The 1980s were all about money--who had it, who didn't have it, who charged too much, and who got the best deals. It was an auspicious beginning for the birth of Windows. Ironically, it was President Ronald Reagan who coined the term many would later use to describe Microsoft. But Ronny's "Evil Empire" wasn't referring to capitalists...

	What happened to TopView? IBM dropped it in favor of OS/2, and anyway, under the Microsoft joint agreement, GUI shells over DOS were Microsoft's purview.
	What happened to DESQView? It was a great task-switcher for DOS systems and had a cult following, but it pretty much died when Microsoft DOS 5.0 included a task-switching shell of its own.
	What happened to Ventura Publisher? This desktop publishing application served as the platform for a runtime version of the GEM operating system. The app now belongs to Corel, which sells it as Corel Ventura 8 for Windows 95 and Windows NT.

1983
Apple ships the first commercial personal computer running a graphical user interface: the Apple Lisa. Running Xerox's Star graphical operating system, the Lisa sells for $10,000--more than three times the cost of DOS-based PCs.

The Microsoft Mouse.

Microsoft makes its first inroads into the hardware market, a journey that culminates in 1997's introduction of Microsoft Actimates Barney (yes, the purple dinosaur). The first product is the Microsoft Mouse. Like all the peripherals of the period, it requires an additional interface card. It is sold to support Microsoft Word, but no one seems to want a $200 piece of hardware for crunching text.

Promotional poster for the Microsoft Mouse.

Shortly after, Microsoft announces a reason to buy the Microsoft Mouse--it's developing its own GUI to run on top of DOS, to be ready in a couple of years. Microsoft offers IBM a sneak peek, but Big Blue isn't interested, because it's working on TopView, its own user interface.

Meanwhile, IBM does join up with Microsoft to develop a whole new operating system designed from the ground up with a graphical interface. It's called Operating System/2 (OS/2).

Digital Research--the developers of CP/M and DR-DOS, a retail competitor to Microsoft DOS--brings out a graphical overlay for DOS. It's called GEM. It's destined to be the de facto operating system of the Atari ST and to live on until the 1990s as the environment that ships with Ventura Publisher for DOS.