Discussion on:

Microsoft Windows 3.x is where it all started for most of us

What was the thing that made Windows 3.x the version to try? Was it only because the computer you purchased then had Windows installed already?

In particular - I bet if we made this a little more granular, most respondents are talking about Windows for Workgroups 3.11

A few things happened...

640x480 VGA and then 1MB SVGA cards capable of 800x600 and 1024x768 resolutions.

OLE and dynamic device driver consolidation really came of age...

The Intel 386DX 32 Bit processor - and maybe more importantly, the AMD 368 processors that were just ever so much faster (386DX40 vs. 33).

And relatively easy network connectivity between workstations.

Most people were buying Win 3.x - too, not getting it bundled. It was not yet a default on PCs - many of which still came only with DOS 5, 6 or 7.

At least, that is my recollection. People forget that shortly before Windows 3 - DOS Shell was still big, and Duke Nukem was a non-3D EGA side-scroller, and lots of people still went with Hercules Mono graphic cards in your choice of amber, green or VGA paper-white to save money (well, not the adapters, but the CRTs that plugged into 'em).

I had forgotten about DOS shell, a way to customize using applications. I tended to call it DOSs Hell for some of the headaches it caused while fixing issues with how things worked.

I was using Commodore computers starting in 1981. They were going out of business, so I went shopping for another computer. Apple was too expensive, so I 'settled' for a windows unit, and it had 3.0 pre-installed, in 1991. I was sorry for my decision within 6 months.But, now I run Linux, so I don't need windows, and I am HAPPY!

and that nothing ran on it, even assuming it didn't crash that hour. Windows 3.0 was better, but I've got to admit that WfW 3.11 was my favorite of that series...

I was late to the game, before that, it was just the Macs in school.
95 was a good experience though compared to those Macs.

Windows 3.x sounds about right. I remember the pain it was to install it. You had to boot up in DOS then proceed with 15 floppy disks. But once you saw a GUI you were so happy lol... Ah the good times... Now any moron can just put in a Windows 7 disk and it practically does the installation for them...

A major "feature" that allowed Windows to take over the world was it's ease of being pirated. The install key was "987654321" (If my memory was correct).
It was only after it was really entrenched that Microsoft went after the licenses.
It was a good marketing campaign that worked!

Windows 3.x didn't require a product key.

15 disks? Were they 5.25"? Windows 3.1 had 6 maybe 7. Windows for Workgroups 3.11 had maybe 8. If you were flipping 15 disks, you were installing Windows 95. As best I can recall, Windows 3.x didn't come on low density media as most computers capable of running it had 1.2MB 5.25" drives or 1.44 MB 3.5" floppies.

and by golly I still have the five disk set for Windows 3.0

I could be wrong but seems like Win95 had around 15 3.5" HD disks. About double that for Win98 SR1.

I dont remember which version we were running, but my family got an IBM machine somewhere around 1985. We basically had a DOS floppy that didnt give us much more than a word processor. No GUI that I remember, unless we decided to play a 3rd party game.

Ahhhh those long plastic tubes full of memory chips that were used to populate the Intel 'AboveBoard' memory boards.

Kids these days don't even know the difference between Extended and Expanded memory

lol.. my wife kept a tube of those chips as souvenirs..
Still in her office somewhere.

Don't tell the kids what a 286/1?mhz machine with 1 MEG of memory cost; they'd probably cry. Oh and 10 MEG hard drives, that was fun.

My friend had a computer with a 10MB HD, I think it was even that interface that preceded IDE (can't remember what it was called, MFM or something???). Anyway the drive had this rod sticking out of the side that would move as the drive worked, why I can't imagine, and a sticker warning not to rotate it. Of course my friend rotated it and it killed the drive.

I still have a few old issues of late 80s and early 90s PC Magazines. $1199 for a Viewsonic 21" CRT monitor in 1998 for example, vs. $99 for an LCD 21" HDTV/Monitor today.

Talk about a lot of 3.5 diskettes, as they were originally called! One to boot up in DOS, then 1 or more for every program. Ahhh, but that machine never crashed!

