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I worked extensively with Windows 2 back in the day.
Possibly even with Windows 1.0 I can't quite recall.
It was a constant battle to get enough RAM for applications to run. Futzing around with himem.sys and moving around network drivers and stuff in high memory.
Windows applications had to run within the first 640K of RAM. In reality, around that time most corporate machines were 80286 machines and as I recall a high specced machine usually had 2MB RAM.
Kinda weird to think that working, useful Windows applications ran on systems with that little memory.
Ugh I'm glad those days are gone.
> It was a constant battle to get enough RAM for applications to run. Futzing around with himem.sys and moving around network drivers and stuff in high memory.
This was a battle even if you weren't running Windows. Many DOS programs wanted enough of that first 640K that you had to jump through hoops to fit them in.
> Kinda weird to think that working, useful Windows applications ran on systems with that little memory.
> Ugh I'm glad those days are gone.
I'm quite the opposite... i miss the times when applications could run in a few megs of ram.... nowaday just a browser showing a simple weather report wastes 2 gigs+ of ram.
> There was a demon in memory. They said whoever challenged him would lose. Their programs would lock up, their machines would crash, and all their data would disintegrate.
> The demon lived at the hexadecimal memory address A0000, 655,360 in decimal, beyond which no more memory could be allocated. He lived behind a barrier beyond which they said no program could ever pass. They called it the 640 K barrier.
> Windows applications had to run within the first 640K of RAM. In reality, around that time most corporate machines were 80286 machines and as I recall a high specced machine usually had 2MB RAM.
There was a protected mode version of Windows 2.0 that would run on 386s and allow larger memory access. I believe it also ran on 286s, but protected mode was crippled quite a bit on those chips.
Windows 1 was hard to work with because they used a strict tiling model for window management. All apps had to fit into a screen grid of non-overlapping tiled windows. You very quickly got to tiles that were too small to be useful and hurt the usefulness of Windows as a product.
By Windows 2, they had given up on that tiling model and gone with overlapping windows.
What network were you on? I'm curious, I never had anything except dial-up (BBS) back in those days.
> the aspect ratio is changed to 4:3
No it wasn’t. The aspect ratio was always 4:3. The resolution changed from 640×350 (with non-square pixels) to 640×480 (with square pixels). But the aspect ratio did not change. (The first image in the article is therefore displayed incorrectly compared to what it would have looked like.)
Kids these days don't believe you when you tell them about non 1:1 pixel aspect ratio
Is there something else going on here? The screen above would have no square icons or ui elements with rectangular pixels. Did everyone just adjust their CRT so the image would fill the 4:3 even if it distorted the image?
It was already a feature in Windows 1.0 to let you customise the colours of the UI elements, and it lasted (with gradual improvements) until Windows 8 where it was removed completely.
I still miss the Windows Classic theme. It was simplistic enough while being streamlined enough for most workflows, now I have to hover icons to find specific windows in an application group or deal with the internet-connected Search/Run box.
It wasn't perfect, but it worked better for me, at the very least.
At least we have to do a bunch of work to add dark modes to individual programs instead of just changing a few settings and having it work globally.
Always demo in hotdog stand theme for greatest visual impact.
> until Windows 8 where it was removed completely.
Now they use AI. White text on white background. /s
Just for comparison the Acorn Archimedes launched in 1987 with Arthur OS (later to become Risc OS) with a full windowed desktop with overlapping windows etc. They were able to pull this off because they had designed a new processor that they called the "Acorn RISC Machine"*
Screenshot of 1987 desktop here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_RISC_OS#/media/File...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_RISC_OS
* ARM for short, you might have heard of it
RISCOS was great, although slightly eccentric in a couple of ways:
- "we have a three button mouse, we're going to make use of all of them" as opposed to Apple
- instead of file pickers, saving was done by drag-and-drop: press save and a window pops up with the file, which you drag to a target folder.
The !Application system, an early bundle mechanism, was a simple and effective form of packaging without having to do anything fancy.
The Acorn was a marvel of its day (to me at least)
AmigaOS was similar (with a 68k) and that launched in 1985.
> Microsoft was paying license fees to Xerox for GUI elements that were similar to those on the Alto (Xerox 8010) just as Apple was.
Really? I've never heard that before.
Yeah, I’ve never heard of that either. AFAIK, Apple offered Xerox to buy some stock pre-IPO, but I have never seen anyone mentioning royalties. The whole paragraph is dubious without sources.
I do get a sense from this article, due to the presence of stories I never heard before, that this is how history gets slowly rewritten. But an important aside for me is how exciting and awesome these developments felt to the users. Modern tech progressions feel relatively dull, probably because they have relatively little impact compared to the leaps being made in the early days.
It seems like most of it is a rewrite of this 2010 article by this Tandy Trower guy who worked on Windows:
https://www.technologizer.com/2010/03/08/the-secret-origin-o...
