Was Windows 1.0's lack of overlapping windows a legal or a technical matter?

CanopyCoder

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).

contextfree

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.

zabzonk

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.

eschaton

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

blacksmith_tb

Overlapping was hard, it was one of the core parts of the original Macintosh OS, courtesy of Bill Atkinson[1]. 1: https://www.folklore.org/I_Still_Remember_Regions.html

dboreham

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

WalterBright

There was a major debate at the time on whether windows should be overlapping or non-overlapping. I was in the latter camp!

opello

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...