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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."
Slashdot, where's the Obama story?
Windows 3.x is a lean, stable, functional, and secure OS! How could they do such a thing?
in-flight entertainment systems on some long-haul passenger jets
Ahh, so that's what they ment by "Every seat is a window seat".
Life is not for the lazy.
That explains why I've taken 4 qantas flights in the past year and the inflight entertainment system hasn't worked once..
Just in case you were interested China Airlines uses Linux on their in-flight.
I flew another airline that also used Linux but I don't recall which one. It's not very often you get to see the boot up but in one case they rebooted the system after they landed and in the other my partners crashed when we were trying to change the default language.
I guess this means my sweet 386DX with the 2400 baud modem is going to be hacked the next time I dial into Prodigy to access Mad Maze.
I wonder if this will simply end up with companies using Wine over linux to run their legacy apps?
Upgrading from Windows 3.x to Vista Ultimate should provide a significant performance boost for any application.
I know it's not the same situation, but finding systems with XP is now difficult. Why not wait until 2017 (or how ever long now + (now - windows 3.x coming out) is to support XP. (I know levels of support are different, but I'd like an easier time of finding XP)
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
They are all nice to you when you retire. "Have fun on the beach," they say. Then one day, when you are relaxing in your hammock enjoying your time off maybe sipping a gin and tonic, the phone rings. "It's Linus and the Mac fag," they say, "They're back." "No way, I'm out of the game," you say. Then Windows ME bangs on your door, his back riddled with bullet holes, you know now and then that the computing world needs you. Up in the attic, you grab a handful of floppies and your trusty 2400 baud modem. "Fuck it," you mutter.
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
I used to coax Win 3.11 to run on a 286 with 1024LKb RAM.
That was a desktop then, but would probably qualify as embedded today!
I was finally getting my config.sys and autoexec.bat files optimized. I suppose I could try putting Vista on my 33 MHz 486 (don't worry, it's a DX) ...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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!
there's an entire division of people packing their desks up right now and going home.
"We had a good run team." One of them says as they walk off into the sunset.
OS/2 1.3 lived on for many years in ATM machines. Unlike Windows 3.1x, it was considered the most rock solid 16 bit OS out there. What did a majority of the machines get replaced with?... oh Windows.
And as I've said in earlier stories, that's a bummer.
Here in California we still have two types of Bank of America ATM machines. The older models, with the amber monochrome screens, I am told still run OS/2. The newer ones, with the color LCD screens, run Windows, and they are MUCH slower than the old ones and their interface is much less streamlined and intuitive.
Now I ask you: It's an ATM machine. What was gained by the transition? The new ones allow you to do some fancy things -- such as setting preferences, so you can hit a "Quick Cash" button and get a predetermined amount with one keypress -- but most folks are just trying to get money out of the things and never spend the time to configure their own preferences. Really the only benefit of the new machines was the ability to show color ads during the transaction, but otherwise the OS/2 software was perfectly capable of handling the required operation (and even more so).
Sometimes I wish more applications developers had experience with the embedded systems world. Know what I mean?
Breakfast served all day!
Yeah. That's a real good reason to take something that works, and to spend a whole lot of time and money getting it ported over to Linux so that...it...ummmm...works?
Such is the folly of religion.
Go away. I'm trying to watch my movie.
...Ford announces they are discontinuing production of Model-A parts. Wright Aircraft and Bicycle Company is also rumored to be considering scaling back licensing of its iconic Wright Flyer, citing loss of market share to "those new-fangled planes with landing gear and ailerons."
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
...why QANTAS jets regularly take multi-thousand foot nosedives (http://tinyurl.com/6jynku).
I still remember the first time I used a PC running Windows 3.11... I was in my early teens. I recall it was during a party at my uncle's place. I played with it just a bit, but it was enough to make a very strong impression on me. The interface, the usability, those things led me to make me a very important choice. That day I swore to myself: when time comes to get my own computer... it must be a Macintosh.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol, a game written for Windows in Visual Basic 3 back in 1995, still has a number of loyal players. Last time I checked Mordor did not work with Wine, and many people have had issues running it in Vista (it apparently requires UAC to be disabled). Mordor plays perfectly in DOSBox with Windows 3.1 installed, though.
How would an in-flight entertainment system even run on Windows 3.1? What kind of entertainment would you be viewing?
Playing Cinepak-compressed video at 15 frames per second in 8 bit color? Maybe playing Minesweeper?
