Windows 1.0 turns 34 years old today

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Actually, the first for-real version of Windows was called 1.01, but there’s a complicated story around it. Microsoft’s had problems with version numb
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Cameochi, ch100

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IF, (and that is a BIG IF) i recall correctly, It was Windows 3.1 in 1986. I think it was on a Compac SX86 portable that weighed about 10 pounds. Got it second hand from a friend that wwas upgrading his stuff. used that thing for about 4 years while driving truck to keep track of directions to my customers using a program called “WingDings”. Still wish I had that program, but it would not install when I upgraded to Windows 7.

Dave

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3.1 was my introduction to windows also.

Don't take yourself so seriously, no one else does 🙂
All W10 Pro at 22H2,(2 Desktops, 1 Laptop).

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win3.1 in I think 1991 Then win3.11 windows for workgroups.  An upgrade to DOS was such big deal then!

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A friend and I flew up to Chicago for a computer show (any excuse for a flight) and saw Windows 1.0!  He became a Beta tester.  Hard to believe that the flight has been that long ago.

 

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I’ve had the opportunity to use all versions of Windows from the very first released version which was 1.01.  Of course I also had the chance to use all versions of DOS as well, so I guess that sort of dates me!  🙂

Windows 10 Pro x64 v1909, Windows 7 Home Premium x64, Windows Vista Home Premium x64

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Pierre77, Noel Carboni, woody, Fred

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windows 2.0 programming in pascal for isu ag department.

Hey look! Another Feature Update!

You mean I shouldn't click Check for Updates?

Where is the Any key?

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I believe my first encounter with Windows was version 2, which shipped as a run-time O/S for a long-forgotten program.  I recall almost nothing about it except periodically checking that program on a Compaq 286 sporting an amber monitor.  I want to say this was back in 1987 or ’88, and remember wondering “why?”

I was the technology manager for a law firm when Word Perfect was king.  What a difference three decades makes.  😉

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I purchased my first personal computer in the Spring of 1991: a Zenith Data Systems horizontal box 80286 processor with 1 full MB of memory (640k plus 128k upper and 256k extended) and a really nice black flat screen 19 inch 256k colors CRT monitor, 128k dial up modem, 20 MB hard disk, 3.5 inch internal floppy, 5.25 inch external serial cable connected floppy, and parallel cable connected Epson dot matrix pinter. It came with MS DOS 4.01, which had a shell program that was the beginning of what became Windows. The computers I used at work were also similar 80286 and 80386 processor type desktop machines. But after that, I changed my type of work and did not get another computer to use until nine years later. By then the first version of Windows I used was Windows 98, which I liked; then went to Windows ME, which I loathed. I’ve had Windows XP and Vista and 7 and 8 and 8.1 and 10. By far, far and away, I’ve liked Windows 7 x64 sp1 the best.

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My first introduction to the “modern” PC was in early 2001 with Windows 98 Second Edition.

From memory, that PC had a 700MHz Celeron processor, 256MB of RAM and a 20GB hard drive.

Prior to that, the only other computer I had experience was an Atari 400 which I bought in 1981. Got quite good at programming in Atari BASIC back then. Fun times.

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Hmm must have been Win3.1 in the early 90’s, wasn’t an early fan even though it was better than DOS I much preferred OS/2 Warp? Certainly much more stable in my mind. Never really tempted in to Home Computing until Win95 rolled along.
Seems to me I was working with NT4 Server and Workstation around then and that was infinitely better than Win95, certainly better than a crash a week with Win95 and I think all of us remember growing old gracefully waiting for a Web page to load on dear old Dial up. 😉

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How about Fortran IV with punch cards in 1967?  OK, more to the point, I tried Windows 1.0x when it was first available and though it was nothing more than the “windows” I was already programming in Turbo Pascal (@$49!). Then came Windows 3.11 and those lovely TrueType fonts. And Microsoft provided college professors such as myself with a free copy of Word for Windows. Thank you MS!

