RSSFlashback 1990: The debut of Windows 3.0
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published October 21, 2009, 4:24 PM
Yet if we follow the pattern, we miss the real story...
It is May 1990. For several months, reporters had been prepared by Microsoft to cover what was being billed as the most important event in the history of software. It was the beginning, we were told, of the end of DOS, and the birth of a new software "ecosystem" that enabled independent developers to build graphical applications for the first time, without having to jump through the many hoops and stroke the countless egos of Apple. Microsoft would have a hands-off policy in the development of software that supports what was being called, for the first time, the Windows Operating Environment.
Sure, it still used the MS-DOS bootstrap, but don't tell anyone that. And sure, that bootstrap still required 640K of conventional RAM, but don't tell anyone that either. The real benefits were to be seen in something Macintosh itself couldn't do: run more than one application at once, with true multitasking and pipelining for the very first time...and all in color.
The prospects for applications were boundless, and Microsoft wanted to be seen as opening all the doors and not stepping through them first. The first question in journalists' minds was, would there be a counterpart to Hypercard? Without a Hypercard, Windows may as well be broken. Rest assured, we were told, a company called Asymmetrix would provide the toolkit that would revolutionize programming, with a bit of Microsoft's funding. The next generation metaphors for Windows were being created not by Microsoft but by Hewlett-Packard, for a product called NewWave -- again, Microsoft made certain journalists knew, with its help but not its supervision. And the world would know Windows was for real when it used an everyday spreadsheet with a name familiar to everyone: Lotus 1-2-3 G.
In the spring of the turn of the decade, I had a regular series in a magazine that was widely considered to be "Computer Shopper in exile," called Vulcan's Computer Buyer's Guide, staffed by many former Shopper regulars who would, like myself, become regulars there again once a dispute with the new owners, Ziff-Davis, was resolved. I had the lead role in covering the biggest software release in history, for a magazine whose editors told me flat out, "Use as much space as you need."
Months earlier, Microsoft had granted me some of the first demonstrations of Dynamic Data Exchange ever shown outside its laboratories. It was astounding to me, and I was proposing to write a book on it all, except that none of the book editors at the time knew, or appeared to care, about running two applications at once. "We want a book about Excel or a book about Word," one editor told me toward the close of a conversation. "No one wants to read a book about Excel and Word."
It was uncharted territory, as every editor I worked with kept reminding me. One of these days, my former Shopper editor told me, you'll be writing this story in May and someone on the other side of the screen will read it in May. But for now, it was the August issue we were working with, and complete with interviews with everyone we thought would matter -- Asymmetrix, HP, and Lotus included -- I headed forward for 33 pages of draft copy, with a full head of steam...
The entire contraption of the DOS environment -- along with the guilt feelings it so subtly leaves us with -- are being shattered by Windows 3.0. There is a movement under way by Microsoft and its independent software vendors (ISVs) to abolish the structure which grants exclusive ownership rights of a set of data to an application. Having done that, the movement will also seek to dissolve the programmatic barricade which surrounds the once-exclusive application, allowing for the equal distribution of correlated tasks within an arbitrarily-defined computing job, to other programs non-specifically.
It's a difficult concept to discuss in the orchestrated fashion with which we have become accustomed, so instead I offer a hypothetical situation: Assume you have an inventory list card file. You want to compare gross profit percentages, so you demand such a list from the computer. Your spreadsheet -- whatever that may be -- shows you the list. You didn't need to save the card file, translate it, export it, and re-import it -- the list simply appeared. You want to see how these figures look graphically, so instantly you see a detailed pie chart. You'd like to make this chart part of your report to your superiors. This is quite simple to accomplish. Since what you're reading is the report to your superiors, the word processor saw your chart and automatically composed a standard form. This was sent to your typesetting program, which is providing the image you're seeing now.
