>"when Gates saw the Xerox machine, the display had no overlapping windows". So M/S cloned it as he saw it. Once M/S W1.0 was developed he saw the demo again and was surprised the windows overlapped.

Microsoft had Apple Lisa's in-house, and Charles Simonyi in person direct from Xerox PARC, and worked on pre-release Macintoshes in coordination with Apple to develop Microsoft Word for the Mac, all well in advance of any MSWindows development. There is no way the story is as simple as the above.

They are a bit out of fashion these days.

The main use-case was multiplexing terminals and, after tmux provided a solution that was usable by normal users, it seduced people away.

Also, mouse-first tiling was introduced on Windows so nowadays it is almost universal to have a degree of tiling.

They are nice for terminals and browsing properly-written web pages but for anything with an aspect ratio or a fixed size they are clumsy.

Modern tiling-wms often have a floating mode so the distinction is more keyboard-wm vs mouse-wm.

Yeah, it’s interesting how the desktop metaphor evolved over time but increasing display size and the ability to have multiple workspaces surely is a huge part of what makes tiling almost work.

And tiling still largely doesn't work with small windows.

You can tile windows in Windows as well with the windows key+ arrow buttons.

The default is just left, right, and top, bottom but if you install Power Toys and use Fancy Zones you can customize the zones https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzon....

There’s also Crop and Lock which can help you cut out extraneous parts of certain windows

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/crop-and...