Reply to post: Virtual Desktops — Who had them first? (was "Re: Meeeh")

Virtual Desktops — Who had them first? (was "Re: Meeeh")

". . . the award for virtual desktops probably goes to the Commodore Amiga."

Almost certainly! Unless someone I don't know about had them even earlier.

I forget whether the Amiga supported multiple "Screens" from the get-go, in July 1985, or only introduced them a year or two later, but it had them long before Linux even existed. (Wikipedia's "Virtual desktop" entry indicates that the Amiga supported multiple desktops from the get-go, with 1985's Amiga 1000.[1]) And thanks to the hardware support, different "screens" or virtual desktops could have different resolutions! (just like different windows could on the Amiga) — a feature no other virtual desktop system I know of has had.

Furthermore, PC Tools for Windows offered virtual desktops in 1993 or 1994 (March 1993, it turns out, in version 1.0[2]) — under Windows 3.1! (and maybe even 3.0?) — and OS/2 introduced virtual desktops with version 4, in 1996.

And of course BeOS supported virtual desktops, with its "Workspaces" . (Don't know in what year Workspaces were first introduced, but I know it had them by the Summer of 1996. Wikipedia says BeOS was "first developed . . . in 1991", but dates Developer Releases 1 through 5 all to October 1995.)

Virtual desktops have been available under Unix through the X Window System for quite some time, but I cannot tell just how long. (The last time *I* used Unix — on a PDP-10 or -11 (I forget which) — was some 4-6 years before X was even invented!) According to Wikipedia, the fact that X Window makes window management a separate function allowed third-party developers to introduce a host of features to the X Window System, including virtual desktop capabilities. However, Wikipedia does not indicate what window manager was the first to offer virtual desktops under X, or in what year they were offered.

Surprisingly, OS X did not introduce virtual desktops until late 2007, with version 10.5 ("Leopard"). (Did NeXT never offer them under NeXTStep or OpenStep? Does anybody know?)

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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_desktop

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[2] http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/9312292500/virtual-desktops-dress-up-pc-tools

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/16/science/personal-computers-better-late-and-better-for-being-late.html

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1993-03-22/business/1993081008_1_norton-desktop-pc-tools-desktop-for-windows