- With spring 1990 approaching, the buzz for Windows 3.0 was becoming deafening within the halls of Microsoft. One of the most exciting things was seeing the visual appearance of the product. Windows 1.0 and 2.0 were, to put it kindly, garish, or at best excessively blocky and utilitarian. Much of this was out of necessity as computer monitors only displayed about the equivalent number of pixels of one app icon on today’s iPhone and only had access to 16 colors (or no colors at all). Windows 3.0 also added overlapping windows like on Macintosh which made a huge difference in how the product felt.