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MS-DOS 1.x - 3.x

Windows 1.0 - 2.x

MS-DOS 4.0

Windows 3.x

MS-DOS 5.0 - 6.x

Windows NT 3.x

Windows 95

Windows NT 4.0

Windows CE 1.0 - 3.0

Windows 98 & 98 SE

Windows 2000

Windows ME

Windows XP

Microsoft Windows 1.0 was Microsoft's initial contribution to the GUI "operating system" market. The phrase operating system is used loosely here, because all Windows versions up to and including Windows for Workgroups 3.11 were not really operating systems, they were just shell enhancements that ran on top of MS-DOS (all versions of Windows NT were true operating systems, though). A true operating system gets loaded when the computer boots, and handles all interaction between the user and the hardware - the versions of Windows prior to Windows 95 did not do either (in reality neither did Windows 95 entirely; see that section for more details).

Windows was by no means the first GUI interface for computers. The first computer to use a GUI, including a mouse pointer, icons and overlapping windows, was the Alto. It was designed by Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the early 1970s.⁵  Later, there was the Apple I by Apple Computer, which used a GUI interface similar to that of the Alto, and various short-lived GUI operating systems and applications intended for the IBM PC.

Initially called the Interface Manager before the product was released in 1985, the first version of Windows featured a taskbar and tiled windows that had drop down menus quite similar to those used today.³⁰  Programs were accessed by clicking on icons, which brought up program "windows" on the screen. All of the windows that were opened would share the screen, and they could not be moved or overlapped. However, they could be "minimized," meaning the user could hide a window from view and make an icon for it appear on the taskbar. The software came on two 5.25" floppy disks and required a minimum of 192 KB of RAM, compared to 29 3.5" disks and 8 MB of RAM for Windows 95. Unlike Windows 95, 98 and beyond, Windows 1.0 did not detect any hardware by itself - users had to specify the I/O address (data path unique to each piece of hardware) of all of the computer's additional hardware, such as the mouse, serial and parallel ports.²⁶

In 1987, Windows 2.0 provided overlapping, resizable windows and the ability to drag icons to new positions on the desktop. The graphics were improved slightly and the taskbar was removed. Some of the integrated utilities that were included with Windows 2.0 were the clock, the calculator, and Paint. Windows 2.1 was announced shortly after, and was available as either Windows/286 and Windows/386. The were both able to run multiple DOS applications at the same time, and Windows/386 was intended to take advantage of the advanced features of the Intel 80386 CPU.^{26, 30}

©2001 Joe Hodsdon.  Page last updated