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Microsoft Discontinues Windows 3.x
rugatero writes "The BBC reports that, as of last Saturday, Microsoft is no longer issuing licenses for the 18-year-old Windows 3.x. Many here may well be surprised to learn that anyone still has use for the antiquated software, but it seems to have found a home in a number of embedded systems — including cash registers and the in-flight entertainment systems on some long-haul passenger jets (Virgin and Qantas are cited). Considering Linux's credentials as an embedded OS, this news could very well indicate the possibility of more migrations in the pipeline."
Somewhere in our basement there is still an old machine which dual-boots windows 3.1 and windows 95A.
It probably doesn't boot anymore, as it was having motherboard problems late in life, but a year or so ago I converted it to a virtual machine image under qemu. I can, within 5 minutes, boot a virtual machine into a legal copy of windows 3.1 that runs and contains useful applications that we don't have equivalents for.
It's amazing that all this software still exists and is used by people, even after 18 years. Old tech is not as dead as you might think.
Ok, I'm genuinely surprised at this. Considering how unstable 3X was, I'm shocked that anyone is using it for anything. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see DOS used in embedded systems, but 3X? Lots of people should have been fired a long time ago for going there in the first place.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Yes, and all nerds by now know that when it comes to governmental issues, the president no longer matters. A new CEO for General Electric however...
I hate printers.
Windows for Workgroups 3.11 gets my vote as the best OS Microsoft ever released, warts and all.
Reliability, ease of configuration, scriptable network installation (remember how you could just toss all the install files in a directory?), and I miss those good old PIFs.
Unlikely though it sounds, I ran a physical window manufacturing plant on Windows 3.11 with some DOS machines too -- all on 10base2 ethernet at 2Mbps. Bus topology and thin coax -- I still have nightmares where a NIC dies somewhere between the data entry machines and the Paradox (for DOS) server.
The glass cutting optimizer was maybe the highest-uptime box I've ever seen, and it lived in a terrible environment of dust and glass shards and extreme heat and cold. Windows 3.11, we hardly knew ye!
WfWG 3.11 with specific, well-engineered apps? Great.
Any MS OS with bloaty, ill-conceived apps from a multitude of vendors, many of which don't play nicely with each other? (I'm looking at you, Netscape and Hewlett-Packard!). Not so much.
I've little doubt that even though there will be no new licences issued by MS, there will continue to be pockets of it in production systems for another decade or two.
Either spend a whole lot of time and money getting it ported over to an operating system that doesn't cost any money to license, or spend a whole lot of time and money getting it ported over to an operating system that doesn't scale with your existing hardware base, costs money, and can be end-of-lifed like the operating system it is replacing. In that view, Linux looks pretty good.
I think the part that you're missing is that windows 3.x is no longer aquirable for these applications, and as such new hardware will need to be re-engineered for a newer operating system. In this case, a free and unencumbered OS might be the right way to go... either Linux, BSD, or FreeDOS.
The ______ Agenda
Ever notice that the part that is slower involves you looking at an advertisement?
Me thinks that is not a coincidence.
Wait, I thought Microsoft had been trying for the past year to bury Windows XP - and now we find out they were still selling 3.x all along?
Does this make sense to anyone?
And the three-finger salute realy restarted the machine by that time. No soft restart (learn that Linux!), no set of options (learn that XP!), and was never ignored (learn that crashing Vista!), just a restart, managed by the BIOS, the way IBM meant it to be!
Now, all you kids get out of my lawn!
Rethinking email
I prefer Bush Vista