Slashdot Mirror
25 Years Today - Windows 3.0
An anonymous reader writes: Windows 3.0 was launched on 22 May 1990 — I know, 'coz I was there as a SDE on the team. I still have, um, several of the shrink-wrapped boxes of the product — with either 3.5 inch and 5.25 floppies rattling around inside them — complete with their distinctive 'I witnessed the event' sticker!
It was a big deal for me, and I still consider Win 3 as *the* most significant Windows' release, and I wonder what other Slashdotters think, looking back on Win 3?
It was a big deal for me, and I still consider Win 3 as *the* most significant Windows' release, and I wonder what other Slashdotters think, looking back on Win 3?
The Amiga did it better and earlier.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It was a big deal. Combine that with visual Basic and desire to never go outside, and you have me. Also knows as God's gift to the world.
You are welcome
Released in the early 90s, but I got to use 4.0 first in the later 90s as a programming student.
But when I used it, it was my first taste of an OS that didn't feel like a toy go kart where the wheels could rattle off any second. (Before I was introduced to Linux.) It's been the heart of window since Win2000.
For that, NT 3.1 is the most significant Windows release ever imo.
Hands down, the most unstable operating system ever to achieve mass commercial adoption.
evar! Oh, wait, I thought we were talking about OS/2 3.0!
The last version of Windows to never have had a remote exploit in the standard distribution.
So this didn't affect me at all.
It obviously helped make Microsoft a lot of money, and I've read about how the one guy managed to make that one thing work, that made this possible.
But Windows is full of crap, and full of "If you can't make it work right, make it look good - Bill Gates" that it basically caused IT to be shit. This is the start of the 3 Rs of Windows. Retry, Reboot and Reinstall.
That is a fucked up legacy to leave behind.
And marketing won the day.
Xenix used the same marketing as Windows did. In fact, Microsoft owned it.
Now OS/2 I'll grant you, IBM fumbled hard on that one...
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
OS/2 was by far more significant. Without it, we wouldn't have Windows, as we know it today.
My first computer was the C64, when i was 5 and i didnt get a different one until about 5 years later when I got myself on win 3.1 (with tabworks)
while I had a blast on the C64, at the time i was too young to really appreciate it. when i got my compaq with its ultra big HDD of 65 megabytes and my copy of Buzz Aldrins Race to Space simulator i spent HOURS on that thing tinkering and learning my way around DOS. the tabworks interface was amazing at the time, just point and click? how awesome!!!
it was only a year or so later when win 95 came out and changed everything. for the better?? I dont know.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I'm not sure if my first computer came with 3.0 for sure, I feel like it did. I just remember buying (shortly after I got my first computer) Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and DOS 6.22 and together with QEMM having the most stable (if not the most difficult to configure properly) system until Windows XP arrived to remove the configuration issues, then Windows 7. There was a utility that I never purchased for WfWG 3.11 that allow the program groups to have nested folders. Man, that was awesome. Then Windows 95 reared it's ugly head. The nested folders application was no more, but so was system stability until Windows XP SP2 arrived. Damn those were difficult times, when reinstalling was a weekly event.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I still have, um, several of the shrink-wrapped boxes of the product — with either 3.5 inch and 5.25 floppies rattling around inside them
Um, no. You have boxes. You have shrink-wrap. You have corrupted floppies. You have no product on those floppies.
and I remember thinking, "shit, Microsoft have done it again - we've lost control of our own PC market"
Sure, OS/2 was technically much, much better, but that was not the point. Like MS DOS before it, MS Windows was available for all, on non-IBM hardware, so beige boxes could finally compete with the Apple's far superior HMI.
The entire PC episode was a disaster for IBM - we rushed the thing out, and for the first time used COTS solutions, so once the BIOS had been (legally) reverse-engineered, Compaq and others could pump out boxes that were better and cheaper. IBM at that time was used to propriety hardware AND software to ensure lock-in and hence - frankly - obscene profit margins.
