Most likely it was a deliberate technical limitation. After all, dialog windows themselves were already overlapped. I remember well what a headache it was to program and render graphical elements on those old machines (PC AT 80286 with 256 KB of RAM).
While it's demonstrated to be likely incorrect here, it's not a wild theory. Apple and Microsoft spent a lot of time in court over the "Look and Feel" cases regarding the windowing UI Apple felt Microsoft had stolen. The lawsuit was first filed in '88 and was widely reported on in tech and mainstream press etc, dragging on throughout the 90s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Micros....
> The likelihood of any legal restriction was probably close to zero - it’s only from today’s era of hyper-regulation that we might even imagine something like that.
Normally I'd agree with a statement like this. Except this is a very specific case.
This surrender agreement is likely why Microsoft felt confident enough to adopt overlapping windows in Windows 2.0. However, Apple's 1988 lawsuit didn't get dismissed because the judge decided that Windows 1.0 and Windows 2.0 are fundamentally different, and the agreement only covered the aspects of Windows 2.0 that also appear in Windows 1.0. The case ground on for several years before eventually getting dismissed because what Microsoft had licensed from Apple were generic ideas that shouldn't be subject to copyright. For example, Microsoft were free to use a trash can to represent deleted files as long as they didn't use Apple's specific rendering of a trash can.
Apple sued Digital Research and later Microsoft when they enabled overlapping windows for windows 2.0.
Also lol a 286 with 256kb of ram - that is a very very weird combination you would never see in a desktop. Generally early IBM PC compatibles might have just 512KB of ram but around 1985 and later 640KB really became the norm even on 8088 and 8086 based systems. I am not counting stuff that really didn't get anywhere like the PCjr and that thing was much earlier in 1983.
286 based systems once they became more common started a 1mb RAM.
How is regulation involved? The OP's idea was that Microsoft feared being sued by other companies over IP. If there is some increase in lawsuits between companies, I'd like to see evidence.
Also, my understanding is that there was a lot more regulation in the 1970s and extending into the 1980s, though it was probably declining by then.
At the time I remember reading that was kind of the issue. I thought the article said something like "when Gates saw the Xerox machine, the display had no overlapping windows". So M/S cloned it as he saw it.
Once M/S W1.0 was developed he saw the demo again and was surprised the windows overlapped. So they rushed 2.0 to fix it.
But funny, with all people on Linux using tiling window managers these days, it seems Windows 1.0 was ahead of its time :)
And tiling still largely doesn't work with small windows.
The default is just left, right, and top, bottom but if you install Power Toys and use Fancy Zones you can customize the zones https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzon....
There’s also Crop and Lock which can help you cut out extraneous parts of certain windows
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/crop-and...
_only_ if you enable hard corners, or something like this, which makes moving windows between screens, difficult.
I have a three monitor setup and have no problem rearranging the windows as I please
Microsoft had Apple Lisa's in-house, and Charles Simonyi in person direct from Xerox PARC, and worked on pre-release Macintoshes in coordination with Apple to develop Microsoft Word for the Mac, all well in advance of any MSWindows development. There is no way the story is as simple as the above.
The main use-case was multiplexing terminals and, after tmux provided a solution that was usable by normal users, it seduced people away.
Also, mouse-first tiling was introduced on Windows so nowadays it is almost universal to have a degree of tiling.
They are nice for terminals and browsing properly-written web pages but for anything with an aspect ratio or a fixed size they are clumsy.
Modern tiling-wms often have a floating mode so the distinction is more keyboard-wm vs mouse-wm.
Are you sure about this history? I'd always heard that GNU Screen had been popular for a while before tmux, and from double checking, Screen dates back to 1987, the same year that Windows 2.0 came out. tmux didn't come for another two decades.
Although I don't know about "popular".
To clarify, my impression was that many people started using tmux around the time when it was introduced including a few who had been using screen before.
It makes sense too because at that point most terminals were still physical with fixed dimensions. Most applications didn't handle terminal resizing yet. Especially on the fly.
True but that's also a factor of tiling being so niche. If it were more common the apps would take it into account and just not so fixed sizes as much.
There's only few uses that really require it like video.
The day the Mac shipped in January 1984, Gates told McGregor to run out and buy a Mac for the Windows developers.
"Reverse engineer it," Gates told him. "I have applications like BASIC and Multiplan that we've hacked out for the Mac, and we're working on other Mac applications like Word with a graphical user interface. I want to run all those Mac applications on Windows." Apparently, Gates didn't see a conflict of interest with this strategy.
...
"How are they different?" Gates snapped back. "They both draw fucking lines on the screen, right? They both put things in windows, right? Mac wrote a windows thing, you wrote a windows thing, they ought to be able to run the same stuff together."
(this was around IRQ13, IIRC,right?)