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m had 16 bit code internally which required among other things device drivers to be 16 bit code as well this was one of the reasons for the chronic shortage of os 2 drivers for the latest devices version 2 0 could also run dos and windows 3 0 programs since ibm had retained the right to use the dos and windows code as a result of the breakup microsoft windows version 2 0 2 01 and 2 03 internally came out on december 9 1987 and proved slightly more popular than its predecessor much of the popularity for windows 2 0 came by way of its inclusion as a run time version with microsoft s new graphical applications excel and word for windows they could be run from ms dos executing windows for the duration of their activity and closing down windows upon exit microsoft windows received a major boost around this time when aldus pagemaker appeared in a windows version having previously run only on macintosh some computer historians who date this the first appearance of a significant and non microsoft application for windows as the start of the success of windows like prior versions of windows version 2 0 could use the real mode memory model which confined it to a maximum of 1 megabyte of memory in such a configuration it could run under another multitasker like desqview which used the 286 protected mode it was also the first version to support the high memory area when running on an intel 80286 compatible processor this edition was renamed windows 286 with the release of windows 2 1 a separate windows 386 edition had a protected mode kernel which required an 80386 compatible processor with lim standard ems emulation and vxd drivers in the kernel all windows and dos based applications at the time were real mode and windows 386 could run them over the protected mode kernel by using the virtual 8086 mode which was new with the 80386 processor version 2 1 came out on may 27 1988 followed by version 2 11 on march 13 1989 they included a few minor changes in apple computer inc v microsoft corp version 2 03 and later 3 0 faced challenges from apple over its overlapping windows and other features apple charged mimicked the ostensibly copyrighted look and feel of its operating system and embodie d and generated a copy of the macintosh in its os judge william schwarzer dropped all but 10 of apple s 189 claims of copyright infringement and ruled that most of the remaining 10 were over uncopyrightable ideas 23 on december 31 2001 microsoft declared windows 2 x obsolete and stopped providing support and updates for the system windows 3 0 edit the logo of windows 3 0 main article windows 3 0 windows 3 0 released in may 1990 improved capabilities given to native applications it also allowed users to better multitask older ms dos based software compared to windows 386 thanks to the introduction of virtual memory windows 3 0 s user interface finally resembled a serious competitor to the user interface of the macintosh computer pcs had improved graphics by this time due to vga video cards and the protected enhanced mode allowed windows applications to use more memory in a more painless manner than their dos counterparts could windows 3 0 could run in real standard or 386 enhanced modes and was compatible with any intel processor from the 8086 8088 up to the 80286 and 80386 this was the first version to run windows programs in protected mode although the 386 enhanced mode kernel was an enhanced version of the protected mode kernel in windows 386 windows 3 0 received two updates a few months after introduction windows 3 0a was released as a maintenance release resolving bugs and improving stability a multimedia version windows 3 0 with multimedia extensions 1 0 was released in october 1991 this was bundled with multimedia upgrade kits comprising a cd rom drive and a sound card such as the creative labs sound blaster pro this version was the precursor to the multimedia features available in windows 3 1 first released in april 1992 and later and was part of microsoft s specification for the multimedia pc the features listed above and growing market support from application software developers made windows 3 0 wildly successful selling around 10 million copies in the two years before the release of version 3 1 windows 3 0 became a major source of income for microsoft and led the company to revise some of its earlier plans support was discontinued on december 31 2001 24 windows 3 1 edit main article windows 3 1 in response to the impending release of os 2 2 0 microsoft developed windows 3 1 first released in april 1992 which included several improvements to windows 3 0 such as display of truetype scalable fonts developed jointly with apple improved disk performance in 386 enhanced mode multimedia support and bugfixes it also removed real mode and only ran on an 80286 or better processor later microsoft also released windows 3 11 a touch up to windows 3 1 which included all of the patches and updates that