Suddenly documents were far above Epson 9 pin dot matrix quality. But what really came along just in time to make Windows a permanent install on my computers was….  books by a guy named Leonhard. You may have heard of him!

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Noel Carboni

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I remember being in college in the mid-1980s and seeing a notice on the wall of the Academic Computing Center in the spring of whatever year it was:

“Punch card jobs will no longer be accepted for input after June 6, 1985.”  It may have been 1986 – dates back then are starting to get a little fuzzy.

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I feel certain that, somewhere, somehow, there are die-hard Win 1.01 users still running it who, now getting close to thirty years ago, pulled out a tooth and sworn in blood never to patch and never, ever to “upgrade” to another g******** newfangled version of Windows! With: “Win 1.0 is good enough for us and it should be good enough for you too!”, their raspy crie de guerre.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

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My first experience was with Windows 3.0, but I didn’t find it that interesting because I was an Amiga person at the time, and it was the far superior GUI.

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OOOOPPPPSSSS ! ! ! ! ! Boy is my sometimer’s showing up big. My first contact with Windows was in 1996, NOT 1986. I seem to be more and more forgetful as time goes by. Sorry about thhe mistake.

Dae

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Wheel_D

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My first encounter with Windows was around 1988 and the version would have been 2.0 or 2.1. It was a friend’s PC and I did not get anywhere near very good using it. My own PC at the time was a Mac Plus, which I thought was much superior, not counting that small screen. The first Windows PC I owned had version 3.11 on it, around 1993.  That was soon after I first started regularly using one at work, and I’m pretty sure it also had 3.11 on it.

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[Mr. Natural]

I knew nothing at all about computers when I bought a Compaq 486sx25 from Circuit City for $2500. 4 mb ram, 16 color vga monitor powered by a 256k Trident on board graphics card. Dos 5 and Win 3.1.

One thing to note on Windows 3.1. Some of you may recall Y2K happened on a Sunday morning and those of us in I.T. were likely at work that day as I was. Our department was checking out everything of course and the only Y2K issue we experienced was the Y2K date issue with 3.1  …which was later patched with a file less than 100Kb.

Red Ruffnsore

• This reply was modified 5 years, 5 months ago by Mr. Natural.

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Noel Carboni

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Oh, yeah, I remember Y2K. I was a COBOL/CICS programmer back then, mostly working on financial, statistical, and business reporting systems. The hardware our systems ran on was an IBM 390 mainframe, but there were also AS/400 systems that another programmer group (mostly RPG) supported. We spent a good part of 1998 and 1999 changing thousands of programs and JCL dating well back into the early 70’s. Most of our users were on dumb terminals rather than PCs, but those were gradually being replaced with PCs. Those with PCs got to our systems through an emulator, so we did not have a need to do anything with the PC software.

The whole Y2K thing was basically a sorting problem. Comparing dates with two-digit years was kind of hard if the years spanned two centuries. That was no problem when the people who originally created the programs were dealing with dates that fell entirely within the 20th Century. Converting all those systems to work properly with dates in the 20th and 21st Centuries was a long and not too challenging grind to get it all done. We finished up a couple months before the Big Day.

But we knew that the sky was not going to fall if anything went wrong (even though the news media was hyping it like planes were going to fall from the sky and in the process convincing many corporate (non-IT) execs of it). So all of us had to be scheduled to be available at some point over New Year’s Eve and into New Year’s Day (by the way, January 1, 2000, was a Saturday, not a Sunday). My boss was in overnight along with many of the other managers and a few of the most senior programmers. Lots of company-bought pizza and probably some beer as well. The rest of us were scheduled to come in that morning in case there were things to fix. But there was nothing to fix. Everything ran fine, but all the pizza was already eaten. I think maybe at the end of January a couple of reporting programs gave some screwy results, but those were easily and quickly fixed.

Loads of fun was Y2K.

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I remember the fuss made about Y2K. I spent hours(!) trying to explain to my friends and colleagues who knew nothing about computers that the FUD being presented by the news (sic) media was wrong and nothing bad was going to happen.

