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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."

3 of 307 comments (clear)

  1. Win 3.1 emulator by complacence · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Try this one.

  2. Re:Bing is following Google's lead by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So you're saying that we went from PacMan to WIndows 3.0 in only 9 years, 364 days? Wow, that seemed to fly past.

  3. Re:Windows 3.1 was more significant by Skuld-Chan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I remember supporting PageMaker on Mac and Windows - it was awful on both platforms (this was Pre-Quark when PageMaker was pretty much the only app to do layout with). To get really good results on the Mac you have to have an 8-10k machine, to get decentish results on a Windows PC you could get away with a $1200 Dell.

    In other words - an 8 meg Mac was worthless for DTP, but an 8 meg Dell did ok at it - I think this was largely for the fact that System 7 just had that much more overhead. 8 megs was a ton of ram for Windows 3.x, but I can specifically remember my 8 meg IICX being horrible at about everything (and it was like an 8000 dollar machine with the nice screen attached) until it was upgraded to 32 (I think) - which was a ton of money at the time.