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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."

24 of 307 comments (clear)

  1. Bing is following Google's lead by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    If you visit Bing you can run a Windows 3.0 emulator written in Javascript. Even has sound.

    1. Re:Bing is following Google's lead by daveime · · Score: 4, Funny

      And if you'd formatted your link correctly, even other people could have visited it.

    2. Re:Bing is following Google's lead by gyrogeerloose · · Score: 3, Funny

      If you visit Bing you can run a Windows 3.0 emulator written in Javascript. Even has sound.

      And if you go here, you can run their Hell simulator, but who would want to? Same deal with a Windows 3.0 emulator.

      --
      This ain't rocket surgery.
    3. Re:Bing is following Google's lead by mrsteveman1 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Actually OPs link is quite apt, in that it doesn't work :)

    4. 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.

    5. Re:Bing is following Google's lead by commodore64_love · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think everyone should give those Windows 3.x emulators a try. They are great demonstrations for why many of us chose to buy Atari STs, Commodore Amigas, or Apple Macintoshes instead.

      I hated using Windows 3.x.

      Multitasking was an exercise in masochism (and also sadism when you pounded your keyboard). On Mac it was as easy as clicking Apple in the top corner, which would produce a dropdown of all running programs. On Amiga it was even easier. The Amiga-M and Amiga-N keys rapidly flipped through the running programs. I typically ran JRterm, a file manager, WordPerfect, C compiler, and the Workbench all at once.

      Windows 3.x multitasking was like stepping 10 years back in time. It felt as if I was using a slow C64 again. I avoided using that OS as much as possible. Not until Windows 95 did they finally get a decent interface, which was basically just a clone of the Mac desktop (trashcan, shutdown procedure, finder, et cetera).

      --
      "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
    6. Re:Bing is following Google's lead by HermMunster · · Score: 3, Funny

      I don't see that as enough justification for visiting Bing.

      --
      You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
    7. Re:Bing is following Google's lead by sgage · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "Dollars are votes. We the People hold power to bankrupt corporations out of existence. No such power exists over Gov't."

      No, dollars are not votes. We the People have no power to bankrupt corporations, and you are delusional if you think that.

      However, we do have real power over Gov't - it's called actual votes.

      Of course, the real problem is the power that the corporations have over Gov't.

      The idea of dollars as votes is extremely un-democratic.

    8. 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.

  2. I remember.... by jolyonr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:I remember.... by sammyF70 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      So an overtly advertised secret booth? Sounds like MS alright ;)

      --
      "DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
  3. Win by clinko · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

  4. Much better article on the subject by lseltzer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    by me in PCMag....

  5. Re:F*ck Microsoft. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Oh, that is soo last decade. Now it's F*ck the Cloud!

  6. 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.

    1. Re:Windows 3.1 was more significant by gyrogeerloose · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      Of course, it didn't work as well as the other alternatives either. I worked at a service bureau at that time and we absolutely hated it when files that had been created under Windows 3.x came in because we knew it was going to cause us headaches. While Windows might have worked okay for simple documents printed to a user's own printer, it wasn't adequate for high-end graphics work.

      --
      This ain't rocket surgery.
    2. Re:Windows 3.1 was more significant by Anpheus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      People didn't want high end work though, they wanted Good Enough(tm) and didn't want to spend a fortune to do it.

    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.

  7. Ah yes by msgmonkey · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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

    Try this one.

    1. 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

  9. Windows 3.0 Sucked! by lloydsmart · · Score: 5, Funny

    The day Microsoft release a product that doesn't suck will be the day they release their first vacuum cleaner!

  10. Re:More importantly... by commodore64_love · · Score: 4, Funny

    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
  11. 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