Microsoft today is a huge company, with thousands of employees in hundreds of buildings all around Redmond, Washington. That was hardly the case in 1983, when I first saw the product that was destined to evolve into Windows. Microsoft's headquarters were merely a small building next to the Burgermaster in Bellevue, another Seattle suburb. Then eight years old, the company had grown to about 400 people. It was primarily known as the maker of BASIC programs for many systems, and of MS-DOS, an operating system it had sold to IBM a few years earlier.

Many different companies during that period made computers that ran MS-DOS, but the problem was that these computers weren't all compatible with one another. IBM's version, called PC-DOS, was one standard, but companies like Digital Equipment Corp., Texas Instruments, and HP all made systems with different graphics devices.

Over the next few years, the industry would move to a world of "IBM compatibility," but many of these systems couldn't run applications designed specifically for the IBM PC.









"We Bet the Entire Company On It"

That was one of the key goals behind the project that was to become Windows. Back then, it was called "Interface Manager," and when I first saw it, I was working for a magazine called Popular Computing. Interface Manager was being developed by a small team that included Rao Remala, who was Interface Manager's first programmer and worked for Microsoft for more than 20 years in various areas of the business.

Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates clearly remembers how much was riding on that project.

"We weren't kidding that we bet the entire company on it," Gates recalls. "The strange thing was we were a much smaller company at the time. We were competing to establish this platform with companies larger than ourselves."

When Interface Manager was first announced, Microsoft described it as an option that would work on top of all the company's operating systems, including DOS and Xenix, Microsoft's version of Unix.

The idea was that it would provide a single interface to control the bitmapped screen, graphics hardware, and various other I/O devices. The basic foundations of the future Windows were all thereon-screen windows, easy data transfer between programs, graphic icons, and mouse support. One of the key features was a series of menu commands at the bottom of each window, giving a common way of entering commands for all the programs.

Part of the reason this was included was that by the fall of 1983, "integrated software" was the big buzzword in the industry, spurred by the success of Lotus 1-2-3. At this point, a number of new "integrated operating environments" were being developed, including Apple's Lisa, which had shipped earlier that year, and a number of systems that were designed for x86 computersnotably VisiCorp's VisiOn, Quarterdeck's DESQ (which eventually morphed into DESQview), and Digital Research's Concurrent CP/M (notable for enabling multitasking).

Eyeing the Competition

Of course, graphics were a large part of the discussion as well. Apple was working on its Macintosh project at this point, and Digital Research was soon to announce its Graphical Environment Manager (GEM). But everyone was taking cues from work that had been done earlier at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California.

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"Certainly the work done at Palo Alto Research Center, among others, influenced the bet we made to say the company would put all of its energy behind the graphical interface," Gates remembers.

Gates adds that Windows wasn't merely a graphical user interface. "It was actually two things," he says. "It was multiple applications running at a time, sharing the screen and exchanging data, and it was the graphical interface."

Charles Simonyi, who had worked at PARC and was a key architect of Microsoft's applications business in the early days, says that everyone at Microsoft was aware of Windows' potential. "We knew the graphical user interface would be the future," he says, adding that the company expected both Xerox and Apple to be in that arena.

Jeff Raikes, now president of Microsoft's business division, joined the company in 1981 and recalls studying the competition closely.

"Three or four offices down the hall from me, we had a Xerox Star so we could go and understand and play with the graphical user interface," says Raikes, who had worked at Apple and was very familiar with Lisa.

Unleashing Windows 1.0

In November 1983, Microsoft announced Windows to the world, saying it would be available "late in the first quarter of 1984" and that it was designed for systems with two floppy drives, 192KB of RAM, and a mouse. This certainly wouldn't be the last time Microsoft would miss a Windows deadline or underestimate the amount of hardware needed. The actual boxed software for Windows 1.0 launched during the time of the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas in November 1985. By that point, Microsoft was recommending a minimum of 256KB of RAM, or 512KB of RAM and a hard drive for running multiple applications or when running it on top of DOS 3.0 or higher. PC Magazine's first review, in February 1986, pointed out that "Windows strains the limits of current hardware."

"Of the five years of development time that it took to develop Notes, about a third of it ws spent on memory management. It was just staggering, and it wasn't the app, it was just fitting it in memory."

