Windows 1.0 Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Microsoft Windows 1.0 was Microsoft's first effort to implement a graphical-user interface on the PC platform. Windows 1.0 was essentially a front-end to the MS-DOS operating system. It however already included a number of original device drivers, mainly for graphics, which were not managed by MS-DOS at all, but also for the mouse, for the keyboard and for printers.This first version of Windows, which was released in 1985, ran a shell program known as MS-DOS Executive.
One of the interesting aspects of the system were the non-overlapping windows, which were instead tiled. Only dialog boxes could appear over other windows.
Windows 1.0 executables, while having the same .exe extension and initial file header as MS-DOS programs, did not yet contain the so-called MS-DOS stub which prints the "This program must be run under Windows" or similar message and exits when the program is run outside of Windows. Instead, the file header was formatted in such a way as to make DOS reject the executable with a "program too large to fit in memory" error message.
Finally, almost 20 years later, Windows XP is still able to run Windows 1.0 applications to a certain extent.
From the beginning, Windows was intended to multitask programs (although this originally only applied to specially-written applications and for many versions the multitasking was non-preemptive), so Windows program always had their own menu bar rather than switching a single menu bar at the top of the screen like Apple Macintoshes did (and still do).
Another GUI for the PC platform at the time was GEM. It had a nicer look, notably because it copied much more from the Macintosh GUI, notably the trash can, and more generally the desktop interaction. Atari ST 68k-based computers running GEM were sometimes called Jackintoshes as a consequence (see Jack Tramiel). This resemblance later caused legal trouble to the manufacturer, Digital Research, who was obliged to seriously cripple the desktop appearance and functionality of the product.
But GEM was not multitasking, so users had to close one program in order to run another one. Collections of related programs, like GEM Draw, had tricky File menu items like Close (to Edit) to facilitate switching. GEM was merely a GUI toolkit for applications rather than an integration environment like Windows.
An alternative multitasker released shortly before was DESQview, a successor of IBM's failed TopView from 1984. It did not have graphical capabilities initially, but was able to multitask DOS applications in windows.
Windows 1.0 was superseded in 1987 with the release of Windows 2.0.
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