Dude.. I've been using and coding PCs since the 80s and have watched a million documentaries, every Computer Chronicles episode, etc. and this is by far the best video I've EVER seen on the history of early Windows. So much information I had never known. To say I rarely learn A SINGLE FACT watching a video like this is accurate, but I learned A TON here. THANK YOU!
I agree completely, a most excellent research job. I got my first experience with Windows from the first 1.0 Beta in ''82/'83 when I was running a pirate BBS. Got it from an in-house MS engineer (sent to me as a 2 lb+ bag of floppy disks) and a gaggle of us newbie geeks spent many joyous hours to get that sucker working, same with Windows Server 286 betas. We were all convinced that MS knew we deranged pirates who were brave enough to try anything and share our results with the engineers. We had a LOT of fun thanks to Xerox and MS!
@InLightFilm probably not before the end of the year, it’s two hours long and editing is proceeding very slowly. However I am buying a new laptop that should speed things up a bit, enabling me to more easily work on editing in my spare time.
I was in industry during this period. We used HP desktop computers for our design work, writing our own software. Our first PCs were IBM 286 machines running DOS 3.0. When Windows 3 was released, we made the transition, buying box sets of Windows instructional videos on VHS tape. It was a phase where more time was spent learning the OS than doing our job, but that didn’t last too long. Thanks for the video - it was well done.
Looking forward to your part 2, this was beautifully detailed, I've watched this twice now. Please don't be concerned with video length, the people will watch it. Hope part 2 is out soon! -c
i love how any video regarding the PC industry in the 80s and 90s features a clip from Computer Chronicles at some point. What a legendary show. RIP Gary Kildall
Such an incredible show, probably the greatest archive of the personal computer revolution in existence. Stewart Cheifet was such an amazing host, and he and Gary Kildall complemented each other perfectly.
I love this, always hated how all documentaries about the topic in youtube are just 5 minute quick bites. This is EXACTLY what I was looking for! keep it up, pumped for part 2
So glad you are enjoying the videos! I promise part 2 is coming, the rough draft of the script is 70% done and it’s the next major video I’ll be working on after my current one. Unfortunately it’s probably going to be at least 2-3 months, my current video (fall of OS/2) is around 90 mins long and I’m not sure how long it will take me to edit it.
@@AnotherBoringTopic Here's a tip: Stop making such long videos, it's ok to leave out some details. It's a youtube video, not a book. Also here's the easiest fix.. raise the volume in your editing program, it's too quiet.. you are at like -6db try to get as close to 0db as possible, without clipping.
@@DelsinM yeah, I don't mind waiting, it's the detailed social history which defines this TH-cam creator. If it's removed for brevity, then his videos will just become as generic nd valueless as many other video on tech history. I love this creators work precisely because it is longform and unique, produced by a person clearly passionate and learned in the topic.
Glad you enjoyed it! The rough draft of part 2 is mostly done, I’ll be working on it once I’m done editing the current video. Hopefully be done and released before the end of May(but no guarantees, I am really bad at estimating how long projects will take) :D
You deserve far more subscribers than you have based on the quality and depth of information you have in your videos. This documentary about the Windows is so fascinating.
@@AnotherBoringTopic Of course the secret key to a million subscribers is to post pictures of kittens and puppies on FB....and never, ever post anything causing people to think :) Seriously though, it's like a doctoral thesis on the history of Windows. Bravo!
I would subscribe, but poor quality sound and, most importantly, the fast paces, edited voiceover is to much to handle for non-native English people. And yes, I do undrstand quite alot of it, but must scroll back every 10 secs to fully understand and not miss anything that is said. Such a shame, for what seems a quite interesting history lesson.
@@AnotherBoringTopic Excellent work, where I'd be most interested in your OS/2 video, that hopefully recognizes that IBM was doing something quite special with OS/2 2.1, that I had the pleasure to experience at work, back in the mid 90s, where their preemptive multitasking was on entirely different level and was insanely smooth, and I could be compiling our Borland C++ Panel+ (a windowing and mouse API) DOS app in the background, while playing around with native OS/2 GUI apps, such as asteroids, where I could have multiple asteroids windows open without them dropping a single frame! If you haven't seen the 1993 HAL-PC OS/2 NT Shootout, where David Barnes thoroughly embarrassed Microsoft with their stolid NT 3.1 demo, you're in for a real TREAT, but don't get me wrong, as I had a successful career in part thanks to MS Windows, where for the 32-bit app we released, we used both Win32s to target 16-bit Windows (development was purely on the rock-solid Windows NT, with an MS SQL Server backend), plus incorporated the SQL based Jet database engine, that powered Access, for local database support (as it was royalty free), that I was instrumental in championing, where an MS representative even visited our office in the UK to see how they could better serve us! th-cam.com/video/-DAojx2Hgec/w-d-xo.html (I've skipped ahead to the OS/2 part, which is quite possibly the most enthusiastic tech demo in history!).
Glad you enjoyed it! Part 2 is coming, it’s the next tech history video on my docket once I get the OS/2 video done. Still going to be a few months though, but I will do my best to make the video worth the wait. Thanks for watching and commenting!
@@nickduplooy8845 I am sure Steve Ballmer is out there somewhere shouting down at the video editor software with his title of Chief Video Editor Expert... with zero video editing experience :) Can you believe it ? REVERSI!... :)
I am already half way into the video and I am so excited when another "boring" topic video is made... This is one of the most underrated channels on youtube. Amazing research work. Looking forward to the rest of the videos. Will mention this on forums when there is talk about the history of Windows
Appreciate the compliment! It's a subject I love studying and its been great to not only have an outlet for it, but also to see other people enjoying it.
@@AnotherBoringTopic I really enjoyed your IBM videos and I am really enjoying this one. This is the kind of documentary that deserves to be in a paid platform like curiositystream or similar. It's great to have it here on youtube for free.
Great video. The only thing that bothered me is that Digital Research's GEM Desktop wasn't mentioned, since GEM 1.0 for the PC was released a little before Windows 1.0, in February 1985. The GEM developers had similar challenges getting it to work on PCs of that time, writing drivers, etc. Until the massively successful release of Windows 3.0 in 1990, GEM was still considered a legitimate competitor to Windows. I recall it was bundled with Amstrad's PC clones in 1989, sold here in Australia in Myer department stores. (Though maybe you mentioned GEM in Part 2!)
Really loved this video. I'm a software developer myself currently working in a medium-sized company and this story eerily resembles same disfunction that is going on here. It's hopeful to hear it didn't work out at first, and there were so many course changes, and empty promises. And yet it worked out in the end. My first windows was 98, so and i have a lot of nostalgia for those simplier times. I have never been aware of what win 1 really looked like. Looking forward to further chapters.
*Extensive, exhaustive, far reaching, informative, well paced, top notch content, a masterpiece for the Computer History Museum! Congratulations!* I started mini-computer H/W & S/W development in 1972 then designed & developed original business & industrial systems starting with CP/M-80 in 1979, MP/M-80 in 1981, CocurrentDOS-386 in 1988 and all of the Microsoft platforms along the way and I have to tell you, you are making me relive the days I was proud to ship product after working 80 hour weeks & going 48 hours straight. Likely only Aerospace & Weapons Development teams experienced the same crazy workloads!
Good explanation of the somewhat chaotic development process. By the way I still run Windows 1.04 in Virtualbox on a Ryzen 3 2200 G with 8MB of RAM. The minimal amount of memory Virtualbox supports and I don't even complain about the 18MB of video memory Virtualbox needs to run. I have all Windows releases from 1.04 (1987) till 11 (2022), including the NT releases of the nineties. Windows 1.0 is highly modern again with its tiling windows manager :)
It's funny that 4 MB is the smallest amount of memory you can allocate to a VM in VirtualBox, an absolutely incredible amount of RAM for most PCs from the '80s. Even VBoxManage will return an error if you try allocating less memory: VBoxManage: error: Invalid RAM size: 1 MB (must be in range [4, 2097152] MB)
Anxiously awaiting the next episode! The work that must have gone into this must have been epic. So much reading and other research. Being a fellow documentary producer myself, I know how much effort these things take, so take your time, but hopefully you'll get part 2 released some time!
