Early Windows¶

Windows 1.x and 2.x, 1985 to 1990; Win16. The design language Windows 1.01 introduced in November 1985 and Windows 3.0 replaced in May 1990: flat one-pixel frames, monochrome line-art chrome that lives in the display driver, one fixed-pitch bitmap font, and reverse video as the only state color.

No first-party Microsoft document names this design language. "Early Windows" is a filing name, the same way "Windows 3.x" and "Windows 9x" are for the two eras after it.

Principles¶

The Guide Specifies Behavior, the Driver Supplies the Pixels¶

The era has exactly one normative UI document, the Application Style Guide version 1.03 from October 1986.¹ It runs twelve chapters on menus, accelerators, selection, keyboard and mouse conventions, filenames, dialog and message-box wording, multitasking etiquette, localization and help. It has no principles chapter at all. The one-page introduction is the whole of its stated intent, and it names a single value, consistency, for the benefit of "the nonprogramming user". It also says "Applications should deviate from the guidelines only when absolutely necessary", which is a stricter conformance stance than the 1992 guide that followed it.

What the book does not have is appearance. Its whole section on color, §10.8, is this:

"Applications should use color wherever appropriate; however, consideration also must be given to how the program looks on monochrome displays."

That is the complete color specification of the design language. There is no RGB value, no font name, no bevel, and outside one push-button height ratio no measurement of a drawn thing in all 92 pages. Note where the sentence sits, too: color is filed under Cooperation, after memory and file usage, as a compatibility duty toward hardware the application does not control.

Appearance lived in three places outside the book:

Cooperation Is the Real Core¶

Chapter 10, "Cooperation", is the one place the book states an ethic, and nothing in any later Windows guide replaces it. The machine was an 8088 with 256 to 640 KB, no memory protection and cooperative multitasking: an application that did not yield froze the whole system, the mouse included. So the rules are about yielding, signaling progress and not touching what you do not own.

• "Unless waiting for user input, applications with the input focus must not present any pause in activity (dead air) that lasts longer than five seconds." This is the era's only numeric UI requirement, and it is a ceiling on unresponsiveness, not a response-time target.
• The hourglass pointer must be shown for long operations, "with both keyboard and mouse interfaces", because the mouse was optional.
• An inactive application may not put a dialog in front of the user. It beeps, flashes its title bar or icon, and waits to be activated. The flashing title bar is the era's entire notification system.

What the Era Is Not¶

Two Plateaus and One Cliff¶

The era looks like one thing but is two flat stretches with a single break between them. Windows 1.01 to 1.04 add two API functions in seventeen months and change nothing visual. Windows 2.03 to 2.11 add no new #define names at all and keep 51 of 52 chrome bitmaps byte-identical. Everything that tells "Windows 1" from "Windows 2" happens at 2.03, December 1987, and it happens because windows stopped being tiled.

Two things commonly credited to Windows 3.x are not dating markers: the X in the check box and the rounded push-button corner both run unchanged from 1985 into Windows 3.0.

Foundations¶

Color¶

The Slot Table¶

Windows 1.x has ten COLOR_* slots, Windows 2.x thirteen.^{5 6} They name surfaces and their text, nothing else.

The three 2.x slots all follow from overlapping windows. The header order, the WIN.INI keys and the Control Panel list (string ids 112 to 121 in the shipped CONTROL.EXE) are the same ten items in the same sequence, three independent routes.

What is missing matters more. COLOR_BTNFACE, COLOR_BTNSHADOW, COLOR_BTNTEXT, COLOR_HIGHLIGHT, COLOR_HIGHLIGHTTEXT and COLOR_GRAYTEXT return zero hits in the 1.01, 1.03, 1.04 and 2.03 headers. They arrive with Windows 3.0 (COLOR_BTNHIGHLIGHT with 3.1). A push button in this era is painted from the window colors like everything else; there is no "button surface" in the color model, and no slot whose job is to show a state.

The Four Default Palettes¶

Both halves of the era have their defaults recovered from first-party evidence, and each half has a color and a monochrome row.

