5 ms·

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

105 points by SeenNotHeard 7mo ago

CanopyCoder 7mo ago
The likelihood of any legal restriction was probably close to zero - it’s only from today’s era of hyper-regulation that we might even imagine something like that. Most likely it was a deliberate technical limitation. After all, dialog windows themselves were already overlapped. I remember well what a headache it was to program and render graphical elements on those old machines (PC AT 80286 with 256 KB of RAM).
- giobox 7mo ago
  > The likelihood of any legal restriction was probably close to zero - it’s only from today’s era of hyper-regulation that we might even imagine something like that. While it's demonstrated to be likely incorrect here, it's not a wild theory. Apple and Microsoft spent a lot of time in court over the "Look and Feel" cases regarding the windowing UI Apple felt Microsoft had stolen. The lawsuit was first filed in '88 and was widely reported on in tech and mainstream press etc, dragging on throughout the 90s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Micros....
  - parl_match 7mo ago
    Yeah. > The likelihood of any legal restriction was probably close to zero - it’s only from today’s era of hyper-regulation that we might even imagine something like that. Normally I'd agree with a statement like this. Except this is a very specific case.
  - plorkyeran 7mo ago
    That lawsuit happened in response to Window 2.0, and the fact that they adopted overlapping windows in 2.0 strongly suggests that Microsoft did not think that the change would lead to legal action and was taken by surprise.
    - ndiddy 7mo ago
      Apple threatened to sue Microsoft when Windows 1.0 came out in 1985, but Gates responded by threatening to stop developing software for the Macintosh, pull the Macintosh software Microsoft had already developed from shelves, and refuse to renew Apple's license for Applesoft Basic for the Apple II. Sculley backed down and signed an agreement with Microsoft granting them the right to create derivative works of the Macintosh and Lisa UIs and a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual license to use those derivative works in current and future software. In return all Apple got from Microsoft was a promise to continue supporting Word and Excel on the Mac until October 1986, which they would have done anyway. This surrender agreement is likely why Microsoft felt confident enough to adopt overlapping windows in Windows 2.0. However, Apple's 1988 lawsuit didn't get dismissed because the judge decided that Windows 1.0 and Windows 2.0 are fundamentally different, and the agreement only covered the aspects of Windows 2.0 that also appear in Windows 1.0. The case ground on for several years before eventually getting dismissed because what Microsoft had licensed from Apple were generic ideas that shouldn't be subject to copyright. For example, Microsoft were free to use a trash can to represent deleted files as long as they didn't use Apple's specific rendering of a trash can.
      - WillAdams 7mo ago
        Not just that, he also got MacBasic killed: https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html
- jmclnx 7mo ago
  > 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 using tiling window managers these days, it seems Windows 1.0 was ahead of its time :)
  - Affric 7mo ago
    Yeah, it’s interesting how the desktop metaphor evolved over time but increasing display size and the ability to have multiple workspaces surely is a huge part of what makes tiling almost work. And tiling still largely doesn't work with small windows.
  - lovich 7mo ago
    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/fancyzones 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-lock https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/crop-and...
    - hulitu 7mo ago
      > 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.
      - lovich 7mo ago
        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
- KellyCriterion 7mo ago
  But hey, for 320x200 (8b) / 640x400 (4b) you had a linear framebuffer early on, before VESA&Co came along :-D (this was around IRQ13, IIRC,right?)
- blkhawk 7mo ago
  Actually it was very much a legal thing. For example i can point to GEM that had to have its windows glued down because of this. See GEM 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment)#/media/File:Gem_11_Desktop.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment)#/med... vs GEM2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment)#/media/File:Gem20about.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment)#/med... Apple sued Digital Research and later Microsoft when they enabled overlapping windows for windows 2.0. Also lol a 286 with 256kb of ram - that is a very very weird combination you would never see in a desktop. Generally early IBM PC compatibles might have just 512KB of ram but around 1985 and later 640KB really became the norm even on 8088 and 8086 based systems. I am not counting stuff that really didn't get anywhere like the PCjr and that thing was much earlier in 1983. 286 based systems once they became more common started a 1mb RAM.
  - whobre 7mo ago
    They didn't even sue DRI, just threatened to sue: https://nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com/p/history-of-the-gem-desktop-environment https://nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com/p/history-of-the-gem-...
- charonn0 7mo ago
  I don't think regulations are the legal restrictions people are referring to, but rather private lawsuits.
  - saghm 7mo ago
    I also can't imagine calling our current era "hyper-regulation" with respect to software. The Microsoft antitrust case was only 16 years after Windows 1.0, but this year will be the 25th since then.
- mmooss 7mo ago
  > it’s only from today’s era of hyper-regulation that we might even imagine something like that. How is regulation involved? The OP's idea was that Microsoft feared being sued by other companies over IP. If there is some increase in lawsuits between companies, I'd like to see evidence. Also, my understanding is that there was a lot more regulation in the 1970s and extending into the 1980s, though it was probably declining by then.
- undeveloper 7mo ago
  i would not describe "today's era" as "hyper-regulation". we're actively removing regulation day over day