I really appreciate the compliment(especially from a fellow creator), thanks for taking the time to watch and leave a comment! It definitely takes quite a bit of time to research and write these videos, but I promise that part 2 is coming sooner rather than later :)
What a gem of a video! heck, the foundation of my career's journey began in these days and I had no idea all this was going on. My first glimpse at Windows was called "Windows 286" and it was part of a bundle of my Zenith 286 PC, circa 87. It was so horrifically slow and klunky on this PC i vividly remember thinking, "Wow, looks cool but it needs more horsepower than I have! oh well, back to DOS"
GEM. What a blast to the memory. GEM was a GUI of that era. Ventura desktop publishing as I recall. If you were doing publishing, you got GEM, and I think Wordstar too ?
@@TheScotsalan WordStar never ran under GEM. You might be thinking of 1st Word, released for the Atari ST in 1985 and later ported to the IBM PC as 1st Word Plus.
@@zoomosis Yup. I just remember different platforms for different things. Or different interfaces anyway. I am sure I had GEM at one point at work. On a 286 ICL with 287 maths chip..1MB ram, 20MB HDD. It was bought for CAD, and we ran fastcad on it on dos 3.3. Just reminising 😂👍
@@zoomosisI used GEM on my own Atari ST, and then a few years later on PCs when supporting users of planogram software (designing layouts for convenience stores) in the UK.
Just happened across this video and channel, and Good Christ, you do not have enough subs compared to the quality of your vids. Good, interesting, and captivating long form video essays/histories are very hard to find. The reality is that its less profitable to do this format, so I really appreciate what you do! Stoked for the rest of the series!
@@ethanepperson-jones9952 You realize that it's spam to constantly post these comments over and over, yes? People generally do not come to comments to read dissertations on video quality, or watch someone simp for likes and subscribes. It's nauseating.
@@atlantic_love I posted, 1, count them, 1 comment, to thank the creator for their work, that they posed for free to a public site. You know what you have the right to do? Not read the comment section. Clearly, you don't have enough happiness or entertainment in your life. I really don't understand why you felt it was necessary to scroll down to the comment section of a video you clearly did not care for, and be a obnoxious to people trying to be friendly. You really are so special ❤️🥰
I don't have a computing background, but I love learning about how all of these day to day computing technologies (that we take for granted nowadays) were developed. Thank you.
I can seriously appreciate this, given that Windows 95 was my first OS. It is amazing to see how far we have come in the past 28 years, let alone 42 in this. I can see why DOS has been considered historical, since 2000, after the final official version of MS-DOS. Keep 'em coming; love these videos!! Oh, and it's incredibly clever how the name "Windows" came about! Suitable name!!
i didn't realize Amiga Workbench was out in oct.'85 ..a month before windows.. it shows how far ahead of everything the Amiga Workbench was ..blows my mind
@@Rasterizing Windows November 20, 1985. Amiga Workbench July 23, 1985. MS-DOS August 12, 1981.Workbench was also fully multitasking while Windows was non-preemptive multitasking. Completely different hardware though. Workbench was also programmed by a tiny team of developers.
@@monotonehell In fairness, workbench was amazing - and so was most of the stuff commodore did, especially the problem solving and working around issues. Granted, 'bench came slightly before Windows but DOS had been around a long time before - but you're right, it wasn't nearly as advanced and couldn't really multitask, it was "emulated" by context switching.
This was fantastic! Particularly illuminating to watch in the context of current news stories about tech companies overselling demos or poaching technologies from less agile firms. Cannot wait for part 2… you’ve earned a new subscriber!
Found this Rise of Windows topic very interesting... I'm very enthusiastic in seeing the next part series. I'm very much looking forward to your future content. Thank you for detailed informative content.
So glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for taking the time to leave a comment, I really appreciate it :) I have been obsessed with computer history for about 15 years now and it’s been great to have an outlet for it here on TH-cam
@@AnotherBoringTopic Most Welcome and excellent work putting that video together. I'm actually watching another one of your videos. (RYAD) Have a great weekend dear Sir. Cheers!
Didn't enjoy the video, it's too long and monotonic, but yes Microsoft really did succeed at making and maintaining the world's favorite operating system
Wow! what an excellent, comprehensive and robust exploration of this subject. I was a young programmer when all this was happening. I was at Comdex for the "Smoke & Mirrors" demo and saw it for what it was. Nice job. I immediately subscribed.
Given how slow I am at creating these videos, I don’t dare make any specific promises about when part 2 will come out…however Microsoft did set the “timeliness” bar really low ;) My goal is to put out part 2 before the end of the year 🤞
Thank you for all your hard work in producing this thorough yet concise enough to digest documentary. I've been looking for a video such as this for sometime and am well pleased.
Dang, thought for sure part 2 would be up since I'm viewing it so much later, but alas! Will check out your other material while I wait. Good stuff! 👍👍
I am really slow at content creation, but I promise Part 2 is coming. It’s the next video I’ll be working on (script rough draft is largely complete) after I finish editing Fall of OS/2. I only just started editing it though, so it will be probably be a bit before it’s done.
Great video. What I still dont understand is how Microsoft could ignore the impossibility to create a GUI in graphics mode cause the hardware was not ready for this. They had to move along some further years with the textmode graphics. Therefor I find it interesting that the most used file manager that were also used to start programs were published after Windows 1.0 - especially Norton Commander and XTree. Maybe many programmers were frustrated about how bad Windows 1 was so they started to create these Tools? Especially the late 80s and early 90s was - as I remember it - the time of "PC Tools" and "Norton Utilities". And Microsoft put a file manager into DOS themselves in DOS 5.0 (the DOS shell). Looking foward to your next video and finally... I subscribed to your channel cause your historical research is just awesome. Keep up your great work. I am not sure if this is really something a large audience will appreciate - but I assume many people who watch it DO appreciate it a lot, like I do.
This is fascinating. Thank you for preserving this history in our collective memory. It's so easy to forget how products get started and why they succeed. Especially when the real history gets replaced by fake history coming either from advertising materials or from sensationalized films.
Fantastic video. I was in my early 20s and a graphic designer. I had to work in MS-DOS for a short time and an Amiga for graphics. But, when I saw the first Mac it was like someone had dropped a device from the future. I came in at night to work and wrote all of my college papers on it. It was like I was set free in the same way that AI has done the same making everything so much easier. Anyone remember PhotStyler? The Windows based Photoshop which Adobe bought for their PC version of Photoshop? Crazy times for sure.
@@ZelenoJabko Part 2 is coming, it covers Windows 1 post launch up to Windows 3.0. I expect to record the audio in a few weeks, although there is one video ahead of it so it will probably be at least a couple months before it's ready for release.
Love the video , however just a bit of a suggestion , when editing the video try boosting the audio volume, or use a compressor to level the volume. My audio was nearly on full but could barely hear you. When editing your audio should be well into the yellow , but not clipping red.
Excellent feedback and advice, thank you. Audio has been a perennial issue for me, I do use a studio mic but figuring out the right levels and such has been something of an ongoing experiment. I think you will find the audio quality far better on the next computer history video, the audio quality came out very nicely and I have been editing the levels to stay right at the the top of yellow but not cross into red.
I absolutely loved watching this video it's great how much information you managed to fit in just one hour worth of video however I feel like the level of the audios is a bit too low but besides that I can't wait for you to release part 2.
This video is fantastic, and I cannot wait for the other parts albeit they'll be spars, and I get that... I can tell you're putting real passion into these videos/documentaries. Keep it up.