That all went away very fast...the attempt to regain lock-in with the PS/2 of course failed....
Mind you, Win 3.0 sucked....compared to both the Mac and OS/2, but it was....good enough
... was MS-DOC 6.22.
Sme way the last good product from Apple was the ][e, before they started locking down their stuff.
Now get off my lawn.
As we did with Eternal September.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
For me, Windows 3.11 "Windows for Workgroups" was the standout. Were you still there for that release?
After that, Windows 95 and Windows XP were the good ones in my book. (Although Windows 98 added a lot, it still felt like an incremental improvement over Windows 95).
For the M$ haters, I'm typing this on a Mac.
360**2 + 262**2
this is where Microsoft broke away from being an IBM partner, to take control of their own destiny. IBM had effectively killed OS/2 with it's insane SDK prices, and per seat costs. Not to mention the complete lack of applettes, and by refusing to let Microsoft do anything with the UI, or allow for OS/2 to run windows binaries. But the success of Windows 3.0 changed all of that.
What did Windows 3.0 give us? Well, while Windows/386 was a really cool 386 hypervisor, Windows itself, and all windows programs were restricted to 640kb of real mode memory. But Windows 3.0 was built around a MS-DOS extender, and now you could run in protected mode on a 286/386. And even better you didn't have to change your OS, just install Windows and go. Not to mention since it sat on DOS, you could still use MS-DOS based drivers, TSR's. It was simply a massive thing. Also licensing MS-DOS extenders at the time was VERY expensive, and per application. Writing a Windows application, along with the license costs of Windows 3.0 was much cheaper.
From this point MS's OS/2 3.0 project became Windows NT, and MS pulled away from the deathmarch project that was OS/2 2.0. The funny thing is that OS/2 2.0 was delayed to add in the most confusing shell (to users, I know programmer's and tech people loved WPS, but to average users, it was a nightmare) and Windows compatibility via specialized drivers. Things that MS wanted to do, but IBM refused to let them.
The sad thing is that bringing Windows up to some kind of usable level where OS/2 was basically already, and by making 286 processor based machines useful ended up setting us back a good 5+ years until the Windows 95 avalanche finally pushed 32bit computing to the masses. Although it wasn't until 2001 with XP Home did it finally become truly usable.
NT, while being a solid future looking design was at the time so massive, and so complex that running it on a 386 was a horrible experience. But as processors got faster the NT investment eventually paid off, with NT being found almost everywhere these days.
So yes, Windows 3.0 was the most significant product Microsoft shipped, that ended up not only defining the direction of the company, but also the industry. Finally everyone could unlock the power of their 286+ computer that was basically un-used by MS-DOS.
Windows was such a huge pain back in those days, while MacOS (which wasn't really called that at the time) blew it out of the water, particularly when it came to multitasking.
Of course, MacOS sat still for years, lacking protected memory or pre-emptive multitasking until they scrapped the whole thing and replaced it with NeXTSTEP to produce OS X, so Windows eventually caught up and then surpassed it. I had enough issues with Win95/98 and the DOS legacy to say that Windows probably didn't catch up (with a consumer OS) until Win2K, which surpassed MacOS, and that ruled the roost for a few years. OS X didn't come out until over a year later, and the early versions of that were super rough.
But once they all evolved to a certain point, I think that the operating system mattered a lot less. They all got good enough that the users don't have to care about the low-level features, and there are utilities to tweak them any way you like, so it's really just down to personal preference at this point. You're going to run most of the same software no matter what OS you pick, and operating systems are increasingly just "the software that runs your web browser".
I had limited exposure to Windows 3.0 (and 3.1). From a support angle, it was mostly a matter of it worked or it didn't (give or take memory limits). Windows for Workgroups (3.1 and 3.11) on the other hand holds many memories for me, almost all horrendous. To this day, I still do not understand why it would sometimes work Monday and Thursday, but simply refuse to network Tuesday and Wednesday. The hours I spent trying to make that garbage work ...
