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Tracking down a far-flung team for a 40-year reunion isn’t easy. But the people who worked on Windows 1.0 got some help from their younger selves: a mischievous Easter egg they hid long ago in the software that would become the foundation of the world’s dominant PC platform.
Back in the mid-1980s, before the product launched, they secretly inserted credits in the code, listing their names, to be revealed through a specific combination of keystrokes.
As the story goes, Bill Gates inadvertently found the list by slamming his fists on the keyboard in frustration over the system’s sluggishness, a discovery that only made things worse. The fix: make the sequence more obscure. It worked. The credits went unnoticed by the public until 2022, when a researcher who was reverse-engineering old Windows binaries found them.
When members of the Windows 1.0 team decided to hold a 40th anniversary reunion this year, that roster became their starting point. It was a time capsule that doubled as a guest list.
A core group from that original Windows team reunited over dinner at Steve Ballmer’s offices in Bellevue on Tuesday evening — trading memories, correcting the historical record, and marveling at what they accomplished back then under nearly impossible circumstances.
“Today, developers have all these tools, drag and drop,” said Rao Remala, an early Windows developer, adding that he would challenge anyone today to build a functioning PC operating environment under the 64K segment limits and other technical constraints of the era.
“Have you tried it in ChatGPT?” Ballmer joked from across the room.
This year has been filled with commemorative milestones for the tech giant, from Microsoft’s 50th to Excel’s 40th to the 30th anniversary of the company’s internet pivot. But this one is different. It’s a glimpse into one of Microsoft’s scrappiest projects, from a moment in its history when key resources — including budget and computing power — were far more scarce.
Microsoft’s landmark platform
Windows 1.0, which shipped on a set of 5.25-inch floppy disks, was technically considered an operating environment, not an operating system, because it ran on MS-DOS 2.0.
Microsoft announced it was developing Windows in November 1983. The release was delayed as the team worked through leadership turnover, technical challenges, and user-interface debates (i.e., tiled vs. overlapping windows), giving rise to industry accusations of peddling “vaporware.” Windows 1.0 finally debuted on Nov. 20, 1985.
By the time it launched, Apple’s Macintosh had set the standard with its elegant interface (at least by 1980s standards). Other DOS-based alternatives were also on the market. Critics favored the Mac’s polish, but Microsoft bet on broad PC compatibility, and that approach ultimately paid off.
Microsoft would later get sidetracked temporarily by its ill-fated OS/2 partnership with IBM, before Windows 3.1 became a breakout hit and Windows 95 set the global standard.
But none of it would have been possible without Windows 1.0. The intense, multi-year project was the foundation for the platform that ultimately turned Microsoft into one of the world’s most valuable companies, launching careers that would reshape the tech industry.
For Ballmer, who was tapped to get Windows 1.0 across the finish line long before he became Microsoft’s CEO, the 40-year reunion stirred up old memories and emotions.
“Of all the things I worked on at Microsoft, in a way, I have the most pride about this project,” he told the group, explaining that he truly felt part of the team.
Figuring things out on the fly
As the night went on, the stories came out, some of them for the first time.
Working out of Microsoft’s Bellevue offices, before the company moved to Redmond, the team was largely in their 20s and even their teens in some cases. (Ballmer, in his late 20s at the time, was one of the older people in the office.) That helps to explain the culture at the time.
“Work and social life — there was no difference. It all sort of blended together,” said Scott Ludwig, who worked on the Windows 1.0 window manager, the core system that handled windows, input, events, menus, and dialog boxes.
They were often figuring things out as they went. For example, when Lin Shaw started in August 1984, months before the original ship date, not a single printer driver existed. She built the banding architecture — a way of imaging one strip of a page at a time to work within memory constraints — that would last through Windows 95.
She routinely stayed up all night and considered it the best job in the world. “It was just like college,” she told the group during the reunion dinner, “except I got paid really well.”
