alt.hn

3/4/2026 at 8:15:06 PM

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

3/4/2026 at 9:39:12 PM

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.

by zabzonk

3/5/2026 at 7:43:51 AM

> 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.

by monkeydreams

3/5/2026 at 1:21:52 PM

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.

by hyperman1

3/5/2026 at 1:41:50 PM

> bright pink, light blue

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

by xattt

3/4/2026 at 11:22:41 PM

> 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.

by dylan604

3/4/2026 at 11:32:56 PM

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.

by zabzonk

3/5/2026 at 2:56:47 AM

Win2K was my favorite as well. The transparency was tasteful. Everything worked and for the most part didn’t crash. Many (most?) games worked. It ran great on a PIII 600mhz. Everything good about NT4 was better and most of the consumer friendly stuff starting to take shape. The disc was even gorgeous. Peak MS design and engineering.

by jonhohle

3/5/2026 at 12:46:06 PM

I love me some Windows 2000 but when I got to XP I was running it with a BeOS theme. My peak of windows ux may be around Windows 10 Beta 1 - combined 7/8/10 transparent and start menu and was super fast. That said beta 1 of Win11 was also super fast so that makes me wonder what they broke under the hood.

by hypercube33

3/5/2026 at 3:25:07 AM

Yep, favorite version of Windows ever. Even with Windows 7 and XP I switched the settings back so it looked like Win2K.

by SoftTalker

3/5/2026 at 7:25:07 AM

Win2k was the last one I was excited about.

by porl

3/5/2026 at 1:49:15 PM

> There were OS improvements too, but I have forgot what …

Hold up, there is no need for this revisionist history.

At the very least, Windows 95 introduced the ability to run 32-bit apps pre-emptively that was otherwise only available on Windows NT. You continued to maintain the ability to run 16-but apps that wouldn’t run on Win NT.

You also gained support for long filenames, and to the chagrin of many, plug-and-play.

These were foundational and set the tone for the next 30 years of computing.

by xattt

3/5/2026 at 12:30:15 AM

I don't remember if Plug-n-Play shipped with the original Windows 95 (it's certainly there in the final OSR), but that was a pretty big shift from the manual IRQ and port mapping days of DOS/Windows 3.1.

by jsolson

3/5/2026 at 4:31:50 AM

It did. That was one of its big features.

It also was the first version to remove the 8.3 limitation and give us long file names.

by MBCook

3/5/2026 at 4:53:43 AM

They were fake long file names though. At the actual dos layer they were 8.3. And the plug and play was terrrrible. I always turned it off. Ugh the plug and play modems/soundcards were trash.

by conception

3/5/2026 at 5:54:26 AM

You're not wrong, but PnP including the configuration basis for PCI which still sits at the config space layer of the latest and greatest PCIe. That's the piece I find so significant. I work with GPUs that mostly communicate over a proprietary C2C connection, but how does the OS find them? PCI enumeration.

by jsolson

3/5/2026 at 12:47:07 PM

IRQ conflict stuff still kinda haunts me.

by hypercube33

3/5/2026 at 1:23:56 PM

I remember. You get a tiny little sliver of sound and then press reset.

by hyperman1

3/5/2026 at 1:35:45 AM

back then, it was still plug-n-pray. it didn't work as well as it was intended when it was first available

by dylan604

3/5/2026 at 3:23:51 AM

IIRC we got long filenames with Win95, and a built-in network stack, no more Trumpet WinSock. And it did seem more stable, not nearly as good as NT/2000 but better than 3.1.

by SoftTalker

3/5/2026 at 12:28:31 PM

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.

by pjmlp

3/5/2026 at 7:11:01 AM

> 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.

by hulitu

3/5/2026 at 1:00:25 PM

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

by zabzonk

3/5/2026 at 1:56:17 PM

I don't like it because, after upgrading from Windows 10, my computer can no longer go to sleep and I can no longer connect to Minecraft servers. These things did not happen straight away, but have developed as problems over time.

by tboughen

3/5/2026 at 4:58:56 AM

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...

by opello

3/5/2026 at 6:15:17 AM

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.

by krige

3/5/2026 at 12:31:46 PM

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

by pjmlp

3/4/2026 at 9:38:54 PM

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.

by contextfree

3/4/2026 at 10:08:57 PM

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.

by somat

3/5/2026 at 1:10:36 AM

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.

by ndiddy

3/4/2026 at 10:56:31 PM

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.

by kalterdev

3/4/2026 at 10:52:13 PM

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.

by layer8

3/4/2026 at 10:46:34 PM

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

by hedgehog

3/4/2026 at 11:13:24 PM

Focus management is such a tricky beast.

by agumonkey

3/4/2026 at 9:50:36 PM

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

by MarsIronPI

3/5/2026 at 3:12:28 AM

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

I was in the latter camp!

by WalterBright

3/5/2026 at 4:54:32 AM

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 :)

by qingcharles

3/5/2026 at 3:20:24 AM

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.

by SoftTalker

3/5/2026 at 9:15:09 AM

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.

by opan

3/4/2026 at 8:43:39 PM

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).

by CanopyCoder

3/4/2026 at 9:03:23 PM

> 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....

by giobox

3/4/2026 at 9:20:47 PM

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.

by parl_match

3/4/2026 at 9:43:41 PM

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.

by plorkyeran

3/5/2026 at 12:51:52 AM

Apple threatened to sue Microsoft when Windows 1.0 came out in 1985, but Gates responded by threatening to stop developing software for the Macintosh, pull the Macintosh software Microsoft had already developed from shelves, and refuse to renew Apple's license for Applesoft Basic for the Apple II. Sculley backed down and signed an agreement with Microsoft granting them the right to create derivative works of the Macintosh and Lisa UIs and a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual license to use those derivative works in current and future software. In return all Apple got from Microsoft was a promise to continue supporting Word and Excel on the Mac until October 1986, which they would have done anyway.

This surrender agreement is likely why Microsoft felt confident enough to adopt overlapping windows in Windows 2.0. However, Apple's 1988 lawsuit didn't get dismissed because the judge decided that Windows 1.0 and Windows 2.0 are fundamentally different, and the agreement only covered the aspects of Windows 2.0 that also appear in Windows 1.0. The case ground on for several years before eventually getting dismissed because what Microsoft had licensed from Apple were generic ideas that shouldn't be subject to copyright. For example, Microsoft were free to use a trash can to represent deleted files as long as they didn't use Apple's specific rendering of a trash can.

by ndiddy

3/4/2026 at 10:59:57 PM

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.

by blkhawk

3/5/2026 at 12:16:25 AM

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

by charonn0

3/5/2026 at 5:13:44 AM

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.

by saghm

3/5/2026 at 1:43:42 AM

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

by undeveloper

3/5/2026 at 3:08:56 AM

And replacing it with even more regulations.

by userbinator

3/5/2026 at 1:21:17 AM

> 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.

by mmooss

3/4/2026 at 9:05:45 PM

> 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 :)

by jmclnx

3/4/2026 at 10:49:49 PM

>"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.

by fsckboy

3/4/2026 at 10:04:50 PM

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.

by Affric

3/4/2026 at 10:54:36 PM

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.

by avadodin

3/5/2026 at 8:53:50 AM

> 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.

True but that's also a factor of tiling being so niche. If it were more common the apps would take it into account and just not so fixed sizes as much.

There's only few uses that really require it like video.

by wolvoleo

3/5/2026 at 5:19:27 AM

> The main use-case was multiplexing terminals and, after tmux provided a solution that was usable by normal users, it seduced people away.

Are you sure about this history? I'd always heard that GNU Screen had been popular for a while before tmux, and from double checking, Screen dates back to 1987, the same year that Windows 2.0 came out. tmux didn't come for another two decades.

by saghm

3/5/2026 at 8:54:25 AM

Yes but screen didn't feature tiling when it first came out. That came much later.

It makes sense too because at that point most terminals were still physical with fixed dimensions. Most applications didn't handle terminal resizing yet. Especially on the fly.

by wolvoleo

3/5/2026 at 5:53:32 AM

You are right.

Although I don't know about "popular".

To clarify, my impression was that many people started using tmux around the time when it was introduced including a few who had been using screen before.

by avadodin

3/5/2026 at 12:47:12 AM

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."

by ok123456

3/4/2026 at 10:42:45 PM

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...

by lovich

3/5/2026 at 7:17:33 AM

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

_only_ if you enable hard corners, or something like this, which makes moving windows between screens, difficult.

by hulitu

3/5/2026 at 9:00:42 PM

What makes it hard to move windows between screens? You can do it with the key command or by dragging with the mouse.

I have a three monitor setup and have no problem rearranging the windows as I please

by lovich

3/4/2026 at 9:38:24 PM

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?)

by KellyCriterion

3/4/2026 at 9:53:14 PM

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

by eschaton

3/5/2026 at 6:01:54 AM

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.

by wolvoleo

3/5/2026 at 5:57:13 PM

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.

by WalterSlovotsky

3/5/2026 at 12:10:53 AM

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

by dboreham

3/5/2026 at 3:02:01 AM

> 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.

by andsoitis

3/5/2026 at 4:41:50 AM

Then who did?

by MBCook