25 Years Today - Windows 3.0 387
An anonymous reader writes: Windows 3.0 was launched on 22 May 1990 — I know, 'coz I was there as a SDE on the team. I still have, um, several of the shrink-wrapped boxes of the product — with either 3.5 inch and 5.25 floppies rattling around inside them — complete with their distinctive 'I witnessed the event' sticker!
It was a big deal for me, and I still consider Win 3 as *the* most significant Windows' release, and I wonder what other Slashdotters think, looking back on Win 3?
It was a big deal for me, and I still consider Win 3 as *the* most significant Windows' release, and I wonder what other Slashdotters think, looking back on Win 3?
*shrug* (Score:4, Insightful)
The Amiga did it better and earlier.
Re: *shrug* (Score:3, Insightful)
That would be so awesome. .. if Amiga programming could have gotten anyone a job outside of a few sparse cities.
It had to be a trusted business upgrade path to be viable. It had to run on big blue hardware.
Re: *shrug* (Score:3, Insightful)
Bollocks. The Amiga did get quite a bit of business use. They failed because of inept management.
Re: *shrug* (Score:5, Informative)
RIGHT!
The Amiga Workbench was multitasking - the first of its kind for "microcomputers" and it was the bread and butter of airport displays, sports announcers annotating where basketball or football players were moving on the field, and real-time "video toaster" displays for TWO DECADES after.
It was only in the late 2008-9/2010+ timeframe that Windows replaced Amiga displays for those things for realtime video annotations.
So yes, the Amiga did it first better. (Grandparent was right)
The Amiga did it for longer than anyone (sorry, Parent)
So sorry the mods are like 15-20 years old and are bored by history and facts.
E
Re: *shrug* (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember in around 2000 the cable TV network we 'subscribed' to crashed.... about a dozen channels were showing the Amiga boot screen and were stuck until someone came along and fixed them. Was quite funny at the time.
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RIGHT!
The Amiga Workbench was multitasking - the first of its kind for "microcomputers" and it was the bread and butter of airport displays, sports announcers annotating where basketball or football players were moving on the field, and real-time "video toaster" displays for TWO DECADES after.
It was only in the late 2008-9/2010+ timeframe that Windows replaced Amiga displays for those things for realtime video annotations.
So yes, the Amiga did it first better. (Grandparent was right)
The Amiga did it for longer than anyone (sorry, Parent)
So sorry the mods are like 15-20 years old and are bored by history and facts.
E
It was outclassed even at the time it was being used for Babalon 5 by Pentium PCs and Macs. Amigas were only used for the first season...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V... [wikipedia.org]
Re: *shrug* (Score:5, Informative)
There's two different things here. The Amiga's place in the broadcast TV and video effects world was it's features that allowed the graphics card to synchronise to an external vsync, and to generate TV standard signals, such that mixing live video signals and computer graphics was trivial.
Separate to that was the ability to render complex 3D scenes, usually not in real time. For that, you needed (at that time) the most powerful CPU and FPU.
Presumably for the most part Babylon 5 needed the latter, not the former.
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At the time of windows 3.0, windows jobs were scarce too. Bigger market for some other systems at the time. Huge market for people not even on microcomputers, which was sort of a joke at the time.
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Not how I remember it. IBM was still big and the big name, not Microsoft. The home market was split between a lot of choices, it was the small to medium business market where PC was more dominant. The PC was falling behind too in the microcomputer world. Windows may have been catching up, but 3.0 did not make it caught up.
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"Microsoft was already nearing monopoly position in the PC market"
Really? I never operated a Microsoft OS until Win 95 was coming out. THEN MS started dominating, and I was more or less forced to investigate how and why MS-DOS was any better than TRS-DOS, or any other DOS. I investigated Windows 1 point something, up through Windows 3.11, then finally Windows 95. My PREFERRED OS was DR-DOS. And, if I'm going to load any DOS, it's still going to be DR-DOS.
Windows 95 and then 98 gave MS their market domi
Re:*shrug* (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, Amiga was miles ahead. By then I had a decade with Apple ][ and Mac ... no way I could downgrade to DOS with a Windows disguise.
Windows was sold to business. It had been said that no CIO would get fired for buying IBM. Well the mantra was shifting. Buying Windows was safe for Fortune 500 decision makers. According to conventional wisdom, Mac & Amiga were for hippies and weirdos.
Windows was the Lowest Common Denominator (LCD) in the purchasing equation. The generic hardware and software were relatively inexpensive and all the hackers were offering dBase solutions for businesses. That combination was a nightmare for the business that just wanted results, no hassles.
Re: *shrug* (Score:2, Troll)
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The problem was that the microcomputer market was reinventing the wheel all the time. Existing workstations, minis, and mainframes did so much more. But people who grew up on PC or Macs would naively ask "what's the point of multitasking?" That's one of the reasons IBM flubbed the market as they thought it wasn't ever going to be that big except as a front-end for major back office applications or localized spreadsheet type stuff.
So when Amiga, Atari ST, Apple IIGS came out they all had so much better gr
Re:*shrug* (Score:5, Interesting)
...people who grew up on PC or Macs would naively ask "what's the point of multitasking?" That's one of the reasons IBM flubbed the market as they thought it wasn't ever going to be that big except as a front-end for major back office applications...
