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

retrocomputing.stackexchange.com

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

#41

Post by SoftTalker »

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.

IIRC we got long filenames with Win95, and a built-in network stack, no more Trumpet WinSock. And it did seem more stable, not nearly as good as NT/2000 but better than 3.1.

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

#42

Post by SoftTalker »

jonhohle wrote: post #36
zabzonk wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Win2K was my favorite as well. The transparency was tasteful. Everything worked and for the most part didn’t crash. Many (most?) games worked. It ran great on a PIII 600mhz. Everything good about NT4 was better and most of the consumer friendly stuff starting to take shape. The disc was even gorgeous. Peak MS design and engineering.

Yep, favorite version of Windows ever. Even with Windows 7 and XP I switched the settings back so it looked like Win2K.

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

#43

Post by MBCook »

jsolson wrote: post #27
zabzonk wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It did. That was one of its big features.

It also was the first version to remove the 8.3 limitation and give us long file names.

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

#46

Post by conception »

MBCook wrote: post #43
jsolson wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It did. That was one of its big features. It also was the first version to remove the 8.3 limitation and give us long file names.

They were fake long file names though. At the actual dos layer they were 8.3. And the plug and play was terrrrible. I always turned it off. Ugh the plug and play modems/soundcards were trash.

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

#47

Post by qingcharles »

WalterBright wrote: post #39

There was a major debate at the time on whether windows should be overlapping or non-overlapping. I was in the latter camp!

I've run Windows for almost 40 years and I almost never overlap any windows if I can avoid it. I have every window maximized that allows it. Some OCD thing :)

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

#48

Post by opello »

This was discussed in Advent of Computing episode 150 "Starting Windows Up"[1,2] and the timeline of a 1983 demo which showed overlapping windows and multitasking, but also highlighted the contrast to the DR4 build from late 1984 claiming to introduce a multi-tasking scheduler.

This isn't really new information to the Stack Exchange question and answers, but it's kind of fun coincidental coverage of the topic.

[1] https://adventofcomputing.libsyn.com/episode-150-starting-wi...

[2] https://podscripts.co/podcasts/advent-of-computing/episode-1...

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

#49

Post by saghm »

charonn0 wrote: post #26
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.

I also can't imagine calling our current era "hyper-regulation" with respect to software. The Microsoft antitrust case was only 16 years after Windows 1.0, but this year will be the 25th since then.

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

#50

Post by saghm »

avadodin wrote: post #19
jmclnx wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

They are a bit out of fashion these days. The main use-case was multiplexing terminals and, after tmux provided a solution that was usable by normal users, it seduced people away. Also, mouse-first tiling was introduced on Windows so nowadays it is almost universal to have a degree of tiling. They are nice for terminals and browsing properly-written web pages but for anything with an aspect ratio or a fixed size they…

> The main use-case was multiplexing terminals and, after tmux provided a solution that was usable by normal users, it seduced people away.

Are you sure about this history? I'd always heard that GNU Screen had been popular for a while before tmux, and from double checking, Screen dates back to 1987, the same year that Windows 2.0 came out. tmux didn't come for another two decades.

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