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
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.
what nonsense. if their inflight system runs on windows it'd make a hell of a lot more sense to run it on xp/vista or something that's actually compatable (yes you can run win16 apps on vista). of course this is slashcrap so everything means linux. your linux is linux is all that linux.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I just watched Windows 3.1 start up a couple of weeks ago. The town where I live had an e-cycling day where you could recycle a variety of electronics for either free or only a nominal fee. So, I fired up my old 80386/25 DX (with an installed 80387 co-processor) just long enough to do a "format /u c:" and then dropped it off for recycling along with a bunch of other old computer junk I had accumulated over the years (full length, 8bit monochrome video cards, lots of various ISA cards, a few 10-base T NICs along with some co-ax cable and such).
I still have a "true blue" IBM PC/AT (6MHz 80286) with a full height 30 MB hard drive and dual 5.25 inch floppies that I decided to hang onto just in case it actually becomes a collector's item. And, in the same vein, a still shrink wrapped copy of Windows/386 (5.25 inch floppies for installation media).
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Might be able to sneak it in if you phrase it something like that...
Political language
The Microsoft Macro Recorder was sometimes useful in 3.1. The recorder could track your keystrokes and mouse clicks and repeat your actions during the replay. I think it converted the actions into a macro script that could also be manually edited in a text editor. The nice thing about it was that it was like a quick visual batch file to automate procedures without having to write scripts.
The place I just started working at decomissioned their old point-of-sale software only a couple months ago. They still have to use it for reporting and I was asked to troubleshoot their printer the other day, so I had them start up the software and print something, and there was the unmistakable look-and-feel of a Win3.1 app. <shudder> Well now I know why they had to decommision it! (It was running under Win95 though.)
I was at Sears auto center today. I could almost swear that their repair/billing system looks like something written for 3.x running on win95/98.
Can't confirm it one way or another though.
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
NOT TROLLING: I've got a 486 8mb Thinkpad with Calmira on Win3.11. Calmira is a W98 lookalike desktop. It all boots in less than ten seconds, and runs plenty fast from the GUI viewpoint. Linux doesn't have anything like that as far as I know, does it?
Obviously you can't go online with the old beast anymore, but for a super-lightweight GUI kiosk base I don't know that there are any Linux projects that compete with 3.11.
(Kids, please don't go listing mini-linux distro URLs for karma points -- I've tried them all. Nearly everything can't run on 8mb, and the remainer is dog slow to boot and run. Let the people with real-world experience post on this one, thanks.)
I used to work at ON Semiconductor in Gresham OR, and they have win3x on a wafer stress testing machine as of 2008. Its an old machine, but still perfectly good because as the feature sizes get smaller with Photolithography, stress testing is the same (as far as testing the flatness of the surface). So yeah, there are still uses for that OS I suppose.
Considering that selling more copies of Windows 3.x has zero cost to Microsoft, and that nobody expects it to be supported, I wonder why do they need to discontinue it.
They could release the code, but I guess they can't give the core of Vista away...
Andy
contami8ate3 while lubrication. You
...Windows 3.1 installs so fast, that I can hardly see anything other than the reboot option, after installation.
And the GUI is so fast, and so snappy, sometimes I have to do things twice just to check if the action has been done.
Of course, the GUI system in Windows 3.1 was only one layer (Win32 drawing directly to the frame buffer), while todays systems are 7 or 10 layers before a pixel is actually drawn on the screen.
In your face. It looks like your criminal regime has at last been consigned to history and now change is a coming.
Those of you who spoke out for the criminal wars in the middle east listen up, at last the ring leaders and cheer leaders of the atrocities will face UN backed war crimes trials and finally pay for their crimes.
At last America will enjoy a fully nationalised health service helping millions of Americas poorest citizens and migrants to the health care they deserve.
Now the USA can begin to rebuild it's burned bridges with the rest of the world, take it's place with pride at the UN and act as a responsible world citizen for the first time.
The Land Of The Free is a spacious land well endowed with resources, our drive to increase immigration from near and far will build new American communities where none have existed before, new jobs, new cultures, a new energy. With free healthcare and super charged social security America will become the immigrants destination of choice.
No more aggression. America will immediately begin dismantling its vast armament of hate and decimate military spending. We will pull out of all foreign aggression and close our many outposts across the world with our new understanding of how their presence only inflames and ignites anti American thought.
A secular society. Religion has no place in our government, it has no place in our schools and it has no place in our children. We will follow the example of our brother states across the globe and implement an outright ban on religious activities of any sort so that our children can at last grow up truly free.
A fair society. The rich can now shoulder their burden of responsibility to those less well off with pride and honour as they increase dramatically the amount the give back to society.
