Linus Torvalds Celebrates 20 Years of Windows 3.11 With Linux 3.11-rc5 Launch

hypnosec writes "Linus Torvalds released Linux 3.11-rc5 yesterday wishing that it would have been a lovely coincidence if he were able to release final Linux 3.11 as on the exact same day 20 years ago Microsoft released Windows 3.11. 'Sadly, the numerology doesn't quite work out, and while releasing the final 3.11 today would be a lovely coincidence (Windows 3.11 was released twenty years ago today), it is not to be,' notes Torvalds in the release announcement."

Comments

Best DOS window manager

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever made

Captcha: Birthday

I feel old

[philip.paradis]

I've got many memories of evenings spent with Windows 3.11, although I spent far more time in DOS back then. Later on, I spent a few few years with Linux (starting with Mandrake) as my primary desktop OS, and wound up with Mac OS X for the last few years.

I'll still raise a toast to over a decade of Debian or FreeBSD on the server side for anything I care about.

Re:I feel old

[Hatta]

For those feeling nostalgic, Windows 3.11 works in Doxbox quite nicely. Grab the microsoft entertainment pack and play some skifree.

Re:I feel old

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, memories. I remember the day my brother and I were playing that game. He discovered that you could go faster using jumps properly. Well, he was playing and finally passed the Yeti and kept going. The Yeti disappeared off the top of the window and he kept going for at least another minute or two. He then stopped and said, "I think I outran him." Right after saying that, the Yeti comes charging down and eats him. After about 20 seconds of silence, he closes the window and mutters, "I hate that game."

Re:I feel old

[jones_supa]

Seconded. Those Entertainment Packs have other fantastic games too: Chip's Challenge, Tetris, JezzBall, Taipei, etc. 2D graphics implemented using only Windows GDI, and damn solid shit.

Re:I feel old

[mcgrew]

I never did run Windows 3.11. I was on DOS 3.1 until 6.2 came out with doublespace. Windows 95 because Road Rash wouldn't run in DOS. W98 when none of the newer games would run on W95. XP when XCP vandalized my computer and I didn't have drivers (lost the CDs).

I got Mandrake then when XP started getting flaky. Turned out that Linux is just more fault-tolerant than Windows; Windows crashed every hour or so, Linux kept chugging until that power supply failed completely.

This notebook is running W7, because I'm lazy. The one that uses the TV as a monitor is kubuntu.

Re:I feel old

[isorox]

I've got many memories of evenings spent with Windows 3.11, although I spent far more time in DOS back then. Later on, I spent a few few years with Linux (starting with Mandrake) as my primary desktop OS, and wound up with Mac OS X for the last few years.

I'll still raise a toast to over a decade of Debian or FreeBSD on the server side for anything I care about.

Well I had dos 5 originally (with dosshell), then at some point windows 3.1 and 3.11 on a dos 6.22 background, then of course windows 95, installed on about 50 floppies.

Moved exclusively to debian in summer 2000, and them to ubuntu in 2006. I have a mac laptop too which I use for testing programs (that I write on the linux machine), and I have a small windows fanless machine for the same reason.

So my main machine has moved from a 286 mainly running railroad tycoon and qbasic, to a thinkpad running mainly firefox and vim. 13 years of linux, 8 years of dos/windows.

Re:I feel old

[serviscope_minor]

Grab the microsoft entertainment pack and play some skifree.

No need!

http://ski.ihoc.net/

It's been recompiled for modern Windows and it runs great under wine as well. It also works fine on the largest monitors you're likely to have.

Re:I feel old

[Hatta]

Indeed, Windows 3.11, being a DOS program is officially supported by DOSBOX now. Windows 95, being mostly a DOS program, is unofficially supported by DOSBOX.

Re:I feel old

[Tyler Durden]

For those feeling nostalgic, Windows 3.11 works in Doxbox quite nicely.

That or you could just bash your head against a brick wall until you begin to taste brain. Using Windows 3.1/3.11 felt about the same.

Linus still even come up with an original version?

[Anonymous Coward]

What a loser. Just let your project stand on it's own instead of always trying to copy everyone else.

Re:More of a party pooper

[jones_supa]

At least he didn't insult anyone.

That is party spirit in Finland.

And there's the difference

[sjames]

If Linux was a proprietary OS like Windows, Marketing would have been so rabid for the idea that they would have successfully forced the premature release.

What??

[Dishwasha]

I thought Linux added on networking to the OS a LONG time ago.

Re:What??

