CNET Features - Special - Windows 98 - 30 years of windows

1984

1984 Apple Computer ad.

During the Super Bowl, Apple runs a stark ad for its new computer, the Macintosh. As the Bay Area's Oakland Raiders are destroying the Washington Redskins (irony?), Apple's ad shows masses of zombielike workers watching Big Brother droning about the future of computing. Suddenly, an athletic woman in red sprints by and smashes the screen. The message appears: "On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce the Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984." The ad is so controversial Apple has to run it only once--it is replayed during news and talk shows as a conversation piece. The result: 250,000 Macs ship in the first year.

Quarterdeck beats Microsoft to the punch with its own windowing environment for DOS. Called DESQ, this system enables you to switch between multiple windows of text, each running its own DOS application.

1985

MS-DOS Executive

MS-DOS Executive.

Microsoft releases Windows 1.0. Its text is black on a white background--bucking the DOS world's convention of white text on a black background. The crowd goes wild, especially for the file manager--a groovy list of filenames (limited to eight characters, with a three-character extension) called the MS-DOS Executive. With the mouse, you can click the list to highlight a word, and it turns to white text on a little rectangle of black background--just like DOS! If the PCs of the day had enough memory to run it, this would be a great advance.

Quarterdeck releases a graphical update to its DESQ software and calls it DESQView.

Atari scraps its text-based operating system for Digital Research's GEM operating system.

IBM likes the idea of windowing, too, and releases TopView.

1986
Tandy/Radio Shack releases a computer using Digital Research's GEM GUI. A runtime version of GEM would eventually ship in volume as the graphical interface for the DOS version of the Ventura Publisher desktop publishing application.

IBM releases TopView 1.1.

Microsoft Windows 1.0 spawns a joke:
How do you get Windows 1.0 to crash?
I don't know, how do you get Windows 1.0 to crash?
At the DOS prompt, enter the letters w-i-n, and press the Enter key.


1968- 1972	1973- 1977	1978- 1982	1983- 1986	1987- 1991	1992- 1995	1996- 1998



The formative years	The swingin' seventies	The disco years	The economic miracle	I fought the law, and Microsoft won	Windows everywhere	The year 2001--give or take

Photo of "1984" commercial courtesy of Apple Computer.