Windows 3.1 Is Officially 30 Years Old (windowscentral.com) 142
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Windows Central: Windows 11 may be the latest operating system from Microsoft, but [Wednesday was] about Windows 3.1. It's the birthday of the classic OS, marking 30 years since its launch on April 6, 1992. Windows 3.1 introduced several key components, many of which have digital descendants on Windows 11 and imitators on other operating systems. Windows 3.1 brought PCs the CTRL+C and CTRL+V shortcuts for copy and paste. It added TrueType fonts and came with screensavers and a media player as well. Gamers had two options for games that preinstalled games: Solitaire and Minesweeper.
Selling over 3 million copies in the first three months it was on the market, Windows 3.1 was considered a success. It was more user-friendly than Windows 3.0 and introduced many people to the idea of a personal computer in their home. Sadly for those that miss the days of the MS-DOS and command line being king, Windows 3.1 reached its end of support in 2001. Further reading: Windows 3.1 Turns 30: Here's How It Made Windows Essential (How To Geek)
Selling over 3 million copies in the first three months it was on the market, Windows 3.1 was considered a success. It was more user-friendly than Windows 3.0 and introduced many people to the idea of a personal computer in their home. Sadly for those that miss the days of the MS-DOS and command line being king, Windows 3.1 reached its end of support in 2001. Further reading: Windows 3.1 Turns 30: Here's How It Made Windows Essential (How To Geek)
I still have my old PC running Windows 3.11 (Score:2)
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Re:I still have my old PC running Windows 3.11 (Score:5, Interesting)
Windows 3.11 actually lived on much longer than most people realize because it was used for the installation of Windows 95, 98 and ME.
The graphical installer you see is a small Windows 3.11 installation running from the disc, with a Windows 95 skin.
It was only with XP that consumer versions of Windows moved to the Windows NT installer.
Re:I still have my old PC running Windows 3.11 (Score:4, Informative)
Every windows until XP were a skin on top of DOS ;)
I recall pranking colleagues by setting their shell to progman.exe on Win98.
Windows NT and Windows 2000 have entered the chat. They existed long before XP and did not run on top of DOS.
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So, just like today.
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It lacked DirectX though, and couldn't run a lot of Windows games. That was the key reason for not having a "home" version of Windows 2000 and releasing Windows ME as a stop-gap.
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As far as I remember from the time, the main Windows game I played was Minesweeper. For other entertainment, I had CIV, Elite, XCOM ... which fulfilled my gaming requirements. Still does - save that I've substituted Oolite for Elite.
Oh, I flogged through the TR games too, about that time, but I can't remember if that was before or after the burglary and the change from Win95 to Win2k. Still got the disc images somewhere, but it must be 20 ye
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Yeah, OpenGL was required for anyone to take WinNT seriously as a CAD or graphics workstation, and Microsoft had made deals with a bunch of the companies selling professional workstations to replace their various UNIX variants with WinNT and later Win2k. The fact that some games could run with it was a happy coincidence.
WinNT captured the workstation market by being good enough. It definitely wasn't better than a professional UNIX workstation - it was (just barely) good enough and a hell of lot cheaper.
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I ordered with a custom-built desktop from a local back-street computer shop in 2003, after I came back into the country to find I'd been burgled, big-style.
I feel like there's some kind of huge story missing in this sentence.
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Windows 95/98 weren't really shells on top of DOS either. They used DOS like a kind of fancy bootloader, then virtualised it and kept it around so they could thunk to 16-bit real-mode drivers for storage peripherals that didn't have protected mode VXD drivers. You could stop Windows and restore DOS back to running on the metal if you'd messed with the boot scripts.
Windows ME still used DOS as a fancy bootloader, but removed support for using 16-bit drivers. You couldn't actually boot to DOS without loadi
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And this was because of the pricing. The 16-bit junk was priced for consumers, the 32-bit system that had a relatively modern OS was priced for enterpises, even if they both ran on exactly the same hardware.
