Microsoft’s Windows 3.0 and Solitaire Celebrate Thirtieth Anniversary
Friday marks 30 years since Microsoft released Windows 3.0, the successful graphical user interface for MS-DOS. That introduction also marked the arrival of Solitaire, a card game that is still played by millions of people.
Three months after the release of Windows 3.0, on May 22, 1990, Microsoft had sold one million copies, and after a year they had sold four million. Windows 3.0 was therefore much more successful than the previous two Windows versions. According to Microsoft, this was mainly because of two things.
The first is that the earlier Windows versions were not capable of multitasking. Windows itself used up some of the already little memory of PCs, leaving little for other programs. Neither Windows nor MS-DOS supported the “protected mode” of Intel processors, which freed up 16MB instead of 1MB. That changed when a Microsoft employee developed a “DOS extender” that allowed MS-DOS applications to run in that mode. That memory management tweak made its way to Windows 3.0.
The other reason for the MS-DOS gui’s success was that Windows 3.0 had a graphical interface with much more consistent use of color and better design in terms of icons and fonts. That was due to the special User Interface Architecture team set up after graphic designer Virginia Thornton complained to Bill Gates about Microsoft’s gui in 1987.
Perhaps another factor was the presence of Solitaire, the famous card game, also known as Patience. That became part of Windows 3.0 and later versions of the OS. This game was developed in 1989 by an intern at Microsoft, Wes Cherry, and the cards were designed by Susan Karen, who had worked at Apple on interface elements for the Macintosh from 1983 to 1986. In a later interview, Cherry revealed that there was initially support for a shortcut, a boss key, and when the player clicked on it, some random C code quickly appeared on the screen. However, Microsoft removed it. According to Microsoft Solitaire was developed to teach people how to use the mouse.
Microsoft Casual Games has since released Solitaire as the Microsoft Solitaire Collection which has been released for Windows, iOS, Android and for browsers. The company has declared May 22 as Solitaire Day and wants to set a record for the number of games played on this day.