Today marks the 25th anniversary of Microsoft Windows, since the first version of the product was launched on this day in 1985. (To put this in perspective, I graduated from high school in 1985.) Like most people, I never used Windows 1.0, which was by all accounts nothing more than a slightly graphical shell that sat on top of MS-DOS. In fact, the original code-name for Windows–Interface Manager–says everything you need to know about Microsoft’s early intentions for the product.
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The original Windows was nothing more than an attempt to capitalize on the then-nascent move away from command line interfaces towards graphical user interfaces (GUIs), as popularized by Apple’s Mac. In fact, it originally competed not with the Mac, per se, but with DOS shells we’ve all forgotten, like TopView and GEM.
It’s hard to remember how different the industry was 25 years ago. PC clones were born, but were not yet the dominant standard. For consumers, Commodore offered far more compelling–and best-selling–systems, Apple was making inroads in education and with the well-heeled (well, that hasn’t changed much), and a variety of upstarts–including Microsoft–were vying in the PC-based OS space. I was a Commodore user, and proud of it.
Microsoft’s offering at the time wasn’t Windows. It was MS-DOS. Windows 1.0 was marketed as an “operating environment,” not a true OS, and was an “extension” to MS-DOS that ran MS-DOS programs. The key advantages of Windows over plain DOS were simple multitasking–the ability to run multiple programs at the same time–and the graphical environment itself, which could be manipulated with a mouse. You could “cut and paste” information between running applications using a clipboard, utilize several handy built-in programs (shades of the Mac), and access Expanded Memory. (If you don’t remember what that was, just move on. This is a painful, ahem, memory.)