• Windows 1.01 is decoded from the shipped retail display drivers. Each carries an OEMBIN resource holding nine metric words and then ten R,G,B,0 quads in slot order.⁷
• Windows 2.03 is read from the DDK's own driver source, COLOR.ASM and BLKWHITE.ASM, whose header says "The default colors are defined as absolute values to be linked into color display drivers".⁸

How each row is corroborated:

Some details worth keeping:

• The out-of-box Windows 2.x color desktop is cyan, with pure-blue title bars, a cyan menu bar and white windows. Later eras' navy #000080 caption invites the assumption that 2.x looked the same. It did not.
• The 1.01 monochrome row is the look most people picture as early Windows: white windows and menus, black text, a black active title bar and a mid-gray screen.
• #4040C8 is the only hand-mixed color in the era. Every other value is built from 00, 3F, 40, 7F, 80, BF, C0 or FF.
• The 1.01 color row conflicts with Microsoft's own photography on the Windows 1.01 retail box, captioned as an IBM EGA screen, which shows yellow-green scroll-bar troughs and pale-cyan client areas. The likeliest reading is a scheme dressed through Control Panel for the photograph, but that is an inference. The drivers are the evidence.
• The 1987 User's Guide is two slots stale. It agrees with BLKWHITE.ASM on eleven of thirteen keys and still prints the 1.0 values for Scrollbar and InactiveTitle.⁴ The driver source is the authority.
• Only three slots moved between 1.01 mono and 2.03 mono: SCROLLBAR (#C0C0C0 to #3F3F3F), INACTIVECAPTION (#808080 to #FFFFFF) and BACKGROUND (#808080 to #7F7F7F). Those are the ones a viewer notices, so they are the ones not to mix between rows.

Pick a version first, then a display class, and do not mix them. The four rows are four distinct looks.

The Grays Go Round in a Circle¶

Windows 1.01's two grays are #C0C0C0 and #808080, the exact pair Windows 3.x made famous, shipped five years earlier. Windows 2.03 re-derives the ramp as exact quarters (#3F3F3F, #7F7F7F, #BFBFBF) and Windows 3.0 goes back to 192 and 128, this time giving them a job as face and shadow. In this era the grays never compose anything: they paint a scroll-bar shaft, a desktop, a sizing border and an MDI workspace, and nothing is stacked against anything.

Persistence and Theming¶

GetSysColor, SetSysColors and WM_SYSCOLORCHANGE are all present and unchanged from 1.01. Control Panel writes changed slots to WIN.INI [colors] as decimal R G B lines. The shipped [colors] section is empty in both the 1.01 retail runtime and the 2.03 SDK; an absent key falls through to the driver's table.

The whole theming model is Control Panel's Screen Colors dialog: a list box of the ten or thirteen elements, three scroll bars labeled Hue, Bright and Color, a mock window built from the strings Active, Inactive, File Edit and Window Text, and Ok / Reset / Cancel. There are no named color schemes: the word scheme occurs zero times in both User's Guides. Named schemes arrive with Windows 3.x. A scheme picker in a Windows 1.x or 2.x reproduction is the most likely anachronism, because every later Windows has one.

The Hardware Underneath¶

Four of the six Windows 1.01 display drivers are monochrome. CGA and Hercules show 2 colors, EGA 16. There is no palette manager, no LOGPALETTE and no documented rule for how a COLORREF maps to a 2-color device. Color, in this era, is a property of a minority of installations, and the style guide's one sentence is a plain description of that installed base.

Relief: There Is None¶

This is the central finding for the era, and it is a negative one, provable three ways.

1. The drawing API cannot express an edge. The complete rectangle-and-frame surface in both 1.01 and 2.03 is seven calls: FillRect, FrameRect, InvertRect, PatBlt, GrayString, Rectangle and RoundRect. None takes an edge, a side, a light direction or a state. FrameRect draws the same brush on all four sides; it is structurally incapable of an asymmetric bevel. DrawEdge, DrawFrameControl, DrawState and DrawFocusRect return zero hits in all four headers.
2. The color table has no surface. No face, no shadow, no highlight slot.
3. The pixels are one bit deep. Every OBM_* bitmap in every 1.01 driver and every 2.03 resource set is planes = 1, bitsPixel = 1. There are no grays in the artwork because the artwork cannot hold one.

A gray brush does exist: SS_GRAYRECT and SS_GRAYFRAME are static-control styles from 1985, and GRAY_BRUSH is there. No system control is drawn with any of them. A gray brush exists; a gray control face does not. Windows 3.0 introduced no new primitive. It introduced a color slot whose job was to be a surface.

