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Was Windows 1.0's lack of overlapping windows a legal or a technical matter?

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Re: Was Windows 1.0's lack of overlapping windows a legal or a technical matter?

#21

Post by blkhawk »

CanopyCoder wrote: post #2

The likelihood of any legal restriction was probably close to zero - it’s only from today’s era of hyper-regulation that we might even imagine something like that. Most likely it was a deliberate technical limitation. After all, dialog windows themselves were already overlapped. I remember well what a headache it was to program and render graphical elements on those old machines (PC AT 80286 with 256 KB of RAM).

Actually it was very much a legal thing. For example i can point to GEM that had to have its windows glued down because of this. See GEM 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment)#/med... vs GEM2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment)#/med...

Apple sued Digital Research and later Microsoft when they enabled overlapping windows for windows 2.0.

Also lol a 286 with 256kb of ram - that is a very very weird combination you would never see in a desktop. Generally early IBM PC compatibles might have just 512KB of ram but around 1985 and later 640KB really became the norm even on 8088 and 8086 based systems. I am not counting stuff that really didn't get anywhere like the PCjr and that thing was much earlier in 1983.

286 based systems once they became more common started a 1mb RAM.

Re: Was Windows 1.0's lack of overlapping windows a legal or a technical matter?

#22

Post by agumonkey »

somat wrote: post #13
contextfree wrote: post #7

As far as I've figured out the answer is that some people involved (the ex-PARC Scott McGregor and Charles Simonyi iirc) genuinely thought tiling was better, while others (Bill Gates?) disagreed but went along with it to avoid lawsuits.

I think stacking windows looks better, makes for a cool screenshot when trying to sell the thing. But tiling windows are more ergonomic for actually using the infernal machine. For me the revelation was that I have never said "Oh boy I sure am glad this window partially overlaps this other window" I either want one full screen windows or a few windows side by side. Why do I have to handle this myself? and went to the…

Focus management is such a tricky beast.

Re: Was Windows 1.0's lack of overlapping windows a legal or a technical matter?

#23

Post by dylan604 »

zabzonk wrote: post #8

Perhaps aesthetic - both Windows 1.0 and 2.0 were (to me at least) very ugly. Things got a bit better with Windows 3.0 and 3.1 (and easier to program) but it wasn't really until Windows 95 that the whole thing came together. One thing you have to give Microsoft (at least back then) is that they did keep trying. And, speaking as a Windows developer, their documentation was very good.

> it wasn't really until Windows 95 that the whole thing came together.

I remember the launch parties for 95. I remember thinking to myself how strange it was to go to all of that expense to promote an OS.

Re: Was Windows 1.0's lack of overlapping windows a legal or a technical matter?

#24

Post by zabzonk »

dylan604 wrote: post #23
zabzonk wrote: post #8

Perhaps aesthetic - both Windows 1.0 and 2.0 were (to me at least) very ugly. Things got a bit better with Windows 3.0 and 3.1 (and easier to program) but it wasn't really until Windows 95 that the whole thing came together. One thing you have to give Microsoft (at least back then) is that they did keep trying. And, speaking as a Windows developer, their documentation was very good.

> it wasn't really until Windows 95 that the whole thing came together. I remember the launch parties for 95. I remember thinking to myself how strange it was to go to all of that expense to promote an OS.

they weren't promoting an OS, they were promoting a user experience - A GUI that competed with the Mac.

There were OS improvements too, but I have forgot what. The real improvements came with Win2K - one of the best versions of Windows ever.

Re: Was Windows 1.0's lack of overlapping windows a legal or a technical matter?

#26

Post by charonn0 »

CanopyCoder wrote: post #2

The likelihood of any legal restriction was probably close to zero - it’s only from today’s era of hyper-regulation that we might even imagine something like that. Most likely it was a deliberate technical limitation. After all, dialog windows themselves were already overlapped. I remember well what a headache it was to program and render graphical elements on those old machines (PC AT 80286 with 256 KB of RAM).

I don't think regulations are the legal restrictions people are referring to, but rather private lawsuits.

Re: Was Windows 1.0's lack of overlapping windows a legal or a technical matter?

#27

Post by jsolson »

zabzonk wrote: post #24
dylan604 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it wasn't really until Windows 95 that the whole thing came together. I remember the launch parties for 95. I remember thinking to myself how strange it was to go to all of that expense to promote an OS.

they weren't promoting an OS, they were promoting a user experience - A GUI that competed with the Mac. There were OS improvements too, but I have forgot what. The real improvements came with Win2K - one of the best versions of Windows ever.

I don't remember if Plug-n-Play shipped with the original Windows 95 (it's certainly there in the final OSR), but that was a pretty big shift from the manual IRQ and port mapping days of DOS/Windows 3.1.

Re: Was Windows 1.0's lack of overlapping windows a legal or a technical matter?

#28

Post by ok123456 »

jmclnx wrote: post #4
CanopyCoder wrote: post #2

The likelihood of any legal restriction was probably close to zero - it’s only from today’s era of hyper-regulation that we might even imagine something like that. Most likely it was a deliberate technical limitation. After all, dialog windows themselves were already overlapped. I remember well what a headache it was to program and render graphical elements on those old machines (PC AT 80286 with 256 KB of RAM).

