Episode 13: Windows/286 Presentation Manager

Welcome to The Computer Vault podcast where we discuss the history of computers, computing and IT.

In this episode, we're going back to the late 1980s - a period when the personal computer industry was in the middle of a major transition. DOS had dominated the PC world for years, but it was showing its limits, and a new era of graphical interfaces was beginning to take shape. The question wasn't just what the future would look like - it was who would build it.

To explore that, we're looking at two things that came out of that moment. The first is Windows/286 - a version of Microsoft Windows released in 1988 that was designed to get more out of the Intel 286 processor. We'll look at what it actually was, what problem it was trying to solve, and what it meant for the people using PCs at the time.

The second is Presentation Manager - the graphical interface that IBM and Microsoft co-developed together for their OS/2 operating system. Presentation Manager was, in many ways, intended to be the future of computing on IBM-compatible PCs. We'll get into how it was built, how it differed from Windows, and why that divergence ended up mattering so much.