Happy 20th Birthday, Windows 3.0
May 22, 1990 saw the release of Microsoft Windows 3.0. In many ways it was the turning point for Windows, the version at which you could see Windows being generally useful. With Windows 3.0 the Windows "ecosystem," as Bill Gates termed it, was born, an ecosystem which caused the extinction of many other operating systems.
Not that Windows was really an operating system at this point. It was a graphical environment with many application services, but users started it by running the 'win' command from a DOS prompt. It relied on DOS not only for booting the computer, but for many basic services like file I/O.
And while it could run multiple Windows programs simultaneously, this was a cooperative or "non-preemptive" multitasking, in which programs needed to call into the operating system in order for another program to get time to execute. If a Windows program didn't do this, it would get all Windows CPU time.
But Windows 3.0 could run multiple DOS sessions preemptively, an important feature at the time. The application market muscle at the time was held by DOS applications sold by vendors other than Microsoft: Word Perfect, Lotus, Borland, Ashton-Tate, and a host of smaller companies. Microsoft's application market share was not nothing, but it wasn't a leader in any core business applications. Windows 3.0 changed all that.
:story: Full story: PC Magazine
