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Windows 1.0, 2.0, 3.0—How do they look today?
Today Microsoft Windows is installed on about 75% of personal computers in the world. But how did it begin? Let’s test the first versions of Microsoft Windows and figure out, how it works.
Before we get started, it’s helpful to remember the background. About 50 years ago computers had the size of the fridge and the price of a sports car. Later the hardware became smaller, cheaper, and more powerful, and in 1974 the first personal computer Altair 8800 was made. Soon it became obvious that the microcomputers (“micro” compared to the fridge size, of course) sales are growing fast, and IBM, the manufacturer of the “business machines” (mostly large and expensive mainframes) decided to enter this market too. But they did not have a proper operating system for new hardware, and on November 6 1980, IBM signed a contract with Microsoft. MS had about 30 employees at that time and was already known for their BASIC product, which was sold over half a million copies.
In the early 80s, the most popular operating system was CP/M, which looked something like this:
The decision to make a new operating system MS-DOS, similar in functionality, was quite an obvious step at that time. But rather soon, in 1984, Apple introduced the first Macintosh computer and demonstrated that the graphical user interface is much more attractive for an unexperienced user:
I don’t know when Microsoft made a decision to start a Windows project, but one year later, in 1985, the first Windows 1.0 was released.
Emulation
I don’t think, most readers have a computer, capable of running MS-DOS nowadays, and its anyway not required. The easiest way to test any old system is to run it in an emulator. It’s much better to “play” with an actual disk image and to run the “real” software — you will get a real understanding of how it works. There are two ways to do this. You can use the nice website https://www.pcjs.org/software, where images of various operating systems can be…