Yes my brothers, change has come and you republicans are gonna burn in hell for the last 8 years, burn in hell.
Windows for Workgroups 3.11 came on 8 3.5" 1.44MB floppies, while MS-DOS 6.22 came on 3 3.5" 1.44MB floppies, so, 11 all up.
So, either you were using some incredibly ass backwards OEM distribution, or, your memory has faded a little. ;)
Either way, care to explain?
Win3.1 did not have BSOD! Everything would just freeze and you had to do three-finger salute.
My last cross Pacific flights with NWA had Linux in the seats. Wouldn't have known except at one point my seat rebooted itself and I saw a tux logo and a boot sequence.
Do not anger the worm.
"Now, you could replace it all with new equipment (over $100k), or spend a lot of time fooling around with circuit cards, analog-to-digital converters, oscilloscopes, and write some complex software to control it all from a modern pc, or just run windows 3.1."
Oh a challenge. I like it! Details.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
My Windows 3.1 machine is better protected from the internet than any of my other machines. SneakerNet 4 life!
"Don't know about "useful", but my younger daughter likes the Magic School Bus games which are from the Windows 3.1 era. They don't run under wine, since they have wierd attitudes towards video hardware (they fail in different ways, some install but screw up on running, others don't install). "
Have you considered what someone suggested further down the page? Running Win 3.1 in Dosbox. It will at least eliminate the dualboot part. You may even be able to stick the whole mess onto a USB pendrive.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
You can still run Windows 3.11 on DosBOX (complete with a working Microsoft BOB install! Really!). What am I going to do now? :-(
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I never understood why MS didn't release source code of MS DOS. It is cmpletely obsolete, discontinued for a long time by now (at least pre 7.x versions). It could be used for educational purposes and by OS historicians.
Emulators (Dosbox) could also profit from it, although they already RE'd most of that half OS.
Now we could expect the same for Widows 3.x.
I was actually shoulder surfing one of the management consoles of a Laserquest over here in the UK and to my surprise saw Windows 3.x. Given the age of most of their hardware it's probably not surprising. I imagine they can't get the drivers for anything newer (or don't want to hire someone to write one).
What does Win3.1 have to offer compared to, well, anything else.
The development tools, the 16-bit memory model, the limited sound and video... who could they pay enough money to develop for it?
What possible advantage does it have over the zillion alternatives?
No sig today...
"Windows never crashed"?
i have an old HP Vectra PI (233MHz!!!) with 96MB of EDO Ram (!!!!!!) It runs DOS 6.11/WFW 3.11 and i can load everything into a RAMdisk lol. It's wikked fast for old games on the DOS side and on the WFW side has the first working Trumpet Winsock, Z Modem protocol, the hand-cobbled TCP/IP stack and 32-bit extentions which got me connected to the net :)
runs like a champ,and it's the only working machine i have to read 5 1/4" floppies :)
now get off my lawn!
British Rail have been using 3.x for their 'newest' ticket machines!
No , I don't work for them, I've just seen quite a few of them BSOD...
Slashdot, where's the Obama story?
No sorry. The election is over. /. will now resume its usual regimen of trolls about petrified naked Natalie Portman and welcomes given to our latest overlords-du-jour.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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?
It seems to me that it's somewhat silly to actually "discontinue" a software product. After all, it's software. It's not a physical product. It's something you can download, and it seems somewhat nutty to not accept coin for it if asked.
There are exceptions when you don't want a prior product like XP to compete with a current product, say vista, but win3.1 is some of those cases where there is really no threat of it competing with a current generation product.
I'm not saying that microsoft shouldn't abandon support for win3.1. Far from it, only it seems to make little sense since win3.1 was used on a number of systems, and if you lose your drive and for some reason simply have to have that legacy system operational, there is some wisdom is keeping the product available for purchase. Otherwise you run into some questionable situations where you "need" win3.1 but can't buy it.
IBM for example at one point offered PC DOS 5.0 as a free download. It was a commercial product but by 1998-1999 it had NO commercial value. According to wiki you can get PC-DOS 2000 (Chinese Edition) for free. They seem to understand the value of this being a vital port of legacy systems, and make it available. Microsoft offers a ton of files from their dos distribution available.
That's my only bitch, if you need it, the only solution is hunting around for it, or pirating it.
ftp://ftp.boulder.ibm.com/software/dos/
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
The sad part is that now only get turned on by pixelated women.
The Abacus and Difference Engine have been freed from copyright.
Windows 3.x will be scheduled to be freed from copyright in 2038...ish
I can't wait.
