Why did bill gates invent window?

Answer 1

He didn't. He invented Microsoft, but I do not know why. :(

Gates, along with Paul Allen founded Microsoft to make money out of software. Making money is the commonest reason for founding a company!

Bill Gates did not invent windows.

The idea of using a system based on having a user's experience of interacting with a computer based on a screen using the windows, icons, menus and pointers (called WIMP) system was first developed by employees of the company Xerox (best known for their photocopiers) at their Paulo Alto Research Center.

It was picked by first by Steve Jobs, who saw more in it than the managers of Xerox did, and it was popularised by him in his Apple computers. Bill Gates eventually came to see that this "user friendly" approach - where you use a mouse to go and click on a picture on a screen, or an item on a menu, and get up a "window" with your program working in it - was much more appealing to non-technical users than typing instructions on to a black background and have then the result show up as another set of words or numbers on the screen.

All versions of Microsoft Windows (number 8 is about to launch at the time of writing) since then have been the work of hundreds, or even thousands of people working for Microsoft.

I hope that tells you why Microsoft started producing software that gave us the WIMP system - it is seen as more "user-friendly." If you want a quick glimpse of what PCs were like before Windows, go to the Start menu and type "cmd" into the box at the bottom (or click on "Run" and use the box that come up - depending on which version of Windows you are using). You should get up a box with black background. Try typing the word "email" into it. Nothing will happen. Then press the Enter key and see if you understand what comes up. Before Windows everything was like that on the PC.

You can close the "Command window" you just created by clicking on the button on the top right corner - like any other window.

Now close that "command" box (which was what "cmd stood for). Find the email program on your system and (if it is closed) use your mouse to click on the email icon. You now know why people preferred the WIMP system.

When you were in DOS that black screen was the totality of what you had to deal with to start a program or make other things happen. The only way to get rid of it (aside from starting a program) was to turn the PC off.

It worked, but only for people who were really comfortable with typing in commands like "dir *.doc /p /oa" (if I remember correctly!) who mourned the loss of the DOS interface. Most people prefer having a system based on clicking on icons to start programs or open files.

But, though Bill Gates eventually saw the virtues of the WIMP system (being a geek he was quite happy with the text-based system you just saw in operation), he did NOT "invent it". He didn't even write the software for the Microsoft version - that was far too big a job for one man.