David Weise: The man who made Windows!

He leaves Microsoft and changed the world

Friday, February 4, 2005 by Frogboy | Discussion: WinCustomize News

Once upon a time, Microsoft and IBM were working on OS/2 2.0 together. OS/2 was going to replace DOS and Windows.

But then..in the middle of this, a gifted engineer at Microsoft figured out how to get Microsoft Windows to run multiple DOS sessions at once (that could be multitasked together) and figured out how to get Windows programs to run in protected mode (i.e. breaking the 640K barrier).  By figuring that out, Windows 3.0 was made and so was history.

Eventually OS/2 was wiped out by Windows and today, most of us are running Windows XP.  But without the contributions of David Weise, the computing world would likely be very different (and for the worse) today (though I wish OS/2 had won out, I don't think OS/2 2.0 would have been nearly as good if it weren't for Windows 3.0).

10 Reply 15 Referrals
freezejeans
Reply #1 Saturday, February 5, 2005 2:58 AM
Thanks for the link, a great read! I grew up with the Apple II and Atari computers and finally Windows 3.0, and love reading about the histories of machines and software we're using today. It must've been quite an experience to be a programmer back then!

werewolf
Reply #2 Saturday, February 5, 2005 12:58 PM
hmmm, you have no idea what it feels like to drop your case of punch cards all over the floor. It's not good, man, not good at all.

freezejeans
Reply #3 Saturday, February 5, 2005 7:31 PM
LOL...well I got some firsthand experience with that in the Air Force in the early 90's, where they taught us not only punch cards but paper tape. They were still using it! Never dropped a stack of cards, fortunately

GreenReaper
Reply #4 Saturday, February 5, 2005 9:02 PM
I'd just like to note that making Windows was very much a team effort even then - even back in early 1990s the NT team had hundreds of people on it, and now it's probably a couple of thousand depending on how you count it. Just in case someone gets the idea that Stardock should write their own OS.

BX
Reply #5 Sunday, February 6, 2005 3:27 AM
Yeah. He was the one who entirely changed the way we intract with computers today. Very Well Done. & Nice Find too.

WOM
Reply #6 Sunday, February 6, 2005 9:01 AM
WOM remembers those days as a Cobol programmer in the early 70's.

univac 1005. It was call a computer but was a glorified card reader. Watch those hanging chads.

Kuruus
Reply #7 Monday, February 7, 2005 11:35 AM
No doubt about it, the only thing worse than actually punching the punch cards was dropping them! Ugh!

caseagainstfaith
Reply #8 Monday, February 7, 2005 12:17 PM
It may have been genius to get Windows hacked to use protected mode, but Windows 3.0 was the worst thing ever for the industry. Frogboy says OS/2 2.0 wouldn't have been as good as it was without the Windows 3.0 competition, but I'm not sure that is true. And even if it was true, surely it would have been at least better than Windows 3.0, and gone up from there much faster. The industry was shackled for a decade and a half with the Windows 3.x line. And didn't really get enough better in the 9x days, though of course it was a big improvement over 3.x. The first "real" OS by MS was Windows 2000, basically two decades after Windows 3.0.

GreenReaper
Reply #9 Tuesday, February 8, 2005 8:55 AM
Umm . . . it was less than one decade . . .
Windows 3.0 release date: 22 May 1990
Windows 2000 release date: 6 October 1999

And I think you're underestimating Windows NT 4, which was released way back in August 1996. It wasn't perfect, but it was certainly pretty solid. Solid enough to kill Stardock's OS/2 market, anyway!

caseagainstfaith
Reply #10 Tuesday, February 8, 2005 11:15 AM
How the heck did I screw that up? You are right, only one decade. I guess it only seemed like 20 years!

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