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The best YouTube channel I've found on NT is Dave's Garage. He covers a bunch of very technical topics related to NT internals from when he worked for Microsoft:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Seriously, who cars about 3.1? 3.11 for workgroups was a renaissance for those of us who couldn't afford $2000 for new hardware that ran 95 BADLY
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There is something of a problem with the numerically controlled machine business. Thirty years old is a reasonable service life for a lathe or milling machine. With good maintenance, that could easily be extended. But the control software? Big problem there. There is a precision machining company I know, that had Windows 3.1 controlling many of their machines. It is not that they are Luddites, resisting progress. They have stuff that works, and want to keep it that way. Scrapping a perfectly good machine to
Re:I still have my old PC running Windows 3.11 (Score:5, Informative)
It was cooperative multi-tasking, and was primarily due to hardware limits of the 80386 chips it was designed for. Yes, you could write a round-robin scheduler but that reduced the number of available watchdog interrupts* meant that if something went south you couldn't recover gracefully. Hence a lot of CTRL-ALT-DEL or power cycling.
* Non-maskable hardware interrupts are in very short supply and were needed for things like keyboard, COMs, floppy, video V-sync, etc. - processes where 'dropping the ball' is bad.
Maskable interrupts - were used for schedulers... where if you missed it you could catch it on the next go-around. But, would also allow a program to go haywire and now allow the interrupt to be triggered.
68K got around this by having a better execution stack structure*, much of which was absconded and ended up in the '486 architecture, allowing Win-95 to be much better behaved.
* Hence the three A's - Apple, Amiga, and Atari ST - having much better user 'feel' to them.
Above is a 50K foot (15Km) view - down on the metal its is much, much more complex.
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I recall that Macs, back in that era, had the same problem with floppy drives, the IWM having to monopolize the system to write.
Oh, wait...
Re: I still have my old PC running Windows 3.11 (Score:2)
I remember the numerous "bomb" errors in the old Mac OS and that you were forced to restart. You could kiss any open unsaved documents goodbye.
Can't say I miss those days
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Was it in Sys 6 that you could copy files to and from the floppy, over and over, until it crashed? Fun times. I was happy to bid adieu to AppleTalk, people wired that stuff in creative ways. BUT, MacOS sure did kickstart desktop publishing all over everything else, and made me a lot of money.
Re:I still have my old PC running Windows 3.11 (Score:4, Informative)
It was cooperative multi-tasking, and was primarily due to hardware limits of the 80386 chips it was designed for.
Windows 3.1 was designed for the 8088, not the 80386. The coopoerative multitasking was leftover from the design of Windows 1 and Windows 2.
Yes, you could write a round-robin scheduler but that reduced the number of available watchdog interrupts* meant that if something went south you couldn't recover gracefully. Hence a lot of CTRL-ALT-DEL or power cycling.
There were several preemptive multitasking operating systems that ran on the 8088 / 80286 / 80386. OS/2 and Desqview were the most well-known. Desqview supported preemptive multitasking on the 8088. OS/2 supported it on the 80286.
68K got around this by having a better execution stack structure*, much of which was absconded and ended up in the '486 architecture, allowing Win-95 to be much better behaved.
Windows 95 ran on the 80386 and up.
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Re:I still have my old PC running Windows 3.11 (Score:4, Informative)
No, Windows wasn't designed for 8-bit CPUs.
The 8088 was a 16-bit CPU with an 8-bit data bus. Internally, it was basically the same thing as an 8086.
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The Atari ST ran TOS, which was a version of GEM. Atari TOS was not multitasking. GEM was also kinda crap, again no multitasking but also based on CP/M and later their own version of DOS.
I haven't used TOS much so I can't say if it was any good. I did use the Mac's System 7 quite a bit though, on Amiga hardware which was actually the fastest Mac you could buy at the time. It felt clunky compared to Amiga OS, and took comparatively ages to boot.
