That was actually pretty cool Dayglord. Thank you!
Very first computer I ever operated had MS-DOS 2.1.
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.
If I could go back to 1985 with $10,000 knowing what I know now, I would be a multi-billionaire today.
I started with a Commodore 64 and a 1200 baud modem. Used to watch Compuserve load pixel by pixel while my mom complained about not having phone. Used to wait 20 minutes for Temple of Apshai to load from the tape drive, and Commodore’s floppy drive wasn’t much faster.
The day Challenger blew up, I heard the news while waiting on output from our Word Processing Center at work. We didn’t have our own PC’s on our desks at that time. Didn’t until the end of the 80’s, though we did have an Apple II in the office which we used to keep a tool calibration database. I learned to do things in DOS, stored bits of data on 8” floppies (which really flopped), and was kind of disappointed when Windows 1.1 came along, because it was so slow and clunky compared to the DOS commands.
I started out on win3.11 back in 92 at my first employer ..
golly im getting old.