  - userbinator 7mo ago
    And replacing it with even more regulations.
contextfree 7mo ago
As far as I've figured out the answer is that some people involved (the ex-PARC Scott McGregor and Charles Simonyi iirc) genuinely thought tiling was better, while others (Bill Gates?) disagreed but went along with it to avoid lawsuits.
- MarsIronPI 7mo ago
  As a tiling window manager user, I think I agree! :D
- somat 7mo ago
  I think stacking windows looks better, makes for a cool screenshot when trying to sell the thing. But tiling windows are more ergonomic for actually using the infernal machine. For me the revelation was that I have never said "Oh boy I sure am glad this window partially overlaps this other window" I either want one full screen windows or a few windows side by side. Why do I have to handle this myself? and went to the dark side, a tiling window manager. To the point that it really chafes now when I use stacking windows, It feels like I spend most of the time shuffling windows around. To ease the overlapping window pain many linux window managers have a feature where the focused window does not have to be the top window and this makes things a lot better, you can be looking at the top window and typing/clicking on the partially obscured bottom window.
  - hedgehog 7mo ago
    To be fair, in the era when resolutions like 512x342 or 640x480 were common overlapped windows were quite useful.
  - layer8 7mo ago
    Most of the time, I want the active application window in the middle of the screen, but not necessarily filling the whole screen or the whole height, and also not necessarily centered. The window position and size depends on its contents, what sidebars it has, and so on. This inherently leads to overlapping windows. I use a tool that automatically moves and resizes windows to the application-specific desired position, while also having the ability to arrange a split-screen view using keyboard shortcuts when needed.
zabzonk 7mo ago
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.
- dylan604 7mo ago
  > 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.
  - zabzonk 7mo ago
    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.
    - jsolson 7mo ago
      I don't remember if Plug-n-Play shipped with the original Windows 95 (it's certainly there in the final OSR), but that was a pretty big shift from the manual IRQ and port mapping days of DOS/Windows 3.1.
      - dylan604 7mo ago
        back then, it was still plug-n-pray. it didn't work as well as it was intended when it was first available
      - MBCook 7mo ago
        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.
eschaton 7mo ago
“Barbarians Led by Bill Gates” is required reading on the matter.
blacksmith_tb 7mo ago
Overlapping was hard, it was one of the core parts of the original Macintosh OS, courtesy of Bill Atkinson[1]. 1: https://www.folklore.org/I_Still_Remember_Regions.html https://www.folklore.org/I_Still_Remember_Regions.html
dboreham 7mo ago
The reality distortion field at full strength. Neither Apple nor Xerox "invented" overlapping windows.
- andsoitis 7mo ago
  > Neither Apple nor Xerox "invented" overlapping windows. Apple Lisa and Macintosh are widely credited with the first practical, commercial implementation of overlapping windows in a Graphical User Interface. Although Xerox PARC developed early prototypes, Apple engineer Bill Atkinson is credited with creating the code that made functional, rapid-rendering overlapping windows possible.
- MBCook 7mo ago
  Then who did?
WalterBright 7mo ago
There was a major debate at the time on whether windows should be overlapping or non-overlapping. I was in the latter camp!
- SoftTalker 7mo ago
  I switched to a tiling window manager years ago and never looked back, but had the luxury of much larger high-resolution screens. Would be hard to imagine it working well at 640x480 pixels. Even overlapping windows weren't great on such small screens, most people just maximized whatever they were working on.
  - opan 7mo ago
    Fullscreening windows is typically a feature of tiling WMs, and tiling often makes it easier to adjust the ratios of the splits in small amounts. I think tiling works well at all resolutions.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- qingcharles 7mo ago
  I've run Windows for almost 40 years and I almost never overlap any windows if I can avoid it. I have every window maximized that allows it. Some OCD thing :)
opello 7mo ago
This was discussed in Advent of Computing episode 150 "Starting Windows Up"[1,2] and the timeline of a 1983 demo which showed overlapping windows and multitasking, but also highlighted the contrast to the DR4 build from late 1984 claiming to introduce a multi-tasking scheduler. This isn't really new information to the Stack Exchange question and answers, but it's kind of fun coincidental coverage of the topic. [1] https://adventofcomputing.libsyn.com/episode-150-starting-windows-up https://adventofcomputing.libsyn.com/episode-150-starting-wi... [2] https://podscripts.co/podcasts/advent-of-computing/episode-150-starting-windows-up https://podscripts.co/podcasts/advent-of-computing/episode-1...
wolvoleo 7mo ago
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.
- WalterSlovotsky 7mo ago
  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.
krige 7mo ago
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.
- monkeydreams 7mo ago
  That "Smoke on the Water" MIDI tune playing through speakers at the computer shop... I cannot explain how amazing that was.
  - empressplay 7mo ago
    That would have been a MOD file: https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=80661 https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu...
- pjmlp 7mo ago
  I was kind of pissed that my parents sponsored getting a 386SX with Windows 3.1 alongside DR-DOS 5, instead of an Amiga, as everyone else on my group, in hindsight they bet on the right system. To note, the hardware required to get OS/2 running would have added 1 000 euro more in today's money. A couple of years later Comodore was gone and the history has been racounted endless times. Still we don't give up keeping it alive somehow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJS5E4CPmpY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJS5E4CPmpY