IBM was a mainframe and mini-computer company that also sold micros. IBM understood multitasking better than anyone else, but they also understood that as soon as micros could multitask, had networking and became multi-user (file permissions) the market for minis and mainframes would shrink. IBM's PC strategy from the mid '80s to mid '90s could be summed up as using their influence to prevent networking, multi-tasking and file permissions from happening on the same platform at the same time.
Re:*shrug* (Score:5, Insightful)
"IBM's PC strategy from the mid '80s to mid '90s could be summed up as using their influence to prevent networking, multi-tasking and file permissions from happening on the same platform at the same time."
Of course yes.
That explains why in the mid '80s to mid 90's IBM was busy in a joint venture with Microsoft first and alone afterwards... to produce a PC system with networking, multi-tasking and file permissions and even 32 bits (OS/2).
Or maybe you are wrong.
Re:*shrug* (Score:5, Interesting)
That explains why in the mid '80s to mid 90's IBM was busy in a joint venture with Microsoft first and alone afterwards... to produce a PC system with networking, multi-tasking and file permissions and even 32 bits (OS/2).
Wasn't IBM forced into doing this by the roaring success of a company called Netware? Yeah, Netware. Remember them?
The reason the PC succeeded was not because it was great out of the box... it was because of legions of 3d-parties hacking DOS with TSR add-ons that expanded the capabilities of the machine. Microsoft would play catch-up, incorporating the best of what was out there (e.g., memory managers), finally culminating in Windows, which was more than just a GUI... it was memory management, standardized device drivers, and networking packaged together.
IBM was always late to the game. The RS/6000 line came late after Sun, Apollo, and DEC had already proved a market for desktop workstations (except for academia, did the PC/RT even count?) Then, they realized that Microsoft and Netware were slowly hacking the PC into a multitasking, networked workstation for a fraction of workstation prices. Businesses could buy 5, 10 Windows PC's for the price of one workstation, and manage it themselves without a service contract. By the time OS/2 came along, the war was already over, because as lousy and crashy as Windows could be, it had become ubiquitous, and anyway, when you want to sell MILLIONS of PC's, it's never about the OS... it's about the killer app(s) that runs on it. Windows was a platform to sell copies of Word and Excel. Nobody had any reason to write any killer app for OS/2 when they could write it once for Windows and get rich.
That joint-venture? Too little, too late, again. IBM in the 80's and 90's was a string of awful decisions, and before it was over it was entirely feasible that the great IBM would disappear entirely (check out their stock price, rock-bottom in 92, 93).
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Amiga beat those other systems out quite well by having a decent modern operating system too, not just another DOS type thing to run apps.
It was a much better system, but it failed to beat those other systems out due to the Tramiels of business, if you can see what I did there.
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The Amiga did it better and earlier.
And using less RAM. I was always impressed by my Amiga's ability to multitask compared to the Windows machine I had at work.
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I was a major Amiga evangelist back then. But unfortunately, Commodore didn't really know what it had and screwed it all up. They kept trying to shoehorn it into being a "business" computer or something like that, instead of playing up on it's strengths over DOS and the dreadful Macs at the time.
And ultimately, what made the Amiga great was also it's downfall, as it's special chips (Agnes, Paula, Denise etc) couldn't really scale to a new architecture.
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Windows 3 + The Norton Desktop; is STILL a better UI than anything offered in the Windows world for '95 on.
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The Windows 3 UI was actually pretty horrible. It has nothing whatsoever over Windows 95 except footprint, and these days that doesn't matter.
Interestingly, the Windows 3 UI and the Motif UI, the first dominant cross-platform GUI toolkit for Unix more complex than Xaw, look and feel largely the same because Microsoft was a part of the Motif group. They actually deliberately made their OS behave the same as Unix, at least for window manipulation.
For me it's Windows NT 3.1 (Score:5, Interesting)
Released in the early 90s, but I got to use 4.0 first in the later 90s as a programming student.
But when I used it, it was my first taste of an OS that didn't feel like a toy go kart where the wheels could rattle off any second. (Before I was introduced to Linux.) It's been the heart of window since Win2000.
For that, NT 3.1 is the most significant Windows release ever imo.
Windows for Workgroups (Score:2)
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I also worked at an early commercial ISP, helping people install Trumpet Winsock on their Windows 3.1 machines. It was probably WfW 3.11 now that I think about it, given that there had to be at least a rudimentary stub of a TCP/IP stack.
I also worked with some interesting Novell applications where the diskless workstation would network-book to a Novell share, the user would log-in, get drive mappings in DOS, and fr
Re:For me it's Windows NT 3.1 (Score:5, Informative)
Windows 3.0 (and subsequent in that series) was not an operating system, it was a windowing environment. Remember, it still ran on top of MS-DOS, and it was still effectively single-tasking in that switching tasks paused the previous task.
Windows was not a true OS until Windows 95, as I recall the history.
There were others, like GEM, that never really caught on despite their relative quality.
But (to change the subject a little) I think the "big one that got away" was OS/2. A pity that IBM didn't know how to market it.
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That ran on MSDOS as well, all the way up to Win ME. WinNT was the cut down VMS inspired thing that finally got us off the cut down CP/M clone.
Microsoft have always been a "me too" company, which is a description not a criticism since it was often about doing something involved on far cheaper hardware than the competition.