What the era uses instead:

There is one seed of what comes next. Windows 2.03's three new caption-button bitmaps and its redrawn Control-menu box are hollow glyphs with a 1 px top and left edge and a 2 px right and bottom edge. In one-bit art that reads as a drop shadow, and it is the first appearance of the 1 : 2 asymmetry that Windows 3.x later states in color. It appears on those glyphs only, is not expressible in any API, and applies to the glyph inside the button rather than to any surface.

The chrome this era hands forward is literal. OBM_BTNCORNERS (the push-button corner sheet) and OBM_SIZE (the scroll-bar corner box) are bit-for-bit identical from Windows 1.01 (1985) to Windows 3.0 (1990), measured in the Windows 3.0 SDK's VGA.DRV.¹⁰ Windows 3.0 did not repaint the old art. It kept the thirteen monochrome ordinals and shipped fifteen new 4-bpp beveled bitmaps beside them.

Typography¶

The UI type is a single face called System: a bitmap font, fixed pitch, drawn with 2-pixel stems, shipped at one size per display and at no other.⁹ Every value below is read from the FONTINFO headers of the shipped files.

• Fixed pitch. dfPitchAndFamily has bit 0 clear and dfAvgWidth == dfMaxWidth == 8, two independent checks. By Windows 3.x the System font is proportional and bold. The change of pitch is the largest typographic difference between the two eras.
• Regular weight, but heavy on screen. The declared weight is 400, and every stem is drawn two pixels wide, so it reads as a semi-bold. A reconstruction with 1 px stems looks markedly lighter. LOFONTS' weight of 334 is unexplained.
• One UI face. Windows 3.x's split between a chrome face and a dialog face does not exist yet. Menus, captions, dialogs and edit controls all use System, and edit controls are fixed-pitch by rule: "All edit controls use the fixed pitch ANSI font to display characters."
• The zero is slashed, a diagonal from bottom left to top right inside the bowl. It is the fastest test for a substitute face.
• Bitstream, 1984. Every face carries (c) Copyright Bitstream Inc. 1984, except the 2.03 1024x768 face, which is a separate Microsoft drawing from 1987.
• The font may not outgrow the chrome. Every FONTS.ASM in the DDK opens with "System font height should be less than or equal to the close box and the size box bitmaps heights", which is why font and chrome bitmaps are redrawn per adapter in lockstep rather than scaled.
• No antialiasing, no hinting, no scaling, no outline format and no user choice of UI font. The only stroke fonts (Roman, Modern, Script) are document fonts.

The style guide says nothing about type. Its one typographic rule is the push-button height, in §8.11.1.

Substitutes on Current Windows¶

System cannot be redistributed: it is Bitstream-licensed, and a .FON raster face besides, which DirectWrite cannot load. Every monospaced outline face that ships with Windows 11 was measured for this page; "em for 8 px" is the pixel size at which the advance matches the era's 8.

None of them fits, and the gap is weight, not family. At the size where the advance is 8 px, all of them render 1 px stems where the era's are 2 px. Asking for bold is not the fix: the era's face is weight 400 and Windows 3.x's System really is 700, so a bold would erase a documented difference between the two eras.

Metrics¶

The Dialog Unit Arrives Complete¶

The Programming Guide defines dialog units in 1986 exactly as Win32 still does: a horizontal unit is a quarter of the System font's character width, a vertical unit an eighth of its height, excluding external leading.²

Eight vertical units is one line of text by construction. The 1.01 high-resolution configuration is the one where everything lands on whole pixels, and it is the configuration every other measurement on this page is taken at.

Control Heights and Layout, as Built¶

Measured over 57 SDK sample resource scripts and the decoded dialog templates of the shipped 1.01 shell and applets, in dialog units.

The style guide prints the maximum height as 96, which does not match its own formula (24 x 8 = 192). The shipped samples obey the formula.

Per-Adapter Pixel Metrics¶

The first nine words of every driver's configuration block (1.01 OEMBIN, 2.03 CONFIG.ASM), identical across both releases:

Every one of these is a pixel count a person chose per display. There is no formula and no DPI concept anywhere in the era. The eight system metrics 2.x adds (SM_CXMIN/CYMIN, SM_CXSIZE/CYSIZE, SM_CXFRAME/CYFRAME, SM_CXMINTRACK/CYMINTRACK) are exactly what a dragged, resizable, minimizable window needs and a tiled one does not.

States and Motion¶

The entire state vocabulary is two calls: InvertRect and GrayString.

Some rows need a sentence each.

