In a charming nod to history, in 2015, Microsoft released a short video showing someone trying to use Windows 1.0 on a modern Surface Book. The video ended with a simple, fitting tribute: a blue screen with white text that read:

On November 20, 1985, Microsoft finally released a product that had been in development for two years and had been announced to much fanfare (and skepticism) two years before that: . It was not the first graphical user interface (GUI) on the market—Apple’s Macintosh, released in 1984, had already set a new standard. But Windows 1.0 represented Microsoft’s ambitious, if rocky, first step toward bringing GUIs to the much larger world of IBM PCs and their clones. A Long and Difficult Birth The project that became Windows 1.0 was initially codenamed "Interface Manager." The concept was simple: create a graphical "shell" that sat on top of MS-DOS, allowing users to navigate programs and manage files with a mouse rather than by typing commands.

From a tiled, slow, and often-mocked interface to the most dominant desktop operating system on the planet, the journey of Microsoft Windows had to begin somewhere. And it began on that day in November 1985.