I just got a call from one of my fellow techs. He described a scale memory board "with pins you stick the chips into", said there were four chips on the board and asked if there was a way to get new chips for it!

The scale in question uses SIMM boards for memory and firmware. I suspect that memory board has been in that scale for 20 years or longer.

Added: Well, I'll be dipped! You can stilll get'em! http://www.ebay.com/itm/RAM-4164-15-16-Pin-DIP-1-PK-/260380586429

it wasn't until 3.1 that I finally bit the bullet and decided to learn a little about it.
I still have it installed on an old 386DX, haven't fired it up in a long time though.
I used Calmira II as a "shell" replacement for Program Mangler, err, Manager,
when Win95 came out...a few friends were tricked and thought my old 386 was
running 95, hehe! Good times...

the minimum specs for 95 was a 386 with 4MB. I think the guy who came up with that was tried by a UN court for crimes against humanity.

I was one of the sad ones, who spent many, many hours queuing outside WH Smiths - big stationary shop chain for you non UK readers - in Elephant & Castle (London) to get hold of the first release of Windows 95.

Happy days indeed.

My first "modern" computer had a 386DX 33 and 4MB of RAM, which was the minimum configuration. It was running DOS 5.0 and I got a copy of Windows 3.11 for a really cheap price at the IBM Outlet Store at the Morrisville, NC mall. I learned more from that machine than any sense... including a lot of patients!

Uncle brought home a computer from his office around 93 when i was 9 and I started to have a play about with it. When i went to high school in '95 we had a lab of machines that ran Windows for Workgroups 3.11, except when the network was down (was a coaxial network so that was quite often) and the machines would boot to windows 3.1. I remember the excitement in '96 when my dad brought home a PackardBell Multimedia Executive with a pentium processor running at 75Mhz and 8mb ram, as well as a quad speed cd rom. Best of all, its was running windows 95 and school was still on 3.11 so made me feel great

The sad part is that we are still using DOS 3 albeit with a super glorified menu system and better memory management.

As Dos was discontinued with Win 7 (or more specifically Windows PE) I would love to hear your reasoning.

I never followed the NT line closely.

Also, I believe we are on Dos 6 or something aren't we?

Either NT kernel based or post WinME you don't use DOS for boot anymore, thus real mode disappeared. CmdShell != DOS...

'Course your original point is spot on...

The MS-DOS code base died with Windows ME. Windows 2000 and subsequent versions are based on the NT4 kernel.

XP had two command interpreters:

CMD.EXE

and

COMMAND.COM

. The startup headers identify them as "Microsoft Windows XP" and "Microsoft Windows DOS", respectively. Whether command.com is still available in Vista or Win7, I don't know.

Grief! I remember Windows ME. What a pile of JUNK! I think I had it on one machine for a week before I stripped it off and put Windows 98 back on the machine. The prototype Vista release? ;o)

One or two family members never had any trouble out of it, but they bought OEM PCs with it installed.

Several customers, on the other hand, rolled their PCs back to Win98 after months of absolute hell.

Oh the pain ??3200 for 4x32mb 72 pin simms which i still keep in a draw in my desk.Early adapters of high tech pay a very high price.

Didn't see the poll and would have voted for Win 3.x, my first windows version, prior to that still DOS. Recently came across and old invoice for four (4) 1-MB memory sticks for that "dinasour" machine, but don't have the machine anymore. It was a revolution in upgrade, back in 1995. And around 1990, my first computer (DOS) had a whooping 20-MB hard drive, unthinkable today, can't even remember the RAM in it, but it worked relatively smooth with the integrated "Enable" office suite. Unbelievable, thinking back to those days.

There might even be vhd's of these operating systems available.I think that many of these versions are still used.In industry I suspect that XP is the most common.It's hard to get them to change here.

Last I worked at Keybank they were still using DOS machines for tellers, this was just a few years ago. I think they've virtualized most of them now but it's still DOS. I worked at another company whose voicemail system was a PC running DOS. I've worked at warehouses and even a waste treatment plant where the systems were run from a Windows 3.1 machine.

