3 ms·

Yep, around 1990

• Stratoscope 6y ago
  1985. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_TopView https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_TopView I had just started working at Gupta Technologies at the time, and for a short while we seriously considered developing for TopView instead of Windows.
  • reaperducer 6y ago
    Ashton-Tate did it with Framework in 1984. Though my memory is that it goes back a few years earlier to Valdocs on CP/M machines, but I can’t find any pictures on the intarwebs.
    • Stratoscope 6y ago
      Framework was pretty great! My partner and I were working on some similar ideas at the time, and we got together with the Framework team to compare notes and brainstorm. The thing that stuck in my mind when Robert Carr took us on a tour of their office was the printer lab. It was a full size conference room with floor-to-ceiling shelves on every wall stacked with printers. Because back in those days, if you wanted to sell a DOS application that could print anything more than plain text, you had to write your own drivers for every printer you wanted to support. Ouch! I've sometimes thought that the real innovation in Windows 1.0 was having systemwide printer drivers so every app didn't have to provide their own.