In November of 1983, Bill Gates showed IBM his new operating system, Windows. It went down like a lead balloon, but Bill realised that a proper GUI based operating system would be the way of the future.

Microsoft Windows 1.0 was released on November 20, 1985. It wasn’t a complete operating system like today as it was an extension of MS-DOS (which was released in 1981), the ‘command line’ or text based operating system.

From 1985, the selling details were as follows:
Price: $99
Hardware Requirements: 80386 CPU, 256KB RAM, 1MB Storage
Media Size: five 360KB 5.25″ floppy disks

Windows 1.0 ran a shell program known as MS-DOS Executive. Other supplied programs are Calculator, Calendar, Cardfile, Clipboard viewer, Clock, Control Panel, Notepad, Paint, Reversi, Terminal, and Write.

Windows 1.0 did not allow overlapping windows, due to Apple Computer owning this feature. Instead all windows were tiled. Only dialog boxes could appear over other windows.

Windows 1.0 executables, while having the same .exe extension and initial file header as MS-DOS programs, did not contain the so-called MS-DOS stub which prints the “This program requires Microsoft Windows” message and exits when the program is run outside of Windows. Instead, the file header was formatted in such a way as to make DOS reject the executable with a “program too large to fit in memory” error message.

From the beginning, Windows was intended to multitask programs (although this originally only applied to native applications and for many versions the multitasking was co-operative, rather than preemptive), so Windows programs always had their own menu bar rather than switching a single menu bar at the top of the screen like Apple Macintoshes did.

For a more detailed view on Windows 1.0, have a read here.

Yeah it looks ugly, but this 8 bit (yes that’s right) computer was capable of so many things. Essentially it was a gaming computer, but there were are few non gaming titles released.

When it was first released, games came out on cassette tape, and load times were horrendous by today’s standards, Then, as the C64 became more popular, the 1541 floppy disk drive was more affordable. According to Wikipedia, over 10000 titles were released for the C64. The computer had advanced graphics and sound (for the time), and the limits of the processor was pushed by many a software writer.

Commodore Business Machines also brought out the SX-64 – a portable(?) version of the C64. It was a very heavy machine, but boasted a built in 5 inch monitor.

Here is a youtube video of the TV ad, aired in Australia, to promote the C64 (which I remember very well):

The C64 is still very popular, with an abundance of information out there on the net. Just Google it and see how many matches you get ….

Incoming search terms:

• commodore 64
• commodore 64 ebay
• the best gaming computer in the world
• Comodore64
• monitor tv 80s
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