> Most likely it was a deliberate technical limitation At the time I remember reading that was kind of the issue. I thought the article said something like "when Gates saw the Xerox machine, the display had no overlapping windows". So M/S cloned it as he saw it. Once M/S W1.0 was developed he saw the demo again and was surprised the windows overlapped. So they rushed 2.0 to fix it. But funny, with all people on Linux…

We don't have to guess about what was going on at Microsoft in those days. From "Barbarians Led by Bill Gates":

The day the Mac shipped in January 1984, Gates told McGregor to run out and buy a Mac for the Windows developers.

"Reverse engineer it," Gates told him. "I have applications like BASIC and Multiplan that we've hacked out for the Mac, and we're working on other Mac applications like Word with a graphical user interface. I want to run all those Mac applications on Windows." Apparently, Gates didn't see a conflict of interest with this strategy.

...

"How are they different?" Gates snapped back. "They both draw fucking lines on the screen, right? They both put things in windows, right? Mac wrote a windows thing, you wrote a windows thing, they ought to be able to run the same stuff together."

Re: Was Windows 1.0's lack of overlapping windows a legal or a technical matter?

#29

Post by ndiddy »

plorkyeran wrote: post #9
giobox wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The likelihood of any legal restriction was probably close to zero - it’s only from today’s era of hyper-regulation that we might even imagine something like that. While it's demonstrated to be likely incorrect here, it's not a wild theory. Apple and Microsoft spent a lot of time in court over the "Look and Feel" cases regarding the windowing UI Apple felt Microsoft had stolen. The lawsuit was first filed in '88 an…

That lawsuit happened in response to Window 2.0, and the fact that they adopted overlapping windows in 2.0 strongly suggests that Microsoft did not think that the change would lead to legal action and was taken by surprise.

Apple threatened to sue Microsoft when Windows 1.0 came out in 1985, but Gates responded by threatening to stop developing software for the Macintosh, pull the Macintosh software Microsoft had already developed from shelves, and refuse to renew Apple's license for Applesoft Basic for the Apple II. Sculley backed down and signed an agreement with Microsoft granting them the right to create derivative works of the Macintosh and Lisa UIs and a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual license to use those derivative works in current and future software. In return all Apple got from Microsoft was a promise to continue supporting Word and Excel on the Mac until October 1986, which they would have done anyway.

This surrender agreement is likely why Microsoft felt confident enough to adopt overlapping windows in Windows 2.0. However, Apple's 1988 lawsuit didn't get dismissed because the judge decided that Windows 1.0 and Windows 2.0 are fundamentally different, and the agreement only covered the aspects of Windows 2.0 that also appear in Windows 1.0. The case ground on for several years before eventually getting dismissed because what Microsoft had licensed from Apple were generic ideas that shouldn't be subject to copyright. For example, Microsoft were free to use a trash can to represent deleted files as long as they didn't use Apple's specific rendering of a trash can.

Re: Was Windows 1.0's lack of overlapping windows a legal or a technical matter?

#30

Post by ndiddy »

somat wrote: post #13
contextfree wrote: post #7

As far as I've figured out the answer is that some people involved (the ex-PARC Scott McGregor and Charles Simonyi iirc) genuinely thought tiling was better, while others (Bill Gates?) disagreed but went along with it to avoid lawsuits.

I think stacking windows looks better, makes for a cool screenshot when trying to sell the thing. But tiling windows are more ergonomic for actually using the infernal machine. For me the revelation was that I have never said "Oh boy I sure am glad this window partially overlaps this other window" I either want one full screen windows or a few windows side by side. Why do I have to handle this myself? and went to the…

I think stacking windows make more sense in the context of the pre-OS X Macintosh UI. The Mac was built entirely around the concept of spatial manipulation. When you opened a folder, it would remember the exact position and size of its window, where all of the icons were, where your scroll bar was, whether the folder was set for icon, list, or detail view, etc. Every window was permanently and unambiguously associated with a single folder. This made navigating the computer possible entirely through muscle memory. Just like you know where all the light switches and doorknobs are in your house after a few months, you would gain the ability to navigate through files on your computer extremely quickly because when you double click on a folder you already knew where it would open and what would show up in the window. Instead of remembering a file path, you would remember a series of mouse motions to get where you wanted with very little conscious thought. Obviously this workflow isn't suitable for everyone, but a lot of people enjoyed it and I think it's a shame that Apple decided to throw it out for Mac OS X.

Another feature that gets a lot of flack from some Linux users is desktop icons. This is something else that a lot of UIs screwed up (maybe stemming from Windows 95? I'm not sure). The classic Mac UI let you drag whatever files you were currently working on to the desktop and do whatever you needed to do. Then when you were done with the files, you could highlight them and select "Put Away" and they'd all get moved back to their original locations. The desktop was a temporary space for what you were actively working on, not a giant catch-all storage location like how modern UIs treat it.

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