None-the-less, my employer required that I provide a signed and certified statement for each of my computer programs which I had written, assuring that none of them contained any reference to, or made use of, a calendar date.

The only effect that Y2K had for me was that after January 1, 2000, one certain computer program reverted to early 1900’s dates. The program? “Regedit” supplied by Microsoft as part of Windows.

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Giving my age away here. Worked for IBM Australia from 1966 to 1995 (retired 1995). First as Customer Service Engineer then in Customer Service Education from 1984.

So covered all hardware and software during that time. Now still happy using PCs.for the past 24 years at home.

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Mark, Wheel_D

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IIRC, I was learning Basic and Pascal in school around the time Windows 1.0 came around but I totally missed the launch. I think we spent too much on the Apple IIe to consider switching over, they cost a few thousand dollars as a full system at the time of purchase which was “real money” back then, dual floppy drives, color screen, color dot-matrix printer, and all.

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My first was Windows 3.0, but rather late. I didn’t start until 1998! I was 14 at the time.

I wasn’t from an IT background, my parents didn’t have a PC (didn’t have the money for one). My interest was in electronics, particularly television, and my school guidance counsellor suggested IT to me. He gave me an old Amstrad 286 PC with Windows 3.0 to get me started. He also gave me a rather large manual on MS-DOS and a lot of what I learned in that book is still useful to me today. It wasn’t long before I got something with Windows 95 and then I continued on a fairly normal path from there.

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Cybertooth

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Amstrad–wow, that brought back some memories. My second computer was an Amstrad desktop; I bought it in about 1987/88. It came with two 5.25″ floppy drives and both MS-DOS and GEM (a GUI-based version of CP/M, if I remember right).

 

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Microfix

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oh the fond memories..(not!)
AMS PC’s for the masses, DOS bootup disks with a 380mb (or so) connor hard drive, no CD-ROM (shiver)

Windows - commercial by definition and now function...

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Cybertooth

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My first time using Windows was Windows 3.1. I used it to run multiple DOS sessions simultaneously! I did phone support, so here was a typical scenario for me:
* In one window I was logged into the customer’s computer remotely via PC Anywhere (dialup).
* In another window I was running the same program locally that I was running remotely on the customer’s computer.
* In another window I was running Edit.
* In another window I was running our helpdesk ticketing program (to document the call).

Pretty amazing when you realize that Windows 3.1 was itself a DOS program. And it all worked very well.

My favorite memory of those old versions of Windows was with Windows 3.11. A user could get into Windows with no problem; but when he would exit Windows, his computer would lock up. To solve it, I excluded a smaller and smaller range of memory until I got it down to 4 bytes — by excluding that 4 byte range of memory, the computer no longer locked up when the user exited Windows!

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TaskForce141, Noel Carboni, Cybertooth

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Windows 3.0, if I remember correctly.

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I’m a software engineer. In the 1970s I was using mainframes. By the 1980s I was programming primarily minicomputers (Data General, MODCOMP, DEC) but was excited to see PC-DOS run on the first IBM PCs. After the 8 bit microcomputer toys of the 70s, we finally had a glimpse of the future with the Intel 16 bit processors, though there was still essentially nothing useful that could be done with a microcomputer.

Who could EVER need more than 640 kbytes?

I recall getting my own (non-IBM brand) office PC in about 1983 or 1984 on which I ran one of the first Windows versions (2.0?) and had a whole megabyte of RAM. I even had a color monitor! I remember trying to think up uses for it. There weren’t many. Mostly I just used it as a terminal for our DEC minicomputers.

By 1986 I had moved up to an Intel 80286 workstation (over $10K) to do serious software development on DOS. I didn’t have much time to fool with Windows then, which was just a curiosity. Back in the “bad ol’ days” we tweaked DOS by optimizing high memory, adding things like smartdrv and DECNet NETBEUI LAN networking.

