Microsoft Announces Windows
On November 10, 1983, Microsoft announced Windows at a press event in New York. It was described as a graphical extension for MS-DOS, and the first version, Windows 1.0, was released two years later, in November 1985.
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Personal Computers in 1983
In 1983 most personal computers that ran MS-DOS, the operating system Microsoft supplied for the IBM PC and compatible machines, were controlled by typed commands. Graphical interfaces, in which users pointed at pictures and windows with a mouse, had been developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s and had reached the market in the Xerox Star in 1981 and the Apple Lisa in January 1983. Apple introduced the Macintosh in January 1984.
The Announcement
Microsoft announced a program under the name Windows on November 10, 1983, at a press event at the Plaza Hotel in New York. The company described it as a software extension for MS-DOS that would show several programs in separate windows on the screen at the same time and let users switch between them with a mouse. The product had been developed under the working name Interface Manager. Microsoft said that a number of hardware manufacturers had agreed to support it, and it gave a release date in 1984.
The Delay
The program was not finished by the date first announced. Microsoft released Windows 1.0 on November 20, 1985, about two years after the announcement. The first version used windows that were tiled next to each other and did not overlap, and it came with small programs that included a calculator, a clock, a notepad and a drawing program called Paint. It required a computer with at least 256 kilobytes of memory and two floppy disk drives.
Later Versions
Windows 2.0, released in December 1987, allowed windows to overlap. Windows 3.0, released in May 1990, and Windows 3.1, released in 1992, were widely used on personal computers. Windows 95 appeared in August 1995 and did not require users to install MS-DOS first. Windows NT, a separate line of the system intended for businesses and servers, was released in July 1993.
Other Graphical Systems
Windows was not the only program of its kind that appeared in the mid-1980s. The Macintosh, introduced in January 1984, had a graphical interface built into its system. In 1985 Digital Research released GEM, a graphical environment for MS-DOS machines, which was also used on the Atari ST computer, and IBM and Quarterdeck released TopView and DESQview, which allowed several programs to run in windows on an IBM PC. The Commodore Amiga, with its own graphical system, was introduced in July 1985. Microsoft had been founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and it had supplied the operating system for the IBM PC since the computer was launched in 1981.
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