The day the standard desktop OS would suck forever.
In 94 I went to Comdex, after having used OS/2 for a year or two. Microsoft had just announced Win95 would be released in 1995, giving IBM a 9 month + window to Do Something. At Comdex I found the IBM booth and asked them something about OS/2. Got a blank look. Asked someone else. Got a blank look. Nobody in the IBM booth had even heard of OS/2, let alone was able to answer questions about it.
I knew that day that OS/2 was doomed.
When and if would would ever multitask as well as DESQview did.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
That, coupled with 3.1's release, were what initially drove me away from MS (DOS) and to embrace linux instead.
And 30 years later, I still have little use for anything from MS. I can use it when forced (library kiosk, etc) but its like playing with a toy tractor when you are used to driving the real thing.
Congrats to you and Windows. .cab files for it, but no matter what I did, they would never fit on a blank. It was only after I got a cloned copy (bit for bit I presume), that it worked.
I was more into Apple series and Macs at the time, but occasionally I was asked about IBM PCs and clones.
I had to reinstall Win 3.1 from 3.5" disks - I think there were 11 of them (?) or it could be more.
One of the disks had a fault and I found the
So how did they cram those cab files in the first place? How did duplication work?
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
There was a product called DesQview, that did all that before win3 ever came out. And it did it better, more reliably, faster, and with the existing app. software.
Speaking as a support person, I loved Window 3.x.
It trained the entire world to expect that their computer to crash often, even daily, and that those crashes could be explained away with "Yep, that happens".
Followed by "You need to reboot more often".
Before MS Windows, I supported mainframes and those customers wanted to know why for every crash, which was rare except for hardware failure, and they expected it to get fixed so that it didn't happen again. Those people are still like that, and they pay plenty for it.
After MS Windows, life was pretty much like this:
"My computer is broken."
"Is it on fire?"
"No."
"Then reboot. If it still doesn't work I'll send someone to re-install everything" (thinly disguised threat)
Early versions of Windows are like remembering a rotten tooth aching and oozing. I'm still not using Microsoft products.
Windows 286/386....
Because it looked like that shitty american megatrends BIOS... IIRC you couldn't move the 'windows' on either of them.
http://s00.yaplakal.com/pics/pics_original/0/2/0/414020.jpg
Now OS/2 I'll grant you, IBM fumbled hard on that one...
People wanted backwards compatibility.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Desqview had no applications. by the time they bothered with a SDK, windows 3.0 was already a thing.
For the kids in the room you'll need to be more explicit, or I can.
One of it's biggest failings was claiming that it was "a better DOS than DOS and a better Windows than Windows"... which is all fine and dandy except for it helps to remove the motivation to build much of anything specifically targeting for OS/2, rather than Windows... and being an 'also runs' OS doesn't get you much traction for adoption.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
I see buttons, shadows, depth, higher colors, etc.
All ruined in the name of anti skuemorphism which was the most advanced progress made in gui development since win 3.0. What a shame sigh
http://saveie6.com/
I had a friend who had faithfully programmed for Windows 2 for a couple of years. Windows 2 was never popular, so his fine efforts didn't see much use. At that time, the lingua franca of Windows was MS Pascal. However, when Windows 3 came out, MS abandoned Pascal as the primary programming language for Windows and switched to C.
As we now know, Windows 3 turned out to be Microsoft's first big success after DOS. So, my friend found himself sitting on a pile of Windows code that he had written in Pascal over the years that was suddenly useless. Which was ironic, given the newfound success of Windows.
I don't know if that was the first time that loyal MS developers like my friend got Micro-shafted. But it wasn't the last. Even so, switching from Pascal to C turned out to be a very good idea. No pain, no gain, I guess.
how much of my life I have wasted fixing Windows.
Yep
People back then were neophytes amd corporter users.
Corporations cared for just software. Users who were neophytes used what came with work amd found these, machines intimidating and didn't like change.
