Was Windows 1.0's lack of overlapping windows a legal or a technical matter?

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/32511/was-windows-1-0s-lack-of-overlapping-windows-a-legal-or-a-technical-matter

by SeenNotHeard • 5 months ago

105 82 5 months ago

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CanopyCoder• 5 months ago

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.

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).

giobox• 5 months ago

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.

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....

parl_match• 5 months ago

Yeah.

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.

plorkyeran• 5 months ago

That lawsuit happened in response to Window 2.0, and the fact that they adopted overlapping windows in 2.0 strongly suggests that Microsoft did not think that the change would lead to legal action and was taken by surprise.

jmclnx• 5 months ago

Most likely it was a deliberate technical limitation

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 :)

Affric• 5 months ago

Yeah, it’s interesting how the desktop metaphor evolved over time but increasing display size and the ability to have multiple workspaces surely is a huge part of what makes tiling almost work.

And tiling still largely doesn't work with small windows.

lovich2• 5 months ago

You can tile windows in Windows as well with the windows key+ arrow buttons.

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...

fsckboy• 5 months ago

"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.

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.

avadodin2• 5 months ago

They are a bit out of fashion these days.

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.

ok123456• 5 months ago

We don't have to guess about what was going on at Microsoft in those days. From "Barbarians Led by Bill Gates":

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."

KellyCriterion• 5 months ago

But hey, for 320x200 (8b) / 640x400 (4b) you had a linear framebuffer early on, before VESA&Co came along :-D

(this was around IRQ13, IIRC,right?)

blkhawk• 5 months ago

Actually it was very much a legal thing. For example i can point to GEM that had to have its windows glued down because of this. See GEM 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment)#/med... vs GEM2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment)#/med...

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.

whobre• 5 months ago

They didn't even sue DRI, just threatened to sue: https://nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com/p/history-of-the-gem-...

charonn0• 5 months ago

I don't think regulations are the legal restrictions people are referring to, but rather private lawsuits.

saghm2• 5 months ago

I also can't imagine calling our current era "hyper-regulation" with respect to software. The Microsoft antitrust case was only 16 years after Windows 1.0, but this year will be the 25th since then.

mmooss• 5 months ago

it’s only from today’s era of hyper-regulation that we might even imagine something like that.

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.

undeveloper• 5 months ago

i would not describe "today's era" as "hyper-regulation". we're actively removing regulation day over day

userbinator• 5 months ago

And replacing it with even more regulations.

contextfree• 5 months ago

As far as I've figured out the answer is that some people involved (the ex-PARC Scott McGregor and Charles Simonyi iirc) genuinely thought tiling was better, while others (Bill Gates?) disagreed but went along with it to avoid lawsuits.

MarsIronPI• 5 months ago

As a tiling window manager user, I think I agree! :D

somat• 5 months ago

I think stacking windows looks better, makes for a cool screenshot when trying to sell the thing. But tiling windows are more ergonomic for actually using the infernal machine.

For me the revelation was that I have never said "Oh boy I sure am glad this window partially overlaps this other window" I either want one full screen windows or a few windows side by side. Why do I have to handle this myself? and went to the dark side, a tiling window manager. To the point that it really chafes now when I use stacking windows, It feels like I spend most of the time shuffling windows around.

To ease the overlapping window pain many linux window managers have a feature where the focused window does not have to be the top window and this makes things a lot better, you can be looking at the top window and typing/clicking on the partially obscured bottom window.

hedgehog• 5 months ago

To be fair, in the era when resolutions like 512x342 or 640x480 were common overlapped windows were quite useful.

layer8• 5 months ago

Most of the time, I want the active application window in the middle of the screen, but not necessarily filling the whole screen or the whole height, and also not necessarily centered. The window position and size depends on its contents, what sidebars it has, and so on. This inherently leads to overlapping windows. I use a tool that automatically moves and resizes windows to the application-specific desired position, while also having the ability to arrange a split-screen view using keyboard shortcuts when needed.

piekvorst• 5 months ago

The primary value of overlapping windows is spacial memory: you remember where a given window is positioned on a 2D surface. The moment I grasped this I had the “oh boy I sure am glad this window partially overlaps this other window.”

(At one moment, I used to work on a single desktop with around 20 windows, no dock, just windows, on my 14in MacBook with 125% DPI. Too much but possible. Now I keep only 6-7 windows.)

This is not to say that dynamic window management is worse. Far from it. But it excels at this: dynamic, rapidly changing environments, where at almost any given moment something is either opening, closing, or changing its dimensions. This is usually the case with specialized programs like web browsers or IDE, but not with the main system WM.

