The evolution of personal computers is full of anecdotes and details that at first glance could not even be guessed. One of the least known has to do with the reduced but remembered selection of video games that were included in the versions of Windows in the 90s. Did you know that the famous minesweeper and Lonely Did they fulfill a very specific function for you? If you do not know what we are talking about, here we will reveal all the details.
First, it should be noted how difficult it was for some users, especially during the first half of the 1990s, to get used to using a mouse or mouse. At that time, despite the fact that this technology was not very different from that of the time, there were no improvements like the ones we take for granted today, namely hardware acceleration, high DPI and laser precision.
Even most personal (or even business) computers used to not have an operating system with an integrated graphical interface. During the early 1990s, MS-DOS continued to dominate the market, and it was not until the advent of Windows 95 when the vast majority of users in the world first embraced mouse and keyboard GUIs.
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Windows 95: the best excuse for a mouse
The first commercial and home user-focused operating system to have a graphical interface was probably Mac OS 1.0, which came along with the Macintosh in 1984; even so, Windows 95 it was the first OS of its kind that succeeded in displacing any other text-based system.
At Microsoft, they spared no detail for the launch of this important system and, therefore, decided to provide a large number of tools to help people adapt to the use of windows and a mouse, especially those who had been working only with a mouse for years. keyboard and some text OS like TWO or BASIC.
Minesweeper and solitaire: adaptation software
This is how in Redmond they had a great idea, surely influenced by the great boom that video games were having at that time, which were also beginning to stand out thanks to the multimedia features, already made possible by the evolution of processors.
At Microsoft, they had already published a handful of video games designed precisely so that people could become familiar with the most common gestures of a mouse. For example, Minesweeper was originally released in 1989, in a package called Microsoft Entertainment Packcompatible with Windows 3.0.
In fact, the standard version of Windows 3.0 it included Minesweeper that had replaced Reversi (the first video game included in Windows 1.0 in 1985) and this same one was present in each installment of the OS until Windows Vista.
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For its part, Solitaire was created in 1990 and also integrated into Windows 3.0 and the Microsoft Entertainment Pack 2.0 with the aim that people could practice the action of dragging and dropping with the keyboard.
It is worth mentioning that Windows 3.0 was not exactly a success, but it did manage to improve Microsoft’s user base until then. With the arrival of Windows 95, Microsoft did not hesitate a second to include both video games under a new menu called precisely ‘Games’, which would surely attract the attention of the most curious users. This was the reason why the two most emblematic titles of each Entertainment Pack ended up reaching the computers of millions of people.