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The History of Windows 2.0
- jmpeax 3y agoI always thought garbage websites from garbage companies were the only ones to pop up a subscription window. Bradford Morgan White, why did you turn your website into one of those websites with that "subscribe" popup?
- TillE 3y agoRe: that last quote, I'm not sure they could have done a better job of copying the Macintosh at the time, except in a very crude way. Microsoft was targeting 16-bit Intel CPUs which required a coprocessor for floating point support. That's a huge constraint on what you can practically do, compared to the Mac's 68k. Hardware is probably the biggest reason Windows was garbage until Windows 95, where they jumped ahead of Mac OS with preemptive multitasking etc.
- Narishma 3y agoThe early Macs didn't have floating point support either, not even as a co-processor until the Mac II in the late 80s I think.
- desiarnezjr 3y agoNeither did Amiga. Also OS/2 was performant on equivalent hardware at the time.
- woleium 3y agoOS/2 was great! Most of the dev team went on to write Windows NT.
- mnd999 3y agoThe Amiga did have superior custom graphics chips (I guess a GPU in today's language, although entirely 2D focused) which helped a lot.
- bitwize 3y agoThe Atari ST lacked a blitter, but also had a GUI environment less miserable than Windows 2.0. Industry pundits called it the "Jackintosh", as it was Jack Tramiel's budget answer to the Macintosh.
- Narishma 3y agoOS/2 required much more resources than Windows 2, which is what we're talking about here.
- firecall 3y agoAs a Mac person that also used Windows NT in my day to day work, I never liked Windows 95. From a purely subjective perspective the design wasnt to my taste. But the worst thing was the Viruses! Windows 95 was a hellscape of security issues. It felt like I never encountered a Windows 95 box that actually worked like it was supposed to. And it seemed like everyone was always reinstalling Windows 95 to get it working again. In the late 90s I had an NT4 box that I never had to reboot. My Mac was getting rebooted multiple times a day.
- ronsor 3y ago> reinstalling Windows 95 to get it working again Even today, reinstalling Windows is often the only way to get it working again.
- pengaru 3y agoI worked as a lowly PC technician assembling machines from components for a little shop in a strip mall when Windows 95 was what everyone wanted. The OS was indeed a hot mess, but one thing was abundantly clear after assembling and installing it on hundreds of new machines: driver quality varied wildly across hardware vendors, and installing them was often the change transforming a perfectly stable fresh installation into a crash-prone unstable disaster. Linux may not have had much in the way of hardware support, but what hardware it did support tended to work pretty well. This was a huge difference vs. Win95, where all hardware ostensibly came with drivers for the OS, sort of a classic quality vs. quantity situation.
- kiwijamo 3y agoThat would explain why my experience with Win95 was so good. I never really understood all the hate for it (especially given 98/98SE/ME/XP, which came after 95, all of which I never really liked due to the all the extra "user friendly" features I never really used). I must have been lucky to have had the 'right' hardware with the better drivers at the time. IIRC I stayed on Windows 95 right up until Firefox (or whatever it was called at the time) finally dropped support for Windows 95.
- fidotron 3y agoImplementing 2D graphics operations with fixed point arithmetic isn't hard, and has the benefit of being absolutely exactly reproducible on 1980s hardware (hence why TeX uses it). You can do very sophisticated work entirely with fixed point (such as the first Playstation), and I suspect we're going to see more noise from the ML people about using it for silicon space efficiency reasons.
- acdha 3y agoGeoWorks Ensemble ran much better on the same hardware. If you wanted closer to a Mac experience it was a much better choice … except that anti-competitive licensing deals made it more expensive because most systems came with Microsoft licenses whether or not you intended to use them.
- dphidt 3y ago+1 for GeoWorks which ran a lovely suite of bundled programs amazingly well on a 286, and was preinstalled alongside MS-DOS on some systems in the early 90s. Despite being a quality product, apparently development was a major pain (expensive documentation and bad workflow), while Windows rode a wave of third party software to market domination. An interesting footnote to the Windows story of the era, and a cautionary tale perhaps. But FWIW I still run Ensemble in a VM :).