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.
Your migration migraine solved until the recession is over. After the recession you decide to use apps developed for linux. When a new recession comes a long you decide to open source that funky linux app. You wonder why you didn't thought of it before.
Ofcourse when your an airline and the price for oil has become too expensive... You might just let the old hardware and win3.x software rot away. Everyone already has portable media/computing devices. Who cares about your win 3.x entertainment center anyway?
Was there anything cooler than Shared Windows with Windows 3.x series? One copy of Windows running from one server (Novell of course). Each user with custom Windows settings (colors, ini's) stored on their "H" drive.
Thin clients, run from anyway, easy remote user environment troubleshooting. ...But died with Win95 and requirement for real mode networking drivers.
I flew across the US with my daughter, and I immediately turned off the in flight "entertainment" system on our seats. Well, I turned the brightness and volume all the way down - you couldn't actually turn the dang things off. The attendants kept walking by, seeing our screens dark, and without talking to me, rushing to the front of the cabin to announce, "Please be patient, we need to reboot the in-flight movie system." This happened about 6 times before they finally figured out that I was turning them off on purpose.
If I remember well Win 3.x was installing as an application over DOS 6.x? Does my memory plays a prank to me? I remember I bot my first 486 DX4 (100Mhz) with DOS 6.22 as an OS and Windows 3.11 Workgroup.
NONE of the DOS-based Windows (1,2,3,95,98/me) were stable. They were kludges sitting on top of an ancient DOS, trying to be a Mac-like environment.
Wait, are you talking about MS Windows or X Windows?
Migrations to Linux from Windows 3.1? If you had an existing app out there, already developed, already deployed, would you convert it to run on Linux, or simply pick the next-supported Windows OS (98 if it's available, XP if necessary). That's a better way to ensure compatibility, stability (well, at least as much as 3.1 was providing).
A conversion to another OS is likely to create more bugs/instability, even if the OS is more stable itself. I doubt we'll see a noticable bump in Linux embedded adoption because of this.
(That being said, freeing themselves of licensing costs, and the possibility of using Wine for backwards compatibility are certainly worth exploring for any such companies.)
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I seem to remember a similar story more than a year ago. What the hell?
When manufacturers stopped giving out info to MAKE your drivers. Closed source wasn't really common and closed hardware only slightly more common when Windows rode that pony until we were ALL shagged.
And now people think that closed source and a user manual that just says "put the CD in the slot and click setup" is the norm.
It didn't used to be, and companies were still profitable.
Then again, engineering were as important as marketing in those days, and the bosses weren't all accountants and sales reps.
I've always thought it was interesting that you can still download a Citrix client for it.
The BBC reports that, as of last Saturday, Microsoft is no longer issuing licenses for the 18-year-old Windows 3.x
They don't have to anymore, Windows 3.x is now an adult and Microsoft is not required to pay child support any longer.
Some may say it is harsh to just kick it out on the street, to fend for itself. But it will be interesting to see how well Windows 3.x does on its own, will it be flipping burgers or will it be working in IT?
Personally I hope it isn't jelous of its younger siblings who gets all the attention, otherwise we could end up with a messy OS gone postal.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
Good bye GlobalAlloc()! Good bye GlobalLock() and their local counterparts! By the way, heap management was damn hard in 16 bit Windows. You only had 8192 memory handles which you must share with other apps. It was a pain to develop applications for it.
As someone who used Win3.1 frequently when it was still popular, I can assure you that it had /frequent/ BSODs. It also had frequent General Protection Faults and the occasional Unrecoverable Application Error. Also, since it used cooperative multi-tasking, one program freezing up would bring down the entire computer; quite often this occurrence would require a hard reset, because Ctrl-Alt-Del wouldn't work.
Some of this could be laid on bad 3rd-party drivers, but most of it was bad design and insufficient compartmentalization.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I set up a VirtualPC VM this past Sunday, installed MS-DOS 6.22 and WfW 3.11, and also Microsoft's TCP/IP stack for WfW and Internet Explorer 5.01, and Win32s. I added in Calmira, which is a free 3rd-party shell that can give a Win95-style or WinXP-style interface (depending on which variant), and (oh yes) Microsoft Bob. That last is as bad as they say. The Microsoft TCP/IP stack only partway supports DHCP; you have to manually input the gateway and DNS servers.
Thing runs fairly decently on the Internet, provided your site doesn't need newer stuff like AJAX. Sourceforge is Right Out, and for some reason I can't click links for Google search results. The S3 driver I downloaded can even do 1600x1200 at 16 colors, and 1024x768 at 24-bit color.