Glad you enjoyed it and I really appreciate the kind words! Over the past weekend I decided to split Part 2 into two…parts…since the script was heading towards two hours long. So part 2 will cover Windows 2, and part 3 will cover Windows 3.0. Ideally I will record both parts simultaneously in 2-3 weeks, goal is to get them out only a month or two apart. Of course I am terrible at estimating how long a given video will take, so please take that timeframe with a healthy dose of skepticism ;)
I very much enjoyed this documentary and am looking forward to part 2. I'm particularly interested in how windows replaced unix workstations for 3D modelling pipelines
I can’t stop thinking about this video days later! I really want to see Part 2 because I first got to use Windows right at the end of the v2.11 era with a runtime version bundled with (what was then) the only GUI word processor, Ami Pro. We made a few wrong bets back then, using features instead of momentum to make plans, and invested heavily in Ami Pro because it looked like the future more than Word for DOS. (I’m fascinated by Part 1’s implication that Word for Windows was kind of happening even before Word for DOS … I knew about Word for Macintosh though). Both Windows 2 and Windows 95 resembled the Mac more than Windows 3 did, and Windows 2 still worked fully & comfortably in a monochrome mode. I still remember vividly the first time I launched the Windows 2 UI, and all the work that went into it was clear with its intentions and parallels to the Mac. I mostly had experience with DOS, Mac, GS/OS and GEOS for Apple II, so there were many monochrome UIs floating around before 1990. The world of colour computing was still pretty rare before VGA became the baseline with the 486 in the 1990s.
I feel like such a dinosaur here. I was an early Byte Mag subscriber, and I remember the caustic editorials about MS delays and hype. Windows 3 was the first Windows that worked for me. I ran it on a 386 with full and extended RAM. I had a souped up PC with 2MB of RAM, and a hard drive emulator. It was hotter than my company supplied TIPC, which I abandoned except for email, which was a requirement (TI PC’s were “ IBM Compatible” (cough, cough) - TI had internal e-mail when I joined in 1986). Terrific video.
congrats and thx for everything. it's suoer nice to see that this bubble in the youtube cosmos does not only keep its quality and sincerety, it even improves. so many great old talk heads like you who stick to the mission, and so many promising newcomers. it's fantastic, the overall quality keeps imoroving and improving, and what i like at keast as much, the content length gets longer and longer, sometimes approaching 2h full feature film documentary format (shout out to crd, another boring subject, adrians digital basement). would love to see more long-format content from you, too, clint!!!
This was a really good video. Despite already knowing a lot about the history of Windows, I still learned a ton! Can't wait for part 2 to be published.
As someone who worked at Microsoft and read Hard drive book in 1993, I am very impressed with your documentary. The only thing I would say is more than Visicalc, the strategic ambivalence vs. IBM OS/2 was perhaps more important to Microsoft at the time. OS/2 was supposed to be this Unix level OS with true advanced features and GUI that was supposed to replace DOS, instead we got windows and then Windows NT.
Great detail given! I always wondered about some aspects of the relations with xerox etc, this filled in that detail that I hadn't found before, thank you!
Glad you enjoyed the video and thanks for taking the time to leave a comment! Xerox itself…oh boy is there a lot of confusion around PARC and what it did and did not do. At some point I am definitely going to do a video on it
Very welcome documentary, I had learn so many things about this crazy development. Both Apple an Microsoft had miss the A4 paper page simulation of the Xerox project. It was evident that on the standard PC, you can create a semi graphic interface only, To create a GUI you have to supply a graphic card anyway, with serial mouse interface, own processor and memory, using pipes in DOS 3.3 or environ variables for inter tasks communication.
Thanks for the fun and informative rewind into Windows history. I started with 3.11 and got to try 2.0 once or twice. Thanks for making it audio-only friendly as well. I'm not sure what tools you have available, but for future videos, can you normalize the volume level up a bit? Adrian's Digital Basement about blew out my speakers when he came up next in my queue (his levels run a bit hot). :D
Audio is definitely something I am still working on learning. I like to think that each of my videos shows improvement, but I am still finding the right balance. Thanks for taking the time to leave a comment and some constructive feedback!
In my more mature years, I look back and appreciate the contributions Microsoft has made towards usability and most importantly lowering the cost of computing to the point where it was within reach of most people to own one. They've had their up and downs, but their contributions to equipping the world with usable technology has been amazing.
Maybe you should watch the video again - Microsoft did not contribute the useabilty of the GUI, they copied others before them. Hardware costs were reduced by companies sourcing from the Far East. Microsoft software was never cheap - Amstrad's boss for example complained that the cost of Windows was the most significant single factor in the cost of their PCs.
@@lexlayabout5757 It doesn't surprise me that the OS is more expensive than any individual HW component. Still, you can't ignore how drastically their work lowered the price of operating systems and made computers more affordable for families. We never saw consumer market penetration until Windows 3.0 was released. It was an incredible game changer and one of the top 10 moments in computing history.
@@lexlayabout5757 Later Windows versions definitely contributed to GUI standards. The taskbar has become the norm in OS no matter what form it takes (Mac OS' dock is a form of taskbar).
@@osu9400Wrote : _" We never saw consumer market penetration until Windows 3.0 was released."_ IDK in what part of the world you were at the time, but most people under the age of 40 tha I knew had a home computer well before Windows 3.0 in 1990, only it was not usually an IBM compatible. I had an Amstrad running CP/M, but there were lots of BBC Micros and Sinclair Spectrums around.
Top view, Desqview, Windows 1.x... did all of those way back when. Wrote code for the big switch message pump until MFC. Nowadays I find myself poking, pinching and swiping non-touch screens on laptops and desktops but still prefer to write C++.
Congratulations very factually rich program, on thing you missed was the Digital Research "GEM " Gui which I remember was released slightly prior to Windows. It was popular here in Europe for a short time. I have an original Win 1.1 in my loft somewhere, which I used in early '86 to be able to run some Mac like DTP programs on a PCXT with 1M of RAM, it was not great but a major step up from my previous company who had a multi user "office automation" box which was basically 16 users sharing on a single 68000 - which meant that using some commands - like "calculate" on the spread sheet equated to take a long coffee break.
This video made the history of Windows far more intriguing then most of TV shows out there! Can't wait for part 2! In the meantime I think I'll devour all the other videos of the channel :)
Incredible good content! Too bad the audio is so low that I can hardly hear it from my laptop with all volume controls at max. A tip for future videos: use an audio processor or at least normalize the audio. Way to good content to be skipped by people, because they can`t her the commentary.
I think I caught the NeXT video first, and now I'm working through your other videos. Excellent work & research. A lot of pictures, scans, & details that I wasn't aware of. There is one major missing piece here, though: Digital Research, CP/M, & GEM. Digital Research's DOS competitor (formerly CPM/86, then Concurrent DOS), and it's efforts to develop a GUI, which was released for the PC as GEM in February 1985, beating Windows to market by 9 months, and was *far* more advanced and Mac-like, ran on top of both DR's DOS & Microsoft/IBM's DOS, and ran on 8088 machines to boot (though slow). A big part of Bill Gates' rush to market was to beat DR to market and freeze them out, and he saw them as probably the biggest threat. I can't remember if it was Stewart Chiefet (host of the Computer Chronicles), or someone else involved with the TV show, but after Gary Kildall (founder of DR & wrote CP/M originally) died young in the early 90s, they said in an interview that Bill Gates semi-religious watched the show and read all of DR's briefs & Kildall's talks, because Kildall would detail exactly how his stuff technically worked and their product roadmap, and Gates used that to guide his own products and designs, often copying features directly that they hadn't though of previous, made his products incompatible on purpose, and make vaporware announcements & other product strategies to destroy his competitor; as opposed to Kildall, who was more of a "futurist" and friendly academic type. They had someone from Microsoft basically quote Bill as saying he was a technical genius but an idiot businessman. GEM also ran on other computers too... it ran on the Amstrad in Europe, and was built-in to the Atari ST, but because of Microsoft's moves & anti-trust tactics with the OEMs (& it was also slow on older 8-bit & 8088 machines), they discontinued it super early before machines even got fast enough to run it.
One angle that I think is underexplored in most tellings of the story of Windows is hardware abstraction. Windows had drivers for all major PC video cards, from CGA to Tandy to Hercules to EGA and in some versions even VGA. And for numerous mice and printers. It even had versions for computers that weren't even real IBM compatibles, like the Zenith Z-100 or DEC Rainbow. I've even heard those early Windows releases described as abstraction layers for developers first and environments for the end users second, and Gates' original vision you mentioned seems to fit that narrative.
