Inside the Windows 1.0 reunion: How a scrappy team shipped the product that changed everything, eventually

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.

So 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 that 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 Windows launched, Apple’s Macintosh had set the standard with its elegant interface (at least by 1980s standards), and 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.

In many cases back then, they were figuring things out on the fly. 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.”

Gates got involved, at times, down to the smallest details. Mark Taylor, who wrote the calculator and other early Windows apps, recalled Gates asking him to remove a timer delay in the Reversi game — not to make it faster, but to make Windows look faster. Years later, chips got so fast that the move flashed by too quickly to see, turning the fix into a bug.

Joe King, who worked on the Windows Control Panel, had an office across the hall from Ballmer with remarkably thin walls. He watched a parade of people come for their “SteveB meeting.” The pattern was always the same: quiet conversation at first, then Ballmer would start pacing, getting louder, gesturing emphatically, and reaching a crescendo before it was over.

“The door would open, a guy would sheepishly walk out, and Steve would greet the next person with full energy and enthusiasm,” King recalled. “I would see that all day long.”

Tandy Trower reminisced about joining the team in 1985 despite being warned that it was a dead end by another product manager, Rob Glaser, later of RealNetworks fame. 

“I came to Microsoft with this vision of bringing software to the people,” Trower said, explaining that Ballmer pitched the Windows project to him as a way of accomplishing that goal. 

He took the job, only to discover the head development manager was already gone. Ballmer offered reassurances that the product was “virtually done.” It wasn’t. 

When Trower suggested changes — overlapping windows, proportional fonts — he got the same response: “You want to ship this year?” The answer was yes. Trower ended up working on Windows through Windows 95, part of a Microsoft career that ultimately spanned 28 years.

Marlin Eller, a programmer and musician, was interested in building a music notation editor. At the end of his first year, Gates asked what he wanted to work on. Eller pitched his idea. Gates engaged enthusiastically, then asked: “How big is the market?” Eller realized it was very small.

Gates had another idea. For music notation, Eller would need to build a graphics package — lines, ovals, curves, etc. An operating system needed that foundational technology to support spreadsheets and charts. And that’s how Eller ended up working on Windows. 

“The thing the world does not know,” Eller joked before the dinner, “is that Windows was written so I could do music notation. All those other people were working for me.”

Pulling pranks and checking facts

And then there were the pranks. A month or two before Windows 1.0 shipped, for example, developer Mark Cliggett decided to have some fun. He wrote a program that gradually turned off bits on a computer screen, and installed it on Ballmer’s machine when he wasn’t there.

“Multiple bad decisions right there,” Cliggett acknowledged: putting malware on a colleague’s computer, giving it to the future CEO, and missing the irony given the security challenges that would consume the industry years later. Marlin Eller wasted an hour debugging the problem before realizing what had happened. Ballmer, to his credit, didn’t hold a grudge.

GeekWire was invited to cover the Windows 1.0 reunion and document all this history. To prepare, I pulled together a 16-page report using Google’s NotebookLM to mine for information about Windows 1.0 in a variety of historical documents, books, and articles.

After I mentioned this to Ballmer, he suggested I open the evening by reading some colorful anecdotes from the research. It turned into an impromptu fact-checking exercise. 

Did Ballmer really call a meeting at 9 a.m. on Easter Sunday 1985 and take down the names of anyone who didn’t show? Yes, he called the meeting. No, he didn’t take names. “I wouldn’t call it exactly a loyalty test,” Ballmer explained, saying it was more about setting a tone. 

Did the team really blow off steam by making bombs and rockets with sugar and saltpeter, drawing police to the building when a security guard smelled explosives? Actually, that happened when making a later Windows version, according to someone who was there. The security guard joined them to blow up traffic cones in the parking garage. The police came later, when they were hiding in the library. (The details are a little fuzzy, but you get the idea.)

And finally, turning to a canonical story about the Windows 1.0 project: was the pivotal 1983 Comdex demo really just a videotape flashing graphics on the screen — classic smoke and mirrors to freeze the market? No. “This was real code,” Remala insisted. 

“It was a little more smoky than not,” Ballmer added, “but it was all real code.”

Some notable former members of the Windows 1.0 team were missing from the reunion, including the famously hard-to-reach Gabe Newell, who went on to co-found Valve and build Steam into the dominant PC gaming platform.

Scott McGregor, the lead development manager recruited from Xerox PARC, left before Windows 1.0 shipped. McGregor later co-authored the X11 windowing system at DEC and served as CEO of Broadcom.

Other members of the Windows 1.0 team went on to remarkably varied careers. 

For example, user interface developer Neil Konzen worked at Ferrari in Italy and pioneered Formula One telemetry. Ed Mills, who worked on fonts, runs a movement therapy practice in Bellevue and is involved in a nonprofit that operates a roller-skating rink in Issaquah.

Cliggett became a long-distance running coach. Eller (who went on to co-author the book Barbarians Led by Bill Gates) teaches computer science. Trower founded a robotics company and continues to work in the field. Taylor is a Seattle public school teacher.

King still introduces himself in the Seattle tech scene by saying he goes back to Windows 1.0 — sometimes prompting the response: “There was a 1.0?” Yes, there sure was.

For Ballmer, the Windows 1.0 experience led to a management technique he still uses today. On his first day as development manager, he repeated to the team what he’d been told was the schedule for different aspects of the project. He heard laughter in response.

He now calls this the “snicker test” — repeat back what you’ve heard from a project’s leaders, and see how the room reacts. If they laugh, you know you’re not getting the true story.

But the real legacy of Windows is much bigger, he told the group this week. If it had shipped two or three years later, Windows wouldn’t have been a relevant product, he said. The key, he explained, was figuring out how to ship “enough of the right stuff at the right time.”

“You did, and it’s nothing short of amazing,” Ballmer said. “It did change the world.”