That is until Windows 3.11 for Workgroups came out in 1993. Then I outfitted a whole engineering division with that. We saw our first 80386s. With Windows 3.11 for Workgroups we integrated source code management right into File Manager in the RIGHT ways – ways that are used even today. Productivity soared. The company made insane profits with the modems and digital access products we built.

What I’m getting at is that Windows was really just a toy for decades but the promise of being able to multitask – to do more than one thing at once (like compile one program while coding the source of another or a report) was intoxicating. WYSWYG editing with graphics with WORD was a Big Deal. One simply couldn’t rely on multitasking and data loss was a given – until Windows NT came out – and even then if you did intensive work with your computer you simply had to reboot from time to time. It was in the design. That lasted until well past Windows XP. I think Vista (after a few service packs) was the first OS that I could run for weeks or months even under a heavy workload.

Looking back, it’s almost surprising how slowly computing progressed by comparison to today.

We complain about issues today, but your computer just rebooting out of the blue and you losing all of what you were working on really is a thing of the past.

A funny thing, boot times of PCs have never gotten any better (i.e., the time from power on to being useful). It has always been a portion of a minute to a few minutes with every OS, even on a good computer. I guess it’s just always tuned to what people are willing to stand.

Given that computers are somewhere around 10,000 times faster than the first IBM-PCs, one can only imagine how quickly those early OSs might boot up today on a modern processor – probably less than a second. Maybe a minute or two until the first OS crash…

-Noel

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Pierre77, F A Kramer, ch100, Wheel_D

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Back then they where called IBM PC clones and as I recall the computer booted into MS-DOS and then the user could start Windows from there, or create a startup batch file that could get the Windows started if needed. So that that’s one shell of a start with Windows(Shell) being loaded in ontop of MS-DOS to provide a 16 bit Shell for multi-tasking. To think that folks still preferred the DOS Prompt at that time but that can still be more useful in the form of powershell/etc for automating certain tasks.

As for Booting Up, the entire OS(DOS) on those old computers was smaller in size than the modern UEFI/BIOS that may include a nicer graphical UI and network stack that did not exist way back then except on some dial-up or even more rarely some Ethernet based add-in hardware as the 1980s progressed.

Wikipedia’s timeline(1) of Windows OS versions is interesting as it lists the Kernel that the various Windows OS versions was based on and lists Windows ME(September 14, 2000) as the last MS OS based on MS-DOS. NT was in use by NT-3.1(July 27, 1993) and the timeline begins the gradual transition to the NT Kernel from there.

(1)

“Timeline of Microsoft Windows”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Microsoft_Windows

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Windows 3.0 in 1990.

And anyone who remembers the Microsoft Professional Development System v7.0 or v7.1, I was there as well.  It was sort of the DOS precursor to Visual Basic.

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I still have a functioning Kaypro II with CP/M and Perfect Office.
It has a whopping 300 baud dialup modem and 64kb of ram.

Byte me!

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Windows 2.something on a 286 … late 80s. Had a 20 MB HDD and VGA graphics. MS-DOS 3.20.

Not the first computer I used, just the first one with MS Windows.

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Well I was going to say I started with an Atari 1040ST but I remembered my parents had bought me a ‘computer’ that consisted of some plastics pieces that interconnected on a plastic frame and what (as I surmised years later) was some kind of binary math machine. I never figured it out at the time, at ~9 years old with no one to explain it was just a mystery. I think that was the same year I got a box of plastic particles that was supposed to go with a molding set, but with no molding set I , maybe better not to divulge the mischief that ensued..

In ’92 (maybe 93) into a new job I had a DOS mentor and a friend that was working for a bank had a bunch of XTs that were being discarded, I bought one for $100 and then the my friend dug up a 10 Mb HDD for me. I eventually installed WARP OS/2 on it and loved it, helped keep me awake at night for several years at work. In ’94 I bought a computer from a vendor on Computer Shopper (remember that??), a 486 with a 540 MB SCSI drive with WFWG 3.11 I built my next computer, the huge tower case is still in use. A year or 2 later I tried Yggdrasil Linux but found no benefit and much confusion.
Hope you yungin can forgive old timers reminiscing. You will hopefully be doing it some day too!