In lieu of making a six hour video, part 2 will solely cover Windows 2 and 3. It may stretch to Windows 3.1 but I’m betting that will be the start of part 3.
While discussing MS-DOS the video shows Gary Kildall demonstrating CP/M, which was the forerunner of MS-Dos, eventually. Great video. Wish I had found it earlier.
Wow... coming from watching the OS/2 videos before this one... this was a fantastic new angle that totally changed my perspective. While the disaster of OS/2 is a fairly well-known story in online tech circles, I was totally unaware of the development hell behind the original Windows 1.01! In the OS/2 videos, it seemed that _everything_ that could have went wrong for IBM _did_. This video shows it was certainly not smooth sailing for Microsoft either, in the beginning. I also must compliment the quality of and effort put into these documentaries! Very well put; to-the-point while also detailed. Light touches of humor here and there, too, much appreciated. Despite the channel name, your videos are _anything_ but boring to me! These docu series/es have kept me entrained for many hours! I also must wonder if that 'blowing off steam' joke right after introducing Gabe Newell's name was intentional! Anyway, great work @Another Boring Topic! Looking forward to watching the next 4-5 videos!
I really appreciate the narration and valuable extracts of historical information. More Boring Topics please! Now if excuse me I need to dig the source code of Windows 1.0, hopefully I can find it.
I can still remember the day in 1989 I came back to my office after a visit to head office in the city. One of the guys there gave me a copy of Windows 3.0 on about 25 3.5 inch disks. I installed it and when it was finished just the flash screen was amazing!
@5:48 The Star had very little impact besides introducing the desktop metaphor, drag and drop (implemented slightly differently), cut and pastel, file versioning built straight into the file system, network drives, networking in general, and most of the other user interface conventions used in GUIs today. The Macintosh GUI was a straight up cut and paste from the Star, with the more difficult to implement features removed. Saying the Star had "very little impact" is like saying the Velvet Underground were an obscure art band.
Was born in ‘83 so remember lot of the old computers as a kid. Never fully the understood the difference between mac and windows until after I graduated in the 2000 and saw a mac, remembered the interface from a kid but thought it was a depreciated windows version. At home I had a green text one with Oregon trail on a hard disk.
Thank you for the compliment, I’m glad you enjoyed it! Part 2 is getting close to being ready for recording. I wound up splitting it in half as my original intention of covering both Windows 2/386 and Windows 3.0 in one video resulted in a script approaching two hours long. So part 2 will now solely cover Windows 2/386 and part 3 will solely cover Windows 3.0. I’ll probably stick to this format going forward as well, with each entry just looking at a single Windows release. I am (as usual) well behind where I was hoping to be, however I only have two points to finish covering and one timeline issue to finish researching (two sources give wildly conflicting timelines for a key event in Windows 2 development) and then part 2 will be ready for recording and editing. The script for part 3 is close enough to ready that I’m going to try to get it done and released before the end of summer as well. So the current planned cadence for this summer is RoW part 2, NeXT part 2, RoW part 3. Of course, the usual caveats about this planned schedule being at best a semi-educated guess apply. ;)
This is excellent, and must have been a lot of work! Do consider upgrading your microphone, though. This is the first of your videos that TH-cam recommended to me and I almost hit the back button when I heard the audio quality. I'm glad I didn't, but its definitely a factor in viewer retention.
I have learned a lot of (mildly painful) lessons about audio(and video…and general production) over the past few years, I’d like to think I am running out of things to do wrong ;) I do have a brand new mic (actually I have two…long story) that I switched to for upcoming videos, and I think I have a much better recording environment than prior, so hopefully there is a noticeable jump in quality going forward.
@@AnotherBoringTopic sweet... Btw, was there a part 2 for the Steve Jobs Next video you did? That was excellent and was looking to watch that but couldn't find it
That one has been stuck in limbo for well over a year. I intended to get it out the door this past fall, but I am just not happy with the script currently. Until that changes, it’s unfortunately on the back burner.
@@AnotherBoringTopic totally understand and thanks for replying. There's at least one guy hoping to see that but I know your videos must take a LOT of effort/time, so I'll hope to see part 2 one day... Keep doing what you do, it's really good 😊
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Dude.. I've been using and coding PCs since the 80s and have watched a million documentaries, every Computer Chronicles episode, etc. and this is by far the best video I've EVER seen on the history of early Windows. So much information I had never known. To say I rarely learn A SINGLE FACT watching a video like this is accurate, but I learned A TON here. THANK YOU!
Glad you enjoyed it and many thanks for the kind words!
I agree completely, a most excellent research job. I got my first experience with Windows from the first 1.0 Beta in ''82/'83 when I was running a pirate BBS. Got it from an in-house MS engineer (sent to me as a 2 lb+ bag of floppy disks) and a gaggle of us newbie geeks spent many joyous hours to get that sucker working, same with Windows Server 286 betas. We were all convinced that MS knew we deranged pirates who were brave enough to try anything and share our results with the engineers. We had a LOT of fun thanks to Xerox and MS!
When will part 2 be released?
@InLightFilm probably not before the end of the year, it’s two hours long and editing is proceeding very slowly.
However I am buying a new laptop that should speed things up a bit, enabling me to more easily work on editing in my spare time.
Thank you for your effort. We really appreciate your work. @@AnotherBoringTopic
For context around 5:05, the setup cost in Jan. 2023 dollars was a bit over $250,000 and each additional 'star' was nearly $55,000.
I was in industry during this period. We used HP desktop computers for our design work, writing our own software. Our first PCs were IBM 286 machines running DOS 3.0. When Windows 3 was released, we made the transition, buying box sets of Windows instructional videos on VHS tape. It was a phase where more time was spent learning the OS than doing our job, but that didn’t last too long. Thanks for the video - it was well done.
Does anyone remember the Intel 386 486 585 (Pentium) processor handbook ?
Can you confirm the time period you mean? Seems you mean 1987-1988.
hour long videos of old computer stuff? This is right up my alley.
Looking forward to your part 2, this was beautifully detailed, I've watched this twice now.
Please don't be concerned with video length, the people will watch it.
Hope part 2 is out soon!
-c
i love how any video regarding the PC industry in the 80s and 90s features a clip from Computer Chronicles at some point. What a legendary show. RIP Gary Kildall
Such an incredible show, probably the greatest archive of the personal computer revolution in existence. Stewart Cheifet was such an amazing host, and he and Gary Kildall complemented each other perfectly.
Stewart insisting that its archive get donated to the Internet archive was one of his greatest contributions to sharing computer history.
I love this, always hated how all documentaries about the topic in youtube are just 5 minute quick bites. This is EXACTLY what I was looking for! keep it up, pumped for part 2
Nah these quick documentaries are great, this is boring, monotonic and puts me to sleep.
@@beardsntoolsBut you just HAD to comment on it. Lol 😂
@@david-spliso1928 Yeah so?
Please don't let us down for the rest of this series! Been watching your channel front to back after getting recommended this. Fantastic work!
So glad you are enjoying the videos! I promise part 2 is coming, the rough draft of the script is 70% done and it’s the next major video I’ll be working on after my current one.
Unfortunately it’s probably going to be at least 2-3 months, my current video (fall of OS/2) is around 90 mins long and I’m not sure how long it will take me to edit it.
@@AnotherBoringTopic Here's a tip: Stop making such long videos, it's ok to leave out some details. It's a youtube video, not a book. Also here's the easiest fix.. raise the volume in your editing program, it's too quiet.. you are at like -6db try to get as close to 0db as possible, without clipping.
@@beardsntools I agree with the audio recommendation, but the details are what make this stuff fascinating.
@@AnotherBoringTopic Part 2 better ship by the time the snow falls! ; )
@@DelsinM yeah, I don't mind waiting, it's the detailed social history which defines this TH-cam creator. If it's removed for brevity, then his videos will just become as generic nd valueless as many other video on tech history. I love this creators work precisely because it is longform and unique, produced by a person clearly passionate and learned in the topic.
Looks like the YT algo is recommending this vid to people. Well deserved. Subscribed and looking forward to part 2.