Your superiors are in six different countries and two of them are out on the road somewhere. you tell your machine to send them all a copy of the report you're looking at now. The machine already knows two of them have fax machines, two are available via WANs, and the other two have cellular phones connected to laptops. You neither know this nor care; you just have your computer "send" the report to them, regardless of the media of transmission. The report is received in six different places, even if the recipient computers' operators weren't using their machines at the time. A mere three minutes of your life have been expended in the processing of the weekly profit report.
You have just been witness to an example of the model for the meta-application -- one smoothly-flowing, correlated process combining the resources of several programs from different vendors. This is the model Windows 3.0 seeks to gradually implement. Actually, this is what OS/2 was supposed to implement at first; its muddled and haphazard development agenda has prevented it from leading the way.
The meta-application is not an inevitable fact of computing; the marketing debacles of cross-vendor cooperation it imposes may render it as ineffective as OS/2 in changing our computing habits. Still, it is something to be wished for. And it is a far more important facet of the Windows 3.0 story than faceted buttons and little pictures. The way in which world industry and commerce works is not affected in the least by faceted buttons and little pictures.
Wow this looks great! I'm gonna install this in my 66MHz 386DX when it comes out. I just hope it doesn't come on too many floppies, my 80mb hard drive is getting a little full...
Woah, sorry, not sure what happened there.
Anyway, is it just me or does the File Manager look more modern than 3.1's did in some ways? We got the side pane for Folders (3.1 had the folder pane embedded in each MDI window IIRC), drives inside the folder pane instead of on a window toolbar. The only difference that's not "modern" is the lack of the main toolbar.
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No- it's around for a while. But since it's used more by consumers than business users, I think opening it up will allow for some interesting consumer level products. In the enterprise, it's all about eliminating .pst files because of all of the technical and legal hurdles they present.
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|Great article!
Thanks for the memories :) I was just starting college when 3.1 came out, and had to have a PC with Windows on it (cause it looked cool :)). I remember my first Windows 3.1 application I wrote, the whole aspect of programming was awesome, event loops, window messages, memory spaces :) I was honestly I lot happier with Windows NT and its memory management, but yes, 3.0 started it all :)
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|This kind of misses the point. And, a lot of people missed the real point when Windows 3.0 came out. I remebered being a beta tester for it. And the big news at the time was that Windows 3.0 would be a unifying factor for the software industry.
Ventura Publisher was THE big app on GEM Desktop. While many people worked around DOS, and Wordperfect still dominated there, the start of desktop publishing and graphic editing needs was beginning to appear. Earlier versions of Windows had significant problems most notably with font management, mixing in multiple typesets .. Windows 2.0 really needed Adobe PostScript (ATM or Adobe Type Manager) to be functional. Windows 3.0 was going to be the introduction of Truetype, newly licensed from Apple, and would cut the need to rely on Adobe.
This was the potential godsend. Up until then, several non-adobe developers were torn.. they could develop for GEM/Desktop like Ventura (I believe there was also a version of Borland tools and Quattro for GEM), they could look at the up and coming GeoWorks, which provided it's own inbuilt suite which was more effective then Dos based MSWorks, or they could look at OS2.
The moment that it became clear that other desktop publishing tools could reside on Windows because there might not be a need for Adobe Type Manager, the doors opened wide open. People began shipping font and formats quickly, and DOS applications oriented around publication started moving to Windows. By the time Windows 3.1 was out, enough apps came out with it that real printing work was now being done on Windows.
Businesses now began to see Windows as a way to do something that they couldn't do with DOS, which really only provided access to fonts already hardware remembered in the printer (example, Epson LQ had "Helvetica" as FONT1 in WordPerfect)
It wasn't about pretty looks.. all of the applications, even if you only had one open at once (most common) still could use the same font and style base with almost no cost to the customer, and no need to rush out and buy Typecase.
Changed everything about the market overnight.
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|Windows 3 was something I got in order to get a good deal on a Microsoft dove bar bus mouse. I put it on my machine, and almost immediately took it off. It sucked. DDE was nice, when it worked, and if you had apps that would work with it.