The Atari ST was... Well, on the one hand the basic model was qu
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Re: I still have my old PC running Windows 3.11 (Score:2)
Was the RAM battery backed or did it rely on residual charge?
Back in the Hercules monochrome days, I was playing a game that used Hercules graphics. I switched the machine off for a while, turned it back on, and used a program that switched to the Hercules graphics mode without initializing the video ram.
The last video frame that the game displayed was still there, but it was pretty badly garbled with random lines and such sprinkled throughout the picture.
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OS/2 had very few problems preemptively multitasking on 80386 hardware, that I recall.
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It ran on 80386, but was also for 80286 and 8086 as well, and that's what dragged it down. If it was designed for 80386 it wouldn't have had most of those limitations, and could abandon the MS-DOS backwards compatibility, 16-bit handles, etc, (ok, it would have needed a better interrupt controller but that's what you got on that era of PC).
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If I recall, the primary multi-tasking mechanism under DOS was the TSR, or Terminate and Stay Resident application. My business partner did all the fancy computering. I am just a hardware guy and occasional mathematician. My friend built his own computer, with a rack of cards in a big aluminium box, and two eight inch floppy drives. I think the OS was some variant of PL/M. I did a bit of programming in PL/1. Most of my work was Wordstar documents. When you consider that the Z80 based hardware could only sup
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If I recall, the primary multi-tasking mechanism under DOS was the TSR, or Terminate and Stay Resident application.
DOS doesn't didn't really have a multitasking mechanism. TSR, as the same suggests, just allowed your code to stay resident. To actually multitask, you needed to attach code to the timer interrupt. This created the potential for problems when using multiple TSR's. Well-behaved TSR's would insert themselves into the top of the chain while saving the current address to call after they had completed their task. Poorly behaved TSR's would just return when done, leaving previously installed TSR's inactive
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I think the situation with DOS multi-tasking was similar to how you do that kind of thing in an embedded system, which does not have an OS as such. Quite a few systems my colleague wrote had most of the work driven from interrupt service routines (ISRs). This could unfortunately lead to terrible spaghetti code, despite the best of intentions to write code in a structured style. I found this when I started writing embedded code in C. You can't pass arguments to an ISR. Communication from other parts of the p
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There was no good reason for cooperative multitasking on Windows 3.11 Other OS's on the same chip ran preemptively and even Windows 3.11 ran DOS boxes preemptively. It was just legacy madness from earlier versions written for the 286 and 8086. Even then, other OS's managed preemptive multitasking on 286's including OS2.
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--Or, like I did, you could use OS/2 to format a floppy while doing other stuff ;-)
Re:I still have my old PC running Windows 3.11 (Score:4, Funny)
--Or, like I did, you could use OS/2 to format a floppy while doing other stuff ;-)
I remember a similar discussion back in the day, after bragging about how the Amiga happily formatted floppies with no other system impact. The PC crowd responded with "boy, you Amiga guys sure need to format a lot of disks!"
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IIRC, the problem was that Win3.1 used DOS and BIOS calls, but more importantly (worse yet) the floppy controller used DMA which held the main system bus during the real-mode DOS and BIOS floppy calls. That's just from my memory from 20+ years ago, I might be wrong...
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You gamed on Windows 3.1? I don't think I any gaming on Windows 3.1, except perhaps Solitaire and Minesweeper. Any other gaming back then was done in MS-DOS. Even in the Windows 95/98 era, a lot games were still DOS-based, as Windows would eat up a consider amount of the PC's ram back then, whereas DOS had almost no overhead.
So it begins... (Score:3)
As a 10 year old, Windows 3.1 blew my mind. My home computer at the time had MS-DOS installed. I could start applications (mainly games), browse the file system, modify autoexec.bat but that was about it... Then my friend got a 486 and it had Windows 3.1 (with a sound card too!) installed on it. I previously had had interest in computers but Windows really drew me in with the GUI. Just being able to change the colour scheme for example, was something that really started me thinking "what else can I do with this thing?" and really helped push me towards a career in IT.
