This week in CS History – 10/11/1983 Windows 1.0 is introduced by Microsoft
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Microsoft introduced their first foray into graphical user interface operating systems with Microsoft Windows 1.0 in New York on 10th November 1983.
While certainly not the first GUI operating system on the market, it was an important step for Microsoft and slotted on top of their Command Line Interface operating system known as MS-DOS (and their IBM licensed version IBM DOS).
A lot of computers at the time relied on MS-DOS as there were limited competitors and much of the hardware used between manufacturers was very similar. This gave Microsoft (who had originally come from a background in application and interpreter design) an early advantage which they managed to capitalise on as a company .
While 1983 would be the first introduction of Windows 1 to the public it actually took a further 2 years to be released, finally being released on November 20th 1985 in the United States to a particularly poor reception. It was released across 2 floppy disks and required 192KB of RAM.
Windows 1 did not have a lot of native GUI apps, and as it was built on top of MS-DOS, on lower specification machines, it was slow.
While not particularly well received, Windows 1.0 will go down in history as Microsoft’s first GUI operating system and would prove to be the first of many. They have continued to dominate the PC GUI operating system market for nearly 40 years bringing out many different operating systems since.
While Windows 1.0 only lasted till December 1987 till it was superseded by Windows 2.0, Microsoft continued to support it until 31st December 2001, making it the longest supported version of Windows.