Re:For me it's Windows NT 3.1 (Score:5, Informative)
Win 9X didn't run 'on top of' DOS. This explains it better than I ever could:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnew... [msdn.com]
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The big change for me was with Win95. All earlier versions of Windows were bolted on top of MS-DOS, although many people had it started by AUTOEXEC.BAT so they never needed to notice that DOS was still there. Starting with Win95, however, the default was for the computer to boot directly into Windows unless you went out of your way to make it come up in CLI mode. And, as most users were more comfortable with the GUI, that just made thei
Re:For me it's Windows NT 3.1 (Score:5, Informative)
Windows 95 worked like a lot of 386-enhanced DOS-based games did, loading itself after using DOS as a means to get the program loaded. '98 and ME were similar, though when they tried to strip most of that out of ME they made things screwy.
Re:For me it's Windows NT 3.1 (Score:5, Interesting)
Windows NT was really ahead of it's time, born in 1988, and shipped in 1993. It's funny reading about it in showstopper (http://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Microsoft/dp/0029356717) how they were surprised how deadly slow it was when they finally went to test it on actual hardware.
But CPUs got faster, memory got cheaper and here we are in a SYSv clone, Mach/BSD derivative, and NT world.
But for me, NT 3.5 was the first killer NT which was WAY faster than 3.1, and had awesome PPP support, unlike OS/2 which pretended that networking and this internet thing wasn't a thing.
That said, I have a copy of OS/2 2.0, along with the TCP/IP pack now, and it's so basic. Again no file serving capabilities, to make OS/2 even close to NT 3.1's level of usefulness. IBM really goofed by leaving networking out of the equation.
And of course the usual complaints, IBM wanting way too much money for the SDK/tools, and making 1.x too 286 centric, while not letting MS put windows on top of OS/2.
Re:For me it's Windows NT 3.1 (Score:5, Informative)
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Granted the window between 3.0 and 3.1 for workgroups was a crappy period for networking but by the time OS/2 3.0 came out, it was already too late. And it's TCP/IP was that horrible dialup centric POS, nothing multi-homed, or with physical network cards.
in the OS/2 1.x there was a clear leader in the LAN, and it was Netware. But IBM just thought OS/2 should be as crappy as MS-DOS, and let the 3rd parties come along and add in support. Instead they should have at least bundled in LanMan support, but of c
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Warp Connect (Warp v3+) that actually that shipped with a full networking stack. Warp v3 shipped with the IAK (Internet access kit) which had just enough of a network stack to allow dial-in to work. Only had SLIP at first while the refresh included PPP. Also had WebExplorer (along with a gopher client, usenet client and email client which used sendmail) which was mostly a big DLL so other apps could have a browser based UI. MS took this idea, and even the name, and used it for their GUI. Warp v3 was release
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It was amazing when NT 4.0 shipped how everyone turned around and killed their Netware servers. Of course the whole TCP/IP native services thing helped, and the far cheaper licensing for NT didn't hurt either, and then there was that netware emulation package for NT that was pretty awesome too.
that being said, I've helped a handful of people migrate their old Netware 3/4 stuff onto KVM, and it's kind of funny seeing it running on 'modern' hardware.
Invulnerable (Score:5, Funny)
The last version of Windows to never have had a remote exploit in the standard distribution.
Big deal for MS, shit for the rest of the world (Score:5, Insightful)
It obviously helped make Microsoft a lot of money, and I've read about how the one guy managed to make that one thing work, that made this possible.
But Windows is full of crap, and full of "If you can't make it work right, make it look good - Bill Gates" that it basically caused IT to be shit. This is the start of the 3 Rs of Windows. Retry, Reboot and Reinstall.
That is a fucked up legacy to leave behind.
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But Windows is full of crap, and full of "If you can't make it work right, make it look good - Bill Gates" that it basically caused IT to be shit.
What was he talking about? Windows has never worked right, but it has never looked good either.
Re:Big deal for MS, shit for the rest of the world (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, there are 5 Rs. The last two are Reformat, RedHat.
never touched 3.0 (Score:2)
while I had a blast on the C64, at the time i was too young to really appreciate it. when i got my compaq with its ultra big HDD of 65 megabytes and my copy of Buzz Aldrins Race to Space simulator i spent HOURS on that thing tinkering and learning my way around DOS. the tabworks interface was amazing at the time, just point and click? how awesome!!!
it was on
I was working at IBM at the time (Score:5, Interesting)
and I remember thinking, "shit, Microsoft have done it again - we've lost control of our own PC market"
Sure, OS/2 was technically much, much better, but that was not the point. Like MS DOS before it, MS Windows was available for all, on non-IBM hardware, so beige boxes could finally compete with the Apple's far superior HMI.
The entire PC episode was a disaster for IBM - we rushed the thing out, and for the first time used COTS solutions, so once the BIOS had been (legally) reverse-engineered, Compaq and others could pump out boxes that were better and cheaper. IBM at that time was used to propriety hardware AND software to ensure lock-in and hence - frankly - obscene profit margins.
That all went away very fast...the attempt to regain lock-in with the PS/2 of course failed....
Mind you, Win 3.0 sucked....compared to both the Mac and OS/2, but it was....good enough
Re:I was working at IBM at the time (Score:5, Insightful)
IBM shot OS/2 in the head when they announced it alongside the PS/2 in April of 1987.
Microsoft had Windows/386 in November/December 1987. Think about that, 'EU DOS 4.0' aka where OS/2 came from was still in real mode, while MS had a 386 hypervisor that they were shipping out the Compaq before the end of '87. By forcing MS to keep OS/2 on the 286 without any 386 based features, and charging $2000+ for a SDK OS/2 was dead before 1.0 was even close to GA. And releasing 1.0 without the UI was a major disaster, 1.1 should have been the first public offering. 1.0 should have been given out for free along with the SDK to developers.