I know a lot of people like to hate on windows, but it has done a lot of good for computing in general over the years.
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"modify autoexec.bat " ... for other games, loading or not the mouse drivers, moving them to one or another memory, ...)
and config.sys
People used to have multiple versions of them, and select and reboot in specific configurations (the most possible amount of base memory 640kB for some games, expanded or extended or extruded or
Or... or... hear me out... (Score:2)
Install QEMM and get nearly all of that 640k for those memory-hogging, wasteful games!
Re:So it begins... (Score:4, Informative)
It's interesting how different people had different experiences back then, before the internet made screenshots accessible to everyone. If you had never seen an Amiga or Mac or Acorn then Windows 3.11 must have looked pretty impressive.
Meanwhile those of us who had Amigas were a little bit surprised at how crap the Microsoft OS was in comparison.
Mac OS 7 came out the year before Windows 3.11 and did support true multitasking, something Amiga users had been enjoying for 6 years at that point. RISC OS never got true multitasking at all. So I guess by the standards of the day the Amiga was an outlier, and Windows 3.11 wasn't actually quite as archaic as I thought at the time.
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Re:So it begins... (Score:4, Informative)
Depends on what you mean by "true multitasking". Both Classic MacOS and Windows 3.1 primarily used cooperative multitasking between applications. Windows 3.1 in '386 enhanced mode would preemptively multitask DOS programs, though - each running DOS program got one time slot each, and all the Windows programs shared a single timeslot between them.
MacOS had a crude form of preemptive multitasking since System 7 as you could run stuff at interrupt time. You were limited in what you could do (e.g. couldn't do anything that would move memory, couldn't call sound manager, couldn't directly do GUI stuff), but this is how stuff like MP3 players worked and kept the music playing even when the foreground application was being badly behaved, or you did something that prevented cooperative task switches, like keeping a menu open.
Classic MacOS on PowerPC got so-called Multiprocessing Services, originally developed by Daystar to support their dual CPU upgrade cards, but sold to Apple. This allowed applications to create preemptively multitasked threads. It was most useful for multi-processor Macs, as all cooperatively multitasked application code and code running at interrupt time would be limited to the first CPU. However, it did work on single-processor Macs as well, so you could use it if your application was easier to structure that way. Of course, there were limits on the Toolbox APIs you could call from preemptively multitasked threads. Classic MacOS never really got away from the assumption that there was one thing running per "tick", and 68k interrupt levels were baked into the OS so hard that interrupts were dispatched through the 68k emulator right up to the end.
The weird thing with AmigaOS is that despite its preemptive multitasking and all, it never had a concept of application heaps. Classic MacOS had this from the very beginning. If an application crashed or had to be killed (Option-Command-Escape), its entire heap could be freed. Yes, it could be very annoying that application heap sized had to be set before launch and they couldn't grow. However on AmigaOS, all memory was allocated from the system heap with no tracking of ownership. If an application crashed, any memory it had allocated leaked until you rebooted. It always seemed bizarre to hear Amiga users boasting about the wonders of their OS when it lacked such a basic feature.
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Exactly this, your perspectives depend what you're used to.
Having used Mac, Amiga and several Unix (DEC, Sun, SGI) systems i always found windows/dos to be a very poor offering and wondered why anyone would want to use it, especially once i learned all the headaches people had configuring ISA cards and setting up games to run.
I had a relative who was a mainframe programmer, and she scoffed at the tiny amounts of memory and storage in any of the home computers of the day too.
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I think it was because the DOS/Windows platform was cheap and had a lot of business software support. It was crap but back then most business users didn't care, they just wanted particular software to run.