The 19 80s were about us geeks. The 1990s were the suits and Joe Six packs driving the market
http://saveie6.com/
Poor design made a standard.
Notwithstanding its clear bugs and usability flaws, Windows 3.0 was the first version to allow developers to fully use the PC's memory and processor. It was the first version I developed for, and I continued to target it for many years after users had moved on to the more stable, polished and complete 3.1 and 3.11 versions. Although, it was a pain to exit to DOS, compile something, launch Windows, execute it, and repeat.
However, like an alcohol or drug abuser who is in a state of denial about their past, you need to reexamine your behavior. You will never recover and regain your sense of self worth until you admit your destructive activities, ask for forgiveness, make amends to those you harmed, and actively pursue a path of helping others. It sounds like you are still obsessing about negative things you should have let go.
Seek help. Do not be ashamed to ask. Although there are some who will hold your previous actions against you, there are still people in the Unix/Linux/BSD community who will help you get to a better place. If you don't feel comfortable with them, try Android. Even if you are scarred by the past, you can still have a better future.
Now get the hell off my lawn.
Why is Snark Required?
Honestly, the Steaming Heap of IInnovative Technology that was Windows 3 is what led me to Linux and UNIX and much of the rest of my career.
Right when nearing the end of Uni a free UNIX came along in the form of Linux ... because I had witnessed first hand what a steaming pile of crap was Windows 3, and then eventually Windows 3.11 (which sucked somewhat less, but not enough), I knew I wanted UNIX experience. It led to my first jobs.
I will be marked troll by people who weren't there, but Windows 3 was such a steaming pile of shit compared to what Linux (and at some point FreeBSD) could do on the exact same hardware, it's almost impossible to describe.
In 1993 no fewer than 3 other science nerds, to whom I said "hey, if you like Windows, far be it for me to judge ... but if you're asking for my Slackware disks and some install help, no problem -- I'll wipe out your new computer". They all switched to Linux because it was far more usable than Windows was on the same hardware. Even if Linux did occasionally crash, it was more robust than Windows. Because they could actually do several things at once.
On the same hardware, Linux destroyed Windows 3/3.11.
Windows 3 is significant in that it forced me to realize Windows wasn't anywhere NEAR being able to do what I'd learned in operating systems class ... I wrote an instance of pre-emptive multi-tasking before Microsoft made a commercial instance of it.
That doesn't mean that I could write a better OS than Microsoft, but it means when Linux was doing pre-emptive multitasking with proper virtual memory ... Microsoft was doing time-slicing ... it was a hell of a better operating system than Microsoft had written.
It just didn't have Word. It did, however, have LaTex ... yet another bit of awesome for a university student.
So, Kudos to Windows 3 for being such an out-dated pile of crap technology by the time it was released that it wasn't even fully utilizing a 386's inbuilt hardware features for multitasking, and wouldn't until Windows '95 ... which made possible (and preferable) for the widespread popularity of Linux.
If it hadn't sucked, we might not even know who Linus even is.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Why would you say that? I have plenty of floppies from 1990 and earlier that still hold data.
Mostly random stuff.
That Sargent Pepper taught the band to play, unfortunately Windows 3.0 was no Fab 4 ha ha
I was glad I had a Mac, but otherwise didn't care much.
Well, you did ask.
Yes some did it better, some did it slicker, some over engineered it(HP), others underestimated it.
But in the end, It was done "HIS" way, and look after all these years whom has survived?
Whether or not we like it, or hate it, look where it is now, and look at where the others are not, and why?
Food 4 thought...
I remember my neighbor running a brand new installation of Windows 3.0 a 386. The only native app was, if I recall, was Word, and it was pretty crappy back then. Windows 3.0 would UAE at the drop of a hat and hang completely. It wasn't until 3.11 that Windows became actually usable, though the architecture (cooperative multitasking) was so bad that I'm surprised any programmers stuck with the system long enough to develop any apps. I guess the promise of a stable GUI API and a standardized hardware abstraction layer (printers, etc) was enough. And Windows 3.11 introduced truetype fonts, which were pretty amazing compared to what we had before that time in Windows and MacOS.
