Combating some myths about Windows' origins & shipping media

[liam_on_linux]

Another Quora answer. Someone is wrong on the Internet!

Your history and your memories are both incorrect.

MS Windows 1 was released in 1985: Windows 1.0 - Wikipedia

It did not resemble GEM. MS worked closely with Apple and had designed Windows as a tiling window interface, with no desktop, no drive icons and no other features to resemble MacOS, which had been released the year before.

If you look at it you will see next to no resemblance: GUIdebook > Screenshots > Windows 1.01

Furthermore, GEM is not an Atari product. GEM was written by Digital Research and released on the PC before it was ported to the ST: Graphics Environment Manager - Wikipedia

Additionally the Atari ST was not only a games computer; perhaps its primary long-term market success was as a music sequencer, due to built-in MIDI ports. STs were still used for this well into this century. Here are some accounts: Red Bull Music Academy Daily

The Band Atari Teenage Riot were named after the machine for this reason. The musician Alec Empire still uses one. I have seen both, and I still own an ST. Have or do you?

GEM did closely resemble MacOS, Apple sued and won, and PC GEM was crippled so it did not look so Mac-like. Compare here:

GEM 2.0

No overlapping windows — tiled instead. No desktop drive icons.

The lawsuit did not affect the Atari version.

Atari TOS 1.0

GEM is now FOSS and the Mac-like features have been restored: Screenshots of FreeGEM

It does not “look like X-windows”. There are 2 primary reasons.

1. There is no such thing as “X-Windows”. It is The X Window System, so called because it followed the W Window System.
   W Window System - Wikipedia
   It was called W because it ran on top of, i.e. came after, V:
   V (operating system) - Wikipedia
   There is not and never has been a product called “X-Windows”. The current version of X is version 11, so it is usually called X.11. The reference implementation for x86 PCs is run by the FreeDesktop foundation, whose website is X.Org so it is often called X.org.
   Decades ago they spent a lot of money on trying to teach people not to call it “X-Windows”. That was never the name.


2. X imposes no look and feel. It just just a system for drawing windows on the screen and putting contents in them. Every X.11 environment looks different. Look at the early version with twm in the Wikipedia article and you will see it’s nothing like MS Windows. Or compare to SunOS:
   SunView - SunOS 3.5
   The later Motif toolkit looks a little like Windows, with similar controls, because it was licensed from Microsoft, so that it would be familiar to use.
   GUIdebook > Screenshots > CDE 1.5 in Solaris 9

I deployed Windows for Workgroups in production in 1992. It did come on floppies.

The next year, I replaced some of the nodes on the networks with early Pentium computers running Windows NT 3.1. It was shipped on CD. You can download CD images here if you wish: Windows NT 3.x 3.1

It looked like this:

Again, I have one. And 95, 95B, 98, 98SE, ME, NT 3.51, NT 4, and Windows 2000. Do you?

There were editions available, at extra cost, on floppies, yes, but as even NT 3.1 in 1993 took over 30 floppies, it was not a popular option.

NT 3.51 Workstation was 150 MB. You can look at the downloads for yourself here:

Windows NT 3.x 3.51

Since a high-density 3½” floppy diskette stores 1.4 MB, that means about 100 floppy disks. Nobody used this if they had a choice. You remember incorrectly if you think it came on 11 disks; it took 3 just to boot a text-mode installer!

Windows 95 shipped on CD by default. It looked like this:

Windows 95B, which added USB support, also came on CD:

Again, yes, floppies were available, or you could make your own, but it took a lot and was very cumbersome indeed.

As you can see from the label, even if you bought a PC with it pre-installed, you got the CD. You did not normally get floppies because there were so many of them it was too expensive to duplicate and ship them all.

Note that both NT 3 and Windows 9x came with boot floppies, because add-on CD-ROM drives on PCs were not usually bootable at this time.

So you booted the PC of floppies, loaded the CD-ROM device drivers into MS-DOS (for Win9x) and then accessed the CD and ran SETUP. This may be what you are thinking about.

NT had 3 boot floppies, to load the kernel, then some essential drivers, then the Setup program.

Win9x had just one and indeed the OS contained an image of a bootable floppy and could write it to disk for you. You can download that here:

Bootdisk.Com

You seem to be working from some very vague and patchy memories. Perhaps you were very young at the time.

I was not. I was a year into my first job in IT when Windows 3.0 was released. I correctly predicted that it would be a huge hit. The company did not believe me and refused to stock up.

Suffice to say that within a few years the company no longer existed.

I worked with this stuff as an adult professional. It was my stock-in-trade. I kept copies of stand-out highlight products.

I know whereof I speak.