If you want the history behind early Windows, read "Barbarians Lead by Bill Gates." Windows 1.0 a direct response to a demo from VisiCorp for a graphical desktop environment called "Visi On" [1] in 1982.
Some other things in that book that I learned: Microsoft passed on the opportunity to use Postscript. Windows running in protected mode started as someone's summer skunkworks project at a time when the company assumed that OS/2 was the actual future.
Some other things in that book that I learned: Microsoft passed on the opportunity to use Postscript. Windows running in protected mode started as someone's summer skunkworks project at a time when the company assumed that OS/2 was the actual future.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visi_On