- coldacid 3y agoA stupidly overpriced SDK didn't help much either.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoDigital Research's GEM was able to do a better job than early Windows of getting the Lisa/Mac UI style/paradigm on PC hardware. So much so that Apple sued them. And they got to market sooner than Microsoft. Though their original target wasn't a Mac clone, it borrowed Mac UI elements. Lee Jay Lorenzen left Xerox and joined DR because he couldn't sell Xerox on the idea of getting Xerox Star functionality onto commodity 8080/8086 class machines. Another early one was VisiOn, from the VisiCalc folks, which had a very nice (for the time) minimalistic look and feel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visi_On https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visi_On
- fortran77 3y ago[flagged]
- a-dub 3y agoi'm trying to remember what 80286 era dos/windows PC applications actually made use of the optional FPU and find myself coming up blank. maybe autocad?
- dm319 3y agoAnd Workbench was there with pre-emptive multi-tasking, resizable overlapping windows with adjustable colours in the same year that Windows 1 was released. Makes me wonder what went wrong for them.
- hulitu 3y ago> Makes me wonder what went wrong for them. It didn't came preinstalled on the PC ? "For free" ? /s
- pjc50 3y agoThe key was not so much the FPU, but the MMU, and the availability of the various modes of the 386 processor.
- NegativeLatency 3y agoThe first versions of excel were actually made for the Macintosh: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel#Early_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel#Early_history
- Narishma 3y agoYes, that's what the article states as well.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- firecall 3y agoCheck out those Screenshots. That is the OG Flat UI Design. MS were well ahead of the curve. Who says MS dont have any taste! ;-)
- cglong 3y agoI know you're joking, but don't forget that Metro predated Material Design and iOS 7 by several years :)
- mc32 3y agoUsability-wise it’s better. It actually had more affordances than Metro did. In Metro you had to freaking poke around to see if there were active elements. Also Metro was too reductivist icon heavy.
- afavour 3y agoIMO it might have been better than both of them! But probably too restrictive. It worked wonderfully on Windows Phone but it didn’t feel right at all blown up to desktop size in Windows 8.
- cglong 3y ago"Restrictive" is probably a perfect word to describe it. I maintain that Zune Desktop was the most beautiful app ever produced, but it definitely had a lot of custom design elements on top of the Metro base.
- steve1977 3y agoThey did use a flat look in some applications even back in 2000: https://youtu.be/v40aT_Fones?si=ObbyUnbqwqL2ELKP https://youtu.be/v40aT_Fones?si=ObbyUnbqwqL2ELKP This was also similar in style to Windows CE back then IIRC, at least on Pocket PC.
- qingcharles 3y agoMetro was peak design for me. I was doing UI work for MS around 2004 on Windows Media Center, and I think the design on that UI predated it officially becoming "Metro". The flat design work I did for the UI on there I borrowed from Sky Digital's 1998 UI shown at the start of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnJ4YK7XHeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnJ4YK7XHeI
- markguy 3y agoAppleTalk on windows 2.11. Really? How?
- fredoralive 3y agoApple did release a LocalTalk card for PCs circa 1987, although the article I found about it shows MS-DOS drivers[1]. AFAIK until Windows for Workgroups MS-DOS provided network file access, so perhaps this is referring to support for AppleTalk printers??? Alternatively, 2.11 was 1989, and I’m sure Ethernet cards would be available for NuBus Macs by that time. Or perhaps even those funky SCSI to Ethernet adapters for those without. [1] http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2020/07/appleshare-pc-on-ms-dos-and-apple.html http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2020/07/appleshare-pc-on-ms-dos-a... --- Edit: I "found" some disc images for 2.11/386, and the README.TXT notes: "Version 2.11 now supports the following hardware ... includes a dynamic link library to allow the Postscript driver to work with AppleTalk networks"
- Cloudef 3y agoIt's funny that they had decent window manager that actually managed your windows in 1.0 and then it went gradually worse from there.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pasc1878 3y agoThis is a real different view. Windows 1.0 was unusable because if you opened a new window it was too small to do anything and so had to minimize all the others. Windows 2.0 was a great step forward as you could have seveal apps on the screen and easily switch between them and they were large enough to work in.
