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Microsoft Windows 3.0 Is 20 Years Today
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."
If you visit Bing you can run a Windows 3.0 emulator written in Javascript. Even has sound.
I remember going to a big computer show in early 1990 up in Birmingham. This was just before the Windows 3.0 announcement, so the Microsoft booth had a secret area inside it where they were showing the product to invited guests. As a dedicated Amiga fanatic at the time, I wasn't entirely impressed with it - however I did go back and recommend to my employer at the time (BP - no I don't work for them any more) that they should start looking into Windows again (we'd discounted Windows 2.x for widespread deployment).
Commodore used the same show to preview the Amiga 3000 computer, which was far more exciting to me, and I put my order in a couple of days after!
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
The only time where you type Win to lose.
I thought of that joke when I was 11. Damn you misconfigured autoexec.bat! You led me down this path to the cubical I now live in!
by me in PCMag....
Oh, that is soo last decade. Now it's F*ck the Cloud!
you dont have good memory, eh?
read up about undocumented dos functions in ms-dos and what happened when you tried to run windows 3 in dr-dos...
digital research went to court about it and roughly 10 years later they won .... only that they were already moved out of os market because of microsofts behaviour (oh these memories)
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.
The version of Windows that made you wish your 286 was a 386 and 640KB of ram certainly was n't more than you would ever need. Fond memories of wondering where 150K of memory had disappeared to only to realise that lovely desktop background image you set sucked 15% of your free memory. I also remember if you typed fast enough MS Write could n't keep up and you would fill the input buffer, let alone running MS Word. I can n't say I'ill miss those days.
I don't want to start a flame war, but can someone tell me when windows is going to support a one button mouse?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Try this one.
The day Microsoft release a product that doesn't suck will be the day they release their first vacuum cleaner!
That's odd. My teenage angst was fueled by 4000 color nudie pics downloaded on my Amiga. (My IBM PC friends were still stuck with only 256 or 16 colors... not lifelike at all.) I never got off on windows.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
To celebrate, Google will change their logo to one which crashes your machine when you click on it.
The Amiga was large in the UK home user market, and I think Germany as well - most of my friends had an Amiga, while only a select few had PCs and I cannot think of one that had a Mac (and only a single one had an Atari).
Windows 3.0 wasnt succesful at all. A lot of boxes may have gone out, but after a week of playing with it, they sat on the shelf and we all went back to getting work done without it. It was atrocious.
Now was it a "Windows operating system" however you parse it. It was at best a windowing environment. The Operating System was still DOS, and remained DOS until NT/XP.
Windows 3.1 was the first MS Windows environment to be useable enough that people actually ran it for more than just a 'look at this' phase. It was still a huge step down from other multi-tasking DOS shells, and it took years for it to be forced down the throats of the more clueful users, by the expedient of discontinuing support and development of all the applications in favour of new, inferior versions which would only run within the Windows environment.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Like it or not Windows 3.1 was a ground breaker in business, as a techie at the time it was a challenge to get enough conventional memory at times, but Microsoft's marketing dept and indeed their programmers produced Office 4.2. The entire Office suite for the price of the competitor's single product and it worked under windows rather than DOS based. Wordstar for example under Windows just emulated a DOS screen. Businesses jumped enmass. And as they did so their suppliers and competitors went with it. MS at the time were really really lucky to be the chosen one, but they were and it's no surprise that the "monopoly" ensued in the business world. At the time the entire home market had a share of the market that linux would be ashamed of.
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
Damn you misconfigured autoexec.bat! You led me down this path to the cubical I now live in!
Insightful. Woefully, tragically, OMG what have I done with my life, insightful.
Loose lips lose spit.
I accept the Apple Lisa was not popular outside the US but the Amiga had a much higher percentage of users in Europe than in the US.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Near... Far! Near.... Far! In the old days you could learn programming from sesame street.
>>>Yeah, too bad neither the Amiga nor the Lisa were ever relevant outside the US
Completely and totally wrong. I can't speak to Macs, but Amigas were HUGE in Europe, and even today most of the Amiga community resides in the EU.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall