The Windows Environment

Windows hardly needs an introduction. Yet it’s easy to forget the sea change that Windows brought to office and home desktop computing. Windows had a bumpy ride in its early years and was hardly destined to conquer the desktop market.

A History of Windows

Soon after the introduction of the IBM PC in the fall of 1981, it became evident that the predominant operating system for the PC (and compatibles) would be MS-DOS, which originally stood for Microsoft Disk Operating System. MS-DOS was a minimal operating system. For the user, MS-DOS provided a command-line interface to commands such as DIR and TYPE and loaded application programs into memory for execution. For the application programmer, MS-DOS offered little more than ...

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