Microsoft Windows just hit a major milestone — its 40th birthday.
On Nov. 10, 1983, Microsoft unveiled the first version of Windows. It was an extension of the software company’s MS-DOS operating system for personal computers, which were just beginning to gain popularity in the 80s.
The year was 1983. Never Say Never Again was the top movie in the land. Total Eclipse of the Heart was the #1 song, and the most popular show on TV was Dallas.
1983 was also something of a Golden Age for personal computer consumers. New choices, rapid technological advancements, and ingenious innovations abounded like never before. For example, Apple’s $6,000 Lisa was released, fundamentally re-imagining what a personal computer could be. It was also the dawn of business applications such as Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, and, of course, Microsoft Word.
From its humble beginnings, Word has gone on to become one of the most popular office tools in the world, and pretty much everyone is familiar with it in one way or another. So, to celebrate its 40th birthday, we decided to take a look at how we got here and also share where we’re going.
This iteration of Windows was a graphical user interface that had early versions of features we would recognize today, like drop-down menus, the ability to run multiple applications at once and the ability to use a mouse to click and open electronic files.
But this version of Windows wasn’t nearly as ubiquitous as the software is currently. Consumers weren’t able to purchase it until two years later in 1985. It cost $100 and only sold around 500,000 copies, according to Time.
Fast forward to today and over a billion people now use Windows, Microsoft reported in May.