At college we used to say that only a fool would have win at the end of his autoexec.bat. The rest of us would run windows when we needed it, from the DOS prompt as God intended. I had a friend who ran OS/2 2.1 with a text-mode shell that multitasked MS-DOS apps, and that was far more useful at the time than Windows was, since all our apps were DOS apps back then.
>" I wonder what other Slashdotters think, looking back on Win 3?"
I was using Interactive Unix and SunOS Unix.
3.11 was Windows for workgroups, which actually was very good, probably better than 3.1. More stable anyway. Though 3.1 was way more stable than 3.0. No more UAEs. apps could actually crash without crashing the whole OS, if I recall correctly.
Well not only is the best way to run MS-DOS in the 1990's on OS/2 2.0, but the best way to run a Windows app in it's own copy of Windows was OS/2. IBM did themsleves no favours by charging a fortune for the SDK, and tools, nor was forcing this SAA crap on OS/2 instead of directly using Microsoft Windows on OS/2 like MS had wanted to.
There was that skunkswork project, WLO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... which of all things ended up being the basis for Win32 on NT once they dumped the OS/2 cruiser personality.
As long as people could run Word Perfect 5.1 and Lotus 1-2-3 everyone was happy. I remember people hating "Windows" versions of program as they sucked so badly initially.
OS/2 Was better then windows at running windows apps to bad they never got full win32 in it.
I can't believe you're bragging about a horrible piece of software; which only sold because it was cheap.
Wasn't there some kind of licensing arrangement that allowed IBM to either use Microsoft libraries or else to have access to the APIs for 16-bit Windows, that did not extend to 32-bit Windows applications?
I do not discount the important evolutionary step in OS that Windows 3.0 was, but given that Windows 3.1 and then 3.11 for Workgroups fixed many of the problems that Windows 3.0 had and added the initial computer networking protocols, I just can't call 3.0-even the most important milestone of even the 3.x line, let alone Windows in general. I'd be more likely to label Windows NT 3.5 with that, as that was the first version where the server-side of things was robust enough to do something useful for corporate networks, and when they were still headed in a direction where the relatively light-weight GUI on the server box wasn't a horrible resource-hog for the running machine. Hell, they even had intended on taking NT into the embedded server market before they changed course with 4.0 and 2K.
Sometimes I wonder if the introduction of general-purpose computers into business environments was a mistake. Couple the general-purpose nature in that they run anything and everything with a connection to a global network and I wonder if the productivity gained through the use of a computer for many tasks has been taken away by the ability to be distracted.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
It wouldn't matter, as SMP was becoming a thing, and don't forget the coming x86_64 along with the ability to run on RISC. OS/2's kernel was largely untouched from early MS OS/2 2.0 betas, and the device drivers were still 16bit assembly. IBM's L4 port of OS/2 cost such an incredible amount of money, and it produced an OS with no networking, and was dreadfully slow as well. IBM wanted BIG money to run OS/2 in SMP, meanwhile NT workstation supports two processors out of the box. You can guess which I was running on my dual proc P100.
With NT you run basically the same OS on the desk and the server, so for many dev's to make a 'server' version was all too easy. And compared to NT, OS/2 was a horrible server. I'd take NT's registry over the insane config.sys any day. Not to mention one goof in config.sys and you can't boot.
OS/2 could have been made to become more NT like, but IBM clearly wasn't up to the task, instead they were basically maintaining the same codebase from MS OS/2 2.0 circa 1991.
I used DOS up until I got OS/2. That was my first use of Windows 3, since it gave me the option to install windows while I was installing it :)
I asked myself,
"Why is timothy still blocked? It's been ten years!"