I used DesqView/X and liked the ability to smoothly multitask my applications much better than any tweaking of Windows 3.0 or 3.1 was able to do. It was when WFWG 3.11 came out that Microsoft began to step out of the dark ages, and become usable.
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|Oh God! We are geting very, very older! If you can remember working on DOS, really man, think about your las 20 years in front of a monitor.
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|Twenty? I wish...33 years for me.
-SF33
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|Then, like me, you remember with great joy when CRT monitors started being used with computers, speeding up output dramatically from the formerly slow teletype!
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|the course of evolution is always interesting.
who would have thought that a drop out would be credited for helping the world to evolve.
though bill gates is a visionary, perhaps the real unsung heros are the guy(s) that spent many months developing dos, only to have had it given away for 500 dollars.
wonder what could have developed if the inventors of dos had told ibm to screw themselves and their dress code and went over to bill gates garage back then.
shucks, we would likely have miracle cures and warp drive space craft by now if it weren't for the conservative right wing impeding the progress of mankind.
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|shucks, we would likely have miracle cures and warp drive space craft by now if it weren't for the conservative right wing impeding the progress of mankind.
...?
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|bourgeoisdude - don't even waste your time trying to make sense of it.
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|Having worked with the beta builds of Win 3.0, I had to wonder at the time who would create such a mess. Of course, having used OS/2 that finally had Presentation Manager after a long, long, long wait, it wasn't so surprising an answer.
Had Digital Research thought past the 640 KB barrier (and had Apple not fought them legally so viciously), GEM would have taken hold in more than desktop publishing on DOS machines and Windows would likely still be on the sidelines. Shortsightedness gave Microsoft the upper hand.
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|The major significance of Windows 3.0 was that the OS handled the graphics and printer drivers. This sounds trivial now, but in the DOS world you needed one driver per application and each application had to be individually set up. If you had 100 applications and 100 devices, then you needed 10,000 device drivers which is totally impractical so the end result was poor driver support. Once it was handled by the OS, you only needed one driver per OS and the application just worked.
Windows 3.0 was only the beginning though the vast majority of Windows 3.0 customers were using DOS the majority of the time. That's because most of the applications they wanted hadn't been ported or written for Windows yet. It wasn't until Windows 3.1 that Windows really started to take off.
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|You guys are all wrong. Windows was invented on the planet Caprica over 150,000 yrs ago before the cyclon invasion began. Just after the HD holographic vs Blu holographic disc wars ended
(smile)
Score: 4
|All of this has happened before, and will happen again.
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|I can already feel the pain...
Silly me. Silly, silly me.
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|So say we all!
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|Looks an awful lot like the interface Microsoft stole from Xerox all those years ago.
Score: -11
|You mean the interface that Apple stole from Xerox right?
Apple was the company that went to Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center and stole all the ideas from them. Then Microsoft, like a good trojan horse, went to develop applications for the Macintosh and did some second hand stealing.
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|Very incorrect. Apple look it from Xerox and Microsoft took from Apple. ... and Microsoft for the the win!
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|Or my favorite... "Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it." I've also heard it the opposite way that Apple broke in and saw that it was already stolen, so either way both parties are guilty.
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|Xerox was guilty of letting all those hot inventions from PARC go to waste including the GUI. The company simply got too big and stuck in their ways.
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|One of my favorite Chuck Peddle quotes:
"There's nothing nice about Steve Jobs and there's nothing evil about Bill Gates."
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|Xerox PARC is amazing. All those inventions and so little to show for it today.
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|We have lots to show for it; it is just Xerox that doesn't.
By not commercializing their research, they prompted hungry entrepreneurs like Jobs/Woz and Allen/Gates to take some of the ideas and frustrated researchers like Metcalf and Warnock to leave with others. Their companies got things to much broader markets than Xerox ever would have.
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