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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?

#71

Post by xattt »

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.

> There were OS improvements too, but I have forgot what …

Hold up, there is no need for this revisionist history.

At the very least, Windows 95 introduced the ability to run 32-bit apps pre-emptively that was otherwise only available on Windows NT. You continued to maintain the ability to run 16-but apps that wouldn’t run on Win NT.

You also gained support for long filenames, and to the chagrin of many, plug-and-play.

These were foundational and set the tone for the next 30 years of computing.

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

#72

Post by tboughen »

zabzonk wrote: post #67
hulitu wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Either this is sarcasm or you and me are the only two people here that actually like Win11.

I don't like it because, after upgrading from Windows 10, my computer can no longer go to sleep and I can no longer connect to Minecraft servers. These things did not happen straight away, but have developed as problems over time.

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

#73

Post by empressplay »

monkeydreams wrote: post #59
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.

That would have been a MOD file:

https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu...

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

#74

Post by WalterSlovotsky »

wolvoleo wrote: post #53

Wow seeing that Cedar system by Xerox, it's so advanced, even more than anything else I've seen from those days. Even featured RPCs. They could have owned the industry. I find it hard to understand why they never saw the potential.

Xerox was a photo copier company. Actually, they were more of a photo copy company as most of their revenue came from charging the customer by they number of pages photo copied. This was the lens through which they looked at what was being produced at PARC, how is this going to cause my customer to need to make more photo copies. How is having working RPCs going to result in more photo copies being made?

Computing just wasn't in their DNA and those people at Xerox who did see the potential in PARC never had the leverage to reorient the company to take advantage. This is almost always the result when a for profit corporation invests in fundamental research that is not intimately related to their primary revenue source.

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

#75

Post by lovich »

hulitu wrote: post #56
lovich wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What makes it hard to move windows between screens? You can do it with the key command or by dragging with the mouse.

I have a three monitor setup and have no problem rearranging the windows as I please

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

#76

Post by hagbard_c »

hyperman1 wrote: post #68
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.

Part of it was the video mode. EGA 640x350x16 had 16 simultanous colors, from a palette of 64 possibilities. And non square pixels as a bonus. They might have made better choices from the palette, but the limitations were severe. If you really want to stab your eyes out, CGA had a mode with white, bright pink, light blue and black. I remember playing Keen on it. I've never seen that mode used for anything nice.

The CGA colour palette was horrid on RGB monitors but on Composite it could look quite good for its time. Not Amiga-level good but good enough. Of course composite monitors were not really a thing in the IBM PC world so it was to little avail. Here's an example of a screen in the mentioned horrible hot-pink palette:

https://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/20...

...and here's the same screen viewed on a composite monitor:

https://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/20...

These images come from this page:

https://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/cga-composite-graphic...

If this isn't enough it seems to be possible to coax ~1000 colours out of these cards as well:

https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-...

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

#77

Post by tharkun__ »

monkeydreams wrote: post #58
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.

I never understood that pull.

One of the very first things I always do in any OS is to set the desktop background to solid color, usually black. I almost never ever will see it, coz there's always going to be a window on top of it, except upon startup for some brief period of time or if I accidentally minimize everything.

I work with full screen windows. Always (tiny number of exceptional cases maybe). I switch between windows with Alt+Tab when necessary. I also have a relatively small screen, both for work and personal stuff (14" for at least 10 years now).

You do you of course.

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

#78

Post by tharkun__ »

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.

Plug and Pray!

They weren't fake long file names. They were actual long files names but of course the operating system that didn't support long files names didn't know what to do with the (very real) long file names. It only knew the 8.3 file name that was also set for compatibility.

Of course it sucked if you looked at or worked with DOS based apps. But it was one of those things that was always good about Microsoft Windows: Backwards compatibility.

They literally would build in (bug-) compatibility layers for specific games, where if they detected you were running a particular game, they'd not use the fixed or optimized code paths, but the old ones / emulate / patch things as the game expected them to be. And that was not because Windows was buggy and the games were good. It was the other way around. Games used trickery and internal knowledge that they shouldn't and if/when MS would block those paths or change internals, those games would stop working or crash.

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

#79

Post by lproven »

SoftTalker wrote: post #41
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.

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.

> 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.

Kinda sorta but this misses context.

> we got long filenames

Consumers got long filenames. NT had been doing it for a couple of years. Win95 did it on FAT on a mass-market OS.

> a built-in network stack

No. Windows for Workgroups had offered that for several years. It talked NetBEUI, the Microsoft protocol, out of the box, and it also talked Novell IPX/SPX for talking to Netware, and DECnet, and HP-DLC...

But you hint at the important bit...

> no more Trumpet WinSock

Bingo. Win95 offered native 32-bit TCP/IP for the first time and it was over Ethernet.

WfWg had DOS-based 16-bit TCP/IP but only over Ethernet (or Token Ring!) It didn't have dialup networking -- at all. It couldn't talk TCP/IP over PPP, such as over a modem. WfWg 3.11 offered, only as an optional extra download, a 32-bit TCP/IP stack -- for network cards. And nobody had anything to download it over. ;-)

Internet Explorer 4 for Windows 3.x had an optional 16-bit dialup stack and optional 16-bit TCP/IP -- but that could not talk to a network card.

I know, it's prehistory, but in the late 1980s and early to mid 1990s, local-area networks were catching on like wildfire and by 1993 or so Microsoft noticed and made networking in Windows a standard feature.

What is overlooked today: it didn't use TCP/IP.

Nothing much did. Not even big iron or minicomputers like DEC VAX kit with VMS. TCP/IP was a Unix thing, and Unix cost $thousands just for the OS, plus $thousands more for the hardware. Even if you ran it on PCs, you needed $thousands worth of RAM. SCO Xenix was huge but for production it needed 2-4 MB of RAM, ideally 8+ MB, and in the DOS era, PCs came with 1 MB.

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

#80

Post by lproven »

pjmlp wrote: post #63
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.

I was found of Windows 3.1 though, it wasn't the Amiga that I envied from everyone else on my group, but I still could have my share of fun with Borland compilers.

Well, it was a breath of fresh air after even 3.0 let alone Windows 2.

But personally, I enjoyed NT 3.1 more. Built-in PPP so I could dial up to CompuServe and get on the Net. Not the web, which barely existed yet, but the Internet. Grab my email at the same time as I downloaded some files over FTP and grabbed the latest from my newsgroups.

At the same time, I had all of MS Office open, and a few command prompts, and a connection to the big office VAX watching that it was happy...

I enjoyed taunting Amiga owners about Real Multitasking on Windows. :-D I was about 25 at the time, in my defence.

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