Celebrating 39 years of Microsoft Windows LIVE: A Laptop Mag retrospective
Join us as we look back on the highs and lows of Microsoft Windows on its 39th anniversary
On this day in 1985, Microsoft unveiled its leap into the graphical user interface world with Windows 1.0, a piece of software that would change the personal computing world forever.
• Windows is used by ~ 67% of all desktop PCs and laptops
• Windows is estimated to have been installed on over 1.6 billion devices worldwide
• Microsoft has released nine major versions of Microsoft Windows since Windows 1.0 in 1985
Well, almost. As they say, greatness rarely shows up fully formed. While success wouldn't arrive overnight, Windows has gone on to become the digital backbone of personal computing. Windows is now estimated to helm some 1.6 billion devices the world over including desktop PCs, laptops, tablets, and handheld gaming PCs.
Even the custom operating system behind Microsoft's Xbox Series X|S games console is built on the foundations of the modular Windows Core OS.
For much of the last 39 years, Windows has been the world's most popular platform, gifting us many of the operating system staples that we take for granted today, from something as simple as overlapping windows to the iconic Star Menu and taskbar combination.
To celebrate this accomplishment, we welcome you to the Laptop Mag Windows anniversary live blog, where we'll be spending the day reflecting on Microsoft's stalwart operating system, offering a retrospective of the platform's many iterations throughout the years.
Another major feature to debut in Windows 2.0 was the introduction of overlapping and resizable windows. For the first time, users could layer application windows instead of being forced to comply with static tiled layouts.
This made multitasking more practical and, when paired with the introduction of new keyboard commands, made Windows 2.0 a much more effective platform for power users.
This new level of control over windows also saw the introduction of the terms "Minimize" and "Maximize" for the first time, replacing the previous "Iconize" and "Zoom" commands.
Sure, Windows 2.0 may not have lit the world on fire on release, but it did get several things right. Most notably, it ported two iconic pieces of software into the GUI layer: Excel and Word.
Both pieces of software were vital in the business world, and interestingly both preceded Windows, finding success even on the Macintosh before making their way to Microsoft's fledgling platform.
In their new home, Excel and Word would thrive when paired with the graphical interface growing into powerful productivity tools. Something that can still be said almost 37 years later.
Windows 2.0 launched two years after Microsoft's first attempts at a GUI interface in December 1987. While it was a step closer to a full operating system, it still relied on MS-DOS as its backbone and acted as a graphical overlay rather than a standalone platform.
Windows 2.0 was a modest success for Microsoft, but it still wasn't the breakthrough moment of the Windows franchise. That said, the improvements it delivered played an important role going forwards.
While the critical response wasn't great, with many holding up AmigaOS as the GUI of choice, Windows was able to edge out much of the competition — especially due to its wide compatibility with IBM PCs, which had begun to dominate the market (especially in the business sector).
In contrast, AmigaOS (while faster, more efficient, and offering better customization) was exclusive to more niche Amiga computers — Just as Apple's System 1 was designed only for the Macintosh.
Microsoft was also able to bank on the popularity of MS-DOS, which had raised them enough funds to go all out on promoting Windows 1.0 to a wider crowd. In one video from 1986 (seen above) you can even catch future Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer peddling Windows 1.0 for the incredible value of only $99. It's an incredible price, but it's true.
The recommended system requirements for Windows 1.0 were, for the time, also seen as quite high.
When it released in 1985, the minimum requirements to run Windows 1.0 were two double-sided floppy disk drives or a hard disk, a graphics adapter card, and at least 256 kilobytes (KB) of RAM (though Microsoft recommended 512KB of RAM for running multiple programs at once).
To put that into perspective, Windows 11 requires 4GB of RAM, over 8,000 times the memory of Microsoft's initial GUI.
While laptops were still in their infancy, you could run Windows 1.0 on a Toshiba T1000 which released in 1987 with 512KB of RAM for between $800-900 (which is between $2,222 and $2,500 when adjusting for inflation) though the lack of a color screen would certainly detract from the experience.
Despite its legacy, Windows 1.0 was met with a middling response when it initially released.
Although the Windows GUI showed potential, many felt it failed to deliver. While it made computing more accessible, it was slow and heavily relied on using a computer mouse, which, at the time, wasn't a common computing peripheral.
MS-DOS, short for Microsoft Disk Operating System, was the primary operating system for IBM PCs in the 1980s. However, Microsoft's operating system ambitions went even further back, having developed a Unix-like OS called Xinex that released in 1980 — a year before MS-DOS.
MS-DOS was a command line, text-based operating system. Users would have to manually type out commands to execute programs or navigate directories.
The Windows 1.0 GUI (Graphical User Interface) ran on top of MS-DOS and offered a new, color 16-bit interface as a user-friendly way to navigate files or run applications while allowing for multiple applications to be ran simultaneously.
The Windows platform came to life in November, 1985 with Microsoft's release of Windows 1.0 — which was the company's first attempt at developing a graphical user interface.
However, Windows 1.0 wasn't a fully-fledged operating system like the platform we know today. Instead, it worked as more of a graphical extension to Microsoft's flagship operating system at the time, MS-DOS.
