This article summarizes Microsoft's decades-long effort to evolve Windows from a single, one-size-fits-all desktop operating system for everyone into a robust family of server and desktop operating systems. On November 10, 1983, Microsoft announced Microsoft Windows, an extension of the MS-DOS® operating system that would provide a graphical operating environment for PC users. Microsoft called Windows 1.0 a new software environment for developing and running applications that use bitmap displays and mouse pointing devices. With Windows, the graphical user interface (GUI) era at Microsoft had begun.

The release of Windows XP in 2001 marked a major milestone in the Windows desktop operating system family, by bringing together the two previously separate lines of Windows desktop operating systems. With the upcoming release of Windows .NET Server, Microsoft will complete a cycle of server operating system upgrades it began nearly a decade ago in 1993, with the release of the first version of Microsoft Windows NT® Server. To understand the progression of Windows server operating systems you have to look back earlier than 1993, however, to the even longer line of Windows desktop operating systems stretching back to the early 1980s.