Members of the Windows 1.0 team at their 40-year reunion this week. L-R, kneeling/sitting: Joe Barello, Ed Mills, Tandy Trower, Mark Cliggett, Steve Ballmer (holding a Windows 1.0 screenshot) and Don ...

Windows 1.0 officially released to the public 40 years ago today (November 20), and despite its age, still has some common similarities with what users can expect from the operating system today.

Let's begin with the Start menu (and yes, that's a play on words). It first appeared in Windows 95 and made a big difference in how people used the simple operating system. Before that, from Windows 1 ...

The year was 1983. Microsoft was slowly becoming a well-known tech company in the PC space. Two years before, in 1981, Its MS-DOS operating system would be installed in the first IBM PC. It launched ...