Windows has 30 years: from 1.0 to 10, the major changes of the system – Next INpact

Windows 30 years ago today. The opportunity for us to revisit the outline of the history of a system that eventually completely invade the global computer park. From his very first version to the current Windows 10, we will trace the major changes, to the new challenges of today, very different 80s.

When the first version of Windows was released in 1985, the state of the world’s fleet today was different. MS-DOS we found on many computers, but it was not the only operating system, far from it. PC-DOS was indeed present, and Apple had launched its first Macintosh a year earlier. Windows, Bill Gates initially wanted to call “Manager Interface”, then had primarily answer a simple problem: allowing simplified management of data

For Windows origins. The first three main branches

The name of Windows was selected to better represent its interface organized in windows. At launch, press kits and even contained a squeegee window cleaner combination to stay in the theme. Windows 1.0 claimed to operate a minimum of 256 KB of RAM, a graphics card and two 5.25-inch floppy drives double-sided. The interface itself was inspired mainly from two sources: the work done by the Xerox PARC on the Alto decade earlier, and to a lesser extent the Apple Lisa, who himself drawn heavily from Xerox.

The first Windows performance had nothing exceptional. It was broadly as a graphical overlay for MS-DOS and the system did not yet exist as such. He was single task and windows could not be stacked. A limitation that Windows 2.0 will correct then the price of lower performance.

In 1990 occurs when the Windows 3.X branch, the situation evolves. Windows will start conducting more tests to determine the technical characteristics of the machine. Selected binaries so dependent on the present hardware architecture: 8086 16-bit classic, 80286 16-bit extended memory address and 80386 with 32-bit memory address. On the latter, the performance dramatically changed with the appearance of a first multitasking. Windows then began slowly to take off. Versions 3.1 and 3.11 respectively provide, among other novelties, TrueType fonts and management of the local network. The support of these two drafts only ended in 2001.

Windows 95, the first real success of the system