Windows | Microsoft's Biggest Mistake

The Xerox Star was absolutely released commercially.

Oh my God it's G-U-I. Just the letters. Not "gooey" that's so wrong it hurt my soul

Yooo, how did you get Bill Gates to guest star in your video!?

We need to go back

So, idk if you'll see this, but I wondering. Have you ever considered making a video on the Morris Worm?

had never heard GUI as gooey

Well, notepad is starting to get phased out by Microsoft.

I switched to Michaelsoft Binbows in 2016, and I've never looked back.

Are you gonna do one about Windows 3.1?

I feel bad for anyone who fast-forwarded for the ad break. Difficult, difficult, lemon-difficult is a fantastically stupid turn-of-phrase that made me belly laugh 🤣

Oh yeah. The title is misleading. You lost honesty points. If you could argue that the OS never actually turned a profit, that might be interesting. But I'm not seeing any reasons that MS Windows could be considered a mistake from the point of view of MS Corp.

The original Mac had 128KB of ram. So Mac OS1 was probably less than 64KB resident in memory. That's kind of impressive. Reading the wiki, the Mac had a 64KB rom containing QuickDraw graphic libraries and api. Another interesting tidbit from the article is that the Mac project was stared by Jef Raskin who worked on it for two years before Jobs took over the project himself. Given that his Lisa project was not commercially viable.

microsoft when MEGAHARD walks in

I now understand the line in Epic Rap Battles of History: Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates about "the GUI that Melina (Gates) uses."

I feel like Windows 2 is even more forgotten than its predecessor. At least Windows 1 has the legacy of being the first one, even if it wasn't good.

I used Norton Commander until windows 95 came out.

True though ngl

Stop using GPU as a word. You sound stupid. It's an abbreviation. People don't refer gooy as a Graphic user interface. It's a abreviated to be short.

no, the first ever computer to have a GUI was the NLS/oNLine System from 1968, which was also the first time a mouse ever showed up. this was from a demo called the "mother of all demos" by Dr. Engelbart if I have the spelling correct, and was a 1 of a kind system, but for $32k in 1973 money, who are they selling the Altos to?

Actually computers in 1985 were really expensive it was until almost a decade later that prices were much more reasonable, just in time for Windows 95 to take the world by storm.

I was there! CLP was all I needed. I didn't relent to GUIs until Win95.
Of course, long before that I was banned from Sears and Radio Shack... at the same time.
It's a story.

The biggest mistake of the computer world was not bringing Unix to the masses. Windows and Macintosh were first and stole the show while Unix based systems had about 15 years of development and software at the time Windows came out. And because of Windows we're stuck in a world where the professional computing world and the home computer world are vastly different and mostly non-compatible. It probably set back computing by a good few years. Everyone lost because of that. Windows to this day has little professional tools and Unix based systems are poor in everyday desktop entertainment/multimedia applications. Of course because of Linux and the open source community there's a lot of really good software and Linux desktop is a really good alternative to Windows and Mac in 2024, but it took years to crawl back to this position.

Thank you for this video. Not sure how it wound up in my feed, but I was glad that I watched it.
You know, I didn’t get my first PC until 1996 when I was 32 years old. It seemed everyone had a computer except me, so I felt left out. I had no need for a PC and had no clue how to use one. I guess it was one of those things that I felt like I needed in my home.
My brother gave me my first PC and set it up in our home, a Gateway with Windows 95. After he left, my wife and I were like “okay, what the hell do we do with it?” Our daughter player solitaire on it from time to time, but for the most part it sat there looking pretty.

Long story short, I never got into owning a PC since my job rarely requires the use of a computer. Last year my brother bought me a Macbook. For some reason, he has bought every computer that’s ever been in my home. I don’t know what happened, but I absolutely love that Macbook. I have no explanation why it took me 27 years to start enjoying having a computer. Thanks to your video I understand the evolution a little better

Normally I love your channel but this is just a clickbait title. You don't explain any failure. You just give the history.

Unless the 'failure' is implied in "the marketing was boring"?

1. A lot early home computers from the 1970 and 80s, like those mocked in this video, used the BASIC interpreter as their interface. On most of those systems, that BASIC was created by Microsoft. 2. MS-DOS was not created by Microsoft; Microsoft bought it and then licensed it to IBM for the PC. MS before that was mainly a BASIC interpreter company. 3. Preemptive multitasking did not come to consumer Windows until 2001. But it didn't come to Macintosh either until 2001. It was built into AmigaOS in 1985 and IBM OS/2 in 1987.

Windows didn't get much attention until version 3.0

I don't like that Apple restricts in a garden wall. They don't license their OS to manufacture, limiting the OS just their Macs. Whereas Microsoft Windows can be installed on any PC. Unlike Apple, Microsoft doesn't make PCs or hardware, just the software

Windows 1.0-3.0 was just a graphical shell on top of DOS

Love the parody at the beginning

Micro$oft

Please stop the Ads

i love the way he pronounces GUI

That gooey stuff sure is more user-friendly than text interfaces

Macintosh was a niche computer and the vast majority of people certainly did not care. Besides, the 1st gen Macintosh certainly wasn't very advanced technologically, irrespective of its modern GUI. IBM PC (compatibles) was the industry standard and has remained so until today. The MDA text mode was slick and crisp, and people didn't mind until the early 1990s when computers became powerful enough for meaningful GUI operations at every price point. Besides, apps themselves could have graphics and GUIs even in the DOS environment. Multitasking just wasn't a thing that people needed at the time and computers weren't really powerful enough for it.

I just wanna say one thing: AmigaOS!

Windows was also designed for very specific hardware that many PCs of the time didn’t have (mouse, hard drive, color display..)

"MacIntosh was for the rebels, those who were sticking it to the man. It was the punk rock of computers."

Not something I'd expect to hear, especially in the current year haha. Great video as always, that skit as Bill Gates was hilarious and I always appreciate your accompanying visuals.

The user interface was crude in early computers, but quite simple in its crudeness, as were computers in general. So I don't think it's not that regular people had a difficult time of learning simple commands and tasks, it was arguably more about the lack of purpose and killer-apps. Except gaming, of course.

In all fiarness Windows rang on DOS right up to Windows XP as Windows 95 and 98 still rang on techincally DOS 7

Developers developers developers

Windows went from a Mistake to a Masterpiece (Well, sometimes, at least)

It's been well recorded that Xerox had very litte interest in the PARCS project and were happy to sell the idea to Apple. The Xerox engineers were extremely angry at their senior management for giving Apple access to the GUI idea. Bill Gates is editing history to suit this narrative, he did the same thing with the whole MSDOS/86-DOS situation.

I have never heard someone say "gewy" rather than "gee, yu, eye"

Windows 1.0 is very lackluster in a world where the Amiga exists.