followed the release of windows 3 1 in 1992 the logo of windows 3 1 and nt 3 x in 1992 and 1993 microsoft released windows for workgroups wfw which was available both as an add on for existing windows 3 1 installations and in a version that included the base windows environment and the networking extensions all in one package windows for workgroups included improved network drivers and protocol stacks and support for peer to peer networking there were two versions of windows for workgroups 3 1 and 3 11 unlike prior versions windows for workgroups 3 11 ran in 386 enhanced mode only and needed at least an 80386sx processor one optional download for wfw was the wolverine tcp ip protocol stack which allowed for easy access to the internet through corporate networks all these versions continued version 3 0 s impressive sales pace even though the 3 1x series still lacked most of the important features of os 2 such as long file names a desktop or preemptive multitasking microsoft quickly took over the os and gui markets for the ibm pc the windows api became the de facto standard for consumer software on december 31 2001 microsoft declared windows 3 1 obsolete and stopped providing support and updates for the system however oem licensing for windows for workgroups 3 11 on embedded systems continued to be available until november 1 2008 25 windows nt 3 x edit main articles windows nt windows nt 3 1 windows nt 3 5 and windows nt 3 51 meanwhile microsoft continued to develop windows nt for business users at the time the main architect of the system was dave cutler one of the chief architects of vax vms at digital equipment corporation 26 microsoft hired him in october 1988 to create a successor to os 2 but cutler created a completely new system instead cutler had been developing a follow on to vms at dec called mica and when dec dropped the project he brought the expertise and around 20 engineers with him to microsoft windows nt workstation microsoft marketing wanted windows nt to appear to be a continuation of windows 3 1 arrived in beta form to developers at the july 1992 professional developers conference in san francisco 27 microsoft announced at the conference its intentions to develop a successor to both windows nt and windows 3 1 s replacement windows 95 codenamed chicago which would unify the two into one operating system this successor was codenamed cairo in hindsight cairo was a much more difficult project than microsoft had anticipated and as a result nt and chicago would not be unified until windows xp albeit windows 2000 oriented to business had already unified most of the system s bolts and gears it was xp that was sold to home consumers like windows 95 and came to be viewed as the final unified os parts of cairo have still not made it into windows as of 2025 update most notably the winfs file system which was the much touted object file system of cairo microsoft announced in 2006 that they would not make a separate release of winfs for windows xp and windows vista 28 and would gradually incorporate the technologies developed for winfs in other products and technologies notably microsoft sql server driver support was lacking due to the increased programming difficulty in dealing with nt s superior hardware abstraction model this problem plagued the nt line all the way through windows 2000 programmers complained that it was too hard to write drivers for nt and hardware developers were not going to go through the trouble of developing drivers for a small segment of the market additionally although allowing for good performance and fuller exploitation of system resources it was also resource intensive on limited hardware and thus was only suitable for larger more expensive machines however these same features made windows nt perfect for the lan server market which in 1993 was experiencing a rapid boom as office networking was becoming common nt also had advanced network connectivity options and ntfs an efficient file system windows nt version 3 51 was microsoft s entry into this field and took away market share from novell the dominant player in the following years one of microsoft s biggest advances initially developed for windows nt was a new 32 bit api to replace the legacy 16 bit windows api this api was called win32 and from then on microsoft referred to the older 16 bit api as win16 the win32 api had three levels of implementation the complete one for windows nt a subset for chicago originally called win32c missing features primarily of interest to enterprise customers at the time such as security and unicode support and a more limited subset called win32s which could be used on windows 3 1 systems thus microsoft sought to ensure some degree of compatibility between the chicago design and windows nt even though the two systems had radically different internal architectures windows nt was the first windows operating system based on a hybrid kernel the hybrid kernel was designed as a modified microkernel influenced by the