The main problem is that overlapping windows and automatic window management are incompatible. The former assumes that user sets the dimensions and is always right, which makes the latter powerless to follow any efficient algorithm. To give an example, if you manage your windows with a dock and “maximize” button, they’d break overlapping patterns.

I either want one full screen windows or a few windows side by side.

You’re not wrong to work like this, but it may be a byproduct of modern hybrid systems making it harder to fully internalize the overlapping windows concept.

agumonkey• 5 months ago

Focus management is such a tricky beast.

ndiddy2• 5 months ago

I think stacking windows make more sense in the context of the pre-OS X Macintosh UI. The Mac was built entirely around the concept of spatial manipulation. When you opened a folder, it would remember the exact position and size of its window, where all of the icons were, where your scroll bar was, whether the folder was set for icon, list, or detail view, etc. Every window was permanently and unambiguously associated with a single folder. This made navigating the computer possible entirely through muscle memory. Just like you know where all the light switches and doorknobs are in your house after a few months, you would gain the ability to navigate through files on your computer extremely quickly because when you double click on a folder you already knew where it would open and what would show up in the window. Instead of remembering a file path, you would remember a series of mouse motions to get where you wanted with very little conscious thought. Obviously this workflow isn't suitable for everyone, but a lot of people enjoyed it and I think it's a shame that Apple decided to throw it out for Mac OS X.

Another feature that gets a lot of flack from some Linux users is desktop icons. This is something else that a lot of UIs screwed up (maybe stemming from Windows 95? I'm not sure). The classic Mac UI let you drag whatever files you were currently working on to the desktop and do whatever you needed to do. Then when you were done with the files, you could highlight them and select "Put Away" and they'd all get moved back to their original locations. The desktop was a temporary space for what you were actively working on, not a giant catch-all storage location like how modern UIs treat it.

zabzonk3• 5 months ago

Perhaps aesthetic - both Windows 1.0 and 2.0 were (to me at least) very ugly. Things got a bit better with Windows 3.0 and 3.1 (and easier to program) but it wasn't really until Windows 95 that the whole thing came together. One thing you have to give Microsoft (at least back then) is that they did keep trying. And, speaking as a Windows developer, their documentation was very good.

dylan6042• 5 months ago

it wasn't really until Windows 95 that the whole thing came together.

I remember the launch parties for 95. I remember thinking to myself how strange it was to go to all of that expense to promote an OS.

zabzonk3• 5 months ago

they weren't promoting an OS, they were promoting a user experience - A GUI that competed with the Mac.

There were OS improvements too, but I have forgot what. The real improvements came with Win2K - one of the best versions of Windows ever.

hulitu2• 5 months ago

Perhaps aesthetic - both Windows 1.0 and 2.0 were (to me at least) very ugly.

Microsoft got back to the roots with Windows 10 and 11.

zabzonk3• 5 months ago

Either this is sarcasm or you and me are the only two people here that actually like Win11.

monkeydreams2• 5 months ago

Perhaps aesthetic - both Windows 1.0 and 2.0 were (to me at least) very ugly.

But it was amazing for those of us used to black and white/green/amber screens in DOS. You could put an image as your background. And it stayed there, lurking behind your word processor or spreadsheet, to spring back into your vision whenever you finished up your work.

tharkun__2• 5 months ago

I never understood that pull.

One of the very first things I always do in any OS is to set the desktop background to solid color, usually black. I almost never ever will see it, coz there's always going to be a window on top of it, except upon startup for some brief period of time or if I accidentally minimize everything.

I work with full screen windows. Always (tiny number of exceptional cases maybe). I switch between windows with Alt+Tab when necessary. I also have a relatively small screen, both for work and personal stuff (14" for at least 10 years now).

You do you of course.

pjmlp2• 5 months ago

I was found of Windows 3.1 though, it wasn't the Amiga that I envied from everyone else on my group, but I still could have my share of fun with Borland compilers.

lproven3• 5 months ago

Well, it was a breath of fresh air after even 3.0 let alone Windows 2.

But personally, I enjoyed NT 3.1 more. Built-in PPP so I could dial up to CompuServe and get on the Net. Not the web, which barely existed yet, but the Internet. Grab my email at the same time as I downloaded some files over FTP and grabbed the latest from my newsgroups.

At the same time, I had all of MS Office open, and a few command prompts, and a connection to the big office VAX watching that it was happy...

I enjoyed taunting Amiga owners about Real Multitasking on Windows. :-D I was about 25 at the time, in my defence.

hyperman13• 5 months ago

Part of it was the video mode. EGA 640x350x16 had 16 simultanous colors, from a palette of 64 possibilities. And non square pixels as a bonus.

They might have made better choices from the palette, but the limitations were severe.

