- These were the days before major product launch events, though Apple spent millions the year before on "1984"-themed Mac TV ads for Superbowl Sunday
- Nothing very interesting ran on the new Microsoft Windows environment
- Windows 1.0 was not an operating system, just an add-on to DOS
- You could only run applications side by side ("tiled") which made the view pretty small on the low resolution small monitors of the day
- Windows was over four years in the making, after endless delays and at least one name change (Interface Manager was its original name)
Windows 95 marked the first time that Windows was an operating system, not just something you installed on top of DOS. And the rest is history, detailed very nicely here (with a lot of ads):
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/ ... of_Windows
Although this article doesn't touch on what came before, Windows was really a "Johnny Come Lately" as the Apple Macintosh had sold big thanks to the technology. Even the Mac was really Version 2 of the Apple Lisa that came out at the beginning of the 1980s. All of which was preceded by Xerox PARC, a 1970s research organization in California that invented the mouse and the graphic interface we know as Windows. Apple's Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC and knew he had found the future of computing.