But that's IBM thinking they can squeeze both ends of the toothpaste, dreaming they were the only game in town. Windows 3.0 showed Microsoft that they didn't need an IBM partnership anymore, and that their 'good enough' software was 'good enough' to sell on their own, and in their own direction.
Oh without a doubt, Windows 3.0 was a massive even (Score:5, Informative)
this is where Microsoft broke away from being an IBM partner, to take control of their own destiny. IBM had effectively killed OS/2 with it's insane SDK prices, and per seat costs. Not to mention the complete lack of applettes, and by refusing to let Microsoft do anything with the UI, or allow for OS/2 to run windows binaries. But the success of Windows 3.0 changed all of that.
What did Windows 3.0 give us? Well, while Windows/386 was a really cool 386 hypervisor, Windows itself, and all windows programs were restricted to 640kb of real mode memory. But Windows 3.0 was built around a MS-DOS extender, and now you could run in protected mode on a 286/386. And even better you didn't have to change your OS, just install Windows and go. Not to mention since it sat on DOS, you could still use MS-DOS based drivers, TSR's. It was simply a massive thing. Also licensing MS-DOS extenders at the time was VERY expensive, and per application. Writing a Windows application, along with the license costs of Windows 3.0 was much cheaper.
From this point MS's OS/2 3.0 project became Windows NT, and MS pulled away from the deathmarch project that was OS/2 2.0. The funny thing is that OS/2 2.0 was delayed to add in the most confusing shell (to users, I know programmer's and tech people loved WPS, but to average users, it was a nightmare) and Windows compatibility via specialized drivers. Things that MS wanted to do, but IBM refused to let them.
The sad thing is that bringing Windows up to some kind of usable level where OS/2 was basically already, and by making 286 processor based machines useful ended up setting us back a good 5+ years until the Windows 95 avalanche finally pushed 32bit computing to the masses. Although it wasn't until 2001 with XP Home did it finally become truly usable.
NT, while being a solid future looking design was at the time so massive, and so complex that running it on a 386 was a horrible experience. But as processors got faster the NT investment eventually paid off, with NT being found almost everywhere these days.
So yes, Windows 3.0 was the most significant product Microsoft shipped, that ended up not only defining the direction of the company, but also the industry. Finally everyone could unlock the power of their 286+ computer that was basically un-used by MS-DOS.
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There was a product called DesQview, that did all that before win3 ever came out. And it did it better, more reliably, faster, and with the existing app. software.
It was all about the Mac back then (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows was such a huge pain back in those days, while MacOS (which wasn't really called that at the time) blew it out of the water, particularly when it came to multitasking.
Of course, MacOS sat still for years, lacking protected memory or pre-emptive multitasking until they scrapped the whole thing and replaced it with NeXTSTEP to produce OS X, so Windows eventually caught up and then surpassed it. I had enough issues with Win95/98 and the DOS legacy to say that Windows probably didn't catch up (with a consumer OS) until Win2K, which surpassed MacOS, and that ruled the roost for a few years. OS X didn't come out until over a year later, and the early versions of that were super rough.
But once they all evolved to a certain point, I think that the operating system mattered a lot less. They all got good enough that the users don't have to care about the low-level features, and there are utilities to tweak them any way you like, so it's really just down to personal preference at this point. You're going to run most of the same software no matter what OS you pick, and operating systems are increasingly just "the software that runs your web browser".
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So ture. A/UX was Apple's best hope for a decent OS, but they always seemed to do their best to ignore it. It was pretty awesome back in the day, SYSV Unix, with OS 7 finder + apps. Hell even softpc ran on A/UX.
So instead of making more Mac's with full 68040's they did all these LC crap things. Then on the move to PowerPC, they went with AIX of all things on one model but had no MacOS compatibility at all. A/UX was more like OS X today, an they could have had it everywhere in the early 90's but they we
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I've seen A/UX in operation, and it indeed was nice, and felt a lot like what would become OS X. Probably one reason they didn't make it a mainstream product was licensing. There just wasn't enough of a free software tradition (including inside Apple, I'm sure) for it to happen like it did with OS X, and I'm sure AT&T Unix[tm] didn't come cheap. Also, back then 4 megabytes of memory was a lot, and people didn't tolerate memory hog operating systems on single-user computers.
But Apple was trying to move
When I knew OS/2 was toast (Score:5, Insightful)
I knew that day that OS/2 was doomed.
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They probably didn't have the fortitude to sit though through the training video.
https://youtu.be/aoBEYUFagi8 [youtu.be]
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Notice at 0:44 the lady talked about windows apps. Contrary to popular belief Apple didn't invent the word "App"
What I was wondering? (Score:3)
When and if would would ever multitask as well as DESQview did.
I luuuuuved Win 3.x (Score:5, Funny)
Speaking as a support person, I loved Window 3.x.
It trained the entire world to expect that their computer to crash often, even daily, and that those crashes could be explained away with "Yep, that happens".
Followed by "You need to reboot more often".
Before MS Windows, I supported mainframes and those customers wanted to know why for every crash, which was rare except for hardware failure, and they expected it to get fixed so that it didn't happen again. Those people are still like that, and they pay plenty for it.
After MS Windows, life was pretty much like this:
"My computer is broken."
