On November 10, 1983, Microsoft introduced its revolutionary Windows 1.0 software. Windows wasn’t an operating system at the outset; instead, it worked with the MS DOS operating system to represent the user experience in a desktop-like manner. The headline innovation for this new software was that the user could now run programs in windows (hence the name) instead of taking up the whole screen, and for several Microsoft programs, you could even run them simultaneously side-by-side. These advancements were, at that moment, big news. But, as we all know, the world of computer technology moves fast, and by the time Microsoft actually released Windows 1.0 in November of 1985 they were already behind the times.
Windows wasn’t the only game in town, even in the nascent area of graphical user interfaces. Visi On Applications Manager, which did many of the same things as Windows, was released just a month after Microsoft first demonstrated Windows. While allowing for easy switching between applications, Visi On ran only VisiCorp’s own applications and had huge memory requirements for the time (512k of RAM - modern operating systems require around 2GB, or roughly 4,000 times as much RAM). Ultimately, regardless of its abilities, Visi On faded away amidst corporate intrigue which resulted in the end of VisiCorp.
The competitor that would prove to be most concerning to Windows was Apple, who released their first operating system in January of 1984, almost two full years before Windows 1.0 would come out. This Mac OS introduced some of the hallmarks of the Apple user experience, as well as desktop computing as a whole. It used a true “desktop” style home screen with folders and files that could be dragged and dropped anywhere, as well as the “Finder” for organizing and discovering files. It couldn’t multi-task, and most applications took up the entire screen, but it was advanced enough (it didn’t require a knowledge of command languages) that it scooped Windows 1.0 and subsequently earned all the glory as the progenitor of the modern operating system.
By the time Microsoft got around to releasing Windows 1.0 in November 1985, it was old news, and even failed to live up to expectations. While Microsoft had promised multi-tasking on applications and the ability to drag windows in front of other windows, neither feature was present in the full release version. Additionally, all of the advances they had made, which seemed revolutionary in 1983, were now old hat with the Apple OS having introduced them years earlier. Instead of admitting defeat, the company used this release as a lesson and Microsoft soldiered on and soon began gobbling up much of the desktop computing market with subsequent better version of Windows.