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Buying Guide: Early Years
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
Microsoft today is a huge company, with thousands of employees in hundreds of buildings all around Redmond, Washington. That was hardly the case in 1983, when I first saw the product that was destined to evolve into Windows. Microsoft's headquarters were merely a small building next to the Burgermaster in Bellevue, another Seattle suburb. Then eight years old, the company had grown to about 400 people. It was primarily known as the maker of BASIC programs for many systems, and of MS-DOS, an operating system it had sold to IBM a few years earlier.
Many different companies during that period made computers that ran MS-DOS, but the problem was that these computers weren't all compatible with one another. IBM's version, called PC-DOS, was one standard, but companies like Digital Equipment Corp., Texas Instruments, and HP all made systems with different graphics devices.
Over the next few years, the industry would move to a world of "IBM compatibility," but many of these systems couldn't run applications designed specifically for the IBM PC.
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