Was Windows 1.0's lack of overlapping windows a legal or a technical matter? • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by lproven » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 1:57 PM UTC

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.

Er... he's saying Windows 1 was really ugly, and with Win11, MS has got back to its roots. In other words, Win11 is also really ugly.

Cosmetically, it's all right, sometimes pretty. I like the Bing Wallpaper thing.

Functionally, 11 is a pile of organic fertiliser.

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

#82

Post by hyperman1 » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 3:48 PM UTC

hagbard_c wrote: post #76

hyperman1 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Thanks. I learned something. Also the fact that it only worked on NTSC, so people from the EU like me simply never saw the nicer variant

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

#83

Post by rekabis » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 9:50 PM UTC

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.

> A GUI that competed with the Mac.

Oh, that is _hilarious._ Mac started out strong and has always kept ahead of Windows in many if not most ways that GIUs are done.

Hell, every now and then I’ll fire up my 2002 Power Mac (dual 1.25Ghz G4, MDD) and just bask in the beauty that is OS 9.2.2. While it was lacking good multitasking and multi-user accounts, it is still an exquisitely gorgeous UI.

I still use it for various tasks, although it’s close to impossible to do decent Internet work on it, owing to no available modern web browsers.

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

#84

Post by high_priest » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

tharkun__ wrote: post #77

monkeydreams wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 betwe…

For me, its a distraction from the corporate world. A token of my outies existence in the innie world.