After three years of blood, sweat and code, about two dozen, mostly 20-something, members of the original Windows development team altered the computing landscape forever.

Moving from character-based DOS to Windows with its graphical user interface was an enormous challenge back in the early 1980s. Programmers logged long hours, worked with feeble hardware, designed previously unimaginable new drivers and created a new paradigm. In effect, they dragged, pushed, pulled and cajoled DOS into the GUI age for PCs.

When Windows 1.0 shipped in November 1985, it represented a gigantic step toward the still-elusive ease-of-use goal of computer programmers everywhere. Instead of having to decipher the strange language of DOS, Windows gave users a GUI.

That is a fancy term for simplicity, something visual, something requiring minimal hand-eye coordination to manage.

Of course, Xerox Corp. had the Star System in 1984 and Apple Computer Inc. also had an early GUI that year, but there is no doubt that the development team that produced Microsoft Windows version 1.0 rewrote the textbook on PC desktop operating systems.

Back in 1984, Chris Peters was a 27-year-old development manager for the kernel on the Windows version 1.0 project. A very large project for Microsoft at the time, the team worked fairly independently in three areas: the kernel group, the user group and the graphics part.

Complicating development, Microsoft jumped the gun with the announcement of Windows 1.0, first telling the world about the product in October 1983. It did not ship until November 1985. When it did, it was introduced at a cost of $99. It featured tiled Windows and fit and ran on two 360-Kbyte 5.25-inch disk drives, the standard configuration for many users at the time. "It was a little bit of a disaster," said Peters, currently Microsoft vice president of Web authoring tools. "It took a long time to get it out the door."

Back then, Microsoft was small, about 80 people housed in pedestrian offices in Bellevue, Wash. The company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen was still smaller than Lotus Development Corp., Xerox, Apple, IBM Corp. and most other competitors.

"We worked long hours for many years," said Peters. "The other crazy, insane thing was Windows had to work fairly well on a two-floppy machine. There were no hard disks. A design requirement was that it worked well on a two-floppy machine with 256K of memory."

Among other challenges, developers had to write sample applications to show that Windows could run something, said Peters, who wrote a strategy game called Reversi that shipped with Version 1.

A variety of small applications shipped with the original Windows package, including MS DOS Executive, Calendar, Notepad, Terminal, Calculator, Clock, Reversi, Control Panel, Program Interface File editor, Print Spooler, Clipboard, RAM drive, Windows Write and Windows Paint.

"It was November in Seattle. It was very dark," said Peters. "Like being in school and going through finals and more finals and more finals, and waking up after it's over and thinking, 'I gotta go to a final. But there's no final to go to.' "

Windows 1.0 was a critical success but not a commercial one.

"Windows 1 days we were just trying to explore the graphical user interface," said Peters. "We had the terrible, terrible constraint of these things running on computers that ran 100 or 1,000 times slower than they do now. We just had toy computers then."

An original advertisement for Windows read: "Windows will instantly deliver you a more productive present and a leap into the future."

It took awhile, but the advertising proved true. Windows evolved into the most popular user interface in the history of computing, with 75 million machines and still growing, according to a modest, single-panel display at the Microsoft museum on the corporation's sprawling, Redmond, Wash., headquarters.

Back before the huge success, Rao Remala was lead developer in the graphics area for Windows 1.0. He is currently technical manager of Microsoft's desktop applications division.

"It really laid down a great foundation for the other systems to come down the road," Remala said. "We had a great team, really smart by any standard. We used to work very hard. We were all so engrossed with this project. We really wanted to do something that had a huge impact on the users and that's what carried us along. We just worked."

Remala recalled that now-President Steve Ballmer took over the group in 1984 and said he was going to manage the team until the product shipped. In March 1985, Ballmer made a bet that he was going to ship the product before snow fell that fall. But one day, during a Seattle Seahawks and Denver Broncos football game, it snowed on national television. "Steve was upset," Remala said.

Remala's office was next to Ballmer's in those days. "He talked so loud we had to go tell him to calm down," he said.

Ballmer was the de facto development manager, agreed Tandy Trower, director of retail marketing for Windows 1.0 in 1985 and currently senior director of Microsoft's advanced user interface group.

"Even though there were technical leads, Steve was the spiritual leader for the group," Trower said.

"Probably no one at Microsoft then realized what a significant project it was," Trower said, who calls the summer of 1985 "the lost summer" because of all the time he devoted to Windows.

"In the early days of Windows, OEMs supported different screen resolutions. We had to support quite a diverse amount of hardware," Trower said.

And in those days, new software usually turned around in six to nine months, not two or three years.

"No one even imagined the magnitude of what we were trying to take on," Trower said. "It was a huge bet for the company. No one really knew what a graphical app looked like."

It was a whole new approach, and both Ballmer and Gates had set conservative expectations for sales of Windows, Trower said.

Windows 1.0 set Microsoft firmly on the path to graphical user interfaces and committed the company to an industry leadership role in the development of the GUI.

Indeed, in 1987, Microsoft Windows 2.0 offered overlapping on-screen Windows and a plethora of technology advances.

After a major redesign, commercial success truly was attained with Windows 3.0 in 1990. In the first year, 3.0 sold 4 million copies. Windows 3.1 brought even broader acceptance after it was introduced at Windows World in 1992.