Computing gets personal - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 157

work on a GUI project after Bill Gates had visited Jobs at Apple and had seen
the prototype Macintosh computer in development. The Microsoft product was
originally going to be called “Interface Manager,” but Scott McGregor, who had
joined Microsoft from PARC, had written the window manager component for
PARC's interactive programming environment and had called his PARC software
“Windows.” Rowland Hanson, the head of marketing, then persuaded Gates to
call Microsoft's new operating system “Windows,” as Hanson explained, “to
have our name basically define the generic.” 23 Version 1 of Windows appeared
in 1985. The highest performance Intel microprocessor for the PC at the time
was the 80286, called the “286” for short, but even on this chip the Windows
GUI ran far too slowly. It was only when the Intel 386 and 486 chips became
available in the late 1980s that using windows on Windows really became a
practical proposition. Meanwhile, the company had also developed a new GUI-
based operating system called OS/2 with IBM, released in 1987. But by early
1989, Microsoft had sold some two million copies of Windows and OS/2 was
history. When Windows 3.0 launched in May 1990, Bill Gates ( B.8.10 ) was finally
able to say that it “puts the 'personal' back into millions of MS-DOS-based com-
puters.” 24 However, it was not until the release of Windows 3.1 in 1992 that the
original PARC vision of computing for the masses truly arrived.
During the 1980s, Microsoft had been developing application software for
the Macintosh and, in so doing, had learned how to develop software for a win-
dows-based interface. When Microsoft designers applied this experience to the
PC, Gates followed the example of Steve Jobs in insisting that each application
adhere to a common GUI. With Charles Simonyi ( B.8.9 ) having left Xerox PARC
and now at Microsoft developing Word for Windows, and with the Excel spread-
sheet program, first developed for the Mac, Microsoft could finally put these
together with the PowerPoint presentation software to form an “office suite.”
By a wholehearted commitment to GUIs, and by bundling three applications
together as Office, Microsoft was finally able to overtake the PC market leaders
for word processing and spreadsheets, WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.
Meanwhile, Microsoft's lawyers were battling a lawsuit filed by Apple
charging that Microsoft had infringed “the Company's registered audio-visual
copyrights protecting the Macintosh user interface.” 25 After four years of legal
B.8.9. Charles Simonyi wrote Bravo, the first WYSIWYG word processor, while at Xerox PARC.
He later “took the PARC virus” to Microsoft where he was responsible for creating the hugely
successful Word for Windows application. Simonyi also helped develop a system of programming
that allowed Microsoft to manage increasingly complex software projects involving large teams
of programmers. The style involved a systematic way of naming variables - called “Hungarian”
because of its apparent incomprehensibility. Simonyi has used some of his personal fortune
from his time at Microsoft to become an astronaut - as shown here - and he has visited the
International Space Station on two occasions.