Windows 1.0 did not enter the marketplace full grown, an Athena popping out of Zeus’ migraine. For a while, it was even vaporware. Announced in 1983, it only showed up toward the end of 1985, in order to capitalize on the holiday season. Sales were slim—not surprisingly, since it appeared subsequent to Digital Research’s remarkably memory-efficient GUI, GEM, and Berkeley Softworks’ GEOS, while the king of the hill remained Visi On by VisiCorp (the developers of the popular spreadsheet program, VisiCalc). At that early stage, Windows was neither an OS nor a multitasker. There were as yet no program groups, no overlapping windows, and no screen icons; just a list of files. It provided a graphical calendar, a Control Panel that controlled almost nothing, Notepad with only fixed fonts, terminal emulation, and both Microsoft Paint and Write. Underwhelming it certainly was, but Gates presumably wanted something out there to show investors.

Windows 2.0 debuted in 1987. Little had changed on the front end, aside from the significant addition of overlapping windows—though this resulted in a “look and feel” suit by Apple against Microsoft, alleging that the latter had violated copyright by making a GUI. The suit was unsuccessful, and the irony of Apple suing to protect the GUI concept, which Steve Jobs had been introduced to by Xerox’s Star GUI back in 1979, was lost on no one.

There was also some increased support for Windows 2.0 from third-party developers, including the first Windows versions of CorelDraw and PageMaker, as well as the first appearance of Microsoft’s own Word and Excel. More important to the future of this GUI were the introduction soon afterward of Windows/286 and Windows/386. The latter in particular included a protected-mode kernel, permitting genuine parallel multitasking, as opposed to time-sharing. There was no virtual memory through disk allocation, however, so no swapping to disk if you ran out of RAM. Need more memory? Buy it. On the positive side, you could run DOS-based text programs in a window, though not effectively. It is perhaps unsurprising that Windows never really succeeded in handling DOS windows well until it did away with DOS.

The defining moment for Windows was its 3.0 release, in 1990. Several standard Windows features first appeared at that time, including Program Manager, replacing the previous launch-from-file-manager—though a new file manager showed up, too, that would evolve over time into Windows Explorer. The 256-color MCGA mode was supported, as well as 16-color VGA. A macro recorder was included, though it would later be phased out. This was the first version of Windows that furnished an operating system (albeit one that ran on top of another operating system, DOS) and a broad suite of development tools, such as Platform Builder 3.0. Most importantly of all, Windows 3.0 could run in protected mode. Many companies liked what they saw at this stage of the product, and quite a few applications started selling in dual DOS and Windows-based GUI versions.

As for Windows 3.1, it was released in 1992 to considerable fanfare, and sold more than a million units in its first three months of availability. Improvements included TrueType scalable fonts, Object Linking and Embedding, API multimedia and networking support, and the beginnings of Windows’ Registry system. At roughly the same time, Windows 3.1 for Workgroups supplied such features as support for P2P networking, print manager improvements, and Server Message Block file sharing utilizing both IPX and NETBEUI protocols.

It was a good times for Windows—arguably the best it ever had, before domestic and foreign courts, permatemps and blacklists, Linux, and Firefox all began to slowly erode its hegemony. Not that Microsoft is doing poorly today, but the three-year period between April 2004 and March 2007 alone saw $300 million in legal fees and over $4 billion paid out in litigation settlements. By comparison, the early 1990s were halcyon days. Microsoft had the world at its feet, and was not above sharply giving it the toe of its boot. But however matters evolved, the achievement of Windows remains a story of popular software parlayed into a cutting-edge empire.

Wax nostalgic with Barry at barry@cpumag.com