Daily Tech History: November 10, 1983 — Microsoft Announces Windows

On November 10, 1983, Microsoft publicly announced Windows for the first time, unveiling a graphical interface meant to sit on top of MS-DOS. At a press event in New York, Bill Gates promised the new system would ship by April 1984 — complete with overlapping windows, icons, and mouse-driven menus instead of typed commands.

That ship date turned out to be wildly optimistic. Windows 1.0 didn’t actually arrive until November 1985, more than two years after the announcement, and even then it was a modest, tiled-window affair that few people adopted. It took until Windows 3.0 in 1990 for the idea to really click with buyers. Still, the 1983 announcement mattered: it was Microsoft’s first public commitment to a graphical future for the PC, made at a moment when IBM-compatible machines were still almost entirely text-based, and it set the direction the company would spend the next decade executing on.

Also on this day: November 10, 2001 was the day Apple actually started shipping the original iPod to customers, a few weeks after unveiling it — the beginning of the device’s slow climb from a $399 curiosity to the product that remade Apple’s business.

Source: This Day in Tech History, The National Museum of Computing

Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.