*uncheck*
(months, mod points elapse)
"25 Years Today - Windows 3.0"
IBM already got burned on a commodity OS that could run on non-IBM-but-compatible commodity hardware, ie, MS-DOS. Their attempts in the late eighties and nineties to mitigate that didn't work because cost ruled, and no one wanted to pay thousands of dollars for a Microchannel expansion card when an ISA card did the same thing for a tenth the price.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
They did for a short period. Then Microsoft found out and modified the Chicago so it could not run in OS/2. IIRC, OS/2 supported upto 2GB of virtual address space per process where Win32 supported upto 16GB virtual address space. So to break OS/2's ability to run fun Win32 in OS/2 was to just throw some resources up to the top of virtual memory space.
So they had it running for a short time but would not break backwards compatibility to chase running Windows apps.
Windows 3.0 was part of my first venture into the PC platform. I got my first computer, an Atari 800, in 1984. I stayed with the Atari 8-bit platform until 1991, when I was able to purchase my fist PC: an 80386SX-16, running DOS 3.3 and Windows 3.0. Windows 3.0, despite it's repeated UAE errors and other frustrations, was absolutely AWESOME. I was a junior in high school, and using a mouse and icons felt so cutting-edge and... just fun. I still used DOS WordPerfect 5.1 for serious document creation, but Write was a lot of fun to work with, because of the pre-TTF fonts and pseudo WYSIWYG display.
> I purchased a Logitech ScanMan plus, B+W half-page scanner, and I was the envy of my classmates. This scanner worked great in Windows, if you didn't move the scanner too fast and overload the buffer. There was also a more competent DOS scanner utility, but the Windows one was just more fun.
I really enjoyed using Win3.0, and then Win3.1 with its TTF fonts. But, by then, I had moved to college and really depended on the stability of the OS. In 1994 I was using MS Word 6.0 and the stability of the whole system was simply atrocious. If I didn't habitually save my document every few minutes, I risked losing work due to lock-ups and crashes, which happened repeatedly and often. This was total CRAP! There had to be something better! I couldn't work like this -- how could anyone?
In 1995/1996 some of my fellow engineering student friends were talking about a new way -- "Lie-nuks". This new operating system that was a lot like the SunOS systems we were using in the lab. It was more stable and, even though there weren't as many applicationss available, it promised a more reliable way of getting work done. I tried Yggdrasil "plug and play" Linux in 1995, but it wasn't until 1996 that I was able to get Red Hat 4.1 (kernel 2.0.27) up and running that I completely fell in LOVE.
Since then, I've used Windows only as a necessary evil -- either for gaming or video editing (something Linux still lags in). But, for absolutely EVERY other task, I've used and enjoyed Linux (with Windowmaker, Gnome, Enlightenment, KDE; WordPerfect 8.0, WingZ, StarOffice 5.0, Liberoffice, and on and on, etc.) since 1996.
I have fond memories of Windows, sure. But, the best times I had with computing (even as I was a PC/Windows tech support guy for Packard Bell computers in the 1990's (and with the advent of Windows 95 and 98)), Linux has been the most fun, most stable, more secure, least worrisome and most productive OS in PC land for me. So, while I do certainly share in the Windows nostalgia, Micro$oft can totally SUCK IT! I lost more work and time and patience with your crappy, bloated, insecure and unstable OSes throughout the years than I care to chronicle and, while you may now be making strides to right the wrongs of the past, I will always view you with contempt and blame you for holding the home PC platform back from the more excellent potential it could have had if you had not been the dominant player. FUCK YOU.
sig: sauer
win3 was important, mainly politically, though. after all, the windows of today is not decended from win3 - it's the not-love child of the OS/2 project, really. remember that around the time of your fabled 3.0 release, OS/2 was at the milestone version 2.0 which took advantage of 32b flat mode for the first time. and OS/2 was really just a sort of wet-nurse for NT OS/2, which became Windows NT and all recent versions...
