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Buying Guide: A Brief History of Windows
Contents
- Early Years
- Windows 3.0
- Windows 95
- XP & Vista
- Bill Gates on Windows Past, Present, and Future
- Dave Robson: Xerox veteran, worked on Xerox PARC's Smalltalk
- Jim Cannavino: Led development of OS/2 during his 30 years at IBM
- Charles Simonyi: Former Xerox PARC, Microsoft employee
- Eric Hahn: Netscape CTO during the browser wars
- Michael Dell: Founder and chairman, Dell Computer
- Inside PC Labs
- A Brief History of Windows
- Whose Idea Was It?
- Windows: The Formative Years
- The Many Flavors of Today's Windows
Back in 1985, Microsoft Windows 1.0 required 256KB RAM and two floppy drives to run. Our favorite PC at the time ran at a blazing fast 8 MHz. Here's a nostalgic look back that proves just how far we've come since those early days of personal computing.
1985-1991
| WINDOWS HISTORY | INDUSTRY NEWS | ALSO IN THE NEWS | |
| 1985 | March: MS-DOS 3.1
released November: Windows 1.0 released (price: $100); Microsoft announced it in November 1983 |
March: Digital Research
releases GEM May: Steve Jobs resigns from Apple to form NeXT July: Quarterdeck releases DESQview October: Intel releases 386 processor |
1985: Gateway Computer founded one year after Dell Inc. (formerly PCs Limited) |
| 1986 | January: Apple ships Macintosh System 3.0 | March: Microsoft goes
public at $21 a share; 1,100 employees, almost $200 million in revenue; Bill Gates owns 43 percent of
Microsoft, becomes world's youngest self-made billionaire at 30 December: 30 million PCs in the U.S. |
|
| 1987 | December: Windows 2.0 (with icons and overlapping windows) and Windows/386 (with multiple DOS sessions) released; millionth copy of Windows sold | April: IBM releases OS/2 and the PS/2 computers with Micro Channel Architecture | |
| 1988 | June: Windows/286
released July: Bug-filled MS-DOS 4.0 released; fix soon follows |
June: Digital Research
releases DR-DOS September: IBM releases ISA-based PS/2 Model 30 286 |
December: 45 million PCs in the U.S. |
| 1989 | April: Intel releases 486 processor | November: Berlin Wall
falls December: 50 million PCs in the U.S. |
|
| 1990 | May: Windows 3.0 released; a complete reworking of the interface, it addresses memory beyond 640K | September: IBM and
Microsoft split from OS/2 development November: Berkeley Softworks releases GeoWorks Ensemble 1.0 December: Tim Berners-Lee makes Web available |
December: 92 million PCs in the U.S. |
| 1991 | June: MS-DOS 5.0
released October: Windows 3.0a with multimedia released |
August: Linus Torvalds
introduces the world to Linux October: Quantum Computer Services renames itself America Online |
January: First Iraq war begins; ends seven weeks later |