22 Nov
2025
22 Nov
'25
9:53 a.m.
On 18/11/2025 20:18, Murray McCullough via cctalk wrote:
According to history Windows 1 was introduced to the
world on Nov. 20,
1985, 40 years ago, minus 2 days. Prior to this Windows was first announced
in 1983(vaporware) but…An even earlier development was Interface Manager.
What we have now is much more and ‘better’ but for classic computing I
still prefer WIN 3.1.
Happy computing.
Murray 🙂
I can actually confirm that because, by chance, I was there. I'm not
sure of the exact date but I was at Comdex Fall '85 with Atari, for the
US launch of the ST. (I'd written some of the bundled software, and it
had been launched in London earlier in the year).
Someone said "Go along to the Microsoft stand, they've released their
own version of DesqView, called Windows".
I went for a nose and there it was, running on one PC. It looked just
like DesqView. Yawn. If it worked in graphics mode they weren't
demonstrating it. Perhaps it could, but multi-tasking DOS applications
in text mode was more useful. It was very weird, and underwhelming. Like
OS/2 before Presentation Manager was released. I guess it shipped with
graphical Program Manager and File Manager. If anyone saw more of it at
the time I'd be interested, as I've been wondering about it ever since.
Was I looking at the whole thing? Would it have got better if I'd stuck
around?
GEM (which I was working on with Digital Research) was graphics based,
and looked like a Lisa/Mac - which was clearly the future. It was, er,
rubbish on the 8088 but quite cool on the 68000.
Regards, Frank.