She also designed many icons for Windows 3.0. Solitaire featured card faces designed by Susan Kare, who had previously designed many graphical elements and fonts for the Macintosh. And of course, it was also a great way to kill time between tasks in the office. With its detailed cards (and amusing card backs), Solitaire proved an able example of Windows’ graphical capabilities. The famous partnership first came together in 1990 when Microsoft shipped its first-ever version of Solitaire with Windows 3.0. The Debut of Microsoft Solitaireīy now, Solitaire is so heavily associated with Windows that it’s hard to picture the two apart.
Today, File Explorer serves as both the main interface and the file manager of Windows 10. If you did want to manage files in Windows 3.0, you needed to launch a separate application called File Manager. Users could easily find and launch applications while being mostly shielded from accidentally messing up its file-based underpinnings. Compared to MS-DOS by itself, or Windows 2.0’s MS-DOS Executive shell, Program Manager provided a very non-intimidating interface. Compared to that, the “large” 16-color icons in Windows 3.0 felt like a revelation, bringing icon detail matching expensive color Macintosh computers to relatively inexpensive PCs.Īlso, Program Manager was easy to use. In Windows 3.0 that job was held by Program Manager, which was also the main interface (shell) for Windows.Īs a shell, Windows 2.0 had used MS-DOS Executive, which was basically a glorified list of files with no support for application icons. In today’s Windows, the Start Menu provides a quick and easy way to organize and launch installed applications. RELATED: PCs Before Windows: What Using MS-DOS Was Actually Like The New Program Manager Here are some of the elements that came together to make both Windows 3.0 unique and successful.
Third-party application support followed, and Microsoft cemented its PC market operating system dominance. Unlike previous versions of Windows, it proved to be a hit, selling over 10 million copies. It allowed multitasking of both MS-DOS programs and specially written Windows applications. Then came Windows 3.0 in 1990, another GUI shell that ran on top of MS-DOS. Neither Windows 1.0 nor Windows 2.0 proved successful in the market. It ran on top of MS-DOS and provided a bitmapped display with non-overlapping application windows. After witnessing several early GUI-based operating system approaches, Microsoft released its own graphical mouse-based interface, Windows 1.0, in 1985. Magazine editorials spoke of the productivity increases that would come from being able to run two applications at the same time.Īround that time, ideas about graphical and mouse-based computer interfaces that had been pioneered on the Xerox Alto had begun to filter down into the personal computer industry. As computers grew in power in the early 1980s, “multitasking” became a huge buzzword in the industry. In the early days on IBM PC compatible machines, most PCs ran Microsoft MS-DOS, a command-line based operating system that typically could only run one program at a time.