In the fall of 1982, Bill Gates walked the floor of COMDEX in Las Vegas and stopped at a booth run by a company called VisiCorp. On the screen was something called Visi On — a graphical interface for the IBM PC, with a mouse, on-screen menus, and multiple programs sharing the same display. It was clumsy and slow, but Gates saw past that. The command line that had made Microsoft rich, the blinking C:\ prompt, suddenly looked like the past. The future was a screen full of pictures, and Microsoft did not own a single pixel of it.
That moment set off one of the longest, most public, and most stubborn bets in the company's history. Microsoft would spend three years, burn through a team lead, miss deadline after deadline, and earn open ridicule from the trade press — all to ship a product almost nobody wanted at first. The bet was Windows.
The announcement before the product
On November 10, 1983, Gates called a press conference in New York and announced Microsoft Windows: a graphical environment that would run on top of MS-DOS, add a mouse and on-screen menus, and — crucially — let outside developers write programs for it. Microsoft promised it would ship by April 1984. Hardware makers including Compaq, Zenith, and DEC lined up to support it; software houses like Lotus and Ashton-Tate signed on too. Notably absent from the stage was IBM, which rejected Windows and went off to build its own interface, TopView.
The announcement was, in a sense, the whole strategy. Microsoft did not yet have a finished product — it barely had a working one. What it had was a year earlier, in 1981, the company had shown it wanted a graphical interface, and now it wanted to plant a flag before Apple, VisiCorp, and Digital Research's GEM could define the standard. Gates had recruited Scott McGregor, one of the engineers behind Xerox PARC's original windowing system, to lead development in August 1983. But announcing a product is easier than building one.
Three years in the desert
April 1984 came and went with no Windows. Microsoft slid the date to May, then quietly stopped naming dates at all. The delays became a running joke; the trade press slapped Windows with the label "vaporware," software that existed in press releases and demos but never on a store shelf. Internally the project was a grind of redesigns. Early demos had shown overlapping windows, like the Macintosh that Apple shipped in January 1984; the shipping version was reworked to use tiled windows that sat side by side and never covered each other, with a menu bar tucked under each title bar.
Through it all, Gates refused to blink. In April 1984 he told InfoWorld that "our strategies and energies as a company are totally committed to Windows," and warned that "only applications that take advantage of Windows will be competitive in the long run." One observer later wrote that Gates had pushed Windows "almost fanatically for years." In January 1985, with the product still unfinished, McGregor left and a young, loud executive named Steve Ballmer took over the job of simply getting it out the door.
The screen full of windows
On November 20, 1985 — more than two years after the press conference — Microsoft finally shipped Windows 1.0, priced at $99. It ran as a 16-bit shell on top of MS-DOS 2.0, needed a mouse to be worth using, and came bundled with a suite of small programs that would become oddly familiar over the decades: Calculator, Calendar, Cardfile, Clock, Notepad, Paint, a terminal, a card game called Reversi, and a word processor called Write. Ballmer himself starred in a now-legendary television spot, bellowing about the price like a used-car salesman.
There was one more piece of maneuvering that would echo for years. As Windows neared release, Gates negotiated an agreement with Apple's John Sculley in which Apple licensed Microsoft the right to use certain visual displays from its software in Windows 1.0. Apple thought it was protecting the Macintosh; it had, in fact, signed a document Microsoft's lawyers would later wield as a shield in the long "look and feel" lawsuit of the late 1980s.
The reviews were lukewarm. Critics complained that Windows was slow, that almost no software ran on it, and that it did not live up to three years of hype. They were not wrong. Windows 1.0 was a commercial dud, succeeded by the barely-more-successful Windows 2.0 in December 1987. The graphical revolution Gates had glimpsed at COMDEX would not truly arrive under Microsoft's banner until Windows 3.0 in 1990. But the flag was planted. Microsoft had committed itself, fanatically and publicly, to the idea that the future of the PC was graphical — and it had five more years of stubbornness in the tank.
Next in the series: Part 7 — the 1986 IPO that turned a private software company into a public fortune, and minted a generation of "Microsoft millionaires" overnight.
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