RAY OZZIE, a Microsoft chief of technology officer, on the early days of developing Notes for 16-bit Windows while he was at Iris Associates.

That first version had a large number of utilities and accessories, most of which remain in Windows today, including the Calendar, Notepad, Terminal, Calculator, Clock, Windows Write and Windows Paint, Control Panel, and the Reversi game. The menus had moved to the top of the screen, and the windows couldn't overlap; instead, they could be stacked as tiles, so one was next to another.

The first few versions of Windows were available as an "operating environment" that ran on top of DOS, or, more commonly, as a runtime environment that was included with applications. A few early programs would take advantage of this, notably the Micrografx CAD program called In-A-Vision. Still, most PC users were content to stick with DOS.

Windows 2.0: Overlapping Windows

Microsoft continued to improve Windows over the next few years. The most significant improvements during this period came in December 1987 with the release of Windows 2.0, when icons and overlapping windows were added, and with Windows/386, which took advantage of the abilities of Intel's 80386 processor to run multiple sessions of DOS. This established Windows as a competitor against products like DESQview, which was designed more simply to let you load multiple DOS applications in memory at once, switching among them.

What continued to hold Windows back in the late 1980s was the dearth of applications available for it. Along with In-A-Vision, the most important were Aldus PageMaker, a page layout program, and Microsoft's own Excel spreadsheet. Excel was one of three applications Microsoft had already decided to develop when Charles Simonyi arrived in 1981 and became director of application development. The other two were word processing and database products. But Microsoft focused first on Excel because it had the "best cost-benefit ratio," Simonyi says.

Both PageMaker and Excel had first appeared on the Apple Macintosh, but they were where Microsoft's application strategy really came together. Unlike Lotus, which was focusing on single integrated applications (Symphony on DOS and Jazz on the Macintosh), Microsoft concentrated on large individual applications like Excel and, later, PowerPoint and Word.

Jeff Raikes says he convinced the company to work with the developers of AppleWorks (an older Apple II integrated suite) to create a low-end suite, which became Microsoft Works, to complement the individual large programs such as Excel.

"I had to explain to Bill how we were going to position Works with the rest of the product line. That's when we came up with 'depth users' and 'breadth users,' that whole positioning," Raikes recalls. "It worked."

"I had to explain to Bill how we were going to position Works with the rest of the product line. That's when we came up with 'depth users' and 'breadth users,' that whole positioning. It worked."

JEFF RAIKES, Microsoft employee since 1981; currently president of the company's business division.

Indeed, the depth- and breadth-user concept was the overarching theme of the era for the industry. Each application fell under either low-end or high-end functionality, and integrated or standalone programs. In the low-end standalone category were products like the PFS line; low-end integrated products included AppleWorks and Microsoft Works. There were many high-end integrated packages, such as Symphony, Framework, and Enable; high-end standalone products included Microsoft Word and Excel, along with DOS competitors such as 1-2-3 and WordPerfect.

Though Microsoft had been working on a word processing program for a few years, it was an obvious missing piece of Windows until 1989, when Windows 2.0 and Windows/386 were the versions on the market. That year, first Ami (then from Samna, later acquired by Lotus) and then Word for Windows shipped. As Raikes remembers it, while Excel, which shipped a few years earlier, was mostly ported from the Macintosh version, Word for Windows was a whole new architecture. Simonyi points out that the Mac OS had handled many of the functions Word would need, such as dealing with fonts properly, but they weren't tackled for Windows until Windows 3.0.

Ray Ozzie, now a Microsoft chief technology officer, was starting a company at that time called Iris Associates, which would eventually produce Notes. He recalls how difficult Windows programming was in the early days. Memory management was very tough in 16-bit Windows, but Ozzie decided to stick with it, instead of trying to build a graphics environment of his own. "Because I knew Bill and Steve [Ballmer], after playing with it I talked with them about it," Ozzie says. "I was convinced that they had the will to want to get it right."

Iris Associates eventually signed a development deal with Microsoft and created Notes with Windows in mind; it shipped in December 1989. But memory continued to be an issue. "Of the five years of development time that it took to develop Notes, about a third of it was spent on memory management," Ozzie recalls. "It was just staggering, and it wasn't the app, it was just fitting it in memory."