be pretty easy to edit restrictions on programs.
That is true, and personally I kind of liked it that way. In the days where system resources were much more limited than now there were lots of programs that ran much better in the DOS environment. Up until fairly recently I still had most of my machines setup to multi-boot meaning that I had them stop or pause and give me the choice as to what environment I wanted to boot into. With hardware as powerful as it has become it is now typically just easier to use virtual machines if you want to use a different operating system.
By the time Windows 3.11 came along probably 99% of users machines were already set up to go straight into Windows. Windows 95, although it brought some major improvements could still easily be set up to boot into DOS 7 if that is what your preference was. But by that time machines were becoming more capable, the operating system was getting better at ending processes that were tying up resources that were not being used and programs were being written to take advantage of Windows built in features. Photoshop was a good example... when version 2.5 was ported to run on PCs it needed Windows. And when Photoshop 4.0 was introduced it needed Windows 95.
Of course like many others caught in the hype of the day I put together a machine and purchased Windows 95 the day after it was released, and I loved it. But it is interesting how many software companies basically forced you to upgrade to Windows 95 if you wanted to continue using their products.
I wrote “macros” for Lotus 123 running under DOS 3.2. And this provides an example of why software companies utilized shortcuts provided by Windows in their products. Lotus 123 had a macro language that was very easy to use and much quicker to come up with a useful routine than using more traditional programming. And it was a vaguely like that with the shortcuts that Microsoft provided for software companies. They could let Microsoft handle most of the hardware related issues. But this also caused software companies to require their latest upgrades use the latest Microsoft OS release in some cases.
Sorry to get sidetracked.
Good Hunting... from Varmint Al
Don’t forget Win v3.1 with its dial-up.
Does anyone else remember Windows 286 RunTime, (prior to v3.1) with all those 3.5” disks”
Report: Apple Is Lobbying To Soften Bill That Fights Forced Labor In China
https://dailycaller.com/2020/11/21/apple-lobbying-china-forced-labor-uighur/
Clippy, and don’t forget that wonderful Microsoft *Bob*.
I've heard rumors that Clippy may make a re-appearance in Windows 10X. No details yet.
"Bob", probably not so much.
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