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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?

#51

Post by avadodin »

saghm wrote: post #50
avadodin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are right.

Although I don't know about "popular".

To clarify, my impression was that many people started using tmux around the time when it was introduced including a few who had been using screen before.

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

#52

Post by jsolson »

conception wrote: post #46
MBCook wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're not wrong, but PnP including the configuration basis for PCI which still sits at the config space layer of the latest and greatest PCIe. That's the piece I find so significant. I work with GPUs that mostly communicate over a proprietary C2C connection, but how does the OS find them? PCI enumeration.

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

#55

Post by hulitu »

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.

> Perhaps aesthetic - both Windows 1.0 and 2.0 were (to me at least) very ugly.

Microsoft got back to the roots with Windows 10 and 11.

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

#56

Post by hulitu »

lovich wrote: post #14
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…

You can tile windows in Windows as well with the windows key+ arrow buttons. The default is just left, right, and top, bottom but if you install Power Toys and use Fancy Zones you can customize the zones https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzon... . There’s also Crop and Lock which can help you cut out extraneous parts of certain windows https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/crop-and…

> You can tile windows in Windows as well with the windows key+ arrow buttons.

_only_ if you enable hard corners, or something like this, which makes moving windows between screens, difficult.

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

#57

Post by porl »

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.

Win2k was the last one I was excited about.

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

#58

Post by monkeydreams »

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.

> Perhaps aesthetic - both Windows 1.0 and 2.0 were (to me at least) very ugly.

But it was amazing for those of us used to black and white/green/amber screens in DOS. You could put an image as your background. And it stayed there, lurking behind your word processor or spreadsheet, to spring back into your vision whenever you finished up your work.

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

#59

Post by monkeydreams »

krige wrote: post #54

Meanwhile, the Amiga had the Boing demo in 1984, months before the system was actually sold. Smoothly liding screens and multitasking, baby. Also, stereo sound and nice visuals but that's not the point here.

That "Smoke on the Water" MIDI tune playing through speakers at the computer shop... I cannot explain how amazing that was.

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

#60

Post by wolvoleo »

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…

> They are nice for terminals and browsing properly-written web pages but for anything with an aspect ratio or a fixed size they are clumsy.

True but that's also a factor of tiling being so niche. If it were more common the apps would take it into account and just not so fixed sizes as much.

There's only few uses that really require it like video.

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