So glad you enjoyed it!
This really went far further in depth than I hoped for, thank you for making this for everyone to see and I hope the sequel is made soon!
Glad you enjoyed it! The rough draft of part 2 is mostly done, I’ll be working on it once I’m done editing the current video. Hopefully be done and released before the end of May(but no guarantees, I am really bad at estimating how long projects will take) :D
@@AnotherBoringTopic You need Bill Gates "encouraging" you to work faster :) LOL
@@mgoad08 😂😂😂
You deserve far more subscribers than you have based on the quality and depth of information you have in your videos. This documentary about the Windows is so fascinating.
Appreciate the compliment, glad you enjoyed it!
@@AnotherBoringTopic Of course the secret key to a million subscribers is to post pictures of kittens and puppies on FB....and never, ever post anything causing people to think :) Seriously though, it's like a doctoral thesis on the history of Windows. Bravo!
Just got another one, from me!
I would subscribe, but poor quality sound and, most importantly, the fast paces, edited voiceover is to much to handle for non-native English people. And yes, I do undrstand quite alot of it, but must scroll back every 10 secs to fully understand and not miss anything that is said. Such a shame, for what seems a quite interesting history lesson.
@@AnotherBoringTopic Excellent work, where I'd be most interested in your OS/2 video, that hopefully recognizes that IBM was doing something quite special with OS/2 2.1, that I had the pleasure to experience at work, back in the mid 90s, where their preemptive multitasking was on entirely different level and was insanely smooth, and I could be compiling our Borland C++ Panel+ (a windowing and mouse API) DOS app in the background, while playing around with native OS/2 GUI apps, such as asteroids, where I could have multiple asteroids windows open without them dropping a single frame!
If you haven't seen the 1993 HAL-PC OS/2 NT Shootout, where David Barnes thoroughly embarrassed Microsoft with their stolid NT 3.1 demo, you're in for a real TREAT, but don't get me wrong, as I had a successful career in part thanks to MS Windows, where for the 32-bit app we released, we used both Win32s to target 16-bit Windows (development was purely on the rock-solid Windows NT, with an MS SQL Server backend), plus incorporated the SQL based Jet database engine, that powered Access, for local database support (as it was royalty free), that I was instrumental in championing, where an MS representative even visited our office in the UK to see how they could better serve us! th-cam.com/video/-DAojx2Hgec/w-d-xo.html (I've skipped ahead to the OS/2 part, which is quite possibly the most enthusiastic tech demo in history!).
Excellent video - many thanks for producing it. I was hoping there was a part 2 or part 3 - I'll keep an eye out for a future release.
Glad you enjoyed it! Part 2 is coming, it’s the next tech history video on my docket once I get the OS/2 video done. Still going to be a few months though, but I will do my best to make the video worth the wait.
Thanks for watching and commenting!
@@AnotherBoringTopic you’re taking a page out of Microsoft’s book 😂 I’ll be looking out for part 2
@@AnotherBoringTopic Hey, atleast you've learned from Bill, and not overpromising on the release date, lol
@@nickduplooy8845 I am sure Steve Ballmer is out there somewhere shouting down at the video editor software with his title of Chief Video Editor Expert... with zero video editing experience :)
Can you believe it ? REVERSI!... :)
Really looking forward to part 2. Having all parts released now would be great but whaddya gonna do
This is a THRILLER, way better than anything that you can find on TV. Mad respect
🙏💚
I am already half way into the video and I am so excited when another "boring" topic video is made... This is one of the most underrated channels on youtube. Amazing research work. Looking forward to the rest of the videos. Will mention this on forums when there is talk about the history of Windows
Appreciate the compliment! It's a subject I love studying and its been great to not only have an outlet for it, but also to see other people enjoying it.
@@AnotherBoringTopic I really enjoyed your IBM videos and I am really enjoying this one. This is the kind of documentary that deserves to be in a paid platform like curiositystream or similar. It's great to have it here on youtube for free.
Great video. The only thing that bothered me is that Digital Research's GEM Desktop wasn't mentioned, since GEM 1.0 for the PC was released a little before Windows 1.0, in February 1985. The GEM developers had similar challenges getting it to work on PCs of that time, writing drivers, etc. Until the massively successful release of Windows 3.0 in 1990, GEM was still considered a legitimate competitor to Windows. I recall it was bundled with Amstrad's PC clones in 1989, sold here in Australia in Myer department stores.
(Though maybe you mentioned GEM in Part 2!)
Really loved this video. I'm a software developer myself currently working in a medium-sized company and this story eerily resembles same disfunction that is going on here. It's hopeful to hear it didn't work out at first, and there were so many course changes, and empty promises. And yet it worked out in the end.
My first windows was 98, so and i have a lot of nostalgia for those simplier times. I have never been aware of what win 1 really looked like.
Looking forward to further chapters.
*Extensive, exhaustive, far reaching, informative, well paced, top notch content, a masterpiece for the Computer History Museum! Congratulations!*
I started mini-computer H/W & S/W development in 1972 then designed & developed original business & industrial systems starting with CP/M-80 in 1979, MP/M-80 in 1981, CocurrentDOS-386 in 1988 and all of the Microsoft platforms along the way and I have to tell you, you are making me relive the days I was proud to ship product after working 80 hour weeks & going 48 hours straight. Likely only Aerospace & Weapons Development teams experienced the same crazy workloads!
Good explanation of the somewhat chaotic development process. By the way I still run Windows 1.04 in Virtualbox on a Ryzen 3 2200 G with 8MB of RAM. The minimal amount of memory Virtualbox supports and I don't even complain about the 18MB of video memory Virtualbox needs to run. I have all Windows releases from 1.04 (1987) till 11 (2022), including the NT releases of the nineties.
Windows 1.0 is highly modern again with its tiling windows manager :)
It's funny that 4 MB is the smallest amount of memory you can allocate to a VM in VirtualBox, an absolutely incredible amount of RAM for most PCs from the '80s. Even VBoxManage will return an error if you try allocating less memory:
VBoxManage: error: Invalid RAM size: 1 MB (must be in range [4, 2097152] MB)
This was my first video I saw of this channel, and it’s one of the most interesting I’ve ever seen! 🤟 keep it up man can’t wait for part 2!!!
This video is a seminal work. So much details packed into the masterful presentation! Looking forward to the second part. Thank you 🎉
Appreciate the compliment! Thanks so much for taking the time to watch and comment!
Anxiously awaiting the next episode! The work that must have gone into this must have been epic. So much reading and other research. Being a fellow documentary producer myself, I know how much effort these things take, so take your time, but hopefully you'll get part 2 released some time!
I really appreciate the compliment(especially from a fellow creator), thanks for taking the time to watch and leave a comment!
It definitely takes quite a bit of time to research and write these videos, but I promise that part 2 is coming sooner rather than later :)
@@AnotherBoringTopic Happy to hear part 2 is still coming!
can’t wait !!!!
Part 2 is vapour ware.
What a gem of a video! heck, the foundation of my career's journey began in these days and I had no idea all this was going on. My first glimpse at Windows was called "Windows 286" and it was part of a bundle of my Zenith 286 PC, circa 87. It was so horrifically slow and klunky on this PC i vividly remember thinking, "Wow, looks cool but it needs more horsepower than I have! oh well, back to DOS"
GEM. What a blast to the memory. GEM was a GUI of that era. Ventura desktop publishing as I recall. If you were doing publishing, you got GEM, and I think Wordstar too ?
@@TheScotsalan WordStar never ran under GEM. You might be thinking of 1st Word, released for the Atari ST in 1985 and later ported to the IBM PC as 1st Word Plus.
@@zoomosis Yup. I just remember different platforms for different things. Or different interfaces anyway. I am sure I had GEM at one point at work. On a 286 ICL with 287 maths chip..1MB ram, 20MB HDD. It was bought for CAD, and we ran fastcad on it on dos 3.3. Just reminising 😂👍
@@zoomosisI used GEM on my own Atari ST, and then a few years later on PCs when supporting users of planogram software (designing layouts for convenience stores) in the UK.
