Windows launched way back in 1985, when I was still using a Commodore 64 and PCs were all of four years old–barely out of diapers. The GUI or Graphical User Interface, has changed a lot over the years and I thought it might be fun/horrifying to rank every major version of the Windows GUI, from Windows 1.0 in 1985, to Windows 11 as of 2023.
I’m rating not based on how the system looked at the time (you can do only do so much with CGA/EGA graphics, after all), but how they look now. Is this fair? Probably not, but as always, I make the rules!
The rating system is based on a scale of 1 to 10 Clippys, with 10 being best.
NOTE: I am skipping over all versions of Windows NT because it follows the look of other versions mentioned below.
Overall Rankings:
- Windows 11
- Windows 2000
- Windows 95/98/Vista/7
- Windows 10
- Windows 3.0/3.1/XP
- Windows 8.1
- Windows 8
- Windows 2.0
- Windows 1.0
Windows 1.0 (1985)
Rating: 1 Clippy
In 1985, Windows ran on top of DOS, had drop-down menus, fixed windows, and CGA graphics. In a way, the extremely limited colour palette actually made it more colourful. Perhaps too colourful. This is pretty ugly all around. If you are a fan of this, you probably wear plaid bow ties unironically.
The ones that struck out were:
The early versions (1.0 and 2.0) were hamstrung by the technology at the time, while Windows 10 had to pick up the pieces from Windows 8.
Rumours say Microsoft is working on Windows 12. If so, I wouldn’t expect it to depart visually from Windows 11, but you never know.
