> The likelihood of any legal restriction was probably close to zero - it’s only from today’s era of hyper-regulation that we might even imagine something like that.

While it's demonstrated to be likely incorrect here, it's not a wild theory. Apple and Microsoft spent a lot of time in court over the "Look and Feel" cases regarding the windowing UI Apple felt Microsoft had stolen. The lawsuit was first filed in '88 and was widely reported on in tech and mainstream press etc, dragging on throughout the 90s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Micros....

Actually it was very much a legal thing. For example i can point to GEM that had to have its windows glued down because of this. See GEM 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment)#/med... vs GEM2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment)#/med...

Apple sued Digital Research and later Microsoft when they enabled overlapping windows for windows 2.0.

Also lol a 286 with 256kb of ram - that is a very very weird combination you would never see in a desktop. Generally early IBM PC compatibles might have just 512KB of ram but around 1985 and later 640KB really became the norm even on 8088 and 8086 based systems. I am not counting stuff that really didn't get anywhere like the PCjr and that thing was much earlier in 1983.

286 based systems once they became more common started a 1mb RAM.

I don't think regulations are the legal restrictions people are referring to, but rather private lawsuits.

i would not describe "today's era" as "hyper-regulation". we're actively removing regulation day over day

> Most likely it was a deliberate technical limitation

At the time I remember reading that was kind of the issue. I thought the article said something like "when Gates saw the Xerox machine, the display had no overlapping windows". So M/S cloned it as he saw it.

Once M/S W1.0 was developed he saw the demo again and was surprised the windows overlapped. So they rushed 2.0 to fix it.

But funny, with all people on Linux using tiling window managers these days, it seems Windows 1.0 was ahead of its time :)

> it’s only from today’s era of hyper-regulation that we might even imagine something like that.

How is regulation involved? The OP's idea was that Microsoft feared being sued by other companies over IP. If there is some increase in lawsuits between companies, I'd like to see evidence.

Also, my understanding is that there was a lot more regulation in the 1970s and extending into the 1980s, though it was probably declining by then.

But hey, for 320x200 (8b) / 640x400 (4b) you had a linear framebuffer early on, before VESA&Co came along :-D

(this was around IRQ13, IIRC,right?)