Just happened across this video and channel, and Good Christ, you do not have enough subs compared to the quality of your vids. Good, interesting, and captivating long form video essays/histories are very hard to find. The reality is that its less profitable to do this format, so I really appreciate what you do! Stoked for the rest of the series!
Appreciate the compliment, glad you are enjoying the videos!
Who cares what you think about good quality is? The content creator knows what he's doing.
@@atlantic_love you do realize I am complementing his work... Right?
@@ethanepperson-jones9952 You realize that it's spam to constantly post these comments over and over, yes? People generally do not come to comments to read dissertations on video quality, or watch someone simp for likes and subscribes. It's nauseating.
@@atlantic_love I posted, 1, count them, 1 comment, to thank the creator for their work, that they posed for free to a public site. You know what you have the right to do? Not read the comment section.
Clearly, you don't have enough happiness or entertainment in your life. I really don't understand why you felt it was necessary to scroll down to the comment section of a video you clearly did not care for, and be a obnoxious to people trying to be friendly. You really are so special ❤️🥰
I don't have a computing background, but I love learning about how all of these day to day computing technologies (that we take for granted nowadays) were developed. Thank you.
I can seriously appreciate this, given that Windows 95 was my first OS. It is amazing to see how far we have come in the past 28 years, let alone 42 in this. I can see why DOS has been considered historical, since 2000, after the final official version of MS-DOS. Keep 'em coming; love these videos!! Oh, and it's incredibly clever how the name "Windows" came about! Suitable name!!
Fascinating. Your efforts are much appreciated. Looking forward to the next instalment.
Awesome! Can't wait for part 2.
You gonna wait a while...
Super interesting..well researched.
Oh man, i didn't realize before investing the time there were no other parts
I am also eagerly looking forward to part 2 but it was definitely worth the time to see this early part. Thank you!
@@HashCracker it was a too boring topic, l guess (points at the name of the channel) 😜
i didn't realize Amiga Workbench was out in oct.'85 ..a month before windows.. it shows how far ahead of everything the Amiga Workbench was ..blows my mind
I used Amiga Workbench in 1988, so to me, having a GUI was the standard. However, I would not say DOS was difficult to master.
Similar deal for me. I would say the transition to DOS was aided by the Amiga CLI considering how many common commands there were, dir / cd etc
Well, considering Windows came before Workbench and MS-DOS appeared before Amiga DOS....
@@Rasterizing Windows November 20, 1985. Amiga Workbench July 23, 1985. MS-DOS August 12, 1981.Workbench was also fully multitasking while Windows was non-preemptive multitasking. Completely different hardware though. Workbench was also programmed by a tiny team of developers.
@@monotonehell In fairness, workbench was amazing - and so was most of the stuff commodore did, especially the problem solving and working around issues.
Granted, 'bench came slightly before Windows but DOS had been around a long time before - but you're right, it wasn't nearly as advanced and couldn't really multitask, it was "emulated" by context switching.
@@RasterizingUmmmm what? Workbench released July 85 with the Amiga 1000. The complete failure that was Windows 1.0 was released November 85.
This video is truly underrated. Your work deserve huge more mate!
Appreciate the compliment, glad you enjoyed it!
@@AnotherBoringTopic before summer 2023? Don't promise what you cannot deliver.
Still waiting for the sequel, the fall of curtains.
@@AnotherBoringTopic I’m I’m gonna gonna get you something from there 😊😊😊😊😊😊ppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp
@@AnotherBoringTopic I’m so happy happy 😆😆 lol 😝 I’m a fan fan fan and and a pppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp
This documentary is easily the best and most unique coverage of this moment.
I'm going the next one is out soon, and thank you again.
This was fantastic! Particularly illuminating to watch in the context of current news stories about tech companies overselling demos or poaching technologies from less agile firms. Cannot wait for part 2… you’ve earned a new subscriber!
Glad you enjoyed the video! And thanks so much for the sub!
Found this Rise of Windows topic very interesting... I'm very enthusiastic in seeing the next part series. I'm very much looking forward to your future content. Thank you for detailed informative content.
So glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for taking the time to leave a comment, I really appreciate it :) I have been obsessed with computer history for about 15 years now and it’s been great to have an outlet for it here on TH-cam
@@AnotherBoringTopic Most Welcome and excellent work putting that video together. I'm actually watching another one of your videos. (RYAD) Have a great weekend dear Sir. Cheers!
Didn't enjoy the video, it's too long and monotonic, but yes Microsoft really did succeed at making and maintaining the world's favorite operating system
Wow! what an excellent, comprehensive and robust exploration of this subject. I was a young programmer when all this was happening. I was at Comdex for the "Smoke & Mirrors" demo and saw it for what it was. Nice job. I immediately subscribed.
So glad you enjoyed it and thanks for the sub!
Really great! Can't wait for the next installment. Hopefully it's more timely than Windows 1.01 was :)
Given how slow I am at creating these videos, I don’t dare make any specific promises about when part 2 will come out…however Microsoft did set the “timeliness” bar really low ;)
My goal is to put out part 2 before the end of the year 🤞
SO...WHEN IS PART 2 COMING OUT REALLY?
Thank you for all your hard work in producing this thorough yet concise enough to digest documentary. I've been looking for a video such as this for sometime and am well pleased.
Appreciate the compliment, glad you enjoyed it!
Dang, thought for sure part 2 would be up since I'm viewing it so much later, but alas! Will check out your other material while I wait. Good stuff! 👍👍
I am really slow at content creation, but I promise Part 2 is coming. It’s the next video I’ll be working on (script rough draft is largely complete) after I finish editing Fall of OS/2. I only just started editing it though, so it will be probably be a bit before it’s done.
@@AnotherBoringTopic It's great stuff, don't get me wrong. Thanks for your hard work! 🙏 Product is great. Checking out IBM now. 👍
Great video. What I still dont understand is how Microsoft could ignore the impossibility to create a GUI in graphics mode cause the hardware was not ready for this. They had to move along some further years with the textmode graphics. Therefor I find it interesting that the most used file manager that were also used to start programs were published after Windows 1.0 - especially Norton Commander and XTree.
Maybe many programmers were frustrated about how bad Windows 1 was so they started to create these Tools? Especially the late 80s and early 90s was - as I remember it - the time of "PC Tools" and "Norton Utilities". And Microsoft put a file manager into DOS themselves in DOS 5.0 (the DOS shell).
Looking foward to your next video and finally... I subscribed to your channel cause your historical research is just awesome.
Keep up your great work.
I am not sure if this is really something a large audience will appreciate - but I assume many people who watch it DO appreciate it a lot, like I do.
Most underrated channel on youtube. Seriously. Geat work
Thanks for watching, glad you enjoyed it!
This is fascinating. Thank you for preserving this history in our collective memory. It's so easy to forget how products get started and why they succeed. Especially when the real history gets replaced by fake history coming either from advertising materials or from sensationalized films.
Very well done summary of the volatile early 80s at Microsoft! I'm looking forward to the next segment.
Thank you for the compliment, glad you enjoyed it!
Fantastic video. I was in my early 20s and a graphic designer. I had to work in MS-DOS for a short time and an Amiga for graphics. But, when I saw the first Mac it was like someone had dropped a device from the future. I came in at night to work and wrote all of my college papers on it. It was like I was set free in the same way that AI has done the same making everything so much easier. Anyone remember PhotStyler? The Windows based Photoshop which Adobe bought for their PC version of Photoshop? Crazy times for sure.
Loved this video. I am totally your audience.👍
Truly great video! Looking forward part 2!
Glad you enjoyed it!
@@AnotherBoringTopic where is part 2? You like lying to your audience?
@@ZelenoJabko Part 2 is coming, it covers Windows 1 post launch up to Windows 3.0. I expect to record the audio in a few weeks, although there is one video ahead of it so it will probably be at least a couple months before it's ready for release.
Love the video , however just a bit of a suggestion , when editing the video try boosting the audio volume, or use a compressor to level the volume. My audio was nearly on full but could barely hear you. When editing your audio should be well into the yellow , but not clipping red.
