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.
Most likely it was a deliberate technical limitation. After all, dialog windows themselves were already overlapped. I remember well what a headache it was to program and render graphical elements on those old machines (PC AT 80286 with 256 KB of RAM).
As far as I've figured out the answer is that some people involved (the ex-PARC Scott McGregor and Charles Simonyi iirc) genuinely thought tiling was better, while others (Bill Gates?) disagreed but went along with it to avoid lawsuits.
Perhaps aesthetic - both Windows 1.0 and 2.0 were (to me at least) very ugly. Things got a bit better with Windows 3.0 and 3.1 (and easier to program) but it wasn't really until Windows 95 that the whole thing came together. One thing you have to give Microsoft (at least back then) is that they did keep trying. And, speaking as a Windows developer, their documentation was very good.
I was found of Windows 3.1 though, it wasn't the Amiga that I envied from everyone else on my group, but I still could have my share of fun with Borland compilers.
Well, it was a breath of fresh air after even 3.0 let alone Windows 2.
But personally, I enjoyed NT 3.1 more. Built-in PPP so I could dial up to CompuServe and get on the Net. Not the web, which barely existed yet, but the Internet. Grab my email at the same time as I downloaded some files over FTP and grabbed the latest from my newsgroups.
At the same time, I had all of MS Office open, and a few command prompts, and a connection to the big office VAX watching that it was happy...
I enjoyed taunting Amiga owners about Real Multitasking on Windows. :-D I was about 25 at the time, in my defence.
Part of it was the video mode. EGA 640x350x16 had 16 simultanous colors, from a palette of 64 possibilities. And non square pixels as a bonus.
They might have made better choices from the palette, but the limitations were severe.
If you really want to stab your eyes out, CGA had a mode with white, bright pink, light blue and black. I remember playing Keen on it. I've never seen that mode used for anything nice.
This was discussed in Advent of Computing episode 150 "Starting Windows Up"[1,2] and the timeline of a 1983 demo which showed overlapping windows and multitasking, but also highlighted the contrast to the DR4 build from late 1984 claiming to introduce a multi-tasking scheduler.
This isn't really new information to the Stack Exchange question and answers, but it's kind of fun coincidental coverage of the topic.
Wow seeing that Cedar system by Xerox, it's so advanced, even more than anything else I've seen from those days. Even featured RPCs. They could have owned the industry.
I find it hard to understand why they never saw the potential.
Xerox was a photo copier company. Actually, they were more of a photo copy company as most of their revenue came from charging the customer by they number of pages photo copied. This was the lens through which they looked at what was being produced at PARC, how is this going to cause my customer to need to make more photo copies. How is having working RPCs going to result in more photo copies being made?
Computing just wasn't in their DNA and those people at Xerox who did see the potential in PARC never had the leverage to reorient the company to take advantage. This is almost always the result when a for profit corporation invests in fundamental research that is not intimately related to their primary revenue source.
I was kind of pissed that my parents sponsored getting a 386SX with Windows 3.1 alongside DR-DOS 5, instead of an Amiga, as everyone else on my group, in hindsight they bet on the right system.
To note, the hardware required to get OS/2 running would have added 1 000 euro more in today's money.
A couple of years later Comodore was gone and the history has been racounted endless times.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 39.9 ms ] threadMost likely it was a deliberate technical limitation. After all, dialog windows themselves were already overlapped. I remember well what a headache it was to program and render graphical elements on those old machines (PC AT 80286 with 256 KB of RAM).
But personally, I enjoyed NT 3.1 more. Built-in PPP so I could dial up to CompuServe and get on the Net. Not the web, which barely existed yet, but the Internet. Grab my email at the same time as I downloaded some files over FTP and grabbed the latest from my newsgroups.
At the same time, I had all of MS Office open, and a few command prompts, and a connection to the big office VAX watching that it was happy...
I enjoyed taunting Amiga owners about Real Multitasking on Windows. :-D I was about 25 at the time, in my defence.
They might have made better choices from the palette, but the limitations were severe.
If you really want to stab your eyes out, CGA had a mode with white, bright pink, light blue and black. I remember playing Keen on it. I've never seen that mode used for anything nice.
1: https://www.folklore.org/I_Still_Remember_Regions.html
I was in the latter camp!
This isn't really new information to the Stack Exchange question and answers, but it's kind of fun coincidental coverage of the topic.
[1] https://adventofcomputing.libsyn.com/episode-150-starting-wi...
[2] https://podscripts.co/podcasts/advent-of-computing/episode-1...
I find it hard to understand why they never saw the potential.
Computing just wasn't in their DNA and those people at Xerox who did see the potential in PARC never had the leverage to reorient the company to take advantage. This is almost always the result when a for profit corporation invests in fundamental research that is not intimately related to their primary revenue source.
Also, stereo sound and nice visuals but that's not the point here.
To note, the hardware required to get OS/2 running would have added 1 000 euro more in today's money.
A couple of years later Comodore was gone and the history has been racounted endless times.
Still we don't give up keeping it alive somehow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJS5E4CPmpY