- hulitu 3y ago> Windows 1.0 was unusable because if you opened a new window it was too small to do anything and so had to minimize all the others. Just like Android today. And they have the shame of calling it a "Linux". /s
- userbinator 3y agoIt was already a feature in Windows 1.0 to let you customise the colours of the UI elements, and it lasted (with gradual improvements) until Windows 8 where it was removed completely.
- deaddodo 3y agoI still miss the Windows Classic theme. It was simplistic enough while being streamlined enough for most workflows, now I have to hover icons to find specific windows in an application group or deal with the internet-connected Search/Run box. It wasn't perfect, but it worked better for me, at the very least.
- smusamashah 3y agohttps://github.com/dremin/RetroBar https://github.com/dremin/RetroBar gives at least the classic taskbar back. I have been using it on windows 10 for a while now. It is much better experience.
- deaddodo 3y agoIt hasn't been since LiteStep that I found myself so appreciative of some random Windows engineers' work. But this is actually awesome. The only thing I would change is to remove the reliance on .NET Desktop.
- hulitu 3y ago> until Windows 8 where it was removed completely. Now they use AI. White text on white background. /s
- yomlica8 3y agoAt least we have to do a bunch of work to add dark modes to individual programs instead of just changing a few settings and having it work globally. Always demo in hotdog stand theme for greatest visual impact.
- andrewstuart 3y agoI worked extensively with Windows 2 back in the day. Possibly even with Windows 1.0 I can't quite recall. It was a constant battle to get enough RAM for applications to run. Futzing around with himem.sys and moving around network drivers and stuff in high memory. Windows applications had to run within the first 640K of RAM. In reality, around that time most corporate machines were 80286 machines and as I recall a high specced machine usually had 2MB RAM. Kinda weird to think that working, useful Windows applications ran on systems with that little memory. Ugh I'm glad those days are gone.
- pdonis 3y ago> It was a constant battle to get enough RAM for applications to run. Futzing around with himem.sys and moving around network drivers and stuff in high memory. This was a battle even if you weren't running Windows. Many DOS programs wanted enough of that first 640K that you had to jump through hoops to fit them in.
- qingcharles 3y agoRebooting 15 times with different driver ordering in the hope you'll find another 3KB of RAM to get the application to run. Really sucked if you were booting from floppy.
- robin_reala 3y agoQEMM was a life saver in this regard.
- agumonkey 3y agoso qemm was a configurable mapper ?
- justsomehnguy 3y agoQEMM was way more aggressive in clawing out the memory blocks from all nooks and crannies, definitely was more configurable and also had a way to test different configurations of device drivers (ie CONFIG.SYS) fully automatically, so you just started it, go to eat/whatever (pray what it wouldn't lock up) and come back to the best result.
- kristianp 3y ago> Microsoft was paying license fees to Xerox for GUI elements that were similar to those on the Alto (Xerox 8010) just as Apple was. Really? I've never heard that before.
- kergonath 3y agoYeah, I’ve never heard of that either. AFAIK, Apple offered Xerox to buy some stock pre-IPO, but I have never seen anyone mentioning royalties. The whole paragraph is dubious without sources.
- jmclnx 3y agoAt the time, I actually used and liked DESQview better. I wonder what things would have been like had Quaterdeck sold itself to M/S ? I remember M/S trying to buy the company, but they refused to be sold. I think they folded when Windows 3 (or 95) came out, forgot which version finally killed them. At home, I had moved on to Coherent somewhat before Windows 3, then eventually Linux.
