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Windows 3.1 @ 20


ppgrainbow

Windows 3.1 Poll  

50 members have voted

  1. 1. How long have you used the operating system for?



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World's most fave operating system of all time

Citation needed. I'd hardly call it that. Not even near.

Was it even an OS at all? More like a GUI. :angel

It was a GUI operating on top of of MS-DOS or a DOS compatible OS.

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i always consider win 3.x as "Shell" and not an "OS"

but.. , win9x also sits on top of MS-DOS 7.x

i remember mucking with 9x settings (by accidents) that it would return to DOS instead of powering-down the computer, when you choose to shutdown.

win9x will gives messages something like: "You may shutdown the computer", but with C:\> prompt ready.

and, with BootGUI=0 in msdos.sys,

i loves type "win" to (re-)run the win9x,

just like i did on windows 3.x before.

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I didn't have a PC that time, but I've seen Windows 3.11 on my friend's computer. He had a computer with 486 processor, 8 Mb RAM, and 200 Mb HDD with DOS. Our favorite game at that time was Sid Meier's Civilization. When we got Civilization II, we were disappointed - it required Windows! But already well-known Windows 95 (it was about 1995-1996 year) was too large for 200 Mb HDD. But some day my friend discovered Windows 3.11 - less than 12 MB HDD space, and Civilization II was satisfied with Windows 3.11! So, we used this 'OS' only to play Civilization II - Other games of that time were mostly DOS or at least had DOS versions, and Windows analogues were too slow for this PC, and we didn't have any other Windows 3.11 apps. Then in 1997 I bought my own PC - already with Windows 95, and my friend also upgraded his one...

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Ah the memories.

My first PC in 1993 had Windows 3.1 on it, and it was the wonder of the age at the time.

It had a 120 MB hard drive "more than you'll ever need!"

I still have the machine now, and I don't think I could ever bear to part with it.

It was used by a friend of mine for some years, running Windows 98, but when he updated (to a Windows 7 laptop!) the machine came back home.

I was really sorry that I'd actually junked my 3.1 installation disks, as I would have put it back on there.

As it is it's dual booting with Windows 95 OSR2 and Windows NT 3.5.

The latter still gives me the Windows 3.1 experience as it's the same GUI!

:)

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LOL. My first IBM compatible PC came with Tandy Deskmate, a Windows 1.0 clone. Never used it.

Can say the same about my next PC, an IBM PS/1 which came with Windows 3.0. I wiped the hard drive after the first month because it was nothing but a waste of space. I was 15.

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My first IBM compatible PC came with Tandy Deskmate, a Windows 1.0 clone. Never used it.

I still have an Amstrad PC6400 that came with separate floppies for MS-DOS and GEM, the CP/M GUI. I was a DOS guy and never felt the urge to complicate my life with a GUI.

--JorgeA

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It had a 120 MB hard drive "more than you'll ever need!"

Before that, people were saying the same thing about 20MB hard drives, and that was a luxury not many could afford either. Floppies also seemed quite large. I mean, you could fit several full games on one, and I'm not talking about 1.44MB floppies either! People have always said that. I almost wonder if people were saying that when cavemen were making drawings on cave's walls... And these days we have no problems filling drives of a few terabytes. These days online hosts have petabytes of data. Megaupload for example had between 25 and 28 petabytes of data -- that's over 25 000 000 GB. I'm not sure how much space Amazon's S3 has, but they have price breaks for customers that use more than 50TB... I don't see this trend stopping anytime soon, nor will people stop saying "this is more than we'll ever need".

GEM, the CP/M GUI

All these years I thought GEM was an Atari ST-only thing... Not that I've ever used CP/M (I mostly used 8 bit machines before MS-DOS).

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All these years I thought GEM was an Atari ST-only thing... Not that I've ever used CP/M (I mostly used 8 bit machines before MS-DOS).

Atari 400 was my first. With a tape drive. :)

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Who remembers this?

Wow, not me! I was around back then, but I'd never heard of the Software Carousel.

BTW, was that a photo you took of the monitor? It wasn't a screenshot, was it? (Nahh, couldn't be...)

--JorgeA

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Who remembers this?

Me neither. But I remember seeing a lot of DOS menu systems back then, some of which used to be somewhat popular (but my memory fails to remember their names unfortunately).

The main problem with them is that they used memory, and it wasn't uncommon to require "at least" some amount of conventional/EMS/XMS memory to run some app (where we had fancy optimized config.sys menus, some with qemm), and the menu used enough for the program not to run...

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It had a 120 MB hard drive "more than you'll ever need!"

Before that, people were saying the same thing about 20MB hard drives, and that was a luxury not many could afford either. Floppies also seemed quite large. I mean, you could fit several full games on one, and I'm not talking about 1.44MB floppies either!

I remember one time my dad and I were at the computer store, probably 1983. He turned to me, pointed to a wall display with 10-packs of single-sided, single-density (160K) 5.25" floppies, and said:

"What will I ever need ten of these for?!"

I replied, "Yeah, really!"

:)

--JorgeA

Edited by JorgeA
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Who remembers this?

Wow, not me! I was around back then, but I'd never heard of the Software Carousel.

BTW, was that a photo you took of the monitor? It wasn't a screenshot, was it? (Nahh, couldn't be...)

--JorgeA

Yes, it's a photo of a monitor, but not mine. Alas, I don't have Software Carousel anymore! That photo is from a review of it at InfoWorld (Jan 05, 87). Read it, by all means, Software Carousel was much more than just a DOS menu system, since it instanced and swapped all memory above itself, and would run real great on a PC-XT clone having an AboveBoard or any other form of LIM EMS. And just required PC/MS-DOS 2.00+!

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Alas, I don't have Software Carousel anymore! That photo is from a review of it at InfoWorld (Jan 05, 87). Read it, by all means, Software Carousel was much more than just a DOS menu system, since it instanced and swapped all memory above itself, and would run real great on a PC-XT clone having an AboveBoard or any other form of LIM EMS. And just required PC/MS-DOS 2.00+!

dencorso,

Thanks, that was a fascinating read!

It reminds me of a question I had a long time ago, which was whether it's possible to devise a CLI- or DOS-based system that addresses lots of RAM, such that you could dispense with Windows. (For the longest time, whenever the topic came up I would proudly announce that, "I don't do Windows!") I guess now that the answer would be that it IS possible.

--JorgeA

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