Microsoft Windows is 30 years old. On 20 November 1985, Microsoft released the first-ever version of Windows, which was little more than a graphical presentation manager sitting on top of the command-line-driven MS-DOS operating system.
The software has certainly made enormous strides from the first three decades ago to the release in July this year of Windows 10.
When it was launched, Windows 1.0 ran off two floppy disks (requiring two double-side disk drives) and would boot on only 256kB of RAM (that’s a quarter of a megabyte). To run multiple programs, you needed to splash out on a hard drive and upgrade to 512kB of RAM.
Microsoft co-founder and then-CEO Bill Gates had wanted to call the new software Interface Manager, but thankfully the company’s market executives convinced him otherwise.
Few people used the original version of Windows. Indeed, it wasn’t until version 3.0 in 1990 and 3.1 in 1992 that computer users even started considering it as a serious tool for business and home use.
And it wasn’t until Windows 95, launched to great fanfare and hype in August 1995, that the operating system really took off in the mass consumer market.
But Windows 95, and its successors — Windows 98 and Windows Millennium Edition — were still built on top of the legacy MS-DOS as its core.
That changed when the Windows NT line, built for server computers, was merged into the desktop line with Windows XP in 2001. XP proved so popular that it’s still running on millions of PCs around the world today, much to Microsoft’s irritation.
XP was followed by the overbaked flop that was Windows Vista. Then came the well-received Windows 7 and the controversial Windows 8, which did away with the Start menu first introduced in Windows 95.
The latest version, Windows 10, has generally won positive reviews from critics for the way it integrates traditional mouse and keyboard-driven computing with support for touch-screen devices such as tablets.
Which was your first version of Windows? Take a trip down memory lane with the video above and the screenshots of the desktop versions of Windows below and let us know your thoughts in the comments box.