- criddell 3y agoI was a big fan of OS/2. The late 80's and early 90's were a golden time for personal computers. It's a big bummer that the world coalesced around Windows and macOS and now seems to be concentrating more and more around Web technologies. I would love to see an alternate timeline where OS/2, AmigaOS, TOS, BeOS, and other interesting operating systems coexisted and competed for another 20 years.
- tails4e 3y agoInteresting, from the screen shots it seems windows 1.0 had what looks like a burger menu on the top left, and a task at (or status bar) on the bottom. Went full circle 30+ years later.
- agumonkey 3y agoGet ready for blocky web components in 2025 :)
- layer8 3y agoThat menu is the system menu [0][1], still present in current Windows (Alt+Space). You can try out the Windows 1 version in your browser here: http://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows1 http://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows1 I still use it to close applications by keyboard (Alt+Space C) because I find that easier to press than Alt+F4. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_menus_in_Microsoft_Windows#System_menu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_menus_in_Microsoft_Wind... [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/wpf/windows/#the-window-class https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/wpf/windows...
- blackoil 3y agoDouble Clicking System menu also closes the app, even in Win 11. My brother still uses that to close programs. System menu is now missing in some apps. In Edge, though no visible menu button but clicking in that area brings the menu and double click closes window. Explorer is even weird there is no button or area, but double click to close works while holding Alt+Space
- abdulhaq 3y agoI do get a sense from this article, due to the presence of stories I never heard before, that this is how history gets slowly rewritten. But an important aside for me is how exciting and awesome these developments felt to the users. Modern tech progressions feel relatively dull, probably because they have relatively little impact compared to the leaps being made in the early days.
- yard2010 3y agoA bit late to the party but I still remember vividly the day I was back from school and my dad installed Windows 2000 on the family PC. I remember looking at the shiny animations thinking this is the peak of technology. It was exciting!
- BillLumbergh 3y agoSame.
- z500 3y agoThat was how I felt on my second day of high school when all the Windows 98 PCs from the day before were stacked up in the corner and replaced with sleek, new, black Windows XP boxes. I wanted XP at home so bad, it would be a couple more years.
- PretzelPirate 3y agoMy dad upgraded our computer to Windows 2000 and I was really excited until I found out that a lot of my old games wouldn't run anymore.
- StuffMaster 3y agoIt was exciting because it was Windows NT and had pre-emptive multitasking and MAC and dynamic driver loading and NTFS. getoffmylawn!!
- tpmx 3y agoIt seems like most of it is a rewrite of this 2010 article by this Tandy Trower guy who worked on Windows: https://www.technologizer.com/2010/03/08/the-secret-origin-of-windows/ https://www.technologizer.com/2010/03/08/the-secret-origin-o...
- teddyh 3y ago> the aspect ratio is changed to 4:3 No it wasn’t. The aspect ratio was always 4:3. The resolution changed from 640×350 (with non-square pixels) to 640×480 (with square pixels). But the aspect ratio did not change. (The first image in the article is therefore displayed incorrectly compared to what it would have looked like.)
- 83457 3y agoIs there something else going on here? The screen above would have no square icons or ui elements with rectangular pixels. Did everyone just adjust their CRT so the image would fill the 4:3 even if it distorted the image?
- adrianmsmith 3y agoI'm not sure there's anything in that first image that is actually square (and thus would become not-square) if the image was expanded vertically. But look at the clock icon at the bottom, that could definitely do with some vertical expansion to make it circular.
- teddyh 3y agoThe icons were not square. The image was not “distorted” when displayed as 4:3; it was designed to look that way. Non-square pixels are, in fact, a thing.
- pjc50 3y ago> Did everyone just adjust their CRT so the image would fill the 4:3 even if it distorted the image? Yes? I never saw a "letterboxed" CRT. I think I'm with the people who are suspicious of the Windows 1.0 screenshot. Is there an emulator somewhere we can check with?