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Other way around. Amiga's were in the $500 range [wikipedia.org] but IBM PCs were in the $1000 - $2000 range [wikipedia.org]. I remember growing up and machines like the C64 were something you could buy from mowing lawns over the summer, whereas IBM-compatibles were not. Adding the cost of Windows on top of the cost of the PC just made it even harder to reach.
Re: So it begins... (Score:2)
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If you had never seen an Amiga or Mac or Acorn then Windows 3.11 must have looked pretty impressive.
Yes. My Amiga 500 from 1989 has spent a lot of time in a lot of closets over the last few decades but we've dusted it off and I'm finally getting around to upgrading it to 1 whole megabyte of RAM with ECS graphics... Its amazing to me that there is so much new hardware and actively developed modifications for this thing 30+ years later.
PiStorm [ultimatemister.com]
RGB2HDMI [github.com]
2MB Ram expansion for A500 [retrosupplies.co.uk]
Minimig [minimig.ca]
Etc..
Re:So it begins... (Score:4, Interesting)
Mac OS 7 came out the year before Windows 3.11 and did support true multitasking...
My first home computer was the CoCo 3, which used the 6809 CPU. It had preemptive (interrupt-driven) multitasking back in the early 1980's. While its graphical abilities were okay at best, its raw processing abilities at 1MHz were easily equal to, and in some cases better than, the 10MHz 8088 of the time.
Running OS9 Level 2: I ran my BBS, played games, and wrote software (mostly in BASIC09, but a fair amount of Assembly, too) at the same time. I also wrote a miniscule multitasking kernel, just to understand how the preemptive multitasking worked. I loved that system, and was heartbroken when I realized it had become a dead end. Moving to the Intel world was a culture shock, as the Intel CPU designs were terrible.
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If you had never seen an Amiga or Mac or Acorn then Windows 3.11 must have looked pretty impressive.
That was my case. I was a teen used to PC-AT and XT computers running MS-DOS on green phosphor CRTs, and before that to CP/M machines, Apple IIe clones, and TRS-80 clones using standard TV sets for display, so I had no notion about how GUIs were other than having at most seen B&W low-resolution photos while browsing magazines. One day I was walking the electronics-selling street in town, and I saw a computer running Windows 3.1. I was wide-eyed in surprise, and in playing around on that machine found my
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Well, Amiga made Windows 3.x looked silly, but at the same time I was used to using higher resolution monitors at school ant work that made the Amiga look weak. Of course, that's "micro" computer versus the rest of the world. I remember back in 1983 seeing a Sun workstation that actually had fonts on a higher resolution display.
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I did not have a positive attitude to a graphical user interface for general use. I got pretty fluent with DR-DOS, and various applications that were controlled by the keyboard. Having switched to Linux at about the time of Windows 98, I am in happy zone with my terminal interface, based on Bash. I use applications with a graphical UI, for CAD, for example. But I like the idea that you write stuff on the command line that makes stuff work, rather than clicking around the options made available by some UI de
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Nonsense. It stifled all else because it could be pirated, it was simple and relatively easy to hack and replace and the underlying hardware could be cloned. It enabled and engaged consumers to be effective hackers and build. No matter how beautiful, no walled garden would have ever a
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To the dick smelling mods who don't have any clue about trusted computing, you can look up all the companies and look at their docs, here you go:
Trusted computing faq:
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja1... [cam.ac.uk]
TIFCA
https://tifca.com/wp-content/u... [tifca.com]
Trusted computing group
https://trustedcomputinggroup.... [trustedcom...ggroup.org]
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That is an interesting problem. Are:
* Dumb gamers buying MTX the problem, or
* Greedy developers exploiting "whales" the problem?
I think the problem is a little of both. When you have lack of education and people that don't know to respect other people's time and money then you have greedy people taking advantage of that naivety. i.e. Software-as-a-Service (Saas). As they say "If you aren't part of the solution then you are probably part of the problem."
Getting this back on-topic.