If you really want to stab your eyes out, CGA had a mode with white, bright pink, light blue and black. I remember playing Keen on it. I've never seen that mode used for anything nice.

xattt2• 5 months ago

bright pink, light blue

This is magenta/cyan mode is essentially the proto-cyberpunk aesthetic.

hagbard_c• 5 months ago

The CGA colour palette was horrid on RGB monitors but on Composite it could look quite good for its time. Not Amiga-level good but good enough. Of course composite monitors were not really a thing in the IBM PC world so it was to little avail. Here's an example of a screen in the mentioned horrible hot-pink palette:

https://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/20...

...and here's the same screen viewed on a composite monitor:

https://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/20...

These images come from this page:

https://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/cga-composite-graphic...

If this isn't enough it seems to be possible to coax ~1000 colours out of these cards as well:

https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-...

eschaton• 5 months ago

“Barbarians Led by Bill Gates” is required reading on the matter.

blacksmith_tb• 5 months ago

Overlapping was hard, it was one of the core parts of the original Macintosh OS, courtesy of Bill Atkinson[1].

1: https://www.folklore.org/I_Still_Remember_Regions.html

dboreham• 5 months ago

The reality distortion field at full strength. Neither Apple nor Xerox "invented" overlapping windows.

andsoitis• 5 months ago

Neither Apple nor Xerox "invented" overlapping windows.

Apple Lisa and Macintosh are widely credited with the first practical, commercial implementation of overlapping windows in a Graphical User Interface.

Although Xerox PARC developed early prototypes, Apple engineer Bill Atkinson is credited with creating the code that made functional, rapid-rendering overlapping windows possible.

MBCook2• 5 months ago

Then who did?

WalterBright• 5 months ago

There was a major debate at the time on whether windows should be overlapping or non-overlapping.

I was in the latter camp!

SoftTalker3• 5 months ago

I switched to a tiling window manager years ago and never looked back, but had the luxury of much larger high-resolution screens. Would be hard to imagine it working well at 640x480 pixels. Even overlapping windows weren't great on such small screens, most people just maximized whatever they were working on.

opan• 5 months ago

Fullscreening windows is typically a feature of tiling WMs, and tiling often makes it easier to adjust the ratios of the splits in small amounts. I think tiling works well at all resolutions.

qingcharles• 5 months ago

I've run Windows for almost 40 years and I almost never overlap any windows if I can avoid it. I have every window maximized that allows it. Some OCD thing :)

opello• 5 months ago

This was discussed in Advent of Computing episode 150 "Starting Windows Up"[1,2] and the timeline of a 1983 demo which showed overlapping windows and multitasking, but also highlighted the contrast to the DR4 build from late 1984 claiming to introduce a multi-tasking scheduler.

This isn't really new information to the Stack Exchange question and answers, but it's kind of fun coincidental coverage of the topic.

[1] https://adventofcomputing.libsyn.com/episode-150-starting-wi...

[2] https://podscripts.co/podcasts/advent-of-computing/episode-1...

wolvoleo3• 5 months ago

Wow seeing that Cedar system by Xerox, it's so advanced, even more than anything else I've seen from those days. Even featured RPCs. They could have owned the industry.

I find it hard to understand why they never saw the potential.

WalterSlovotsky• 5 months ago

Xerox was a photo copier company. Actually, they were more of a photo copy company as most of their revenue came from charging the customer by they number of pages photo copied. This was the lens through which they looked at what was being produced at PARC, how is this going to cause my customer to need to make more photo copies. How is having working RPCs going to result in more photo copies being made?

Computing just wasn't in their DNA and those people at Xerox who did see the potential in PARC never had the leverage to reorient the company to take advantage. This is almost always the result when a for profit corporation invests in fundamental research that is not intimately related to their primary revenue source.

krige• 5 months ago

Meanwhile, the Amiga had the Boing demo in 1984, months before the system was actually sold. Smoothly liding screens and multitasking, baby.

Also, stereo sound and nice visuals but that's not the point here.

monkeydreams2• 5 months ago

That "Smoke on the Water" MIDI tune playing through speakers at the computer shop... I cannot explain how amazing that was.

empressplay• 5 months ago

That would have been a MOD file:

https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu...

pjmlp2• 5 months ago

I was kind of pissed that my parents sponsored getting a 386SX with Windows 3.1 alongside DR-DOS 5, instead of an Amiga, as everyone else on my group, in hindsight they bet on the right system.

To note, the hardware required to get OS/2 running would have added 1 000 euro more in today's money.

A couple of years later Comodore was gone and the history has been racounted endless times.

Still we don't give up keeping it alive somehow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJS5E4CPmpY

Was Windows 1.0's lack of overlapping windows a legal or a technical matter?

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