Genres: Card / Board / Parlor
Release Date: May 22nd, 1990
Publisher: Microsoft
Developer: Microsoft, Wes Cherry (Original author)
Solitaire is a computer game included with Microsoft Windows, based on a card game of the same name, also known as Klondike. Its original version was programmed by Wes Cherry, and the cards were designed by Susan Kare.

Microsoft has included the game as part of its Windows product line since Windows 3.0, starting from 1990. The game was developed during the summer of 1988 by the intern Wes Cherry. The card deck itself was designed by Macintosh pioneer Susan Kare. Cherry's version was to include a boss key that would have switched the game to a fake Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, but he was asked to remove this from the final release.

Microsoft intended Solitaire "to soothe people intimidated by the operating system," and at a time when many users were still unfamiliar with graphical user interfaces, it proved useful in familiarizing them with the use of a mouse, such as the drag-and-drop technique required for moving cards.

Solitaire games, also known as Patience in Britain, are card games for a single player. Does not exist a precise history of solitaires, but it is probable that solitaires are been born with the card games.

The word solitaire is of french origin, and it means patience. It must but wait for the age of Napoleon (is said Napoleon to have played a lot of solitaire) to see a true development of the solitaire games.

The first book on the argument comes printed in 1870. It was Illustrated Games of Patience by lady Adelaide Cadogan, containing 25 games, reprinted many times. In the U.S. mrs E.D. Cheney published the successive year the book Patience.

The publishing house Dick & Fitzgerald in New York published in 1883 a series of books dedicated to solitaire games ("Dick's Games of Patience") and a second series was published in 1898.

In the 1890's a great populariser of the game was Miss Whitemore Jones, whose 5 volumes on solitaires went reprint for thirty years.