Excellent feedback and advice, thank you. Audio has been a perennial issue for me, I do use a studio mic but figuring out the right levels and such has been something of an ongoing experiment.
I think you will find the audio quality far better on the next computer history video, the audio quality came out very nicely and I have been editing the levels to stay right at the the top of yellow but not cross into red.
I absolutely loved watching this video it's great how much information you managed to fit in just one hour worth of video however I feel like the level of the audios is a bit too low but besides that I can't wait for you to release part 2.
Good to hear this documentary. Looking forward to future episodes. :)
Glad you enjoyed it!
This video is fantastic, and I cannot wait for the other parts albeit they'll be spars, and I get that... I can tell you're putting real passion into these videos/documentaries. Keep it up.
Can't wait for part two. I'm sure it will come when ready, you pour a ton of effort in these so well worth the wait. This really was captivating.
Glad you enjoyed it and I really appreciate the kind words!
Over the past weekend I decided to split Part 2 into two…parts…since the script was heading towards two hours long. So part 2 will cover Windows 2, and part 3 will cover Windows 3.0. Ideally I will record both parts simultaneously in 2-3 weeks, goal is to get them out only a month or two apart. Of course I am terrible at estimating how long a given video will take, so please take that timeframe with a healthy dose of skepticism ;)
I very much enjoyed this documentary and am looking forward to part 2. I'm particularly interested in how windows replaced unix workstations for 3D modelling pipelines
I can’t stop thinking about this video days later! I really want to see Part 2 because I first got to use Windows right at the end of the v2.11 era with a runtime version bundled with (what was then) the only GUI word processor, Ami Pro.
We made a few wrong bets back then, using features instead of momentum to make plans, and invested heavily in Ami Pro because it looked like the future more than Word for DOS. (I’m fascinated by Part 1’s implication that Word for Windows was kind of happening even before Word for DOS … I knew about Word for Macintosh though).
Both Windows 2 and Windows 95 resembled the Mac more than Windows 3 did, and Windows 2 still worked fully & comfortably in a monochrome mode. I still remember vividly the first time I launched the Windows 2 UI, and all the work that went into it was clear with its intentions and parallels to the Mac. I mostly had experience with DOS, Mac, GS/OS and GEOS for Apple II, so there were many monochrome UIs floating around before 1990. The world of colour computing was still pretty rare before VGA became the baseline with the 486 in the 1990s.
I feel like such a dinosaur here. I was an early Byte Mag subscriber, and I remember the caustic editorials about MS delays and hype. Windows 3 was the first Windows that worked for me. I ran it on a 386 with full and extended RAM. I had a souped up PC with 2MB of RAM, and a hard drive emulator. It was hotter than my company supplied TIPC, which I abandoned except for email, which was a requirement (TI PC’s were “ IBM Compatible” (cough, cough) - TI had internal e-mail when I joined in 1986). Terrific video.
congrats and thx for everything. it's suoer nice to see that this bubble in the youtube cosmos does not only keep its quality and sincerety, it even improves. so many great old talk heads like you who stick to the mission, and so many promising newcomers. it's fantastic, the overall quality keeps imoroving and improving, and what i like at keast as much, the content length gets longer and longer, sometimes approaching 2h full feature film documentary format (shout out to crd, another boring subject, adrians digital basement). would love to see more long-format content from you, too, clint!!!
This was a really good video. Despite already knowing a lot about the history of Windows, I still learned a ton! Can't wait for part 2 to be published.
Great video - I love this type of stuff. Eagerly awaiting part 2 and beyond.
Awesome video and research. I hope to see the next chapters soon!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Part 2 is coming, I’ve edited 52 minutes of it so far (out of 1:54). Should hopefully be ready for release in mid-January
Great job. I was a teenager during those years and I say you nailed it.
Appreciate the compliment, glad you enjoyed the video! I did my best to do justice to it, it’s such a fascinating period to study
As someone who worked at Microsoft and read Hard drive book in 1993, I am very impressed with your documentary. The only thing I would say is more than Visicalc, the strategic ambivalence vs. IBM OS/2 was perhaps more important to Microsoft at the time. OS/2 was supposed to be this Unix level OS with true advanced features and GUI that was supposed to replace DOS, instead we got windows and then Windows NT.
Fantastic series. Very well prepared. I'm waiting for the part three already.
This channel is gold. Thanks for your work.
Thank you for making this documentary.
Superbly detailed account. Look forward very much to part 2.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Great detail given! I always wondered about some aspects of the relations with xerox etc, this filled in that detail that I hadn't found before, thank you!
Glad you enjoyed the video and thanks for taking the time to leave a comment!
Xerox itself…oh boy is there a lot of confusion around PARC and what it did and did not do. At some point I am definitely going to do a video on it
This video was the opposite of boring as it was really interesting and informative. Keep up the good work.
Appreciate the compliment, glad you enjoyed it!
Love this. Can't wait for Part 2!
Very welcome documentary, I had learn so many things about this crazy development. Both Apple an Microsoft had miss the A4 paper page simulation of the Xerox project. It was evident that on the standard PC, you can create a semi graphic interface only, To create a GUI you have to supply a graphic card anyway, with serial mouse interface, own processor and memory, using pipes in DOS 3.3 or environ variables for inter tasks communication.
Thanks for the fun and informative rewind into Windows history. I started with 3.11 and got to try 2.0 once or twice. Thanks for making it audio-only friendly as well.
I'm not sure what tools you have available, but for future videos, can you normalize the volume level up a bit? Adrian's Digital Basement about blew out my speakers when he came up next in my queue (his levels run a bit hot). :D
Audio is definitely something I am still working on learning. I like to think that each of my videos shows improvement, but I am still finding the right balance. Thanks for taking the time to leave a comment and some constructive feedback!
Very interesting Windows documentary. Looking forward to part 2.
Very much looking forward to the next episode! Subscribed!
Glad you enjoyed it and thanks for the sub!
In my more mature years, I look back and appreciate the contributions Microsoft has made towards usability and most importantly lowering the cost of computing to the point where it was within reach of most people to own one. They've had their up and downs, but their contributions to equipping the world with usable technology has been amazing.
Maybe you should watch the video again - Microsoft did not contribute the useabilty of the GUI, they copied others before them. Hardware costs were reduced by companies sourcing from the Far East. Microsoft software was never cheap - Amstrad's boss for example complained that the cost of Windows was the most significant single factor in the cost of their PCs.
@@lexlayabout5757 It doesn't surprise me that the OS is more expensive than any individual HW component. Still, you can't ignore how drastically their work lowered the price of operating systems and made computers more affordable for families. We never saw consumer market penetration until Windows 3.0 was released. It was an incredible game changer and one of the top 10 moments in computing history.
@@lexlayabout5757 Later Windows versions definitely contributed to GUI standards. The taskbar has become the norm in OS no matter what form it takes (Mac OS' dock is a form of taskbar).
@@osu9400Wrote : _" We never saw consumer market penetration until Windows 3.0 was released."_
IDK in what part of the world you were at the time, but most people under the age of 40 tha I knew had a home computer well before Windows 3.0 in 1990, only it was not usually an IBM compatible. I had an Amstrad running CP/M, but there were lots of BBC Micros and Sinclair Spectrums around.
Top view, Desqview, Windows 1.x... did all of those way back when. Wrote code for the big switch message pump until MFC. Nowadays I find myself poking, pinching and swiping non-touch screens on laptops and desktops but still prefer to write C++.
Congratulations very factually rich program, on thing you missed was the Digital Research "GEM " Gui which I remember was released slightly prior to Windows. It was popular here in Europe for a short time.
I have an original Win 1.1 in my loft somewhere, which I used in early '86 to be able to run some Mac like DTP programs on a PCXT with 1M of RAM, it was not great but a major step up from my previous company who had a multi user "office automation" box which was basically 16 users sharing on a single 68000 - which meant that using some commands - like "calculate" on the spread sheet equated to take a long coffee break.
This video made the history of Windows far more intriguing then most of TV shows out there! Can't wait for part 2! In the meantime I think I'll devour all the other videos of the channel :)
Glad you enjoyed it!
