Earliest Microsoft operating systems to the present-day release of Essay

Earliest Microsoft operating systems to the present-day release of Windows Vista - Essay Example Rowland Hanson, marketing head of Microsoft suggested that Windows would be a very appealing name to the customer when compared to â€Å"Interface Manager†, which was supposed to be its name. Windows 1.0 was rather an operating environment than a complete operating system; it extended MS-DOS and shared the intrinsic problems and flaws of the latter. It included a simple word processor called Windows Write, an appointment calendar, a simple graphics painting program called Windows Paint, a computer terminal, a clock, a control panel, a notepad, a card filer, and a RAM driver. The MS-DOS Executive and a game called Reversi were also included in the first version. On the 9th of December 1987 the second version of Microsoft Windows 2.0 was released, and gained more popularity than the first version. â€Å"Windows 2.0 supported the Video Graphics Array (VGA) display System, which allowed you to use 16 colors at 640x480† (Shinder, 2003, p. 5). It achieved more popularity than the first version because of the new Microsoft graphical applications namely Word and Excel for Windows, and because of its inclusion as a run-time version. Windows 3.0 version which was released in the year1990 was quite successful because apart from improved capabilities to the native applications it also allowed the users to a more advanced multitask based on older MS-DOS software when compared to Windows/386 due to the introduction of virtual memory. The third version of Windows gave strong competition to the user interface of the Macintosh computer. This version of Windows was compatible with any Intel processor from 8086/8088 to 80286 and 80386 and could run in Standard, Real and 386 Enhanced modes, and was the first version to run Windows program in protected mode, even though 386 enhanced mode kernel was an improved version of the kernel protected mode in