Folks, ive seen a lot of posts that are incorrect as to the beginnings of windows and the current OS.
MS DOS -
was purchased off of a small comptuer company named Seattle computer supply, in downtown seattle for 20,000. Bill Gates had to buy it because he told IBM that he had an OS, (and at the time he really didnt).
Windows 1.0-
Was modeled after the apple release of LISA, because bill gates knew he was behind apple and needed to get an os out fast, plus he had a contract with IBM.
Xerox-
Xerox's PARC center Palo Alto Research Center is responsible for almost everything we use today. They devoloped the First, mouse on a computer running a GUI. At the time xerox's exec's thought it was a joke, and let Apple take whatever they wanted from what PARC had made, (including the GUI, and the mouse). Later one PARC went on to make a ton of inventions listed at the bottom of my post.
These are the real beginnings of it all.........