🍻

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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My first computer was an Atari ST 1040! A friend of mine was selling them, and he convinced me that it was the best thing going in those days.

A year or two later I got my 2nd computer – a genuine IBM PC Model B (the first one in which hard drive support was built into the BIOS). I soon got Word Perfect 4.1 and a Panasonic daisy wheel printer. It didn’t get any better than Word Perfect with a daisy wheel printer!

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It was DOS 6.2 for me in 1992/1993 running on a white tower equipped with AMD 386DX-40. This was AMD’s response to Intel’s line which stopped at 386SX-33 if I remember well. At that time AMD was optimising Intel CPUs tuning them and squeezing every bit of performance out of them while Intel was innovating and releasing new lines, in this case it was the 486 line. After DOS 6.2, I used 6.22 which was an updated version of 6.2 with some changes due to copyright issues but essentially the same, tried DOS 5.0 and used Windows 3.1 initially after moving on to Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. I also briefly tried Windows NT 3.1, same GUI with the regular 3.1 but in fact the first in the professional Windows NT line. Windows 1.0 or 1.01 was totally unknown to me until many years later. I think I have a downloaded copy somewhere which I don’t even know if it is the real thing but still have to find some time to install it on top of MS-DOS in a virtual machine and have some fun.
I enjoyed reading Noel’s post as it reminded me of some of those pre-Windows OSes which I also used, some of them while attempting to do Fortran programming.

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Noel Carboni

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Intel had an 80386DX-33 too.  The SX was the version that had the 16 bit external bus so that it could be used in 80286 designs with minimal re-engineering by the OEMs.

The 386DX did not have a FPU or a SRAM cache onboard like the 486DX.  The 486SX was the lower-cost option, and it skipped the FPU (which we all called a ‘mathco’ at the time, for math coprocessor).

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ch100

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Noel Carboni wrote:

What I’m getting at is that Windows was really just a toy for decades but the promise of being able to multitask – to do more than one thing at once (like compile one program while coding the source of another or a report) was intoxicating.

For me, the thing that I liked about Windows the most was the hardware abstraction.  Prior to that, using MS-DOS, the application itself had to support the hardware.  If your word processor didn’t support your printer, it was either not going to work at all, or the output would never look right.  If your super VGA card was not supported by whatever program you were using, you were stuck using whichever modes it did support, generally regular VGA.  It was like that for all kinds of hardware.  It seemed normal to me, as it had been the same with the Commodore 64/128 I used before I moved to the PC platform.

I remember back in my Commodore 64 days, buying a 1200 bps Volksmodem 6480 to replace my 300 baud Westridge pulse-dialer… the 6480 was less than half the price of the Commodore 1670 1200 bps modem!

I was thrilled to bring home my new speedy (!) modem, but that soon turned to frustration as I realized that nothing worked with the Volksmodem, except for its own weak-sauce terminal program (generally, the ones that came with modems were pretty bad).  It did not work with QuantumLink (the ’80s predecessor of AOL, long before AOL offered internet access) or my preferred terminal programs.  Back it went, and I would have to wait until I could afford the 1670.

Eventually, the Volksmodem got some more support, but the whole system of having the drivers (so to speak) built into the application rather than the OS was, erm, not ideal.  Windows negated that!

Otherwise, Windows 3.0 (the one I started with) was pretty much a toy to me too.  Its user interface was just weird… the program groups looked like they were supposed to represent subdirectories as on the Mac finder,  but they didn’t.  I think it was an example of the object-orientation fad being taken too far.

Windows 95 was the first Windows that I thought really had a reason to exist, UI wise.  It was such a huge improvement over 3.x, and the basic pattern it established is reflected in the KDE Linux desktop setup I am using now to write this, including the cascading “start” menu (which KDE calls the Application Menu).