"Is it on fire?"
"No."
"Then reboot. If it still doesn't work I'll send someone to re-install everything" (thinly disguised threat)
YUCK! (Score:4, Informative)
Yet looks more modern than 8/10 (Score:5, Insightful)
I see buttons, shadows, depth, higher colors, etc.
All ruined in the name of anti skuemorphism which was the most advanced progress made in gui development since win 3.0. What a shame sigh
Re:Yet looks more modern than 8/10 (Score:4, Interesting)
You know just because you all hated the leather background in the Mac address book does not mean you need to get rid of shininess, chrome, depth perception, and other features which actually helped the user distinguish which Window was active.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! Give me my damn skuemorphism back. It works fine. I know NO ONE and I mean NO ONE besides hipster graphic designers afraid to have anything modern looking on their portfolio as other hipster artist look at them before hiring them. It creates a cycle of race to the bottom of less graphics, less detail, blinding white, 72x text.
SKUEMORPHISM != REALISM folks and MS appearently thinks it does.
Fine, but what about Pascal? (Score:2)
I had a friend who had faithfully programmed for Windows 2 for a couple of years. Windows 2 was never popular, so his fine efforts didn't see much use. At that time, the lingua franca of Windows was MS Pascal. However, when Windows 3 came out, MS abandoned Pascal as the primary programming language for Windows and switched to C.
As we now know, Windows 3 turned out to be Microsoft's first big success after DOS. So, my friend found himself sitting on a pile of Windows code that he had written in Pascal ov
Have you no shame? (Score:2, Funny)
However, like an alcohol or drug abuser who is in a state of denial about their past, you need to reexamine your behavior. You will never recover and regain your sense of self worth until you admit your destructive activities, ask for forgiveness, make amends to those you harmed, and actively pursue a path of helping others. It sounds like you are still obsessing about negative things
OK, you asked ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Honestly, the Steaming Heap of IInnovative Technology that was Windows 3 is what led me to Linux and UNIX and much of the rest of my career.
Right when nearing the end of Uni a free UNIX came along in the form of Linux ... because I had witnessed first hand what a steaming pile of crap was Windows 3, and then eventually Windows 3.11 (which sucked somewhat less, but not enough), I knew I wanted UNIX experience. It led to my first jobs.
I will be marked troll by people who weren't there, but Windows 3 was such a steaming pile of shit compared to what Linux (and at some point FreeBSD) could do on the exact same hardware, it's almost impossible to describe.
In 1993 no fewer than 3 other science nerds, to whom I said "hey, if you like Windows, far be it for me to judge ... but if you're asking for my Slackware disks and some install help, no problem -- I'll wipe out your new computer". They all switched to Linux because it was far more usable than Windows was on the same hardware. Even if Linux did occasionally crash, it was more robust than Windows. Because they could actually do several things at once.
On the same hardware, Linux destroyed Windows 3/3.11.
Windows 3 is significant in that it forced me to realize Windows wasn't anywhere NEAR being able to do what I'd learned in operating systems class ... I wrote an instance of pre-emptive multi-tasking before Microsoft made a commercial instance of it.
That doesn't mean that I could write a better OS than Microsoft, but it means when Linux was doing pre-emptive multitasking with proper virtual memory ... Microsoft was doing time-slicing ... it was a hell of a better operating system than Microsoft had written.
It just didn't have Word. It did, however, have LaTex ... yet another bit of awesome for a university student.
So, Kudos to Windows 3 for being such an out-dated pile of crap technology by the time it was released that it wasn't even fully utilizing a 386's inbuilt hardware features for multitasking, and wouldn't until Windows '95 ... which made possible (and preferable) for the widespread popularity of Linux.
If it hadn't sucked, we might not even know who Linus even is.
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What person is so sadistic that they would play C&C or Warcraft on a PS1?
/me raises hand.
Well, not Warcraft, I don't own it, but I do own Red Alert, RA: Retaliation, and Dune 2000. I also had the PSone mouse.
My memory may be failing me, but I do believe one of those games could do multiplayer via system link...
Your memory is correct I know that RA and RA: Retaliation can do system link as well as DOOM. You only need 1 copy of the game for RA since one person can use the Allied disc and the other can use Soviet for system-link skirmishes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org]
but who seriously owned one of those cables?
/me raises hand again. I still have it, though I don't have a working PSone to use it with.
I was hoping the P
3.11 hit the sweet spot. (Score:4)
I remember my neighbor running a brand new installation of Windows 3.0 a 386. The only native app was, if I recall, was Word, and it was pretty crappy back then. Windows 3.0 would UAE at the drop of a hat and hang completely. It wasn't until 3.11 that Windows became actually usable, though the architecture (cooperative multitasking) was so bad that I'm surprised any programmers stuck with the system long enough to develop any apps. I guess the promise of a stable GUI API and a standardized hardware abstraction layer (printers, etc) was enough. And Windows 3.11 introduced truetype fonts, which were pretty amazing compared to what we had before that time in Windows and MacOS.
At college we used to say that only a fool would have win at the end of his autoexec.bat. The rest of us would run windows when we needed it, from the DOS prompt as God intended. I had a friend who ran OS/2 2.1 with a text-mode shell that multitasked MS-DOS apps, and that was far more useful at the time than Windows was, since all our apps were DOS apps back then.
