This is a great history so far, and the comment threads really enrich the content.
I was a teenager when all of this was going down, so some of it is a blur. But I remember Windows 3.0 being mentioned here and there by a few people that liked it, and then all of a sudden Windows 3.1 was out and it was ubiquitous. I had been using DOS for 3-4 years by that point and don't remember anyone talking about Windows before Windows 3.0.
A few other things I remember from that time:
1. As a Windows 3.1 user with a teenager's budget, I remember aspiring to run OS/2 2.0. It just seemed so much more advanced. I even bought 16MB of RAM to run it, which at the time was extremely expensive because of the chronic "memory factory fire" in far-off places that always seemed to explain why memory was so expensive. However, I think the technical sophistication sustained my interest more than what it could actually do. I remember so much of OS/2 feeling unpolished and underwhelming from an end user perspective, even if I felt assured that it was technically capable of doing more than Windows. I always got the sense that disk caching never worked properly on any of my systems, and what's the point of being able to use long filenames if those files then become invisible to your DOS and Windows applications?
2. I was at a consumer trade show in Canada where IBM was trying to sell OS/2 2.x to consumers. They did this by showing Space Quest 4 playing simultaneously with Flight Simulator while also searching for files in Windows File Manager - hey look, the Windows clock is still moving even though Windows only has co-operative multitasking! It was cool if you understood why it was cool, but in retrospect I find it funny that you'd use such a ridiculous use case to sell a product to home users / consumers who just want to get work done.
3. Windows 95 came along and OS/2 just disappeared from the map for me. It solved all of the issues I had with OS/2 and gave all of the benefits and more.
On the first Billion $ in revenue, I was not an employee at the time, but an intern in MSFT France, but I got to see Frank Gaudette's company meeting skit, as a Blues Brothers, singing "Coming to you on a dusty road, big numbers I got truck loads". This was MOST excellent.
"Windows 3.0 seemed to have everything that OS/2 did not. There were compatible PCs. There were new applications. There were supporting peripherals. It had the pricing and distribution too. The fact that it ran on as little as one megabyte of memory (though really two was better) and also ran all existing MS-DOS applications even better than they ran before made for an incredibly compelling launch."
You forgot "Windows 3.0 could print."
It's intriguing that y'all in Apps didn't see the Windows killing OS/2 writing on the wall. I was still in college that Spring (I didn't start at MS until July, 2 1990) and I had decided Windows was going to win the previous Fall. It was sooo obvious from the outside (at least to me).
"To me the company still seemed so approachable. The Microsoft I knew was not much larger than my high school and I felt like I knew all the people in Apps." -- this was a great time at Microsoft, I remember the feeling of the company being so approachable as well. You could walk 5 minutes and see anyone in the company, you could get time with any exec, and yet the company was working on these incredibly impactful products -- MS/DOS, Windows, OS/2, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.
Yes Windows 3 was a great improvement over Windows 1 and 2. Having used a Mac, the Windows 1 & 2 UI with non overlapping windows felt primitive. Developing apps under Windows 1 and Windows 2 was interesting.
Windows 3.0 came with Windows help WinHelp 1.0. It had almost everything that would later become the world wide web (except for being local, no servers). WinHelp 1.0 had text, graphics, even graphics with hyper link areas and text hyperlinks. Source code was RTF instead of HTML. Windows Help was complied into a .hlp file. For technical writers it was complicated to write help systems without tools due to the syntax.
Steven, I've been wondering about the symbiosis between Windows and PC gaming. I was never a big gamer myself but I know that gamers were always ahead of the curve, for hardware and I'm assuming for operating systems as well... did Microsoft make a special effort to ensure that Windows made game development easier than OS/2 or Macintosh did? I'm pretty sure even today gaming is all [console, mobile and] Windows - almost nothing on Mac or Linux
This is a great history so far, and the comment threads really enrich the content.
I was a teenager when all of this was going down, so some of it is a blur. But I remember Windows 3.0 being mentioned here and there by a few people that liked it, and then all of a sudden Windows 3.1 was out and it was ubiquitous. I had been using DOS for 3-4 years by that point and don't remember anyone talking about Windows before Windows 3.0.
A few other things I remember from that time:
1. As a Windows 3.1 user with a teenager's budget, I remember aspiring to run OS/2 2.0. It just seemed so much more advanced. I even bought 16MB of RAM to run it, which at the time was extremely expensive because of the chronic "memory factory fire" in far-off places that always seemed to explain why memory was so expensive. However, I think the technical sophistication sustained my interest more than what it could actually do. I remember so much of OS/2 feeling unpolished and underwhelming from an end user perspective, even if I felt assured that it was technically capable of doing more than Windows. I always got the sense that disk caching never worked properly on any of my systems, and what's the point of being able to use long filenames if those files then become invisible to your DOS and Windows applications?
2. I was at a consumer trade show in Canada where IBM was trying to sell OS/2 2.x to consumers. They did this by showing Space Quest 4 playing simultaneously with Flight Simulator while also searching for files in Windows File Manager - hey look, the Windows clock is still moving even though Windows only has co-operative multitasking! It was cool if you understood why it was cool, but in retrospect I find it funny that you'd use such a ridiculous use case to sell a product to home users / consumers who just want to get work done.
3. Windows 95 came along and OS/2 just disappeared from the map for me. It solved all of the issues I had with OS/2 and gave all of the benefits and more.
On the first Billion $ in revenue, I was not an employee at the time, but an intern in MSFT France, but I got to see Frank Gaudette's company meeting skit, as a Blues Brothers, singing "Coming to you on a dusty road, big numbers I got truck loads". This was MOST excellent.
"Windows 3.0 seemed to have everything that OS/2 did not. There were compatible PCs. There were new applications. There were supporting peripherals. It had the pricing and distribution too. The fact that it ran on as little as one megabyte of memory (though really two was better) and also ran all existing MS-DOS applications even better than they ran before made for an incredibly compelling launch."
You forgot "Windows 3.0 could print."
It's intriguing that y'all in Apps didn't see the Windows killing OS/2 writing on the wall. I was still in college that Spring (I didn't start at MS until July, 2 1990) and I had decided Windows was going to win the previous Fall. It was sooo obvious from the outside (at least to me).
Good stuff, Steve!
"To me the company still seemed so approachable. The Microsoft I knew was not much larger than my high school and I felt like I knew all the people in Apps." -- this was a great time at Microsoft, I remember the feeling of the company being so approachable as well. You could walk 5 minutes and see anyone in the company, you could get time with any exec, and yet the company was working on these incredibly impactful products -- MS/DOS, Windows, OS/2, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.
Yes Windows 3 was a great improvement over Windows 1 and 2. Having used a Mac, the Windows 1 & 2 UI with non overlapping windows felt primitive. Developing apps under Windows 1 and Windows 2 was interesting.
At this time was NT anywhere on the radar as far as Apps or the press is concerned?
Windows 3.0 came with Windows help WinHelp 1.0. It had almost everything that would later become the world wide web (except for being local, no servers). WinHelp 1.0 had text, graphics, even graphics with hyper link areas and text hyperlinks. Source code was RTF instead of HTML. Windows Help was complied into a .hlp file. For technical writers it was complicated to write help systems without tools due to the syntax.
Steven, I've been wondering about the symbiosis between Windows and PC gaming. I was never a big gamer myself but I know that gamers were always ahead of the curve, for hardware and I'm assuming for operating systems as well... did Microsoft make a special effort to ensure that Windows made game development easier than OS/2 or Macintosh did? I'm pretty sure even today gaming is all [console, mobile and] Windows - almost nothing on Mac or Linux