History tells us that Windows 1.0 was not the best Windows made by Microsoft, but every software has a starting point. That starting point can be appreciated live thanks to virtualization. A small portal called Copy's Home maintains a Windows 1.01 environment, and includes copies of its main tools.
The Year 1985
The year was 1985. British Telecom announces the retirement of its famous red public telephones, Richard Stallman reveals the GNU Manifesto, Mikhail Gorbachev becomes General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Back to the Future premieres in theaters, and the remains of the Titanic are officially discovered. But the story of 1985 doesn't end there, as Studio Ghibli is founded in Japan, the Nintendo NES arrives in the United States, and Commodore launches its Amiga 1000. Politics, entertainment, science and technology made 1985 a real whirlwind.
The Origins of Windows
Three years earlier, a certain Bill Gates watched the public demo of Visi On, a graphical operating environment for the IBM PC, at the COMDEX conference. Visi On was innovative, but its high requirements (512 KB of RAM and 2.2 MB of hard disk were madness) combined with a high price and multiple development delays condemned it immediately. That's how Bill Gates came to the conclusion that he could develop something similar to Visi On, with lower hardware requirements and an accessible price. That something was Windows.
Now, the truth is that Gates and his squad didn't deliver what they promised with Windows 1.0. Microsoft's delay in development was even greater (two years), and Windows 1.0 set aside all the functions that required the presence of a hard disk, so it turned out to be a simpler product than Visi On, a detail that the press of 1985 did not ignore.
More than three decades after its debut, Windows 1.0 is now just a toy for us, something that can be virtualized in a browser tab, courtesy of the portal Copy's Home. The environment is simple, and we'll find nothing more than copies of Paint, Write, Notepad, Calculator, Clock and Calendar. The virtualizer offers the possibility of sending commands to the environment via COM1, but I don't think Windows 1.0 can do much with that.
The official requirements of Windows 1.01 are MS-DOS 2.0 as a minimum, 256 kilobytes of RAM (more if possible), and two double-density floppy disks, or alternatively, a hard disk with enough capacity. In other words, today an animated GIF takes up more than this entire operating environment, originally distributed at a price of 250 dollars. As a new and independent product, Windows 1.0 had all the signs of a failure, but it also marked the beginning of a legend.
Windows 1.0 virtualized: Try it online
https://old.neoteo.com/win3mu-emulador-windows-3-viejos-programas/