I mean Windows 3.1 (Score:2)
3.11 was Windows for workgroups, which actually was very good, probably better than 3.1. More stable anyway. Though 3.1 was way more stable than 3.0. No more UAEs. apps could actually crash without crashing the whole OS, if I recall correctly.
Sorry, Unix then too (Score:4, Insightful)
>" I wonder what other Slashdotters think, looking back on Win 3?"
I was using Interactive Unix and SunOS Unix.
Windows still needed to run Word Perfect 5.1 (Score:2)
Excluded timothy once again (Score:3)
I asked myself,
"Why is timothy still blocked? It's been ten years!"
*uncheck*
(months, mod points elapse)
"25 Years Today - Windows 3.0"
Memorable (Score:2)
matter of taste. (Score:4, Interesting)
win3 was important, mainly politically, though. after all, the windows of today is not decended from win3 - it's the not-love child of the OS/2 project, really. remember that around the time of your fabled 3.0 release, OS/2 was at the milestone version 2.0 which took advantage of 32b flat mode for the first time. and OS/2 was really just a sort of wet-nurse for NT OS/2, which became Windows NT and all recent versions...
The good ol' days (Score:5, Interesting)
25 years, you say? It feels longer, somehow. Don't worry, I can see everybody's eyes glaze over, so I won't go too far down memory lane, except to say that there was actually a time when when Windows was cool and fun to work with. By gods, it was a load of crap, back then, but fun to code for, for that very reason. I used to spend 90% of my time commenting out code sections until the latest, spectacular error went away; that was how I learned to program properly in C. There is nothing like having to debug Windows running in real mode to bring home the idea that you must always initialise variable and check returned pointers. I sometimes miss the "hardship" in a perverse sort of way.
Windows 3.0, Wonder Tool of the Yukon (Score:5, Interesting)
Windows 3.0 was launched on 22 May 1990 â" I know, 'coz I was there as a SDE on the team. [...] It was a big deal for me, and I still consider Win 3 as *the* most significant Windows' release, and I wonder what other Slashdotters think, looking back on Win 3?
Pleasedtomeet'cha. Some fine work you did on 3.x! Windows 2.11 was the first version I encountered, but we never really considered it more than a wrapper in which one could run Aldus PageMaker (the Adobe InDesign of today) to output to a LasterMaster 1000 [google.com] typesetter, which was 'the' first dry toner laser that could lay down small serif type that would reproduce on camera.
Windows 3.0 was the first environment one could consider booting into and staying there... we sold a number of them for personal use and its stability for publishing began to rival the Mac (I'm a PC person but pull no punches). Wide adoption for business use in our area did not really start until 3.11 and even 95, but that was mainly because we had done our job 'really well' and had a large installed base of IBMPC/clones networked with Novell and LanTastic running DOS applications. Our customers were comfortable in the DOS environment and we didn't hurry them. Memory and CPU were precious and all graphical environments had plenty of 'hourglass' in those days.
It's worth noting that graphical environments, even multi-tasking is pervasive today but it is still a learned skill and there were many people from the DOS era who had optimized their work techniques well into the Windows era. One fellow who dealt with real estate contracts tried Windows said "It can hardly keep up with my typing speed! This is an improvement?" Even the task switching latency of DesqView (which did lag because hard disk was really slow by today's standard) was a source of frustration to him. Most days he'd stay out of it. He'd seen examples of multitasking workflow and was not convinced. "My DOS programs import and export just fine. Exporting useful bits and naming them properly is an essential part of working efficiently. If you haven't done that you haven't finished the job. So... I'm supposed to bring up some old thing and cut and paste paragraphs or sentences of it into a new thing, one at a time, while switching between them? Look here." He shows me a folder with hundreds of small files. "That's my clipboard. I have all the names in my head. Some of the pieces have several variations, but I can import the whole thing and delete the unused parts faster than the graphic environment can scroll a document from top to bottom." He really could too, in the days of green phosphor displays he was able to read while scrolling quickly, while half the characters had fading ghosts of the previous line. He did not fully commit to a graphical environment until it was running on a 486.
For all the early issues, Windows 3 was still a technician's dream. In order to fully appreciate its beauty, you would have had to experience the nefarious and wacky world of TSRs, IPX and 'packet driver' network stacks and DOS 386 memory extenders. When they finally did work they were really stable but it took a wizard's touch. Windows' driver architecture was well designed from the start.
It reminds me of this quote from slightly later (Score:3)
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And marketing won the day.
Xenix used the same marketing as Windows did. In fact, Microsoft owned it [wikipedia.org].
Now OS/2 I'll grant you, IBM fumbled hard on that one...
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Now OS/2 I'll grant you, IBM fumbled hard on that one...
People wanted backwards compatibility.
Re: Meanwhile OS/2 and Xenix existed (Score:2)
Yep
People back then were neophytes amd corporter users.
Corporations cared for just software. Users who were neophytes used what came with work amd found these, machines intimidating and didn't like change.
The 19 80s were about us geeks. The 1990s were the suits and Joe Six packs driving the market
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For the kids in the room you'll need to be more explicit, or I can.
One of it's biggest failings was claiming that it was "a better DOS than DOS and a better Windows than Windows"... which is all fine and dandy except for it helps to remove the motivation to build much of anything specifically targeting for OS/2, rather than Windows... and being an 'also runs' OS doesn't get you much traction for adoption.
