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Comment by jml7c5 | Hacker News Reader

This is a strange article. It portrays triple and quadruple pane windows as a new development, but they've been around for years.

As far as I can tell, the only development here is the use of ultra-thin glass in the interior layers. This reduces cost, size, and weight relative to normal triple/quadruple-glazed windows.

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My dad built a house in the late 80s with all triple-paned glass...although there were essentially three separate windows, packaged as one.

Except that a cascade of windows is not what is typically referred to as triple-pane. If multiple windows were to count here, then "double-paned windows" have been around for centuries.

Looks like actual double paned windows have been around since the 1870s, so centuries is correct.

I feel like they're around for decades? Gorilla glass is absolutely no necessity to enable 3 or 4 panes. ChatGPT (sry, I'm becoming lazy) agrees that they're available since the 1980s. In the US adoption became more widespread in the 2000s. Here in Europe/Germany they became more popular in the 1990s already. This matches how I remember it.

When we replaced our 1980s double glazed windows with triple glazed a few years ago, I could have easily gotten four-pane insulated windows as well, except for the roof-installed windows. Drawbacks of multi-pane are the increased weight and them being more opaque.

(Yes, we also insulated the walls and can control humidity - just in case someone wants to point out that the window replacement alone can cause moisture/mold damage to our house :))

Just to clarify: The above text is manually written, I just used the mentioned tool to pull the numbers.

These match what I remember, so please correct me/the numbers instead of simply down voting because I mention the source ;-)

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