Although it wouldn’t be released until 1985, Microsoft introduced the Windows 1.0 operating system on November 10, 1983.
Almost 30 years later, The New Yorker remembered Bill Gate’s announcement in “The First Windows.” Here is the story’s video:
About 10 years after releasing the original Windows operating system, Microsoft introduced Windows 95, with a little help from the Rolling Stones.
The following excerpt comes from the 2010 Redmond Magazine article, “Happy Anniversary Windows: The Windows Operating System Turns 25.”
“Windows 1.0 got off to an auspicious start on Thursday, Nov. 10, 1983, at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. That’s when Microsoft founder and CEO Gates took the wraps off the first version of the OS. Gates’ original name for Windows was Interface Manager, but Rowland Hanson, a Microsoft marketing guru at the time, is credited with convincing Gates to go with Windows.
….’It was by no means clear who was going to win during the period of the early ’80s when the rush to GUI was on,’ Zachmann says. ‘The success of the PC in 1981-82 was a character mode interface, and graphics were handled only by applications — and rather tentatively.’
That competitive rush included Apple Lisa (the precursor to the Macintosh), Xerox Star, VisiCorp VisiOn, IBM Top View, Compaq Computer Presentation Manager and Digital Research Graphics Environment Manager, Zachmann recalls. ‘It wasn’t clear that Microsoft was going to be successful with its approach because there were a lot of competing alternatives,’ he says. ‘Windows was viewed as the most likely to succeed, [but] there was no guarantee of it at the time.'”
