Microsoft Windows
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Microsoft Windows is a family of operating systems created by the Microsoft Corporation. Windows was first developed for the IBM PC and compatible architectures and was the first graphical user interface on that architecture. It is still the predominant operating system on desktop PC platforms.
Versions 1.0 to 3.1 were basically graphical window managers on top of MS-DOS. Windows 95 was the first Windows build to qualify as a complete operating system, incorporating most of MS-DOS.
For many years Microsoft Windows provided application developers with 16- and 32-bit APIs in the form of DLLs (Dynamic Link Libraries). Native applications could be written in C++ and Visual Basic and compiled into executables which used the DLLs distributed with the operating system. Today Microsoft provides the .NET framework for application development which underneath utilizes the older APIs to interact directly with Windows.
[edit] Versions
Versions with significant use today in reverse chronological order:
- Microsoft Windows Vista (published 2006)
- Microsoft Windows XP
- Microsoft Windows 2000
- Microsoft Windows ME
- Microsoft Windows 98
- Microsoft Windows 95
