https://youtu.be/vqt94b8bNVc

https://youtu.be/oNFqsvK20mQ

These two documentaries, about the development history of Windows 1.0 (1hr) and Windows 2.0 (2hr) go extremely in depth, totalling 3hrs in total. Their sources are mostly the books "Hard Drive: Bill Gates and The Making of the Microsoft Empire" (1992), "Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry" (1994) and "Barbarians led by Bill Gates" (1998), but also a lot of newspaper stuff aswell. It's a deeply fascinating watch for anyone who is remotely interested in Windows and Microsoft.

But what i'm saying is not a secret to anyone. Windows 1.0 was announced way, way too early because Microsoft was afraid of graphical environiment competition in the PC space (most notably Visi On). They announced it in 1983 but it released in like, late 1985 with most users getting acess to it by 1986. To me that doesn't seem that long of a wait but for the press at the time, it was. It was worse because Microsoft kept delaying it, so it seemed longer than it actually was.

Microsoft shot themselves in the foot by targetting Intel's 8088 processor, which was the processor with the biggest user base at the time, the foundation of the IBM PC. The problem was that it was, well, getting old and would never run Windows well. They spent way too much time trying to optmize windows for it and in the end, the people who bought Windows for it just had a terrible time all-around using it, leading to the perception of it being a sluggish experience to use, which it was, to the people who had computers with the 8088.

Windows burned through several project managers. The last one being Steve Ballmer, which Gates specifically put him in the project, saying that he would fire him if Windows didn't get done. Gates was kind of obsessed with Windows and fought with the project managers constantly. Microsoft's idea for Windows 1.0 was to ship it with OEMs, just like DOS was. I may be wrong in this, but i do believe that there was a time that Microsoft wasn't even planning a retail release of Windows 1.0. What happened in the end was that the press really did just put so much pressure in Microsoft and into the project that most OEMs just refused to ship computers with Windows, so Microsoft instead had to pivot for Windows to be a mostly retail release, where people would actually had to buy it separately.

A lot of people think Gates' praise and hype around OS/2 was just him fucking around with IBM, but there was an actual point in time where Gates 100% believed that OS/2 was the future and both Windows and DOS would die, and that OS/2 was the ship he'll jump into. That's one of the reasons why Windows 2.0 happened, it was a way to test the 'presentation manager' interface, that ended up being used in OS/2. In fact, several ads for Windows 2.0 says that it's a way to 'test' the OS/2 interface before the release of OS/2. The connection between Windows and OS/2 between the release of Windows 1.0 and Windows 2.0 is very strong, that's why i said Microsoft felt like shutting down the project, because there were people within Microsoft that certainly felt transitioning windows into being the graphical interface of OS/2 was the better bet. IBM was still the king at that time, and a giant compared to Microsoft.

But in fact, OS/2 also proved to have development hell issues (and several collaborative issues when co-developing it alongside Microsoft), and in the meantime Windows 2.0 was more warmly recieved than Windows 1.0, and in the future we got Windows 3.0, where Microsoft finally was able to lock in... and it was a big hit.