25 Years Ago, Bill Gates Announced Windows 1.0
25 Years Ago, Bill Gates Announced Windows 1.0
Posted 11/12/2008 at 2:40pm
| by Andy Salisbury
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Nearly a quarter century ago, a young, pinup version Bill Gates released Microsoft’s first operating system, Windows. While the announcement was made in 1983, and the boxes wouldn’t see store shelves until 1985, Gates’ debut at New York’s Helmsley Palace Hotel was a notably ambitious one.
Gates stated that his fledgling operating system would be powering 90% of IBM’s computers by 1984. This didn’t come true initially (read: missed release date by a year), but it has managed to come to fruition as a number that’s near Windows’ market share today.
While Windows 1 was a short-lived ride, being made obsolete only two years later by Windows 2, it was a great start for Microsoft. Using a brand new graphical interface, it certainly made an impact on computing, as we know it today.
Image Credit: Microsoft
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uptimeinf
November 15, 2008 at 2:21pm
Microslop/gates is like a money grubbing cousin the comes to visit and never seems to know it's way past time to leave.
Gates had some brilliant ideas early on, but management and marketing at microslop made it all moot long ago.
They finally cobbled together XP and I actually liked it, all $299 of it. Then they told me I can't play DX10 games without $399 Vista. ( I want all the features an OS has to offer, so I don't buy lesser, stripped versions.) $700 to M$, F*&k that! But, I want to see Far Cry 2 with all graphical tidbits cranked, oh well, not bad enough to buy "Windows"
It's no surprise to me that netbook manufacturers are embracing Linux. It has to start somewhere. In 1993, my first Slackware distro was a command line nightmare, sink or swim, you'ld better learn it, install. I'm glad for that because now I can run through the config of a command line distro like Arch Linux in about 45 minutes, and end with a full graphical user interface supporting VMware Server and XPPro in a vm with M$ security breaches/reinstalling/maintanence forever in the past.
Thanks to Ubuntu, that I'm writing this on now, I can even have VMware Workstation with out all the command line hassle. Ubuntu found my hardware and left me at the Gnome desktop with everything up and running. Even my usb drives are live! Installing software is point-and-click. I just ran Crysis in XPPro in VMware Workstation! It wasn't pretty, or even playable. But, it ran. AllI I need now is Core i7 EE on a dual-proc MB! Four Procs please! Eight native cores please. True hardware RAID on the MB please. Load balancing and clustering is already here! Hey server MB makers and Intel, trickle the s*&t thef*&k down!
I like the idea of Microsoft's stock getting a swirly because now, finally, maybe my favorite magazine, MaximumPC will finally entertain a shift from 90% Dimdows/10%Linux to 90%Linux/10% Numbnuts. It would be refreshing, and it's extremely necessary as this transition builds momentum.
I can be reached at dev0nul@gmail.com. Msloppers need not respond.
Talcum X
November 13, 2008 at 7:40am
States nicely in the pic that it's an "environment", not an OS. Didnt become an OS till NT arrived, or XP for most home users. Even 9X was still DOS dependent to maintain legacy compatability. That's why they had the big DOS retirement party at XP launch.
I started with Win 2.0 on my Tandy 1000 SX. I still prefered DOS over windows untill the launch of 95. To me, windows was just overhead that all my games couldnt afford. Then, like the Borg, it assimulated small companies or stole utilites so Windows would be an all in 1 app that took care of the users needs. It slowly bloated to what we have today.
***********
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Marcus_Soperus
November 12, 2008 at 3:02pm
I only saw Windows 1.x as an OEM product on Zenith Z-286 PCs (unofficial motto "the weirdness goes in before the name goes on"), but I remember selling Windows 2.0 primarily as a way for users to have a mouse-driven word processor and paint program. Windows 2.0 was also available in a run-time version, enabling users to run Aldus PageMaker (later bought by Adobe) in Windows, then go back to good ol' MS-DOS or PC-DOS when they were done laying out pages.
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