NATHAN MYHRVOLD PhD ORAL HISTORY - The Computerworld ...

We then had a two week long meeting arguing about things like, you get all the
various parts of the technology, and what do we have to contribute, and what do they
have to contribute? By the end of the two weeks, we had a deal that Microsoft and
IBM would continue to work together. That was the first thing I did.
After that I was involved sort of two things in parallel. I was a development manager
for graphics on Windows 2.0. That was the last unsuccessful version of Windows.
They got me off boom, you know. So that was exciting. We changed the graphics
algorithms for all of the things in Windows 2.0, but we had a goal of making every
operation a factor or two faster even on the same computer. We actually did it
without a whole bunch of patents, and making it faster was very crucial because
Windows 2 0 was the platform on which a couple of the most successful windows
applications launched, both us and other companies. It’s the platform on which Ray
Ozzie and a bunch of people at Iris Associates wrote Notes. It was a platform at
which Ted Johnson and a bunch of people at Aldus, which is right across the way
here in Seattle, wrote Page Maker for Windows.
That was also when Microsoft wrote Excel and Word. Those applications were very
crucial to the future success of Windows. Windows 2.0 was never a very successful
platform. I think Windows 1.0 came in 1985, and it was a joke cause far as most
people were concerned. In fact there was a big thing at Comdex where they had a
roast of the project and all these people came up to make fun of it. Windows 2.0 was
more credible but it still was not our best seller by any stretch.
Windows 3.0 came out in 1990. So Windows was a product for five years before it
was successful. Those were long, hard, difficult years for those of us that were
involved in building it, but we believed so much in the technology. We believed that
graphical use interface was the future, but we did things in retrospect. You’d say,
“My God what were we thinking.” As one example, in Windows 2.0 we couldn’t
assume that there was a hard disk machine because too many machines didn’t have
hard disks. So there was a card that came in the box with Windows 2.0 that had the
instructions for how you should lay your floppy disks out on the desk, so when asked
you to swap a disk in and get more things, you could shuffle them in and do this little
shuffle to keep it straight.
Nathan Myhrvold
Oral History
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