Windows 1.0 site – everything there is to know about the first Windows version | Hacker News Reader

Windows 1.0 site – everything there is to know about the first Windows version

win1.krnl386.com

96 pointsLammy44 comments

This site seems devoid of actually useful content, and there doesn't seem to be a single screenshot. A better resource might be BetaWiki: https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_1.0

Also worth noting that you can run Windows 1.0 in the browser:

https://archive.org/details/windows-1-0

I really like this specific collection PCjs [1]. The emulator runs extremely smooth.

[1] https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/windows/1.01/ega/

Or you can get it from WinWorldPC

Apricot Xen (not IBM PC/AT compatible) used Windows 1.0, 80286@7.5MHz, and had a paper-white monitor - was fantastic to use. Windows performed really well on it.

Managed to find a brochure!

https://classic.technology/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Aprico...

That's a beautiful machine! The ball roll for mouse, the phone that fits the keyboard. Amazing aesthetics.

Also the pixel art Apricot logo. Very nice.

It almost feels like this is not an actual company or product, but a convincing retro design created by a designer today. I know Apricot was real, but something about it feels like it’s winking ironically, in a “what if this had taken off” kind of way. Imagine the pixel art Apricot on the back of a 2006 smartphone in that alternate universe. (Steve Jobs never went back to Apple and instead Apricot teamed up with ARM and Psion to create the Jesus Phone, turning Britain into the new Silicon Valley…)

Release date October 1985 and it already had 1.44MB HD floppy :o

They were 720k not 1.44MB. I don't think apricot released anything with a 1.44MB before they gave up on the PC market.

Replying to self to correct myself. The Qi series (microchannel based 386 and 486, the very last apricot PCs) had 1.44MB floppies

damn marketing!

>Twin 720K MicroFloppy drives offer 1.44 megabytes of mass storage

but I cant see second FDD on the picture, not a spot for one.

There were/are two front slots; the permutations were:

  720KB FDD, blank
  720KB FDD, 720KB FDD
  720KB FDD, 20MB HDD

(I also seem to recall seeing (blank,blank) for "dumb terminals" when Xenix and line cards were in the Xenix server. Could have up to 16 terminals hanging off the back when using Xenix.

Those would be the 'Xen-WS' version, I once used one on a network in the mid 80s (85 or 86, couldn't say which with certainty, but it was while I was in secondary school*), the 'workstation' itself was still running DOS/Win1.x but all storage was on the network. I don't know if it was net booted or had DOS etc in ROM on the network card.

* Although the network and classes were at the local college as some kind of crossover access, I recall another of the classes involved their lab of Apple IIe that had this weird gated access to the internet for email.

Yeah - and I used one of them, and the Windows version on it. About all it got used for under windows were Reversi, and Write.

It also came with WordStar 2000, which was a bit weird...

The one I had access to had the small green screen monitor, originally from the Apricot PC (Xi?).

That was my first “work” computer. Came with MS-DOS 2.11 IIRC.

Spent many an happy hour with it putting together various DB applications using Delta IV - a hierarchical database system.

Damn, I forgot how harsh on the eyes the default color scheme/theme was. It's like a road worker's high-vis jacket.

>default color scheme

It wasn't so much a "default" but rather the only colors because graphics hardware of that time period was 4-bit which is limited to 16 colors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#Color_p...

Windows 1 on CGA was 640x200 black and white.

EGA was required for 16 colors in graphics mode.

I find it actually pretty cool.

Also, on a CRT monitor of the time, it looked much better.

https://i.redd.it/lcez4td885e61.jpg

Colors were much less saturated back then.

Well to put it mildly, monitors at the time weren't exactly color accurate.

It was also probably a better experience in black-and-white: easier on the eyes and potentially higher-resolution (with a Hercules card for instance).

If everything was a bit duller, this scheme wouldn't be too bad? I don't know much about old monitors, but I presume they weren't as bright as what we have nowadays

They had a much better contrast and brightness.

I would guess an UI like this (maybe with some minor tweaks) could make a perfect fit for a lo-fi (in a pragmatic sense - low-distraction, eye-friendly, "dopamine detox" etc) eInk PC.

It looked much better on contemporary monitors than it does on modern ones.

There's a lot of things there that looks like they should be links but clicking goes nowhere. Like when it mentions available versions, clicking on the versions does nothing for me. :/

It doesn’t look like there’s a lot to know… I mean, Wikipedia article has a screenshot at least.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240310130612/https://win1.krnl...

Wow, yes, I remember not having a mouse. Someone in the office had an expansion board which would add one, which I borrowed. Then I wanted a graphics program, but it was really hard to find one. Wish I could remember what I used.

> Users could still run DOS programs under Windows 1.0, many of them even in a window,

> many of them even in a window

I think I now understand the possible historical reason why the OS was named 'windows' - I used to think the windows name was related to 'a window into a new world', esp considering the scenic Win XP default wallpaper and 'Vista'

Windows did not invent the concept. "Window Systems" predated Windows by quite a bit and applications ran in "windows". Quite obviously the name was not originally coined by Microsoft.

Cool site. I was surprised to learn that Gabe Newell was one of the people that worked on the first version of windows.

This shows Steve Jobs was not exaggerating to claim personal computers wouldn't have had proportionally-spaced fonts had it not been for the Mac. Windows 1.0 and 2.0 font was a horrendous-looking fixed-width thing.

Windows 1.0 had proportional fonts available for use, open up Write and go ham.

Also, the Amiga independently has proportional font support. You can't say computers would "never" have had them if it weren't for the Mac

i never used win1 - did anyone? i did use win2, because at the BBC all our horrible Apricot IBM-compatibles (hollow laugh regarding compatibility) came with it installed. what we used it for was playing the othello game, and that alone.

basically, win3 was the first useable version of windows, and the one that got me into windows programming. and say what you like about MS, they do tend to stick with things once they get started,

>i never used win1 - did anyone? i did use win2,

Some users were exposed to the early versions of Windows 1.0 and 2.0 because they were "bundled as runtimes" for some applications. Aldus Pagemaker was an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_PageMaker#:~:text=Aldus%....

So consumers weren't necessarily going out of their way to buy Windows 1.0 as a separate item and then later installing apps on it.

This was also similar to how a competing GUI like Digital Research GEM was distributed where people didn't make it a deliberate purchase. Instead, Ventura Publisher included it as a runtime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corel_Ventura#:~:text=It%20ran...

Timeworks was the one that I was forced to use GEM for, I loved GEM on ST, but the PC version was awful after the lawsuit.

Yup, used Windows 1.0. At the time the technology seemed space age to me. You could run two COMMAND.COM windows side by side! (Just don't try running any DOS applications, that didn't work so well). I also remember Windows 2.0 being a major breakthrough because it allowed overlapping windows!

> Just don't try running any DOS applications, that didn't work so well

It worked OK if they were small applications and didn't access hardware directly.

I think at the time I was too young to comprehend the difference between "well behaved" DOS programs that stuck to int 21h and the BIOS, and the majority that hammered on the PC hardware directly. The former would have worked.

Yes. The first versionI used Windows 1.03

It wasn't until Windows 3 that I used Windows most of the time.

Number of developers: 2

Very cool. Nevertheless I have an idea of how to make it even more cool:

Having already built the UI we can now enjoy, it should be reasonably easy to imitate a whole Windows 1.0 environment, also all/some essential bundled apps and make what's already there just an app among them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com