History of Windows: Windows 2.0

Before I begin this post, I would like to say something about this series of posts that I am planning.

Windows XP is the star of this whole thing. And as such, the "History of Windows: Windows XP" blog post will be published on the day that support for Windows XP ends. Which if some of you have forgotten, is on April 8th, 2014. So. I am going to be spacing this series out to accommodate that. And there are actually going to be three "parts" to the whole series.

Part 1: The beginning of Windows. This part includes Windows 1.0 to Windows 3.0.

Part 2: Windows 9x. This will include Windows 95 to Windows 2000.

Part 3: The post DOS Windows: This will include everything from Windows XP to Windows 8 (Or whatever Microsoft's newest offering is)

So, without any further ado, I give you History of Windows: Windows 2.0:

The year is 1987. Microsoft releases the succsessor to Windows 1.0: Windows 2.0.

Like with its predesessor, Windows 2.0 was not given high regard in the market. And there were quite a few features introduced with Windows 2.0.

The features included the ability to minimize and maximize windows. With this feature, you could switch between applications more easily then you could with Windows 1.0.

But one thing that Microsoft did that captured the attention of software developers was the introduction of Microsoft Office for Windows 2.0. This helped Microsoft speed up the process of becoming a player in the market, but not by very much.

One year later, Windows 2.1 was released. This version of Windows brought support for Intel processors. Under the hood, this was a very good change. But for regular computer users of the time, support for Intel processors would not change how they used computers.

Windows 2.0 was released December 9th, 1987.

Windows 2.1 was released May 27th, 1988.

The latest version of Windows 2.0/2.1 is Windows 2.11.

Support for both of these versions ended on December 31st, 2001.

So that will be it for this- Wait, we still have to talk about the lawsuit.

On March 17th, 1988, Apple Inc filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Microsoft and HP in a attempt to prevent them from using a Graphical User Interface like those in Macintosh operating systems.

In the midst of all this, Xerox filed a lawsuit against Apple Inc, claiming that the Macintosh GUI was heavily based on Xerox's.

On September 19th, 1994, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of Microsoft and HP. Xerox's lawsuit was dismissed for a verity of legal reasons.

So, now this is really the end of the post.

Thank you for reading. I invite readers to comment with any questions or comments.