• Focus is the sharpest 1.0x vs 2.x discriminator. The 1985 User's Guide uses underscore 18 times and dotted never; the 1987 one uses dotted 8 times. In 1.0x the underscore is a single indicator for the whole screen that turns into the text caret when it lands in a text box, and the style guide sizes push buttons to hold it: "Push-button height should be 1-1/2 times as high as the tallest character in the button name and also should include space for the blinking underscore."
• Default and focus are separate. Enter fires the default button from anywhere in the dialog; Space fires the focused one. The default never moves in 1.0x. 2.0 adds DM_SETDEFID, so it can move at run time.
• Pressed is documented in one sentence, BM_SETSTATE's: "If wParam is TRUE, the button is blackened, or the check box is emboldened."² There is no pressed artwork for a push button or a scroll arrow, no bevel to sink into, and no label offset.
• Disabled grays the text, never the frame. "When a button cannot be chosen, the label in the button should be grayed." On the four monochrome 1.01 drivers there is no gray to draw with, so the gray is a checkerboard.
• No hover. hover, mouse over and rollover occur zero times across all three books, and the BN_* set has no enter or leave notification. With inversion as the only state operation a hover would be indistinguishable from pressed. A menu highlight follows the pointer only while a mouse button is held.

Motion does not exist. No duration, easing or transition is named anywhere. The only timing values in the era are the shipped WIN.INI defaults, identical in 1.01 and 2.03, and the five second dead-air ceiling:

Iconography¶

The era ships five system icons (OIC_SAMPLE, OIC_HAND, OIC_QUES, OIC_BANG, OIC_NOTE) and seven system cursors in 1.x, twelve in 2.x (the five sizing cursors arrive with resizable windows), all 1 bit deep. Masters are authored at 64 x 64 for icons and 32 x 32 for cursors and then squashed by integer factors per adapter, so an icon is 64 x 64 on 1024x768, 32 x 32 on EGA and 32 x 16 on CGA. There is no fixed icon size in this era. The 1.01 icons are a white symbol knocked out of a black tile; the 2.03 masters are black line art on white, and the triangle around the exclamation mark, still in Windows today, arrives with Windows 2.0. The style guide gives no icon design guidance at all.

Minimizing is the icon model: there is no taskbar. In 1.0x icons sit in an icon area along the bottom of the screen; in 2.x they float and can be dragged, and their title shows only while selected.

Controls¶

The era has five window classes: BUTTON, EDIT, STATIC, LISTBOX and SCROLLBAR, plus menus. Every control on this page is one of them.

Push Button¶

A one-bit, round-cornered outline with a label in it. No face color, no highlight, no shadow. "A push button is a box that contains a string."

The only shipped artwork is OBM_BTNCORNERS, a 30 x 10 monochrome sheet with three motifs, byte-identical from the 1.01 driver through the 2.03 DDK to Windows 3.0:

On the 640x200 adapters the sheet is redrawn at 36 x 6 (a 6 x 4 and a 12 x 6 ring), squashed rather than scaled.

Every modal dialog "should have a default push button". Where the safe choice is negative, the guide asks for Yes / No with No as default rather than making Cancel the default.

The system's own labels live in USER.EXE's string table, and they are the sharpest single dating marker there is:

Ok follows the style guide's own rule: "The first letter in the push-button name should be a capital. All other characters in the name should be lowercase."

The guide places buttons "at the upper right edge of the window with Cancel under Ok". Microsoft's own 1.01 applets mostly put them in a bottom row instead. The guide and the product disagreed from the first release.

Check Box and Radio Button¶

Both are drawn from OBM_CHECKBOXES, a sheet of 4 columns x 3 rows of 1-bit outline glyphs.

Facts that matter for a reconstruction:

• The X is from November 1985. It is often presented as a Windows 3.x trait; 3.x inherited it.
• Two marks for two jobs. A checked check box is an X; a checked menu item is a tick (OBM_CHECK). Windows 95 later collapses them.
• Pressed is emboldened, not inverted. The stroke thickens; ink and paper do not swap.
• No well. Not one of the twelve cells has an interior fill or an edge with a direction. A check box is a hollow square with a 1 px outline sitting on the dialog background.
• Grouping: radio buttons carry WS_GROUP on the first member only and no WS_TABSTOP, so Tab skips the group and the arrow keys move within it. Each check box carries WS_TABSTOP | WS_GROUP.