105 points by SeenNotHeard 7mo ago

The likelihood of any legal restriction was probably close to zero - it’s only from today’s era of hyper-regulation that we might even imagine something like that. Most likely it was a deliberate technical limitation. After all, dialog windows themselves were already overlapped. I remember well what a headache it was to program and render graphical elements on those old machines (PC AT 80286 with 256 KB of RAM).

giobox 7mo ago
> The likelihood of any legal restriction was probably close to zero - it’s only from today’s era of hyper-regulation that we might even imagine something like that. While it's demonstrated to be likely incorrect here, it's not a wild theory. Apple and Microsoft spent a lot of time in court over the "Look and Feel" cases regarding the windowing UI Apple felt Microsoft had stolen. The lawsuit was first filed in '88 and was widely reported on in tech and mainstream press etc, dragging on throughout the 90s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Micros....
- parl_match 7mo ago
  Yeah. > The likelihood of any legal restriction was probably close to zero - it’s only from today’s era of hyper-regulation that we might even imagine something like that. Normally I'd agree with a statement like this. Except this is a very specific case.
- plorkyeran 7mo ago
  That lawsuit happened in response to Window 2.0, and the fact that they adopted overlapping windows in 2.0 strongly suggests that Microsoft did not think that the change would lead to legal action and was taken by surprise.
  - ndiddy 7mo ago
    Apple threatened to sue Microsoft when Windows 1.0 came out in 1985, but Gates responded by threatening to stop developing software for the Macintosh, pull the Macintosh software Microsoft had already developed from shelves, and refuse to renew Apple's license for Applesoft Basic for the Apple II. Sculley backed down and signed an agreement with Microsoft granting them the right to create derivative works of the Macintosh and Lisa UIs and a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual license to use those derivative works in current and future software. In return all Apple got from Microsoft was a promise to continue supporting Word and Excel on the Mac until October 1986, which they would have done anyway. This surrender agreement is likely why Microsoft felt confident enough to adopt overlapping windows in Windows 2.0. However, Apple's 1988 lawsuit didn't get dismissed because the judge decided that Windows 1.0 and Windows 2.0 are fundamentally different, and the agreement only covered the aspects of Windows 2.0 that also appear in Windows 1.0. The case ground on for several years before eventually getting dismissed because what Microsoft had licensed from Apple were generic ideas that shouldn't be subject to copyright. For example, Microsoft were free to use a trash can to represent deleted files as long as they didn't use Apple's specific rendering of a trash can.
    - WillAdams 7mo ago
      Not just that, he also got MacBasic killed: https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html
jmclnx 7mo ago
> 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 using tiling window managers these days, it seems Windows 1.0 was ahead of its time :)
- Affric 7mo ago
  Yeah, it’s interesting how the desktop metaphor evolved over time but increasing display size and the ability to have multiple workspaces surely is a huge part of what makes tiling almost work. And tiling still largely doesn't work with small windows.
- lovich 7mo ago
  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/fancyzones 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-lock https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/crop-and...
  - hulitu 7mo ago
    > 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.
    - lovich 7mo ago
      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
KellyCriterion 7mo ago
But hey, for 320x200 (8b) / 640x400 (4b) you had a linear framebuffer early on, before VESA&Co came along :-D (this was around IRQ13, IIRC,right?)
blkhawk 7mo ago