In Microsoft's case they
Some things changed less than Windows, some more (Score:3)
Road bicycles look similar (though they went from 2x7 derailleurs with small rear cassettes to 2x11 with large rear cassettes and from thin steel tubes to thicker Aluminum or carbon).
Phones meanwhile changed even more - cordless phones existed, but most were just a handset tethered by the coiled cable.
Cars look relatively similar, though there are huge changes in both esthetics and functionality.
Planes (commercial) are basically the same, round tubes with wings (and much wider engines).
Houses are larger, though, and with larger windows.
(I have actually used more the 3.11, Windows for Workgroups IIRC).
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TVs were still analog, mostly with big bulky CRTs. Whenever I see those scenes from the LA riots where people are looting CRTs, I just laugh at the fact they don't know they're throwing out their backs and risking jail for something that's going to be left out front of houses with a "FREE" sign in 10 years.
Fake News... (Score:2)
... in regard that Windows 3.1 (released in 1992) introduced copy&paste hotkeys.
You could use those commands as early as in Wordstar (released in 1978).
Its creation is associated to Larry Tesler and Tim Mott in Palo Alto around mid-70s.
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UCSD Pascal had an IDE, with turtle graphics, networking, and a diskless networked filesystem, and it ran on an Apple II. Later it was on the PC (plain, not AT or XT) with the same capabilities. Before MacOS or Windows. The only decent thing that PC had at the time in comparison was Lotus 123 and games.
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I started to learn keyboard accelerators and shortcuts - including Ctrl-c and Ctrl-v - when I started to learn (by RTFMing) Word for DOS, at version 5.
Word? Yes, the Microsoft word processor.
For DOS? Yes - that's where it started.
After M$ introduced WinWord (and completely stopped selling Word fro DOS, forcing people to use Windows), it took 5 to 7 years before the UI and usability of Win
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Word processors themselves have sort of gone the way of the dodo at this point, as digital documents aren't predicated on how they look on a printer much anymore.
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3.11 was first usable version of Windows (Score:3)
Before that, they sucked bigly. Even GEM was better than Windows 1 and 2.
Fortunately, my labs had real computers for me to use (VaxStation II and Sun 2/120 plus terminals to the Univac 1100, Vax11 and IBM 370) so only students had to be subjected to Windows.
The Windows 3.1 close window shortcut remains (Score:2)
Since Windows 3.x didn't have the X to close a window, there was a shortcut to do so that still remains to this day. If you double left-click the app-icon in the upper left of a window, it will close. It's fun to think that it still exists in Windows 10 for us 15 people or so who remember this.
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Hah! I still use this all the time.
I have KDE configured to do the same, now.
It was fantastic (Score:2)
I remember switching floppies 6 times per hour.
Crazy install (Score:2)
It came on several floppy disks, you had to pop one in at a time. If one was damaged the whole thing would not work
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LOL Soft. Try installing windows 95 from floppy disks. It had double the amount.
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I did that a few times also or windows NT. Crazy in the sense that now you can install a program with several hundred megabytes in seconds with only one or two clicks
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That's how I first installed linux. And it's why I used linux instead of bsd, it required fewer disks whereas bsd's minimal distribution was much larger.
Shouldn't we celebrate at 31 instead? (Score:2)
It'd match the version, numerically.
Ah, the memories (Score:3)
I remember those days. 3.1 was the first Windows version that crashed less than 3x a day, and it spread quickly. Employees fought tooth and nail to get enough RAM to not have slug-paced software: "The Great RAM Wars". One jerky manager accused our group of swiping RAM from his printers for Windows -- a lie, he just didn't know how to use printers right and needed a scapegoat.
Before that, everyone knew GUI's were the future, being Mac had been around almost a decade already, but it took a while for the hardware to catch up to affordable mass GUI's. Microsoft's keep-trying-until-its-good-enough strategy paid off, making them the dominant work platform.