Edit Control and Static Text¶

STATIC is both the label and the dialog editor's only decorative primitive. Its six rectangle styles, SS_BLACKRECT, SS_GRAYRECT, SS_WHITERECT and the matching *FRAME trio, are flat single-color fills or one-unit frames in three tones, and they are the era's whole ornamental vocabulary.

List Box¶

Four LBS_* styles, unchanged across the era, and LB_DIR fills one with a file listing in a single message. There is no combo box: not in the headers, the style guide, the User's Guides, the 57 sample scripts or the 507 dialog items decoded from 12 shipped binaries. An Open dialog pairs an edit field with a list box because that was the only way to get the combination. There is no height rule either; the shipped habit is 56 DU (seven rows at 8 DU) for a file list.

Scroll Bar¶

The 1985 User's Guide describes it as "the gray bars" with "the small white box" as the thumb, the only control whose colors any source states. The shaft is COLOR_SCROLLBAR.

libwinui draws this bar under Windows 1.x/2.x in a 17 px gutter: the stemmed arrows in COLOR_WINDOWFRAME on COLOR_WINDOW boxes, a white scroll box of the driver's fixed 18 px (20 on a horizontal bar) framed the same way, and the flat COLOR_SCROLLBAR shaft, inverted under a held page click. The bar's thickness is not on file; 17 holds the 15 px square-pixel arrow art in its frame.

The four arrows and the size box are byte-identical between 1985 and 1988. The size box (OBM_SIZE, 13 x 14) is two 3 px bars forming an elbow: a divider, not a grip. There is no trackbar in the era; Control Panel uses a horizontal scroll bar between Slow and Fast labels as its slider.

Group Box¶

BS_GROUPBOX, a member of the BUTTON class: "a rectangle that has an identifying text string in its upper left corner". No source states its line weight or corner treatment, and there is no bitmap for it; a one-pixel rectangle is the only plausible reading. There is no etched groove in any source. In shipped dialogs the first child sits 4 DU in from the side and 12 DU down from the top.

libwinui's GroupBox draws that reading: a 1 px COLOR_WINDOWFRAME rectangle with the label at the upper left breaking its top line, and the content 8 px in and 24 px down.

Menus¶

The menu bar is the entire navigation model. There is no toolbar, status bar, context menu, cascading menu, tooltip or Help menu. Menu text is on a fixed 8 px grid, so accelerator columns line up with literal spaces.

The prescribed Edit accelerators are Shift+Esc (Undo), Del (Cut), F2 (Copy), Ins (Paste). Windows 2.0 moves to Alt+Backspace, Shift+Del, Ctrl+Ins and Shift+Ins. Ctrl+Z/X/C/V arrives with Windows 3.1.

Dialogs and Message Boxes¶

Windows¶

The chrome bitmaps across the era, EGA high resolution:

Controls the Era Does Not Have¶

Slider, progress bar, combo box, tab control, tree view, toolbar, status bar, toggle switch, tooltip, spin box and every common dialog are later inventions. BS_USERBUTTON and SS_USERITEM are the only owner-supplied escape hatches, and the shipped applets use neither.

Reproducing It Today¶

Unusually for an old era, most of the look can be rebuilt exactly on a modern stack such as Direct2D and DirectWrite. The chrome is one-bit line art on one-pixel frames and the colors are in Microsoft's own driver source, so there is no bitmap archive to approximate and no bevel ramp to reconstruct. The hard part is suppression: every instinct a modern toolkit has (a gray face, a bevel, hover, antialiasing, animation) has to be turned off.

Exactly Reproducible¶

Approximated¶

Behavior, Not Appearance¶

Some of the most recognizable parts of the era are behavior, content or layout. A theme that changes only how controls are drawn cannot give them; an application or a window manager has to.

High Contrast¶

The era has no high-contrast setting and no accessibility settings at all. The style guide never names accessibility, although its rule that every command must work from the keyboard as well as the mouse has the same effect for keyboard users. What the era did have is the next best thing: four of the six Windows 1.01 display drivers are monochrome, so the default for most installations was already black on white, and every color slot could be set by hand in Control Panel. Because nothing in the model is derived from anything else, any set of slot values, including a modern contrast theme mapped onto the ten or thirteen slots, leaves the construction intact.

The next era, Windows 3.x, keeps this era's rounded button corner and check-box X and adds the first real bevel.

Sources¶