Microsoft, 1985. Windows.
Windows 1.01 was the first retail release of Microsoft Windows. It went on sale in the United States on 20 November 1985 for US$99. Microsoft began work on it after Bill Gates saw VisiCorp’s Visi On graphical environment at the COMDEX trade show in 1982, and first showed Windows to the public in November 1983, two years before it shipped.
It isn’t an operating system of its own. Windows 1.01 runs on MS-DOS, and its main program, the MS-DOS Executive, lists files and starts programs. Windows are tiled instead of overlapping, and a minimized program becomes an icon along the bottom of the screen.
It came with Calculator, Paint, Notepad, Write, Terminal, Clock, Cardfile, the game Reversi, and the Control Panel. Reviews were lukewarm, criticizing its speed and how little software supported it. Microsoft followed it with versions 1.02 to 1.04, then Windows 2.0 in 1987, and supported Windows 1.0 until 31 December 2001.