1989
Apple announces specs for its newest operating system, System 7. One Macintosh columnist describes the upgrade thus: "Mac OS 8 works properly, at least, which is more than you could say for System 7 and its sorry daisy chain of bug fixes." Clearly, Apple is beginning to emulate Microsoft's methods.

IBM strongly endorses Windows for low-end PCs (a 386 with 4MB of RAM). Of course, high-end PCs will require OS/2. Microsoft goes along with this story.

Two years late--as usual--Xerox decides to sue Apple for stealing the look and feel of its Star operating system for the Macintosh OS.

1990
Xerox's suit is thrown out, in part because the company had apparently failed to notice the striking resemblance between the two operating systems during the first five years of the Macintosh's existence.

IBM and Microsoft sever their ties as joint developers of OS/2. The reason? Cultural, business, and technical difficulties make it impossible for them to work together. Both companies announce plans to continue developing the new OS they created; IBM gets to keep the name.

A group of developers at Sun Microsystems develop a programming language called Oak, designed for interactive television applications. When ITV fails to take off, the project is shelved for a few years, until it finds a new name and lease on life on the World Wide Web. What's it called? Java.

Microsoft releases Windows 3.0. The crowd goes wild. The MS-DOS Executive is upstaged by a new file manager, called File Manager. File Manager provides cute little icons next to its list of filenames (still limited to eight characters with a three-character extension). Windows 3.0 continues to contain the MS-DOS Executive as an option.

1991
Microsoft vice president Brad Silverberg observes, "DOS will be with us forever. We've learned how passionate people are about DOS."

Microsoft changes the name of its OS/2 to Windows NT. Like OS/2--and unlike Windows--it's a full-fledged operating system that doesn't require a previously installed version of DOS underneath it. According to the magazines of the era, NT stands for new technology--a fact that Microsoft representatives will vehemently deny in 1996, stating, "NT doesn't stand for anything."