What Happened to Windows 1.0? Why Windows 1.0 Disappeared

More than 10 million copies of Windows had sold by March 1992, yet the first version barely registered on office PCs. This is the story of what became of that first Windows, and why it faded from the screen. Promised for April 1984, Windows 1.0 reached stores on November 20, 1985, at $99. It ran on top of MS-DOS, asked for 256K of memory, and could not overlap its windows. IBM backed its own TopView. Microsoft, meanwhile, said OS/2 would eventually replace Windows. In this documentary: 1. Why Windows reached stores nineteen months after its promised date 2. How a 1985 Apple license shaped every later version of Windows 3. Why Microsoft moved its core Windows team onto OS/2 4. How the 640K memory limit held early Windows back 5. How a 1988 side project put Windows into protected mode 6. Why Windows 3.0 passed a million copies within months in 1990 What remains is Notepad and Paint, both inside the first 1985 box and still updated on Windows 11. If you remember typing win at a C prompt and waiting for the screen to draw, tell us which machine it was. Subscribe for more careful histories of what ran on the office screen before Windows won. Sources: Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp., 35 F.3d 1435 - U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, 1994: https://static.case.law/f3d/35/cases/1435-... Microsoft Windows User's Guide, Version 3.0 - Microsoft, 1989: https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_micr... Saving Windows from the OS/2 Bulldozer - Murray Sargent, Microsoft, 2006: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/... Microsoft Windows review - Jeff Duntemann, PC Magazine, 1986: https://archive.org/details/PC-Mag-1986-02-25 #Windows1 #Windows3 #MicrosoftWindows #WindowsHistory #MSDOS #OS2 #BillGates #RetroComputing #ComputerHistory #BeforeWindows Disclaimer: The voiceover used in this video was generated using AI.