A brief history of Windows: Windows 1.01

[Yogesh]

Microsoft began working on Interface Manager, the project that later became Windows 1.01, in September 1981.

COMDEX in 1982, one of the biggest computer fairs of the time, VisiCorp, a company whose main income came from VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program for personal computers, showed to the public for the first time its graphical interface Vision. The presentation was a great success, and vision became one of the most anticipated products and commented.

Vision Applicatons Manager

In November 1983, at the same COMDEX that such good results had given it a VisiCorp the past year, Microsoft showed for the first time Windows 1.0, in an attempt to counter the launch of vision.

Vision was launched in December 1983, costing the operating system, called Vision Applications Manager, 495 dollars. This required the use of a mouse, with the official price of the device, the Vision Mouse, $ 250.

Vision Applications Manager allowed to communicate with each other and integrate new applications VisiCorp initially by the Calc spreadsheet Vision (395 U.S. dollars) program for creating graphical business Vision Graph ($ 250) and the word processor Word Vision (375 U.S. dollars).

The total cost of the package was of 1765 U.S. dollars, without taking into account the price of the machine on which to implement Vision, which required 2.2MB of disk space and 512KB of RAM, a fairly substantial amount for the period.

The high price, coupled with new users to its complexity and its slow pace, made sales of vision does not finish off. This is joined by the release of Apple's Macintosh, with a graphical interface very smoothly and prices for the period, and harassment and demolition of Microsoft, announcing that Windows 1.0 would be available by the middle of next year with a much lower price and similar features (in fact the development of Windows would be very much influenced by Vision).

But the proposed Microsoft was delayed several times, and it was not until two years later, on November 20, 1985, when it was released to market as Windows 1.01, a version editing various bugs in Windows 1.0, the version presented at the COMDEX 1983, and has the honor of being the first Windows market.

[Yogesh]

Windows 1.01 consisted of 5 disks with 360KB of 5.25 each tagged as Microsoft Windows Setup, Microsoft Windows Build, Utilities Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Windows Desktop Applications and Microsoft Write Program.

Box of Windows 1.01

Windows 1.01 was sold in those dates as a graphical environment for MS-DOS, not as an operating system. Therefore, obviously, it was necessary to install MS-DOS 2.0 or higher before installing Windows. It is not until the third version of Windows that this is beginning to market as an operating system, and we have to wait for Windows 95 in order to install Windows without having previously installed MS-DOS.

Other requirements for Windows 1.01 was a hard drive or double-sided disc, 256KB of memory and video card.

When you run setup.exe from MS-DOS started the installation program, with an installer text mode that required only show you where to install the program (C:\Windows by default), the pointing device (6 types supported), the graphics adapter (CGA, monochrome; Hercules, high-resolution monochrome and EGA, with screens from 4 to 16 colors at 640 x 350), and if you have one, the printer (19 models supported).

Windows 1.01 Installer

Once installed could start Windows by typing the command win at the console of MS-DOS, either add it to autoexec.bat to make it MS-DOS to run automatically at startup.

Start-up Screen of Windows 1.01

When you start Windows 1.01, we were with MS-DOS Executive, the equivalent to Windows Explorer, although as we see, no icons and other facilities. To launch an application or open a file, there was double-click on the entry. To copy and paste files or directories, delete and rename it was necessary to use the top menu.

[Yogesh]

The applications included in Windows 1.01 disks were as follows:

• calc.exe: the proverbial calculator for Windows
  
  
  
  Calculator in Windows 1.01
  
  
  
• calendar.exe: an application of appointments and scheduling. Allowed to use the light of day or month and set alarms.
  
  
• cardfile.exe: application PIM (personal information management)
  
  
• clipbrd.exe: the clipboard viewer
  
  
• clock.exe: a simple analog clock
  
  
• control.exe: the control panel, which could add or delete new sources and printers, configure the ports and connections, change the colors used for elements of the interface or set the date and time.
  
  
  
  Control Panel of Windows 1.01
  
  
  
• notepad.exe: the famous notebook. Had a buffer of fixed size text of very limited, so it was only able to work with small texts.
  
  
• paint.exe: The application of design of Windows, that only in this version was capable of creating images in monochrome.
  
  
• reversi.exe: a little game similar to go also called Othello.
  
  
• spooler.exe: to control the print queue
  
  
• terminal.exe: implementation of a terminal to connect to other machines
  
  
• write.exe: a true text editor, format and the possibility of using different sources, is used to open files doc extension. The disk installed Microsoft Write a small paper practice.doc example on how to sell a house, written by Paul Allen himself.
  
  
  
  Write in Windows 1.01

[Yogesh]

Windows 1.01 allowed a certain amount of multitasking, and may have several programs open at once. The windows of the programs could open maximized to fill the entire screen, or arranged in mosaic mode. The first versions wes also able to put some windows on one another, overlapping, but this feature was limited in the final version to minimize the likeness of the user interface of Apple.

The bottom of the screen shows where the application window was not maximized, a bar with the icons of open programs, in the style of the taskbar of Windows today. The user could display any of these programs by double-clicking on it, or scroll through the icons in the toolbar using the familiar combination Alt + Tab.

To close the Windows session and return to MS-DOS, finally, used the Special menu -> End Session.

Windows 1.01 Shutdown Wizard

Sales of Windows 1.01 was very modest, inter alias by the lack of really interesting applications that could force the user to use it. Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, for example, did not show up until Windows 2.0, and it was not until version 3.0 when Windows was really a considerable market share.

Other versions of Windows 1.0x was Windows 1.02, in May 1986, international version that included language; Windows 1.03, released in August 1986 that, among other things, added support for MS-DOS 3.2 and improved support for keyboards and Windows 1.04, in April 1987, which allowed install Windows on Personal Computers (PC) System / 2 IBM.

Microsoft stopped supporting Windows 1.0 on December 31, 2001, being the version of Windows that has had more years of support from Microsoft (16 years).

[SalVatore]

Really interesting!

It makes me remember my first computer, a 8088 XT 90 that came with the DRDOS 5.0 (higher than their hononimo Redmond), which has already brought a majisimo (for the time and the system) windowing system called Viewmax. Sentences of tactics already used by Microsoft then with MSDOS, Digital Research pointed ways.

[Jesse Bas]

So in this way began operating system from evil

If apple had opted to offer its OS to other machines ... surely this would not have happened.