Incredible good content! Too bad the audio is so low that I can hardly hear it from my laptop with all volume controls at max. A tip for future videos: use an audio processor or at least normalize the audio. Way to good content to be skipped by people, because they can`t her the commentary.
I think I caught the NeXT video first, and now I'm working through your other videos. Excellent work & research. A lot of pictures, scans, & details that I wasn't aware of.
There is one major missing piece here, though: Digital Research, CP/M, & GEM. Digital Research's DOS competitor (formerly CPM/86, then Concurrent DOS), and it's efforts to develop a GUI, which was released for the PC as GEM in February 1985, beating Windows to market by 9 months, and was *far* more advanced and Mac-like, ran on top of both DR's DOS & Microsoft/IBM's DOS, and ran on 8088 machines to boot (though slow). A big part of Bill Gates' rush to market was to beat DR to market and freeze them out, and he saw them as probably the biggest threat. I can't remember if it was Stewart Chiefet (host of the Computer Chronicles), or someone else involved with the TV show, but after Gary Kildall (founder of DR & wrote CP/M originally) died young in the early 90s, they said in an interview that Bill Gates semi-religious watched the show and read all of DR's briefs & Kildall's talks, because Kildall would detail exactly how his stuff technically worked and their product roadmap, and Gates used that to guide his own products and designs, often copying features directly that they hadn't though of previous, made his products incompatible on purpose, and make vaporware announcements & other product strategies to destroy his competitor; as opposed to Kildall, who was more of a "futurist" and friendly academic type. They had someone from Microsoft basically quote Bill as saying he was a technical genius but an idiot businessman. GEM also ran on other computers too... it ran on the Amstrad in Europe, and was built-in to the Atari ST, but because of Microsoft's moves & anti-trust tactics with the OEMs (& it was also slow on older 8-bit & 8088 machines), they discontinued it super early before machines even got fast enough to run it.
Excellent job, thank you.
One angle that I think is underexplored in most tellings of the story of Windows is hardware abstraction. Windows had drivers for all major PC video cards, from CGA to Tandy to Hercules to EGA and in some versions even VGA. And for numerous mice and printers. It even had versions for computers that weren't even real IBM compatibles, like the Zenith Z-100 or DEC Rainbow. I've even heard those early Windows releases described as abstraction layers for developers first and environments for the end users second, and Gates' original vision you mentioned seems to fit that narrative.
Excellent work! I’m very excited for the the next part(s)!
Not boring at all. Extremely interesting. Waiting for part 2.
Glad you enjoyed it!
@@AnotherBoringTopic when you make next video from 1986-2023?
it would take just one freaking part 2???
In lieu of making a six hour video, part 2 will solely cover Windows 2 and 3. It may stretch to Windows 3.1 but I’m betting that will be the start of part 3.
Very well researched, entertaining and informative video. Thank you!
While discussing MS-DOS the video shows Gary Kildall demonstrating CP/M, which was the forerunner of MS-Dos, eventually. Great video. Wish I had found it earlier.
What a great video. Looking forward to the next one. New sub. 🙂
Glad you enjoyed it! Appreciate the sub!
Wow... coming from watching the OS/2 videos before this one... this was a fantastic new angle that totally changed my perspective.
While the disaster of OS/2 is a fairly well-known story in online tech circles, I was totally unaware of the development hell behind the original Windows 1.01!
In the OS/2 videos, it seemed that _everything_ that could have went wrong for IBM _did_. This video shows it was certainly not smooth sailing for Microsoft either, in the beginning.
I also must compliment the quality of and effort put into these documentaries! Very well put; to-the-point while also detailed. Light touches of humor here and there, too, much appreciated.
Despite the channel name, your videos are _anything_ but boring to me! These docu series/es have kept me entrained for many hours!
I also must wonder if that 'blowing off steam' joke right after introducing Gabe Newell's name was intentional!
Anyway, great work @Another Boring Topic! Looking forward to watching the next 4-5 videos!
Appreciate the compliment, glad you are enjoying the videos!
How have I not seen this channel until now??? Subscribed!
Such a great business study video on leadership, management, development and design.
This video is so detailed, so well done and interesting.
I really appreciate the narration and valuable extracts of historical information. More Boring Topics please!
Now if excuse me I need to dig the source code of Windows 1.0, hopefully I can find it.
I can still remember the day in 1989 I came back to my office after a visit to head office in the city. One of the guys there gave me a copy of Windows 3.0 on about 25 3.5 inch disks. I installed it and when it was finished just the flash screen was amazing!
I didn't knowanyone could talk so long without taking a breath. I had a hard time keeping up. That said thanks for the video, very interesting!
A very detailed and concise documentary. Just subbed as a result.
Glad you enjoyed it and thanks for the sub!
I think it's incredible that Portal exists as a euphemism for Gabe's time and pressure in working on Windows.
@5:48 The Star had very little impact besides introducing the desktop metaphor, drag and drop (implemented slightly differently), cut and pastel, file versioning built straight into the file system, network drives, networking in general, and most of the other user interface conventions used in GUIs today. The Macintosh GUI was a straight up cut and paste from the Star, with the more difficult to implement features removed. Saying the Star had "very little impact" is like saying the Velvet Underground were an obscure art band.
This is great. I subscirbed, but can't wait for part 2
Was born in ‘83 so remember lot of the old computers as a kid. Never fully the understood the difference between mac and windows until after I graduated in the 2000 and saw a mac, remembered the interface from a kid but thought it was a depreciated windows version. At home I had a green text one with Oregon trail on a hard disk.
Love this video... hopefully part 2 comes out eventually
Hope to see part 2 soon as part 1 was quite informative and educational which I enjoyed immensely.
Thank you for the compliment, I’m glad you enjoyed it!
Part 2 is getting close to being ready for recording. I wound up splitting it in half as my original intention of covering both Windows 2/386 and Windows 3.0 in one video resulted in a script approaching two hours long. So part 2 will now solely cover Windows 2/386 and part 3 will solely cover Windows 3.0. I’ll probably stick to this format going forward as well, with each entry just looking at a single Windows release.
I am (as usual) well behind where I was hoping to be, however I only have two points to finish covering and one timeline issue to finish researching (two sources give wildly conflicting timelines for a key event in Windows 2 development) and then part 2 will be ready for recording and editing.
The script for part 3 is close enough to ready that I’m going to try to get it done and released before the end of summer as well. So the current planned cadence for this summer is RoW part 2, NeXT part 2, RoW part 3.
Of course, the usual caveats about this planned schedule being at best a semi-educated guess apply. ;)
@@AnotherBoringTopic Thanks for the update! Look forward to it.
This is excellent, and must have been a lot of work! Do consider upgrading your microphone, though. This is the first of your videos that TH-cam recommended to me and I almost hit the back button when I heard the audio quality. I'm glad I didn't, but its definitely a factor in viewer retention.
I have learned a lot of (mildly painful) lessons about audio(and video…and general production) over the past few years, I’d like to think I am running out of things to do wrong ;)
I do have a brand new mic (actually I have two…long story) that I switched to for upcoming videos, and I think I have a much better recording environment than prior, so hopefully there is a noticeable jump in quality going forward.
dude this video was amazing, and the editing fantastic. not to mention matching your video background to the white background of youtube...
Part 2 please. I'm a nerd who loves this stuff like my grandpa loved old history Channel ww2 documentaries 😁
Thanks for watching and appreciate the compliment! Part 2 is coming, I promise :) But it will probably be at least another 3-4 months
@@AnotherBoringTopic sweet... Btw, was there a part 2 for the Steve Jobs Next video you did? That was excellent and was looking to watch that but couldn't find it
That one has been stuck in limbo for well over a year. I intended to get it out the door this past fall, but I am just not happy with the script currently. Until that changes, it’s unfortunately on the back burner.
@@AnotherBoringTopic totally understand and thanks for replying. There's at least one guy hoping to see that but I know your videos must take a LOT of effort/time, so I'll hope to see part 2 one day... Keep doing what you do, it's really good 😊
51:25 -Meanwhile AmigaOS was launched in June 1985 and no comment at all in this documentary. Why everybody just forget about it?