With great fanfare, Microsoft took to Twitter the announce Windows 1.0. Wait… what?
If this leaves you confused, you’re hardly alone. What this company’s plans are for an operating system that launched in 1985 is a complete mystery.
It’s not anywhere close to April Fools’ Day, so perhaps all this is just a nostalgia trip by Microsoft’s marketing department.
It all started with the company taking to Twitter to say: “Introducing the all-new Windows 1.0, with MS-Dos Executive, Clock, and more!!”
https://twitter.com/windows/status/1145731141695168512?s=21
And there have been follow-up posts. One says “With Excel, Chart, and even Flight Simulator, there’s no telling where Microsoft and the power of Windows will take you this summer.”
A brief history of Windows 1.0
Microsoft first made its name in the early 1980s with MS-DOS, a command-line operating system. But it got some experience with graphical user interfaces by developing applications for the original Apple Macintosh released in 1984. Windows 1.0 came out the next year, though company founder Bill Gates has always claimed he got the idea from the Visi On suite for DOS, not from the Mac.
Windows 1.0 was pretty much a bust. Few non-Mac users had a mouse back then, and the software required faster hardware than most users owned to run well.
In other words, Windows 1.0 couldn’t compete against Apple’s Finder 1.0, the operating system on the first Mac. The idea that Microsoft is somehow going to re-release it to take on macOS Catalina is… well, let’s just call it unrealistic.