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I once had an incredibly reliable Canon scanner (based on photocopier hardware, built like a tank) that relied on Windows 2.  When the Windows 2 computer died I had to scrap the scanner because there were no drivers available for any later version of Windows (or any other OS).

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Yeah, SO many perfectly working scanners fell by the wayside because of lack of support from the next major version of the OS… Sigh.

-Noel

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I hear you about hardware being made obsolescent by a new OS. But curiously, one time I had the opposite experience: I bought a new scanner for my Windows 98 computer and it turned out that the scanner only had drivers available for XP. In this case, it was the OS that had been rendered obsolescent by new hardware.

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Even a Windows update can render hardware obsolete.

My Canon LIDE scanner and Bubblejet printer worked perfectly well with Windows XP, Vista, 7 and Windows 10 versions 1507 to 1603.

But then Windows 10 update to 1609 made all my Canon hardware useless (I didn’t know then VueScan existed). Wouldn’t you say this is forced obsolescence? Are Canon and Microsoft in connivance?

I was compelled to buy a 2-in-1 Pixma for my few scans and rare prints, which gave a small consolation: it takes less desk space than a printer + separate scanner.

But I wonder if this will last passed Windows 10 v. 2509. Though by that time I myself may have passed …

1 Desktop Win 11
1 Laptop Win 10
Both tweaked to look, behave and feel like Windows 95
(except for the marine blue desktop, rgb(0, 3, 98)

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I started with a Radio Shack Color Computer that used audio diskettes (because the bank would only loan me $5,000 (!!!) to get a computer and the CoCo + a wide-carriage dot-matrix printer were cheaper than an Apple without a printer.). Eventually I upgraded to floppy diskettes and then to DOS.

When my then computer person suggested I upgrade from DOS to Windows, he said something to the effect that Windows 3.0 was a free upgrade if I had any earlier version and he sold me Windows 1 for something like 25 or 50 cents. Then he upgraded me to 3.1 (the current version) from the 3.0 and taught me how to use it. I still have my last DRDOS installation disks, but didn’t bother keeping those ancient Windows disks!

I don’t suppose anyone has any use for DRDOS?

 

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Ascaris wrote:

Intel had an 80386DX-33 too.

This is correct. Yes, this has been a very long time ago in computer industry years. 🙂

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My very first computer (1984) was a Sinclair Spectrum 48 (48KB RAM + 16KB ROM) with an Opus FDD for 3.5″ 180K SSSD diskettes and an 9-pin dot matrix printer. No need to say anything more about this veteran.

My first PC (then named IBM-compatible) was an Atari 80286 with a Syquest 40MB removable cartridge as system HDD.

My first Microsoft OS was MS-DOS 4.01 with DOSShell. Windows 2.0 was installed, but never used and later removed for lack of software and a, at 16MHz, much too slow CPU. So I used DOS software only. This started in 1990 and from then on my nerdiness really took of, only to morph into geekiness by the advent of Windows 95.

To this date, 95 is still my favourite Windows. I made my Windows 10 Home x64 1909 look, and for a large part behave, like Windows 95.

I even wish I could turn 34 years old again, next birthday.

1 Desktop Win 11
1 Laptop Win 10
Both tweaked to look, behave and feel like Windows 95
(except for the marine blue desktop, rgb(0, 3, 98)

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In my experience, the excellent Windows 98SE was far  better than the crash-prone Windows 95.

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The same – Win 1 on a 286. It was pretty d*** useless. Then the 386 came along and made Win 3.1 viable – Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was very stable and usable. And then the world changed…

Edit: Please follow the –Lounge Rules– no personal attacks, no swearing,

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[PKCano]

Windows 3.11 for Workgroups (~1994).

• This reply was modified 5 years, 5 months ago by PKCano.
• This reply was modified 5 years, 4 months ago by Speccy. Reason: Edited (irrelevant, off-topic info removed)

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