New York: With Friday's release of the touch-centric Windows 8 software, Microsoft continues more than three decades of making operating systems for personal computers.
Microsoft got its start on PCs in 1981 through a partnership with IBM. Microsoft made the software that ran IBM's hardware, and later machines made by other manufacturers. That first operating system was called MS-DOS and required people to type instructions to complete tasks such as running programs and deleting files.
It wasn't until 1985 that Microsoft released its first graphical user interface, which allowed people to perform tasks by moving a mouse and clicking on icons on the screen. Microsoft called the operating system Windows.
Windows 1.0 came out in November 1985, nearly two years after Apple began selling its first Macintosh computer, which also used a graphical operating system. Apple sued Microsoft in 1988 for copyright infringement, claiming that Microsoft copied the "look and feel" of its operating system. Apple lost....
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01:14 PM, Oct 26, 2012