Does anyone have a suggestion for a good Win16 or Win32s-compatible browser? Don't suggest Mosaic -- I have it running on WinXP and every time I load a website it crashes. I know of Netscape 4.0x and Opera 3.62.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Windows 3.1 was 16-bit. There was an optional compatibility layer called Win32s (for Win32 subset) that would allow you to run certain Win95-compatible programs. NCSA Mosaic was probably the best-known Win32s-compatible application.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
"In Soviet Russia, Windows 3 discontinues YOU!"
That's why those letters now stand for Denial of Service. ;-)
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
I flew Continental recently & they also had Linux in their inflight entertainment system.
I think you mean OS/2 based. ;)
This is more likely good news for QNX.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
You think they didnt evaluate Teh Lunix before deciding to go with Win3.x? Puh-leez.
Fact is, nobody honestly WANTS Teh Lunix. You can hire just about anyone, and they can figure out how to used Windows-based systems. If you use Lunix-based crap... you need to hire someone who knows Teh Lunix... and like Yogi Berra said, it's just the sort of thing for people who like that sort of thing. NOBODY outside of Teh Lunix community uses, or cares about, Teh Lunix.
So... that "free" OS leaves you at the "mercy" of the standard armada of high paid Lunix consultants who will pick your company clean like vultures on a bloated corpse.
Most people are smart enough to understand that "Free" costs too damn much.
FTFA:
Stefan Berka said he had recently re-installed Windows 3.11 on a computer and was surprised at the results.
That's nice, so someone paid $300 to get Windows 3.11 reinstalled by someone who probably wasn't even born when it came out.
These Geek Squad perps are so expensive, it's cheaper to just buy a new PC!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Or see if the original vendor offers something for newer versions of Windows?
It's fucking stupid that the scientific world hasn't switched to using something portable like Java or even .NET for instrument-control applications. We have a few instruments here that have Win9x or WinNT4 computers plugged into them, because that's all their control software will work with.
The winner is, I think, an IBM PS/2 with 486DX that dual-boots between OS/2 and something else, and has something like five instruments' passthrough dongles daisy-chained out the parallel (or maybe it's SCSI) port. I don't know what they'll do when that computer dies.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I'm definitely interested. Would you post some links?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I'm still using Windows 3.0 on my HP 200LX Pocket PC. Does this mean I'll have to switch to one of these new Palm Pilots?
I was on a flight recently and there was trouble with the in flight entertainment. They tried rebooting it twice, and we all got to watch our seatback screens booting linux complete with a penguin in the upper left of the screen during the boot.
BlockBuster uses windows 3.1
so it takes 18 years to stop selling Windows 3.X but only 8 years to stop selling XP???? what gives?
love the taste, hate the texture
... network neutrality, then we will know if we got screwed or not.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Oh noes!!! I still have my Windows for Workgroups 3.11 license.... no more updates? :(
Even in Vista, the spirit of Win3.1 still lives on in the Add Font dialog box!
(Anyone know if they've updated that yet in Windows 7?)
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Currently using it in dosbox and it works perfectly with the dynamic core, including sound (use the soundblaster drivers built in to windows). You do need a 2GHz CPU if you want good speed, though.
as a guest VM if the host OS is *nix. Or at least as securely as one can be run. If I didn't need Windoze for legacy apps, I wouldn't bother with it in any form.
When running Windows firewalls on a guestVM, I've NEVER seen a firewall alert based on traffic from outside the local network. When I did this for the first time with Win4Lin 9.x running W98SE, it was also the first time I could run in 'popup all alerts mode' without getting interrupted with an alert every few seconds. Or ever.
3 years later, running XP on a guestVM on Sun Virtualbox . . . no alerts. (though I did have to specifically allow traffic from between the LinuxOS and Virtualbox... if you find that stuff isn't working, check the ZoneAlarm log)
Tech Public Policy stuff
try installing a Linux OS, install Virtualbox, and install W98SE on top of it. Assuming that Virtualbox runs as efficiently as VMware Server did, you might be pleasantly surprised at the results. My experience with virtualization with W98SE is that it runs faster than it did as a native OS, and W98SE is actually fairly secure when run as a guest VM. The point is that in virtualization, Linux does the heavy lifting and what's left is an easy job even for a MS OS to do.
I was getting satisfactory performance with a 900 MHz CPU. I'll admit that things improved when I upgraded to a dual-core Athlon 64/4200.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Windows 3.12 for Cash Registers? Man, you don't want to believe it.
I am not devoid of humor.