Attacks on any technology company who dares do anything which does not help Microsoft lock developers into windows. Cross platform OOP tools, fucking kill them because they hide Windows API's. Cross platform compilers, fucking kill them because they give developers choices. Cross platform 3D API's, they couldn't kill it since so many high end workstations(UNIX) vendors used it but they could create their own 3D system and use their big hammer to keep OpenGL apps off the desktop for close to two decades. Cross platform languages, you know the drill.
So, Windows 3.0 release date is a date to be mourned if you have anything to do with technology. Things would be so very different if market pressures and market choices could have been made for so many technologies destroyed because they didn't follow the Bill Gates and Steve Balmer mantra of Windows and only Windows.
Let's not forget pen/tablet computing which Microsoft killed off because Go Inc wouldn't use Windows. So yay Window 3.0. NOT!
Wasn't there some kind of licensing arrangement that allowed IBM to either use Microsoft libraries or else to have access to the APIs for 16-bit Windows, that did not extend to 32-bit Windows applications?
IBM had a license for Windows up to v4 and that is why Win95 was ver 4.095. Earlier when Win32s came out, it used a VBX (or whatever the device driver was called) that was unsupported by WINOS2 and IBM kept writing compatible device drivers to allow WIN32s apps to run. This ended with WIN32s ver 1.30 as at the time OS/2 only gave a process 512 MBs of address space and Microsoft hardwired some DLLs to load above 1GB. (It was possible to mix and match parts of WIN32s ver 1.25 and 1.30 to work around this). At this point IBM gave up the Win32s race.
OS/2 ver4 did include a subsystem to allow easy recompilation of WIN32 apps to OS/2 but it didn't really catch on as at that time Windows had clearly won the OS wars.
But yes, OS/2 could run multiple windows apps, each in its own process space and preemptively multitask them so they were less likely to run out of resources (DDE and the clipboard were shared) plus allow them to use the HPFS file system which was a much better file system the FAT which gave both DOS and Win apps an advantage.
Unluckily the Windows license also increased the price of OS/2 though they did come out with the redbox editions which used your existing Win3.x install.
Another huge factor was that the price of ram didn't decrease as predicted, likely due to uncompetitive measures by the ram manufacturers. Windows ran better in 4MBs (even 2MBs with Win3.0 in real mode) of ram then OS/2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
deja desqview
desq window #1 FrontDoor 2.26
desq window #2 qbasic/ or doom v6.66
desq window #3 wordperfect 5.1
desq window #4 xtree gold
if you were trying to add file_id.diz to all the .zip files you would rather have been working in desq (on a system witth it installed is my insinuation here) with one of the windows as opposed to a windows GUI which you had to re-arrange your memory (memmaker/hacking/editin your config.sys/autoexec.bat) just to get the windows to come up.
You did backup your fid.key license for PaLMa's Fid 2.15 like I did? Right? Right? Don't distribute your FID personal key. Registered to: Serial No: You do remember this is a DOS program right? It don't RUN on windows 7 64bit fool
xtree was a good choice cause you could navigate deep directories and then execute files underneath said path hell. ALT-X freed up some memory before the binary sex
The app ecosystem is ethnically cleansing of the spirit of diy, knowledge, and loyalty to brand; now with the death of heathkit, radio shack, and local electronics suppliers (Not to be confused with a TV appliance/ Phone Stores), good luck finding a swap meet without a CB radio, or a decent chemistry kit. Enjoy your common core and removal of your common sense. Cents is what your future will bring, marching forward, you should learn to dumpster dive with a propane torch and pliars while young for your parts. OR only the ELITE will do electronics, sure you got all that fukcin android horse shit, but WHAT can you make with your bare hand? What can you produce motherfuckers?
I was there for Windows 1.0 :) Trying to answer objectively - whilst 3.0 heralded the 3.1/3.11 which were quite long lived I think more significantly anticipated releases of Windows were Windows 95 (removing the DOS with a GUI component paradigm), Windows NT 4.0 (proper pre-emptive multitasking and UI shared with 95/98) and then probably Windows 7 (everyone begging for anything after the abomination of Vista).