mach microkernel developed by richard rashid at carnegie mellon university but without meeting all of the criteria of a pure microkernel as released windows nt 3 x went through three versions 3 1 3 5 and 3 51 changes were primarily internal and reflected back end changes the 3 5 release added support for new types of hardware and improved performance and data reliability the 3 51 release was primarily to update the win32 apis to be compatible with software being written for the win32c apis in what became windows 95 support for windows nt 3 51 ended in 2001 and 2002 for the workstation and server editions respectively windows 95 edit main article windows 95 after windows 3 11 microsoft began to develop a new consumer oriented version of the operating system codenamed chicago chicago was designed to have support for 32 bit preemptive multitasking like os 2 and windows nt although a 16 bit kernel would remain for the sake of backward compatibility the win32 api first introduced with windows nt was adopted as the standard 32 bit programming interface with win16 compatibility being preserved through a technique known as thunking a new object oriented gui was not originally planned as part of the release although elements of the cairo user interface were borrowed and added as other aspects of the release notably plug and play slipped microsoft did not change all of the windows code to 32 bit parts of it remained 16 bit albeit not directly using real mode for reasons of compatibility performance and development time additionally it was necessary to carry over design decisions from earlier versions of windows for reasons of backwards compatibility even if these design decisions no longer matched a more modern computing environment these factors eventually began to impact the operating system s efficiency and stability the logo of windows 95 and 98 compared to the logo of windows 3 1 it points slightly downwards microsoft marketing adopted windows 95 as the product name for chicago when it was released on august 24 1995 microsoft had a double gain from its release first it made it impossible for consumers to run windows 95 on a cheaper non microsoft dos secondly although traces of dos were never completely removed from the system and ms dos 7 would be loaded briefly as a part of the booting process windows 95 applications ran solely in 386 enhanced mode with a flat 32 bit address space and virtual memory these features make it possible for win32 applications to address up to 2 gigabytes of virtual ram with another 2 gb reserved for the operating system and in theory prevented them from inadvertently corrupting the memory space of other win32 applications in this respect the functionality of windows 95 moved closer to windows nt although windows 95 98 me did not support more than 512 megabytes of physical ram without obscure system tweaks three years after its introduction windows 95 was succeeded by windows 98 ibm continued to market os 2 producing later versions in os 2 3 0 and 4 0 also called warp responding to complaints about os 2 2 0 s high demands on computer hardware version 3 0 was significantly optimized both for speed and size before windows 95 was released os 2 warp 3 0 was even shipped pre installed with several large german hardware vendor chains however with the release of windows 95 os 2 began to lose market share it is probably impossible to choose one specific reason why os 2 failed to gain much market share while os 2 continued to run windows 3 1 applications it lacked support for anything but the win32s subset of win32 api see above unlike with windows 3 1 ibm did not have access to the source code for windows 95 and was unwilling to commit the time and resources to emulate the moving target of the win32 api ibm later introduced os 2 into the united states v microsoft case blaming unfair marketing tactics on microsoft s part microsoft went on to release five different versions of windows 95 windows 95 original release windows 95 a included windows 95 osr1 slipstreamed into the installation windows 95 b osr2 included several major enhancements internet explorer ie 3 0 and full fat32 file system support windows 95 b usb osr2 1 included basic usb support windows 95 c osr2 5 included all the above features plus ie 4 0 this was the last 95 version produced osr2 osr2 1 and osr2 5 were not released to the general public rather they were available only to oems that would preload the os onto computers some companies sold new hard drives with osr2 preinstalled officially justifying this as needed due to the hard drive s capacity the first microsoft plus add on pack was sold for windows 95 microsoft ended extended support for windows 95 on december 31 2001 phases in development edit release name build number release date kernel milestone 4 58s 1993 08 09 4 00 milestone 5 81 1994 01 19 4 00 beta 1 milestone 6 189 1994 09 21 4 00 beta 2 milestone 7 225 1994 12 01 4 00 beta 3 milestone 8 347 1995 03 02 4 00 release candidate 1 4...