It’s all about colorful, touch-friendly tiles and the Modern user interface these days, but Windows used to be a monochromatic set of icons and windows back in the 1980s. See what pre-release Windows looked like in this video.
Recorded by one of the developers of VisiCalc—the first spreadsheet application—Windows didn’t have the same intuitive interfaces that users enjoy today in modern operating systems. For instance, the taskbar only offered rudimentary functionalities. Positioning multiple windows in the screen was quite hard because they didn’t overlap. Instead, they stacked with each other to fill up the entirety of the screen. We take them for granted nowadays, but people in the past would have valued these nifty features highly.
Also shown in the video is the early version of Microsoft Word. SmartArt, equations, several page layout options, and advance image editing were absent, but at least users were able to edit a text document.
…and already touch screen? Wow!