- anonymfus 3y agoLook at the clock "icon", it's squashed vertically. If you apply 4:3 aspect ratio, it becomes round. https://www.reddit.com/r/imageuploads/comments/15zxpka/windows_10_screenshot_resized_for_43_aspect_ratio/ https://www.reddit.com/r/imageuploads/comments/15zxpka/windo... Note that "icon" here is the minimised state of the window, and the clock application draws itself in that state with the same code as in the normal state, and so it utilises screen metrics, while other minimised applications just call default windows procedure which puts bitmaps on the screen.
- mananaysiempre 3y ago> Overlapping windows, a proportional system font, and more general UI improvements were all goals [of the 2.0 release of Windows] As an additional strange twist, Windows 1.0 was capable of overlapping child windows[1], title bars and all, even if the official MDI support APIs came later. It just didn’t use that capability for top-level windows for some reason. [1] https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=36663 https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=36663
- quietbritishjim 3y agoI have a faint memory that this was because overlapping top-level windows seemed like too much of an infringement of an existing windowing system (maybe the Xerox one mentioned in the article) but later they decided, maybe it wasn't.
- bitwize 3y agoApple held exclusive rights to overlapping windows at the time (perhaps on license from Xerox).
- glonq 3y agohttps://imgur.com/3bLoYgn https://imgur.com/3bLoYgn 1985: Windows 1.0 - Gaudy colors, boxy design. Apps can either run as a small tile or fullscreen. no freely resizeable/movable windows. 1986-2011: A quarter century of fumbling around with UI design. 2012: Windows 8 (Metro UI) - Gaudy colors, boxy design. Apps can either run as a small tile or fullscreen. no freely resizeable/movable windows.
- adrianmsmith 3y ago> a proportional system font ... were all goals Well they didn't achieve that goal then, Windows 2.x did not have proportional fonts for the title bars, menus, etc. That came with Windows 3.0.
- pavlov 3y agoActually OS/2 1.3 Presentation Manager in 1989 (also developed at Microsoft).
- tempaway43355 3y agoJust for comparison the Acorn Archimedes launched in 1987 with Arthur OS (later to become Risc OS) with a full windowed desktop with overlapping windows etc. They were able to pull this off because they had designed a new processor that they called the "Acorn RISC Machine"* Screenshot of 1987 desktop here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_RISC_OS#/media/File:AcornArthur110desktopsmall.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_RISC_OS#/media/File... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_RISC_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_RISC_OS * ARM for short, you might have heard of it
- pjc50 3y agoRISCOS was great, although slightly eccentric in a couple of ways: - "we have a three button mouse, we're going to make use of all of them" as opposed to Apple - instead of file pickers, saving was done by drag-and-drop: press save and a window pops up with the file, which you drag to a target folder. The !Application system, an early bundle mechanism, was a simple and effective form of packaging without having to do anything fancy.
- tempaway43355 3y agoYeah that drag and drop save was funny. It was the era of 'lets do this using drag and drop just because it looks cool and metaphorical - you are literally PUTTING that file IN that folder - geddit?'
- johnflan 3y agoI don’t agree that it was eccentric, I used these as my first machine and they felt pretty natural. I would also suggest that these interactions weren’t completely standardised at that point.
- mnd999 3y agoAmigaOS was similar (with a 68k) and that launched in 1985.
- johnflan 3y agoThe Acorn was a marvel of its day (to me at least)
- cool-RR 3y agoOff-topic: When I open that page, my email address shows up in the text input for subscribing. How do they know my email? I don't remember ever going on that website.
- lagniappe 3y agomaybe a different substack has your email, maybe it's the shoulder-gnomes
- userbinator 3y agoBrowser autofill?
- tl 3y ago> Having a good word processor and a good spreadsheet on any software/hardware platform was absolutely vital in 1980s. To this day, I cannot believe Apple shipped the Macintosh without a means of running VisiCalc.