page_title: NewWave
section_title: Overview
hierarchical_section_title: NewWave / Overview
caption_attribution_description: English: Block diagram of the NewWave version 1 environment components and their relationships to the MS Windows environment
context_page_description: NewWave is a discontinued object-oriented graphical desktop environment and office productivity tool for PCs running early versions of Microsoft Windows. It was developed by Hewlett-Packard and introduced commercially in 1988. It was used on the HP Vectras and other IBM compatible PCs running MS Windows.
  From a user perspective NewWave ran on top of MS Windows and completely replaced the standard Windows Desktop and Program Manager user interface with its own object-oriented desktop interface.
  HP promoted NewWave until the release of Windows 95, at which time further development of the product ceased due to incompatibility with the new operating system. The NewWave GUI introduced the shaded "3-D look and feel" that was later widely adopted.
  HP encouraged independent software vendors to produce versions of applications which took advantage of NewWave functionality, allowing their data to be handled as objects instead of files. One early example was Samna Corporation who produced an edition of their Microsoft Windows word processor Ami Pro entitled ‘’Ami Pro for NewWave’’.
context_section_description: In its original November 1987 press release Hewlett-Packard described NewWave as “an application environment designed to provide personal computer users with a single method to access data and files from multiple sources on a company’s network”. It was developed by HP’s Personal Software Division (PSD) in Santa Clara, California, United States, as part of their distributed computing environment strategy, after three years of work by more than 100 employees.
  The original version of NewWave ran on IBM compatible PCs and required MS-DOS 3.2 or later and MS-Windows 2.0 or later.
  Key features of NewWave included:
  An icon-based user interface.
  An Object Management Facility (OMF) which completely replaced the MS-DOS / Windows file-based system.
  “Hot connects” - ensuring data changed in one file are automatically updated in related files in which those data are used.
  Agents, based on artificial intelligence (AI) principles, which could be set to perform routing activities such as gathering data from various computers to create a monthly sales report. Agents could follow a procedure carried out by an end-user and remember it so it could be repeated at a specified time or executed under certain conditions.
caption: HP NewWave v1 environment block diagram