Window into the future
On this day in 1985, Microsoft released Windows 1.0, its first graphical user interface. Remember starting your computer with a floppy disk? Windows was received with a tepid response, due to compatibility and performance issues, and perhaps unfavorable comparisons to Apple’s own GUI showcased in the Mac, released just the year before.
As a freshman in college at the time, my school had gone all in on Apple and so I was delightfully immersed in the Apple ecosystem on my new Mac. From watching my dad come home with boxes full of punchcards as a child, to learning to type command lines in green letters onto black screens, the Mac interface was liberating.
However, upon graduation, I was faced with the fact that Microsoft had achieved a dominant market share in computing and returned to typing backslash commands to create Lotus123 spreadsheets on Microsoft pc’s. That’s right, I was a Lotus wizard and my staff will tell you that I’ve yet to learn Excel.
Even now, the vast majority of the world operates on some version of Windows, which has revolutionized personal computing. Several decades ago, I made a switch entirely to a Linux open-source environment. While Linux served me and my company well, I learned there was no escaping Microsoft and when I entered state employment and faced a full conversion back.
On a side note, my initial struggles with converting to Windows in 1989 was compounded by the fact that my first boss on Wall Street was very old school and did not trust computers. For my first several months as a glamorous, newly minted investment banker, I sat in a windowless conference room for 100-hour weeks with a financial calculator, surrounded by stacks of spreadsheets. My assignment – to calculate every cell on every spreadsheet produced by the Microsoft pc by hand to make sure that the computer did not make an error.
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