It also taught MS to subsidize products until competitors whither. Their DOS cash cow supported wobbly Windows 1-to-3.0 until it was viable. They used a similar strategy against competitor spreadsheets, LAN databases, Delphi, Netscape, OS/2, Geoworks, and others.
It's ALWAYS the video driver! (Score:2)
No joke? (Score:2)
Talk about missing the low-hanging fruit.
And no, I'm not going to search for the joke the moderators missed.
Have they fixed the floppy/network issue yet? (Score:2)
Windows 3.1 introduced several key components, many of which have digital descendants on Windows 11...
Just wondering if Windows still locks up the OS when it can't read a floppy disk, access a previous network share, or find a file linked to a short-cut.
Classic OS? (Score:2)
Windows 3.1 wasn't an OS, classic or otherwise. It was a graphical shell that ran on top of dos. Show me a computer that ever booted Windows 3.1
Re:ctrl+c? (Score:4, Insightful)
ctrl+C was a carry over from old terminals and predates DOS and Windows. In the early days of DOS you were encouraged to use ctrl+Break (near that cluster with scroll lock, print screen, and pause). Using ctrl+C was more of a power user move. Windows, OS/2 and some DOS programs supported CUA [wikipedia.org]-style cut & paste using shift+Delete and shift+Insert.
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windows 3.1.1 ?
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The word 'illegally' might be a stretch because I doubt anyone could prove it but at the same time it isn't really plaus
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Dave didn't merely look directly at the implementations he wrote them and absent some non-compete that is probably fine for Dave but that doesn't make it fine for M$. Not that it matters at this point.
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Original Lync server at the time was ahead of competition until M$ decided to fuck it up.
now its moot
Better to say... (Score:2)
Original [insert product name that MS bought here] at the time was ahead of competition until M$ decided to fuck it up.
now its moot
I'm sure that many of us here can list the tools that were good but are now mere memories since MS bought them.
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I used to like their mice, does that count? :}
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Absolutely agreed.
I was hoping people would see the bitter irony of my statement. AKA, underhanded compliment.
Just in case people don't grasp the irony: the lowest-tech thing MS makes is the best (least bad?) thing they make.
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Setting things that stem from their business practices for a moment I think this touches on the core of why their stuff sucks. Their design philosophy of shoving everything and the kitchen sink into a single product or handful of products so tightly integrated they amount to one up's the complexity factor growth exponentially and that complexity means more bugs and errors. That and they want
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Yes, absolutely agree on all points. I mean no disrespect, but I thought most of what you wrote was common knowledge years ago, so my sarcasm / irony was built on that.
I see the problem in pretty much every facet of life: features and functionality (bells, whistles, gadgets...) is added and marketed out the wazoo, but stability, reliability, are ongoing patches, fixes, afterthoughts.
The auto industry has been guilty of this for years, and they're much more heavily tested and regulated. Even medical device
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Yeah, back in those days I was an avid OS/2 user. It was like a "real" operating system while Win31 was a toy.
What did it in was the lack of 32-bit Windows app compatibility. Once Win95 went mainstream, it was harder and harder to justify using it, even if it was still the superior OS. If I wanted a good OS that supported no commercial software, at that point I'd just run Linux.
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As someone who coded Windows applications at the time, this is not a legend it is truth. That's not the only reason for the demise of OS/2 though.
Windows actually had a similar problem with DOS applications: Windows '9x ran DOS applications in a window, could run multiple instances of them, and supported preemptive multitasking on them. The DOS applications used fewer resources than a comparable Windows application - so why upgrade to the Windows version? And why develop one?
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I never had my hands on 386Max. Now I'm wondering what I missed out on.
I was very big on/in QEMM, had very good success with it. I don't remember having any problems with exceptions. I wonder if your friend had an older version, or something unique in hardware? Or something misconfigured? QEMM had a ton of options and modules.
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From what I see, Windows 8
Really? An instance has actually finished booting?