The Rise of Microsoft Windows Part 1: Windows 1.0

One of the major motivations for windows, is that the driver situation for DOS really sucked. Every single office suite had to talk directly to printers. Text mode was reasonably uniform, but printing graphics required the application to know about the printer. And games needed to talk directly to the video card and sound card if you wanted anything more than PC speaker beeps and non-scrolling screens on one of the default BIOS graphics modes. One of the major selling points of Windows 1.0 was a unified 2D graphics API, for both screen and printing. The graphics vendor would supply a driver and any windows application could use its full resolution and color capabilities needing to be explicitly coded for that graphics card. This rendering API also supported 2D accelerators, so expensive graphics card could accelerate rendering. 2D accelerators were often known as Windows accelerators. Windows 3.1 still relied on DOS for disk and file IO, but everything was can be done by VXD drivers, and should never need to call back to DOS or the BIOS (which was slow, especially on a 286) With Windows 95, Disk/File IO were moved into VXD drivers, and it was finally possible to do everything without ever leaving protected mode (though, DOS drivers were still supported). Read more about the history of Device drivers here: link And I really enjoyed this documentary about the development of Windows 1.0: ▶ this video

I just want to share an excellent video about computer history devoted to the highs and lows of Windows OS development. As it turns out, the first years of the project weren't rosy at all despite the common perception of a younger generation. Another important takeaway is that initial Windows 1.01 took about 80 man/years which is insane. Especially when you try to install it and play with it. Looks like a yet another GUI shell of the day, primitive-ish, nothing notable that meets an eye. However, it's only the tip of an iceberg. ▶ this video