A walk down the timeline as Windows turns 30

Dateline: 20 November 1985

30 years ago today Microsoft, led by Bill Gates, released Windows 1.0.

For those of us who follow every movement of Microsoft, this day is significant because it was the first step in Microsoft Windows becoming the defacto operating system on consumer computers.

Of course, that dominance had some consequences such as the anti-trust period for the company which stretched between 1991 and 2007.

Those early days of Windows were rough as Windows 1.0 and 2.0 were not very successful. The introduction of Windows 3.0 and its subsequent update to Windows 3.1 resulted on more than 10 million copies of the graphical user interface being sold and put to use by consumers around the world. That started the upward trend for the company and its OS that continues to rule the ever changing computing environment to this day.

My own first use of the graphical overlay for MS-DOS was Windows 3.11 which I received as part of a course I was enrolled in that had me building an IBM compatible PC. That hardware had a 10MB hard drive and just 4MB of system memory with a 386 processor on the motherboard. A true power house of its day to say the least.

That machine started my passion for building computers and tinkering with Windows and now all these years later I get to be a geek for a living!

Do you have any favorite Windows memories from over the past 30 years?

Please share them in the comments below so we can all reminisce about those early days of computing.

This screenshot gallery will walk you through the history of Windows courtesy of Microsoft.

Enjoy.