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Well not only is the best way to run MS-DOS in the 1990's on OS/2 2.0, but the best way to run a Windows app in it's own copy of Windows was OS/2. IBM did themsleves no favours by charging a fortune for the SDK, and tools, nor was forcing this SAA crap on OS/2 instead of directly using Microsoft Windows on OS/2 like MS had wanted to.
There was that skunkswork project, WLO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... [wikipedia.org] which of all things ended up being the basis for Win32 on NT once they dumped the OS/2 cruiser personal
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OS/2 had a horrible adoption rate, and the single MS-DOS penalty box was disastrous for compatibility. IBM forcing Microsoft to make it run on the 286 was a complete waste of time. In 1987 Windows/386 shipped, and it was far more useful than OS/2, simply because it truly could multitask MS-DOS, you know where the applications were.
The only thing more boneheaded by making OS/2 for the 286, was to charge well over $2000 USD for the privilege of a SDK. This lesson was of course quickly learned by MS, who wo
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IBM forcing Microsoft to make it run on the 286 was a complete waste of time.
It was, but you need to understand the culture back then. The processor arms race had not begun and people thought that 286s and 386s would be around for ever - 386s for power users and 286s for the rest of us. SLR cameras are an analogy - Nikon have both entry level and professional grade SLRs, always have, and no-one expects today's professional camera to become next year's entry level camera. The two lines develop separately.
That was when I was buying my first PC, and I was going to get a 286 as "
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Here's something I remember about OS/2. I had not actually used it back then, but I recall reading about how awesome it was, how it was much more advanced and reliable than Windows, and so on. But then I saw that IBM was selling PCs with Windows. Well, fuck: if even IBM would not throw their weight behind their own operating system, why would anyone support it?
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That was always a 'team os/2' stumbling block. The OS/2 guys belonged to one division of IBM, and the PC guys were another division. The best they would do is set it up for dualboot, but DOS/Windows was the default, I remember people with IBM PC's that went out to buy OS/2 to be surprised when they found out they already had it.
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And IBM wanted to charge silly money for the licence to make peripherals.
This was the ultimate demonstration of locking out third parties as a way to derail your project. Shame the lesson has not penetrated a few console manufacturers.
Re:I agree (Score:5, Informative)
Cheap software tools is what made Windows. While IBM was demanding $2000+ for an OS/2 SDK, MS was willing to give the SDK away to people who bundled it with their tools, and of course we had the $99 era of compilers including Visual Basic, Quick C, Turbo C and others.
OS/2 1.x did not have any cheap/discount compilers.
OS/2 better then windows at running windows apps (Score:2)
OS/2 Was better then windows at running windows apps to bad they never got full win32 in it.
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I do not discount the important evolutionary step in OS that Windows 3.0 was, but given that Windows 3.1 and then 3.11 for Workgroups fixed many of the problems that Windows 3.0 had and added the initial computer networking protocols, I just can't call 3.0-even the most important milestone of even the 3
Re:OS/2 better then windows at running windows app (Score:5, Informative)
Wasn't there some kind of licensing arrangement that allowed IBM to either use Microsoft libraries or else to have access to the APIs for 16-bit Windows, that did not extend to 32-bit Windows applications?
IBM had a license for Windows up to v4 and that is why Win95 was ver 4.095. Earlier when Win32s came out, it used a VBX (or whatever the device driver was called) that was unsupported by WINOS2 and IBM kept writing compatible device drivers to allow WIN32s apps to run. This ended with WIN32s ver 1.30 as at the time OS/2 only gave a process 512 MBs of address space and Microsoft hardwired some DLLs to load above 1GB. (It was possible to mix and match parts of WIN32s ver 1.25 and 1.30 to work around this). At this point IBM gave up the Win32s race.
OS/2 ver4 did include a subsystem to allow easy recompilation of WIN32 apps to OS/2 but it didn't really catch on as at that time Windows had clearly won the OS wars.
But yes, OS/2 could run multiple windows apps, each in its own process space and preemptively multitask them so they were less likely to run out of resources (DDE and the clipboard were shared) plus allow them to use the HPFS file system which was a much better file system the FAT which gave both DOS and Win apps an advantage.
Unluckily the Windows license also increased the price of OS/2 though they did come out with the redbox editions which used your existing Win3.x install.
Another huge factor was that the price of ram didn't decrease as predicted, likely due to uncompetitive measures by the ram manufacturers. Windows ran better in 4MBs (even 2MBs with Win3.0 in real mode) of ram then OS/2.
Re:OS/2 better then windows at running windows app (Score:5, Informative)
Wasn't there some kind of licensing arrangement that allowed IBM to either use Microsoft libraries or else to have access to the APIs for 16-bit Windows, that did not extend to 32-bit Windows applications?
How short memories are.
When OS/2 was launched it was a joint Microsoft/IBM product, and it was touted (by both) as being the replacement for Windows. That's why and how it had good Windows API support from the start. Then Microsoft saw Windows 3+ starting to become a commercial success and decided it wanted to stay with the Windows branding. It was already working on the next version of OS/2, but split from IBM's path and re-branded the new product as Windows NT. IBM then started their own separate development path and produced OS/2 2.0. Existing agreements with Microsoft enabled them to carry on shipping Windows API binaries.
I still have a t-shirt and bag labelled "Microsoft OS/2" which I picked up at a launch event in Geneva.
Re:OS/2 better then windows at running windows app (Score:5, Interesting)
When OS/2 was launched it was a joint Microsoft/IBM product, and it was touted (by both) as being the replacement for Windows.
