John C. Dvorak

JOHN C. DVORAK

A Windows Retrospective

Did you realize you missed the 25th anniversary of Microsoft Windows? The product was offi cially announced on November 10, 1983. A lot has changed since then, but you have to be struck by the fact that the OS is still around.

Windows, which began life as a product concept called Interface Manager, stemmed from the announcement of VisiON by one of the dominant software companies of the 1980s era, VisiCorp. VisiCorp invented VisiCalc, which was the original spreadsheet for the IBM PC.

At the 1982 Comdex, VisiCorp showed VisiON as a radically new user interface and made it look as if the company was

going into the operating-system business. Microsoft (aka Bill Gates) freaked, since it owned the desktop OS space.

What to do? Well, one thing you might want to do is announce something similar, so when the next Comdex rolled around in 1983, Microsoft did just that. And then the story begins to get weird.

A month before the Microsoft announcement, VisiON shipped and went nowhere. Microsoft must have noticed this, as it coincided with the GUI-centric Apple Lisa in 1983, which sold zilch computers. At the same time, the Xerox Star, the progenitor of the entire GUI computing concept, wasn’t setting the world on fi re, either.

I’ve always been convinced that Microsoft would have dropped the whole Windows idea completely after these failures. It was Steve Jobs who kept the hope alive. Once his engineers redesigned the Lisa as the Macintosh in 1984 and got a huge buzz (and managed to keep the Mac division the center of attention), Microsoft began to take the GUI seriously.

Meanwhile, other players were jumping into the game and putting even more pressure on Microsoft. In July of 1985, the GEM OS appeared. This code from Digital Research, a company screwed over by Microsoft in many ways, would evolve into a solid mouse-centric OS that gathered some steam before Microsoft headed it off. GEM eventually gravitated to the Atari PC and lost its foothold in the business world.

A few months later, Workbench, the jazzy Amiga GUI-OS, would appear. To this day none of the Microsoft products can multitask better than this thing could.

By Comdex 1985, Microsoft had Windows 1.0 ready to show. It was a laughable product that was nothing more than a shell interface running on top of DOS. It was a curiosity at best, and nobody was buying it.

It could only tile its “windows,” and there were no major programs that ran on it. It came with a crude clock, a miserable text editor, and a game called Reversi. Compared with the then year-old Macintosh, it was pathetic.

But someone at Microsoft knew that this GUI thing was the future, and they continued to pursue the idea. The eventual key, to my thinking, was Microsoft’s partnering with IBM on joint development of OS/2. Microsoft put itself into a position where it could jump ship at an opportune moment and throw all its newfound GUI OS expertise into Windows.

It all ended up leading to Windows 3, which was functional and popular and eventually led to the blockbuster Windows 95, which dominated the scene like nothing before and nothing since. Microsoft was at the top of its game.

The hubris was eventually refl ected by the 1995 release of Microsoft Bob, a shell program that turned your user interface into a cartoon-like system dominated by a cartoon dog. For some unknown reason, Microsoft thought this would appeal to adults and sold it to an older audience rather than to the kids. It failed miserably.

Windows itself continued to improve up to and including the release of Windows 2000, which many (including me) believe was the apex of the Windows franchise.

Things today are pretty much at a dead end, although nobody wants to admit it. Windows is 25 years old and needs to be swapped out for something new and better. When Microsoft fi rst showed the OS, in 1983, Ronald Reagan was in his first term as president. It was the year of those dopey Cabbage Patch dolls, and the year that camcorders first appeared. Tootsie was a big movie, and Woody Allen’s Zelig introduced audiences to unusual special effects. Star Wars: Episode VI—Return of the Jedi was the top grossing movie. The USA invaded Grenada. This was a long time ago!

In the tech business, the Osborne Computer Corp. declared bankruptcy. The fi rst commercial cellular phone service was launched in Chicago.

One of the much-covered technology items in 1983 was the RCA video-disc player. The system used stamped recording technology and needle-in-groove techniques to reproduce a prerecorded video from a platter that looked like a vinyl LP.

A lot of things have come and gone since 1983. But Windows remains. Can we put this old dog to sleep? Please?

Things today are pretty much at a dead end, although nobody wants to admit it. Windows is 25 years old and needs to be swapped out for something better.

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