Actually it was very much a legal thing. For example i can point to GEM that had to have its windows glued down because of this. See GEM 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment)#/media/File:Gem_11_Desktop.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment)#/med... vs GEM2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment)#/media/File:Gem20about.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment)#/med... Apple sued Digital Research and later Microsoft when they enabled overlapping windows for windows 2.0. Also lol a 286 with 256kb of ram - that is a very very weird combination you would never see in a desktop. Generally early IBM PC compatibles might have just 512KB of ram but around 1985 and later 640KB really became the norm even on 8088 and 8086 based systems. I am not counting stuff that really didn't get anywhere like the PCjr and that thing was much earlier in 1983. 286 based systems once they became more common started a 1mb RAM.
- whobre 7mo ago
  They didn't even sue DRI, just threatened to sue: https://nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com/p/history-of-the-gem-desktop-environment https://nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com/p/history-of-the-gem-...
charonn0 7mo ago
I don't think regulations are the legal restrictions people are referring to, but rather private lawsuits.
- saghm 7mo ago
  I also can't imagine calling our current era "hyper-regulation" with respect to software. The Microsoft antitrust case was only 16 years after Windows 1.0, but this year will be the 25th since then.
mmooss 7mo ago
> it’s only from today’s era of hyper-regulation that we might even imagine something like that. How is regulation involved? The OP's idea was that Microsoft feared being sued by other companies over IP. If there is some increase in lawsuits between companies, I'd like to see evidence. Also, my understanding is that there was a lot more regulation in the 1970s and extending into the 1980s, though it was probably declining by then.
undeveloper 7mo ago
i would not describe "today's era" as "hyper-regulation". we're actively removing regulation day over day
- userbinator 7mo ago
  And replacing it with even more regulations.

contextfree 7mo ago

As far as I've figured out the answer is that some people involved (the ex-PARC Scott McGregor and Charles Simonyi iirc) genuinely thought tiling was better, while others (Bill Gates?) disagreed but went along with it to avoid lawsuits.

MarsIronPI 7mo ago
As a tiling window manager user, I think I agree! :D
somat 7mo ago
I think stacking windows looks better, makes for a cool screenshot when trying to sell the thing. But tiling windows are more ergonomic for actually using the infernal machine. For me the revelation was that I have never said "Oh boy I sure am glad this window partially overlaps this other window" I either want one full screen windows or a few windows side by side. Why do I have to handle this myself? and went to the dark side, a tiling window manager. To the point that it really chafes now when I use stacking windows, It feels like I spend most of the time shuffling windows around. To ease the overlapping window pain many linux window managers have a feature where the focused window does not have to be the top window and this makes things a lot better, you can be looking at the top window and typing/clicking on the partially obscured bottom window.
- hedgehog 7mo ago
  To be fair, in the era when resolutions like 512x342 or 640x480 were common overlapped windows were quite useful.
- layer8 7mo ago
  Most of the time, I want the active application window in the middle of the screen, but not necessarily filling the whole screen or the whole height, and also not necessarily centered. The window position and size depends on its contents, what sidebars it has, and so on. This inherently leads to overlapping windows. I use a tool that automatically moves and resizes windows to the application-specific desired position, while also having the ability to arrange a split-screen view using keyboard shortcuts when needed.

