Operating system Chromium OS. Microsoft Windows is a family of proprietary operating systems designed by Microsoft Corporation and primarily targeted to Intel architecture based computers, with an estimated 88.9 percent total usage share on Web connected computers. The latest version is Windows 10. In 2011, Windows 7 overtook Windows XP as most common version in use. Microsoft Windows was first released in 1985, as an operating environment running on top of MS-DOS, which was the standard operating system shipped on most Intel architecture personal computers at the time. In 1995, Windows 95 was released which only used MS-DOS as a bootstrap. For
Microsoft Windows version history Microsoft Windows version history Microsoft Windows was announced by Bill Gates on November 10, 1983. Microsoft introduced Windows as a graphical user interface for MS-DOS, which had been introduced a couple of years earlier. In the 1990s, the product line evolved from an operating environment into a fully complete, modern operating system over two lines of development, each with their own separate codebase. The first versions of Windows (1.0 through to 3.11) were graphical shells that run from MS-DOS; later on, Windows 95, though still being based on MS-DOS, was its own operating system, using a 16-bit DOS-based kernel and