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Microsoft Windows 3.0 Is 20 Years Today

Posted by timothy on from the great-platform-for-playing-jeopardy dept.

siliconbits writes "Some say that the Windows 3.0 GUI (remember, it needed MS-DOS or DR-DOS to work) was the single most important version, as it allowed Microsoft to get its day. The first truly successful Windows operating system is 20 years old today; Windows 3.0 was launched on 22 May 1990 and was the successor to Windows 2.1x."

4 of 307 comments (clear)

  1. Windows 3.1 was more significant by ClosedSource · · Score: 3, Informative

    because it had truetype fonts. The combination of Windows 3.1 and HP's deskjet printers made it possible to perform desktop publishing for hundreds of dollars less than using other alternatives.

  2. Re:Win 3.1 emulator by yuhong · · Score: 3, Informative

    No, it was the same on the real 3.x calculator, making it targets of jokes:
    http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/05/25/141253.aspx

  3. Is there a point? by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 4, Informative

    Is there a point to this story, other than "hur hur let's make fun of Microsoft! hur hur hur!"

    Now if you found someone still using it today, that might be newsworthy.

    --
    Comment of the year
  4. Re:Bing is following Google's lead by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 3, Informative

    Windows 95 only had cooperative multitasking as well.

    You're completely wrong. Win9x had proper preemptive multitasking. You could CreateThread() two different threads, and they'd just run on their own, with no need for either one to yield. Whereas, Win 3.x didn't have CreateThread at all, and "process" switches happened during message pumping.

    However, due to the lack of any notion of process boundaries or memory safety in 9x, any programs could break this extremely easily.

    The 95/98/me series was just a bunch of stuff piled on top of old DOS- not really an OS at all, just a wad of runtime stuff running on top of DOS.

    Well, 9x had its own kernel containing a thread and process scheduler, a virtual memory managemer, and a driver API - I'd say that qualifies as an OS. DOS was used as a bootloader for the kernel, effectively. Parts of it were also used when you ran DOS apps in Windows (which was a source of many problems, actually), but so long as you stuck to Win32 apps, DOS wasn't engaged.