zabzonk 7mo ago

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.

dylan604 7mo ago
> 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.
- zabzonk 7mo ago
  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.
  - jsolson 7mo ago
    I don't remember if Plug-n-Play shipped with the original Windows 95 (it's certainly there in the final OSR), but that was a pretty big shift from the manual IRQ and port mapping days of DOS/Windows 3.1.
    - dylan604 7mo ago
      back then, it was still plug-n-pray. it didn't work as well as it was intended when it was first available
    - MBCook 7mo ago
      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.

eschaton 7mo ago

“Barbarians Led by Bill Gates” is required reading on the matter.

blacksmith_tb 7mo ago

Overlapping was hard, it was one of the core parts of the original Macintosh OS, courtesy of Bill Atkinson[1]. 1: https://www.folklore.org/I_Still_Remember_Regions.html https://www.folklore.org/I_Still_Remember_Regions.html

dboreham 7mo ago

The reality distortion field at full strength. Neither Apple nor Xerox "invented" overlapping windows.

andsoitis 7mo ago
> Neither Apple nor Xerox "invented" overlapping windows. Apple Lisa and Macintosh are widely credited with the first practical, commercial implementation of overlapping windows in a Graphical User Interface. Although Xerox PARC developed early prototypes, Apple engineer Bill Atkinson is credited with creating the code that made functional, rapid-rendering overlapping windows possible.
MBCook 7mo ago
Then who did?

WalterBright 7mo ago

There was a major debate at the time on whether windows should be overlapping or non-overlapping. I was in the latter camp!

SoftTalker 7mo ago
I switched to a tiling window manager years ago and never looked back, but had the luxury of much larger high-resolution screens. Would be hard to imagine it working well at 640x480 pixels. Even overlapping windows weren't great on such small screens, most people just maximized whatever they were working on.
- opan 7mo ago
  Fullscreening windows is typically a feature of tiling WMs, and tiling often makes it easier to adjust the ratios of the splits in small amounts. I think tiling works well at all resolutions.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
qingcharles 7mo ago
I've run Windows for almost 40 years and I almost never overlap any windows if I can avoid it. I have every window maximized that allows it. Some OCD thing :)

opello 7mo ago

This was discussed in Advent of Computing episode 150 "Starting Windows Up"[1,2] and the timeline of a 1983 demo which showed overlapping windows and multitasking, but also highlighted the contrast to the DR4 build from late 1984 claiming to introduce a multi-tasking scheduler. This isn't really new information to the Stack Exchange question and answers, but it's kind of fun coincidental coverage of the topic. [1] https://adventofcomputing.libsyn.com/episode-150-starting-windows-up https://adventofcomputing.libsyn.com/episode-150-starting-wi... [2] https://podscripts.co/podcasts/advent-of-computing/episode-150-starting-windows-up https://podscripts.co/podcasts/advent-of-computing/episode-1...

wolvoleo 7mo ago

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.

WalterSlovotsky 7mo ago
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.

krige 7mo ago

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.

monkeydreams 7mo ago
That "Smoke on the Water" MIDI tune playing through speakers at the computer shop... I cannot explain how amazing that was.
- empressplay 7mo ago
  That would have been a MOD file: https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=80661 https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu...
pjmlp 7mo ago
I was kind of pissed that my parents sponsored getting a 386SX with Windows 3.1 alongside DR-DOS 5, instead of an Amiga, as everyone else on my group, in hindsight they bet on the right system. To note, the hardware required to get OS/2 running would have added 1 000 euro more in today's money. A couple of years later Comodore was gone and the history has been racounted endless times. Still we don't give up keeping it alive somehow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJS5E4CPmpY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJS5E4CPmpY