40 years ago today, on November 10, 1983 at a press event in New York City, Microsoft first revealed its plans to launch an all-new graphical user interface-based PC operating system. The company called the OS Windows.
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Interesting… annoys me how the writer calls it an OS - it wasn’t - contemporary tech journalist at the time always called it an “operating environment” - you still needed an O/S (e.g. MS-DOS IBM-DOS DR-DOS) to run windows on… Even Microsoft used “operating environment”.
I read somewhere many years ago, that MS Windows was just Microsoft taking the Presentation Manager software from the source code for OS/2 which they were developing for IBM.
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It was like a WM on top of DOS.
Not sure when, but it gradually swallowed DOS and became both an OS and a WM.
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Even Windows 95, 98 and ME still really ran ontop of MS-DOS - I had a Windows 95 machine configured to boot to MS-DOS, and only run Windows 95 when I typed “win” **.
It was never really an O/S until Windows NT, and XP was the first consumer grade release running on Windows NT, sure there was Windows 2000, but most OEMs were still pre-loading 98SE or ME on new PCs and laptops.
** Heck - that’s pretty much what I’m doing with my Pop!_OS desktop machine, GDM is cactus, so I login to a virtual TTY console, then type “startx”… Doesn’t bother me really… Linux is a kernel + GNU = an operating system - a GUI is not an operating system 
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Regarding history…
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Thanks for sharing the links. At least Microsoft has standardized on the blue screen as that is the only thing that you see regularly even now.
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