40 years ago today, Bill Gates announced Windows 1.0: a visual journey through time

On November 10, 1983, a young Bill Gates in New York announced Windows 1.0, a graphical user interface for Microsoft’s first PC operating system, MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System). MS-DOS had already been released on August 12, 1981, and Gates promised that Windows 1.0 would be released in April 1984. The original Windows didn’t hit stores until November 20, 1985.

At the time, Windows 1.0 required two floppy disks, 256 kilobytes of memory, and a graphics card. If you wanted to run multiple programs, you needed a PC with a hard drive and 512 kilobytes of memory.​

Windows 1.0 introduced a graphical user interface (GUI) that allowed users to navigate the screen by pointing and clicking, that is, it supported mouse input. However, it was not a full-fledged operating system, but rather an operating environment that extended MS-DOS.

Microsoft’s operating system didn’t really take off until a few years later: 1990’s Windows 3.0 sold 10 million copies in its first two years, a phenomenal number for the time. Windows 3.11 gave the system its final breakthrough in 1993.

The following slideshow tells how the Windows story continued.

(oli)