Exactly. I worked for a big corporate at the time and we all had PCDos on IBM ATs running stuff like IBM DisplayWrite and, most importantly, a mainframe terminal emulator because the (IBM) mainframe was where our serious stuff was. When Win 3.0 came out we were all handed boxed copies (I recently sold mine) - although Windows was MS, it seemed (to our management at least) the way to go, and was assumed to have IBM endorsement (a corporate essential) because it would run on IBM PCs. Management were unaware of the MS-IBM bust-up.
Win 3.0 was absolutely awful. It crashed and needed a reboot about twice an hour. It was soon replaced with the improved 3.1. It was not networked of course, but we would share printers in groups of four of us using a switchbox.
At about same time, one guy in our branch, our IT "co-ordinator" (who knew nothing about IT) was given OS/2 as a pilot. We all understood that would be the way to go fo all of us, but the whole thing stagnated (I guess because of the IBM/MS split). OS/2's price (its own, and that of the memory needed to run it) remained too high. I bought OS/2 for home but there were bugs (could have be sorted by IBM if they had their heart in it) and lack of apps. It seemed there was an anti-OS/2 camp within IBM itself.
But people, like our middle-aged management, who had never previously used computers (I had started on a PDP 11) or seen a GUI before, thought Windows and MS were absolutely wonderful. Us younger guys all had home computers by then, and knew better. Ironically, the generation after us also thought Windows and MS were wonderful because they never saw anything but Windows. It led to all the myths [billgatesmyths.org.uk] that we must now endure about Gates being a genius, inventing the PC, making computing affordable, and such like crap.
But Windows 3 (if we include its 3.1 bug-fix) was a milestone in that it popularised the graphical interface.
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Win 3.0 was absolutely awful. It crashed and needed a reboot about twice an hour.
Rubbish.
It was soon replaced with the improved 3.1.
It was two years between Windows 3.0 and 3.1.
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One major reason for the split was that IBM insisted on programming OS/2 in assembler - over Gates' objections...
I think both IBM and Microsoft were working hard to undermine each other from the start of the project. IBM wanted to regain 100% control of the PC market and eventually ditch Microsoft. Microsoft on the other hand was trying to break free of IBM and wanted to license the OS to other computer makers on other platforms. Hence the disagreement over assembler and 286 support.
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It wouldn't matter, as SMP was becoming a thing, and don't forget the coming x86_64 along with the ability to run on RISC. OS/2's kernel was largely untouched from early MS OS/2 2.0 betas, and the device drivers were still 16bit assembly. IBM's L4 port of OS/2 cost such an incredible amount of money, and it produced an OS with no networking, and was dreadfully slow as well. IBM wanted BIG money to run OS/2 in SMP, meanwhile NT workstation supports two processors out of the box. You can guess which I was
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My basic reaction to Win 3.0 was... "This is going to really eff up the memory management for my AutoCAD install", and it did, so I pretty much avoided Windows until I was forced to install it to support the email tools that I had to use for work.
At that point all 'real' work went over to my Unix workstation. The one thing that it did for me was force me to step away from AutoCAD and start using ArcINFO for everything that I did
Windows NT got some positive attention from me because I could install and run O
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Yep, Win 3.11 (with trumpet winsock IP stack http://tech.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]) was ok.
They actually had two ok releases in a row (3.11 and 95), then started the steady drizzle of ok(95), bad(98), ok(2000), oh god why(ME), ok(XP), yeah no(vista), ok(7), pfft(8), we'll see if it's ok(10).
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Windows/386 was amazing for the timeframe. Back in 1987 you could run MS-DOS boxes, *IN A WINDOW*. If you were rich enough to have EGA or VGA, you could play CGA games.. IN A WINDOW.
It was amazing, compared to other things out there. Plus there was the few dozen apps, like Word and Excel.
Re: My personal favorite was (Score:2)
Mac had that since 1984
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MacOS didn't get a hypervisor until the advent of the BlueBox in 1999. But it's more a fault of the Motorola processors lacking something like v86 mode.
Re: My personal favorite was (Score:2)
It didn't need one. Windows and pascal were part of the toolkit. I hated Windows back in the day but was no apple fan boy. Apple was ahead as was others such as Amiga and sunos.
But corporate users needed their apps and rest was history. Windows didn't get ok until XP AND good until 7 ... then 8 sigh
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Sure, and if you had an Amiga, you could run actual x86 hardware and see DOS *IN A WORKBENCH WINDOW*. Are we doing all caps with asterisks now? Is that a thing?
Well, on the same Amiga I also ran a Mac emulator at the same time... *ON ITS OWN BITPLANES*
It was amazing compared to other things out there. Plus there was the multimedia and fractal landscape generators and graphics editing software and games.
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*YES WHY NOT*. PCtask was insanely slow, did you ever use it? And bridgeboards were not only as expensive as a PC, but an Amiga with a 386sx bridgeboard would cost far more than a decent 486 of the era.
AmigaDOS had no memory protection and no resource management. If your program crashed, and left filehandles open you had to reboot. If it overwrote anything important, off to guru land. And good lord, ever setup AmiTCP? Not exactly a walk in the park.
So what really killed the Amiga? It's simple, you
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It was not even an operating system yet. It was just a graphical environment running on top of DOS.
Re:I still own the product on floppies after 25 ye (Score:4)
Why would you say that? I have plenty of floppies from 1990 and earlier that still hold data.