It’s hard to believe that 20 years ago Microsoft released what I believe was an operating system that turned the North American economy around.Let’s take a look back to see what was going on in the fall of 1985.
I was preparing for my school’s first football playoff game. The most significant social event was Live Aid, as musical acts from around the world held concerts in London and Philadelphia to raise money for the starving people of Ethiopia.
In world events, the United States invaded the tiny island of Grenada. It was the U.S.’ first conflict since the ill-fated Viet Nam war.
In Canada, Brian Mulroney was the prime minister. He was the first Progressive Conservative leader to have a majority government in more than 20 years.
Talk about a milestone.
In technology the biggest news wasn’t in the lab but in the courthouse, where Apple Computer sued founder Steve Jobs.
And Microsoft released the first iteration of Windows. At the time it wasn’t much. Most PC users still used MS-DOS. But Microsoft’s MS-DOS 4.0 was a complete disaster. It was filled with compatibility issues, problems that were only
corrected in Version 5.0. By that time Windows hit its stride with version 3.0.
This OS had a graphical user interface where users could navigate with a mouse and double click an icon to launch a program.
Until then everything was character-command based. To launch a program you would have to type it out, and make sure you had the right coding ahead of it, to execute a program.
Windows made PC users a lot more productive. It also made it easier for home users to operate the computer.
I firmly believe that by increasing productivity during this stretch of time, Microsoft aided the improvement in the Canadian and U.S. economies dramatically.
According to the government of Canada, the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) numbers were in decline in 1982, when the economy was sluggish. However, the GDP rose rapidly during a boom period from 1985 to 1988. At the same time the North American PC industry bloomed.
By 1992 there were as many as 100 PC vendors, not counting the many system builders.
That same year a U.S. court dismissed Apple’s patent infringement case against Microsoft over the Windows operating system.
This was a changing of the guard. Apple became a niche player in graphic arts and education market places, while Microsoft gained control of all other markets. Meanwhile software makers loyal to Apple such as Adobe were releasing Windows versions of their packages at the same time they released Mac versions.
Windows got off to a slow start, but when it started to roll it had a steamroller effect on the industry, culture and the economy.