A bit late to the party but I still remember vividly the day I was back from school and my dad installed Windows 2000 on the family PC. I remember looking at the shiny animations thinking this is the peak of technology. It was exciting!
The first versions of excel were actually made for the Macintosh: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel#Early_history
Yes, that's what the article states as well.
Check out those Screenshots.
That is the OG Flat UI Design.
MS were well ahead of the curve. Who says MS dont have any taste! ;-)
I know you're joking, but don't forget that Metro predated Material Design and iOS 7 by several years :)
> That is the OG Flat UI Design.
Not really; it faked 3D as well as it could.
Mac System 1 was flat, though.
> Overlapping windows, a proportional system font, and more general UI improvements were all goals [of the 2.0 release of Windows]
As an additional strange twist, Windows 1.0 was capable of overlapping child windows[1], title bars and all, even if the official MDI support APIs came later. It just didn’t use that capability for top-level windows for some reason.
I have a faint memory that this was because overlapping top-level windows seemed like too much of an infringement of an existing windowing system (maybe the Xerox one mentioned in the article) but later they decided, maybe it wasn't.
https://imgur.com/3bLoYgn
1985: Windows 1.0 - Gaudy colors, boxy design. Apps can either run as a small tile or fullscreen. no freely resizeable/movable windows.
1986-2011: A quarter century of fumbling around with UI design.
2012: Windows 8 (Metro UI) - Gaudy colors, boxy design. Apps can either run as a small tile or fullscreen. no freely resizeable/movable windows.
Apple held exclusive rights to overlapping windows at the time (perhaps on license from Xerox).
I always thought garbage websites from garbage companies were the only ones to pop up a subscription window. Bradford Morgan White, why did you turn your website into one of those websites with that "subscribe" popup?
> Having a good word processor and a good spreadsheet on any software/hardware platform was absolutely vital in 1980s.
To this day, I cannot believe Apple shipped the Macintosh without a means of running VisiCalc.
Interesting, from the screen shots it seems windows 1.0 had what looks like a burger menu on the top left, and a task at (or status bar) on the bottom. Went full circle 30+ years later.
That menu is the system menu [0][1], still present in current Windows (Alt+Space). You can try out the Windows 1 version in your browser here: http://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows1
I still use it to close applications by keyboard (Alt+Space C) because I find that easier to press than Alt+F4.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_menus_in_Microsoft_Wind...
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/wpf/windows...
Get ready for blocky web components in 2025 :)
> a proportional system font ... were all goals
Well they didn't achieve that goal then, Windows 2.x did not have proportional fonts for the title bars, menus, etc. That came with Windows 3.0.
Actually OS/2 1.3 Presentation Manager in 1989 (also developed at Microsoft).
At the time, I actually used and liked DESQview better. I wonder what things would have been like had Quaterdeck sold itself to M/S ? I remember M/S trying to buy the company, but they refused to be sold. I think they folded when Windows 3 (or 95) came out, forgot which version finally killed them.
At home, I had moved on to Coherent somewhat before Windows 3, then eventually Linux.
I was a big fan of OS/2. The late 80's and early 90's were a golden time for personal computers.
It's a big bummer that the world coalesced around Windows and macOS and now seems to be concentrating more and more around Web technologies. I would love to see an alternate timeline where OS/2, AmigaOS, TOS, BeOS, and other interesting operating systems coexisted and competed for another 20 years.
Re: that last quote, I'm not sure they could have done a better job of copying the Macintosh at the time, except in a very crude way.
Microsoft was targeting 16-bit Intel CPUs which required a coprocessor for floating point support. That's a huge constraint on what you can practically do, compared to the Mac's 68k.
Hardware is probably the biggest reason Windows was garbage until Windows 95, where they jumped ahead of Mac OS with preemptive multitasking etc.
Implementing 2D graphics operations with fixed point arithmetic isn't hard, and has the benefit of being absolutely exactly reproducible on 1980s hardware (hence why TeX uses it).
You can do very sophisticated work entirely with fixed point (such as the first Playstation), and I suspect we're going to see more noise from the ML people about using it for silicon space efficiency reasons.
The early Macs didn't have floating point support either, not even as a co-processor until the Mac II in the late 80s I think.
Digital Research's GEM was able to do a better job than early Windows of getting the Lisa/Mac UI style/paradigm on PC hardware. So much so that Apple sued them. And they got to market sooner than Microsoft.
Though their original target wasn't a Mac clone, it borrowed Mac UI elements. Lee Jay Lorenzen left Xerox and joined DR because he couldn't sell Xerox on the idea of getting Xerox Star functionality onto commodity 8080/8086 class machines.
Another early one was VisiOn, from the VisiCalc folks, which had a very nice (for the time) minimalistic look and feel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visi_On
Off-topic: When I open that page, my email address shows up in the text input for subscribing. How do they know my email? I don't remember ever going on that website.
AppleTalk on windows 2.11. Really? How?
It's funny that they had decent window manager that actually managed your windows in 1.0 and then it went gradually worse from there.