As for XP, there are very few compelling reasons to switch from it, and plenty of reasons to stick with it. Plus I've seen plenty of embedded systems in industrial equipment running XP, from laundry tracking to manufacturing in huge multinational companies.

He said he was sad he can no longer buy 386 chips. You don't need much to drive a "one armed bandit" (aka Gaming Machine). They don't even care about Windows.

Hmm! One part of the business that "don't give a sh1#"

I've got a bag full of them! Wonder if I could sell them on some technical forum for gaming equipment like that.

For my first windows machine I used the Mac OS on a Mac 512KE which provided a GUI while MS was still insisting that the command line interface was for real men and the Mac using a GUI was just a toy. I am not an Apple fanboy as I use Windows 7 and MAC OSX and I like both but for different reasons.

There is one compelling reason to use Windows...... The fact that the single most important mission critical program I need will not run on Linux. I've run every version of Windows since 3.0 ........ I ran CPM, and DOS with it's miserable memory management system and bizarrely diverse program interfaces, non unified fonts and drivers........ Next to this Windows was a vast improvement. And of course I ran the MacOs from the very beginning, though have not in quite a few years now. I am constantly frustrated by rapid degradation of windows installations in performance and stability. I wipe partitions on a frequent basis and reinstall because of this........ unlike "typical Joe" who simply cusses it and finally buys a new system with a new version of Windows and goes through the whole cycle again. It's a brilliant but entirely unethical and contemptible marketing strategy that nobody seems to be talking about. Linux installations on the other hand running numerous programs last me many years with no degradation in either performance or stability........... Why should we accept anything less??
Howard

but in keeping it on a level playing field, thought I would point out that the rapid degradation of Windows installations seems to be a thing of the past with Windows 7. Granted, it still requires a bit of maintenance. Also, a good deal of the degradation we speak of here was the fault of computer mfgrs than the OS though I am not claiming total absolution of MS. Fortunately, computer manufacturers are not selling computers with what MS claims to be a reasonable amount of memory to run their OS. XP on 128M Ram. Uh huh, and you want to do what with this computer again? Play a game of touch football with the kids between the load of each webpage?

I am not running Win7 yet....... I'm a "late adopter" which menas that I avoid many of the pitfalls that others end up falling into. My computer systems have one user (me), and I'm very conservative. The current system is running under Vista... which is a miserable version (not as bad as ME was ... which I skipped). My Windows system runs ONLY two programs used for stock trading, not even a browser or email program..... except to briefly run Firefox to download my software. Everything else runs on my Linux system... which is rock stable. My computers systems have been home built for many years, and I run nothing but Asus motherboards, and conservative boards and processors at that with plenty of memory. The goal being stability and reliability rather than speed. You won't find me anywhere near the "bleeding edge". The next system will run Win7 ...... though I am not convinced that it has anything to offer me in terms of reliability.....nor do I intend to support MS by buying an OS when I don't really need one. The biggest source of problems is security software........ the solution is to run MS Security Essentials. The other headache is Windows Update which needs to left turned on........ I update on Saturday, so I can resolve all the problems the updates create before I have to use the system. SUSE gives me ZERO problems. I've been using it for close to 15 years now.....It just works! Installations are quick and painless, and everything works immediately. I'll never willingly go back to Win as my primary OS.

The Mac OS is certainly a GUI based OS but it is not Windows. Personally I like having a command line interface for certain applications. In fact I won a Power Mac 6100 at Comdex in Vegas in 1994 and when I received, unboxed and played with it I couldn't stand that there was no command line interface and only one mouse button so I immediately boxed it up and sold it.

I still do not like Apple but that is my personal choice. I think they make really slick hardware with their laptops though. In fact we have people at our company that use Apple laptops to run Windows OS and apps - LOL. Anyway to each their own.

....but real men use CP/M.
Somewhere I have Windows 286 on 5 1/4" floppies. I've used and supported them all. But Windows 7 finally seems to be pretty stable. My current system (i5/8GB/Win7x64) just had its 2 year anniversary. No, I repeat NO, problems.
old school stuff?.... AST? IRMA 3270? Quadram? QEMM? Desqview? "low level" format an MFM drive?