[philip.paradis]

Hey man, don't rain on the parade. Better late than never, right? I mean heck, I call Linux finally getting networking a win. If you're gonna be such a Debbie Downer, you should just put a sock in it. I bet there's a stack of users rejoicing right now.

Re:Linus still even come up with an original versi

[powerlinekid]

Hes no thinker or dreamer like that Steve Jobs was. Incrementing by the name of cats is a much more agile system.

Re:mad libs

[Barefoot Monkey]

git

Come on, he said so himself ;)

Re:Linus still even come up with an original versi

[tysonedwards]

I see your Lion and raise you an Oneiric Ocelot!
Oh, you counter with a Mountain Lion... Tremble before my Precise Pangolin.

Re:there are no coincidences

[BitZtream]

Actually, it shows he does understand the word, as he would never plan a release time based on something silly like that, he would always do it based on quality and readiness ... in which case, it would be a coincidence if it happened to be released today.

It didn't happen, and thats why its not a coincidence.

Stable release

[gwstuff]

It seems appropriate to celebrate the release of a Windows version with a pre-release edition of Linux.

Re:mad libs

[rhyder128k]

The Bolivian Navy on manoeuvres in the South Pacific.

Re:mad libs

[MightyYar]

purple

Re:This was a triumph!

[Entropius]

Lattice gauge theory simulations, so there's actually an excuse for the bloat. It runs on a 24*24*24*48 grid, so you need buckets of memory to store everything; this isn't as bad as the more ambitious groups, who are up to 192^3*384 (I think). It's pretty obscene how much computing power goes into this field -- the computation I've just started will take two months on 100 GPU's (which is about 10^18-10^19 floating point operations), and it's a small one compared to some of the things people do. It's also very heavily memory bandwidth bound, so I don't think we could do ASIC's like the Bitcoin folks do.

Re:Microsoft Bob

[Gothmolly]

It's called Ubuntu.

Re:mad libs

[Teresita]

Windows has been quickly going downhill after version 3.11.

I run Win3.11 as a hobby on one of my boxes. There ain't no more BBS's out there, except I can get out to Seattle Community Network and King County Libraries with Terminal, at 19,200 baud, woo. I sure as hell ain't going to get an AOL or Netzero dial up account for a hobby. There's a lot of great Windows 3.1 CD-ROMs I get at thrift shops for no more than three dollars. Vetusware has everything. Excel 4.0 for my family budget. Word Perfect for my Great American Novel. There's nothing wrong with running old school.

It was inevitable. Linus has forseen it.

[VortexCortex]

Linux 3.11... So, it's actually happening. I thought it was sarcastic, but now I see the prophesy was self fulfilling.

In other words, we'd have an increasing level of instability with an odd release number, depending on how long-term the instability is.

- 2.6.<even>: even at all levels, aim for having had minimally intrusive patches leading up to it (timeframe: a week or two)

with the odd numbers going like:
- 2.6.<odd&gt: still a stable kernel, but accept bigger changes leading up to it (timeframe: a month or two).
- 2.<odd&gt.x: aim for big changes that may destabilize the kernel for several releases (timeframe: a year or two)
- <odd>.x.x: Linus went crazy, broke absolutely _everything_, and rewrote the kernel to be a microkernel using a special message-passing version of Visual Basic. (timeframe: "we expect that he will be released from the mental institution in a decade or two").

- Linus

Re:Windows 3 lives!

[petermgreen]

95 and 98 use a graphical installer that ran under windows for the early stages of install. You could either run the first part of the installer under your existing version of windows (if upgrading) or if you ran it from dos it would load "mini windows" which afacit is a very stripped down win3.x. IIRC the installer required the hard drive to be already paritioned and formatted as it would use it for temporary storage space. After the first reboot the system was then running windows 9x as it sorted out the final details. The boot floppies included with some copies of windows 9x and the later bootable CDs loaded the corresponding version of DOS (win9x came with it's own version of DOS)

2K and XP use a textmode installer for the early stages of install which I'm pretty sure is based on the NT kernel but without any of the win32 stuff loaded. This can be seen in things like the fact it needs a windows driver to see your hard drive (rather than being able to see any hard drive the BIOS can see). It would then reboot into the system it had partially installed to finish things off.

Vista and later use a graphical installer, which is based on winPE which is a stripped down version of modern windows.

I dunno what other versions do.

Re:3.11 is not a special number

[plankrwf]

Sorry, Linus is not Donald Knuth ( http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=TeXfuture )