The Real History of the GUI

In the Meantime at Microsoft...

Meanwhile, in the Pacific Northwest, a great evil was stirring... Oh, please. To cast Microsoft and its head honcho Bill Gates as the Great Satan, or as Sauron to Apple’s brave little band of hobbits, is ridiculous. Both co-founders, Jobs and Gates, are much more alike than they are different. Neither one is a lily-white altruist just trying to bring personal computing to the masses, nor is either a black-moustachio’ed villain bent on destruction. While I doubt either Jobs or Gates would recognize a code of ethics if it hit them in the mouth, neither one belongs on the Ten Most Wanted List, either. Both wanted to carve out a place for themselves in the PC market, both were willing to cut corners to get what they wanted, and both were tremendously successful at what they did.

Microsoft began just as small and insignificantly as Apple did. Starting out as a two-man operation out of the backseat of Bill Gates’s car, Gates and cohort Paul Allen saw the MITS Altair and in the span of a month had a BASIC interpreter ready to go for the beastie. The code wasn’t tested until they demonstrated the program for MITS, and Allen’s first time even touching an Altair was when he inputted the code into MITS’ machine. MITS bought the product – the first programming language written specifically for a personal computer – and Allen joined MITS as Director of Software. By July ‘75, BASIC 2.0, a Microsoft creation, was running the new, more powerful Altairs. The name “Microsoft” wasn’t chosen until November ‘75.

1977 - Microsoft and Apple Team Up

Allen rejoined Microsoft in time to christen the company’s new offices in Alberquerque. In early 1977 Microsoft licensed “AppleBASIC” to Apple for the flat fee of $21,000, which turned out to be a steal of a deal, as Apple sold over a million computers with AppleBASIC running the show (Wozniak actually wrote the integer BASIC for the early Apples). By the end of 1979, Microsoft had participated in porting both FORTRAN and COBOL languages to microcomputers, moved to Washington State, entered into agreements with ASCII Corporation of Japan, and expanded into Europe. The two-man operation was now employing 40 people and bringing in over $7 million. Microsoft’s congenial association with Apple continued into the 1980s, with Microsoft bestowing the Z-80 SoftCard upon Apple in 1980. The SoftCard allowed the Apple II to run most of the CP/M programs currently featured on most smaller computers.

Interestingly, Microsoft was working out the details of a secret deal between themselves and Big Blue for a new operating system, which they called DOS (Disk Operating System). MS-DOS (which was spawned from an operating system called Q-DOS written as a CP/M knockoff by Seattle Computer Products, and bought by Paul Allen in 1980) appeared as the operating system for the first IBM machine, the IBM PC, in August 1981. Since Gates had insisted on keeping the rights to MS-DOS for his company, he was able to license the operating system to any number of “clone” computer and application manufacturers. IBM made an effort to keep DOS to themselves by releasing machines that ran their own version, PC-DOS, but with Microsoft’s willingness to license MS-DOS to all comers, PC-DOS never caught on. As late as 1993, IBM was still trying to market PC-DOS as a viable alternative to the Microsoft operating systems, but by then DOS was waning in market appeal – mass-market users liked the various GUIs and had little use for further command-line interfaces) At the end of 1981, Steve Jobs paid a visit to Microsoft to give them a look at the embryonic Mac, and authorized Microsoft to develop apps for the new, GUI-based system. From 1981-1984, Microsoft folks were all over the Apple labs, working alongside Apple techs to develop applications for the Mac. In the process, Microsoft acquired an intimate familiarity with the inner workings of the Mac design.

A note on the above: Microsoft’s DOS 1.0 code structure was virtually a clone of Digital Research’s CP/M 1.4 operating system…one source calls it a “bug-for-bug” copy. Digital Research (DRI) began working on an updated version for 16-bit computers called CP/M86, to be used with machines featuring Intel’s 8086 processor; unfortunately for DRI, CP/M86 wasn’t ready for prime time when IBM came looking for an operating system, and they went with Microsoft’s DOS instead. In 1982, Digital Research finally released CP/M86, and converted it to their own DR-DOS system in 1987. Digital Research sued Microsoft over the CP/M – DOS imbroglio, but the lawsuit fizzled. One source very hostile to Microsoft alleges that Microsoft did their level best to sabotage DR-DOS when it was released, including making spurious claims that Windows would not run under DR-DOS, as well as hustling their own updates to MS-DOS onto the market to cut the legs out from under Digital Research’s product, and using illegal marketing practices to force PC manufacturers to use their own system in lieu of DR-DOS.

Naturally, this isn’t the only version of this story, but the bare facts are that DR-DOS never impacted the market in the way that Microsoft’s competing MS-DOS did, at least partially due to Microsoft’s energetic and possibly underhanded attempts to push their own system over DRI’s. Digital Research later sold DR-DOS to Novell in 1991. After attempting to integrate it into their own Networking Operating System and releasing versions under the name “Novell DOS,” Novell sold it to Caldera in 1996, almost three years after Novell’s final attempts to work with DR-DOS. Caldera transformed DR-DOS into an open-source product, called OpenDOS. Caldera also sued Microsoft for illegal marketing practices over the DR-DOS affair, and Microsoft settled the lawsuit out-of-court in January 2000. Had CP/M86 been ready for use when IBM came calling, it’s possible that Microsoft would never have gotten the “in” with IBM that propelled it to glory, and we’d all be cussing Digital Research today, instead of Microsoft. Who can say?

Two months before the Macintosh officially hit the market, in November 1983, Microsoft announced that it was working on its own GUI-based operating system (actually, a “shell” that rode atop the DOS OS) to be known as “Windows” (which Gates wanted to call “Interface Manager,” but slicker heads prevailed). Microsoft had already caused a stir in April ‘83 by giving a “smoke-&-mirrors” demo of their prototypical Interface Manager, using overlapping windows to simulate multiple programs running simultaneously. IBM executives were not happy with Microsoft’s little toy, as they were working on their own DOS-based program manager, to be called “Top View.” Gates had tried repeatedly to interest IBM in Windows, and was rebuffed each time; IBM felt that the interest in GUIs was a passing phase. Top View was released in 1985 and discontinued in 1987; its graphical interface influenced IBM’s much more noticeable OS/2, even though a GUI-driven version was never made public.

Windows 1.0 made its official debut almost two years after it was announced, in November 1985. Apple was stunned by the similarities between the Mac and Windows interfaces, but as there were almost no applications available for the Windows environment (Aldus’s PageMaker for Windows was a notable exception), Win 1.0 came and went on the consumer market without much fanfare. The failure of Win 1.0 to capture a decent market share, along with plateauing Mac sales, caused some to wonder if the GUI craze was a fad that had peaked. Ironically, in light of the bad blood to come between the two companies, Microsoft’s Excel (a GUI-based spreadsheet that was similar to its predecessor VisiCalc, but easier to use) gave the Mac much-needed viability at this time.