https://encyclopedia.thefreedi...nary.com/Windows+1.0

Microsoft Windows 1.0 is a 16-bit graphical operating environment, developed by Microsoft Corporation and released on 20 November 1985.

It was Microsoft's first attempt to implement a multi-tasking graphical user interface-based operating environment on the PC platform. Windows 1.0 was the first version of Windows launched

Windows 1.0 market share grew very slowly

more at link

I remember it. Bought it when I was in college and had to buy an add-on to create menu items .

I liked MS DOS 5.0 and thought Windows sucked.

Back then Windows was just the graphical user interface. DOS was still the OS underneath.

Windows wasn't (weren't?) usable until version 3. I remember 1. It was a joke.

Did they actually market it as Windows 1.0? They were confident I guess.

I really never got involved in Windows until 3.1.
You installed DOS 5.0 then installed the Windows component.
The Good Ole Days.

quote:

Originally posted by smschulz:
I really never got involved in Windows until 3.1.
You installed DOS 5.0 then installed the Windows component.
The Good Ole Days.

I sincerely miss not having to "activate" an operating system...

Article from PC Computing magazine, August 1985 -works best if you can get 640K memory and a souped up 286 processor!:

Drawing back the curtain on Windows shows Microsoft has a clear edge

I remember when MSDOS was introduced. I said CPM/86 was a better operating system and MSDOS would never last.

I had various flavors of DOS - up to 4.0 I suspect - for some reason 3.2 seems to ring a bell

I remember I had a huge file of aliased commands that took the uUnix command that I was familiar with and mimic'd the DOS command. I remember when Windows first came out and I went out and bought a browser and a mail client. And this was on dial up - I had a super-fast 2400-baud modem at the time - I replaced my 300-baud acoustic coupler

ah, the good old days

I still think DOS 3.2 is better than Windows 10

quote:

Originally posted by smschulz:
I really never got involved in Windows until 3.1.
You installed DOS 5.0 then installed the Windows component.
The Good Ole Days.

^^^^ This

quote:

Originally posted by SpinZone:

quote:

Originally posted by smschulz:
I really never got involved in Windows until 3.1.
You installed DOS 5.0 then installed the Windows component.
The Good Ole Days.

^^^^ This

Good old days????!!!!!

I’ve got an attic full of old hardware and plenty of software. We could have a party where we could relive those good old days.

Let’s see. Install the hard drive. What’s those sector settings again? Damn, forgot to put a jumper on the master pin. Shoot, there’re not marked. Check the docs. Nothing. No internet to look it up. Trial and error, and got it.

Ok, where’s that DOS disk. Shit, they’re upgrade disks only. Anybody seen my DOS 4.2 disks? There they are, but they’re 5.25 disks. Crap. Open case and perch a 5.25 floppy on the side of the case. Shoot, the 5.25 has a card edge connector. Where’s that cable that has both pin and card edge floppy connectors? There it is in that box that looks like a rat’s nest. If that doesn’t work, we can borrow one from the old IBM XT.

Ok. We’re up and running on 4.2. At this rate, we’ll be ready to play DOOM sometime next year. Ok, install the DOS 5.0 upgrade disks. Perfect, it’s installing disk 1.... disk 2.... disk 3.. quack, quack, quack, quack. Disk is unreadable. Well great. Anybody seen that Norton Utilities disk anywhere? I need to see if I can fix this floppy. Tape over the hole, repair the disk, say your prayers, and start the installation again.

Finally, DOS 5.0 is up and running. How nice, MS-DOS ripped off Quarterdeck, so it has a memory manager. However, unlike the QD product, you have to trudge through your autoexec.bat and config.sys flies to figure out what order to load things to get to memory nirvana, 600K free. After all, we want the speech synthesizer and animated hand to work while playing Wing Commander. Oh that’s right, it needs expanded memory. Remember to load emm386 first before himem.sys, or is that the other way around? We spend the next 2 hours doing trial and error on autoexec.bat/config.sys combinations while watching Tales from the Crypt. Finally, we’re ready.

Hold up just one minute. You forgot the drivers for your SoundBlaster. You cannot game without a SB card. Install drivers, remembering to add your CH Flightstick at the same time. Repeat the whole exercise with the autoexec.bat/config.sys file to figure out the driver order. After becoming more proficient than Ken Mattingly trying to restart the Apollo 13 command module simulator, you now have enough memory to play your game.

Wife comes in, points out that you’ve been “playing” with your computer for 8 hours now, and it’s time to stop.

Well shit. Tomorrow I’m buying Windows. It will solve all my problems.

I got into Windows at 3.1 but back then gaming was done via DOS. I don't remember if it was 5.0 or 6.0 that introduced multi-boot configurations but it was a Godsend for gaming. Instead of having to create a floppy with game specific data (config.sys, autoexec.bat, stacks, etc.) to boot each game you could create a boot file with all of them and just select a specific game or Windows when booting. The height of convenience in the early 90s!

Anyone miss manually configuring IRQs and DMA channels? Bueller?

That was excellent, sigcrazy7.

Do any of y'all remember these?

hadn't thought about those books in a long time

I had 4 of the 5" floppies (55k each as I remember). It's been so long, but I think they were $500 each. (might be wrong on that)

I have a problem getting rid of old books

IIRC, DOS 2.0 was the shortest lived of IBM’s OS’s. It was the first one to support a hard drive. If you entered the ‘format’ command without a drive designation, it would default to C: (the hard drive) and respond with ‘PRESS ANY KEY TO CONTINUE’ (or something like that). Then it would poll the keyboard for any key press.

At that point, the only way to save your hard drive was to power down the machine. Not good. DOS 2.10 came along very, very quickly.

Still VERY crude compared to what Apple offered that very same day:

Windows 1.0



Macintosh System 1.1

quote:

Originally posted by PASig:
Still VERY crude compared to what Apple offered that very same day:

Windows 1.0



Macintosh System 1.1

True, but you are looking at about all the Macintosh (especially the 128) could do in 1985. Until, I suppose, MicroSoft ported Multiplan (Excel) and Word to the Mac. Even then, the Mac wasn’t a serious machine for most uses when compared to a PC running Lotus 1-2-3, Wordstar, or especially WordPerfect 4.0. $2800 was a lot of money to pay for a machine that could only draw a pretty desktop.

It wasn’t until the Mac Plus came along, with its support for upgradeable 30 pin memory and external SCSI drives, that the Mac became useful, but that was still a year away in 1986. Along with MacWrite and MacPaint, of course.

I still have a Mac Plus with a 20MB external drive. It still runs fine, so I sometimes take it on nostalgia trips. I also have an IBM XT that also works. It’s so original that the internal cables still have their factory folds, and it STILL WORKS!! Amazing. Sounds like a jet turbine spooling up when you throw that big red switch.

Our first home computer, around 1993, was some flavor of Macintosh (can't recall, I was 7).
The 2nd was a TabWorks Windows machine, Compaq maybe.

Not long after that, we upgraded to a Win98 Compaq desktop. I distinctly recall my dad saying something to the effect of "you'll never fill up 10gig of storage".
I've got more than that sitting in front of me on a flash drive about 1/3 the size of my car's keyless entry remote.