Windows 3 wasn't exactly responsible (there were a lot of very destructive forces at work at the time) but it was the standard-bearer of embarrassingly bad technological regression. 1990 was when the big pause in advances happened on personal computers. As others have mentioned, there was the Amiga, and it would be the better part of a decade before the mainstream caught up to the tech that was otherwise considered "normal" back in 1990. Not that Windows 98 was really quite in the same league as Amiga OS 2.0 either, but it ran on CPUs that were so incredibly powerful, and Linux was becoming good enough for the desktop around that time, so the software regressions were mitigated enough for most people. 1999 was about on par with 1990, roughly on average (you win some and lose some, and it's not exactly objectively clear-cut and some people think of it as only about a 5-7 year technological recession; it might depend on whether or not you got a P3 vs holding out for the first Athlon).
Windows 3 signaled the beginning of the dark ages. If you were there in the 1990s, you lived it and grieved over it every day. You worked on horrible garbage and then came home to vastly superior tech that would never be accepted in business due to lack of ported legacies. We should all be very grateful that things finally got better.
Nowdays, Windows is but a memory -- a nightmarish vague memory all the more horrifying because you know that it wasn't just a bad dream, but it actually happened. Now that I think of it, I bet there was a lot of that sort of thing going around, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Geez, why not ask a French man in 1964 what Paris was like in 1939? Yeah, do that, you insensitive clod!
The original release was rubbish, it wasn't unti 3.1 that windoze started to really work. And at that time it was still tagged as a 'graphical interface for MSDOS'
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Desqview didn't need applications - it ran DOS programs. And it was light years ahead of 3.0 in terms of speed and stability.
It was the pretty graphics and network support in 3.11 WFW that killed Desqview (and the QEMM memory manager).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
These days, my mac fanatasism has run out, but talking about the past like this brings it all back. Why did so many users have to endure the pain of windows. MacOS was so much better up to about 1999 at which point apple had already lost to many software publishers. Wait a minute, if I was so fricken smart, why didn't I buy Apple stock, while I was preaching it to a fallen world. What the hell is an C drive? I need to go to a MSDOS prompt ant type in msconfig to do that... what? Keyboard error, press F2 to continue!!!! ok that was the pc side of the problems
Not really. It was a shitty Desqview clone.
OS/2 2.x+ ran most any DOS and 16bit Windows app fine (much better then NT and even Win95 unless booted to DOS). What it was missing was device drivers for much generic hardware and enough ram to run without swap file thrashing. Price was high as well, partially due to the price of the included Windows which seemed free to most users as it came with their computer and was easily pirated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
25 years, you say? It feels longer, somehow. Don't worry, I can see everybody's eyes glaze over, so I won't go too far down memory lane, except to say that there was actually a time when when Windows was cool and fun to work with. By gods, it was a load of crap, back then, but fun to code for, for that very reason. I used to spend 90% of my time commenting out code sections until the latest, spectacular error went away; that was how I learned to program properly in C. There is nothing like having to debug Windows running in real mode to bring home the idea that you must always initialise variable and check returned pointers. I sometimes miss the "hardship" in a perverse sort of way.
What was the SAA crap? The first version of OS/2 I ran was the redbox Warp v3 that used my preexisting copy of Win3.1. Worked very well until MS broke it with WIN32s ver 1.30 and DLLs that were hardwired to load above 1GB.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
And even though. Before 98 I was very much into DeskView for DOS multitasking and SCO Unix V for doing actual work. Used briefly windows 98 and went on to use Ultrix and after one year started using RH. After another year switched to Debian and has been using it with brief intervals using *BSD products. In 2005 discovered OS/X for the desktop...
I don't know where you got that from. It ran on an updated MSDOS with 32 bit capability (MSDOSv7) but it was still MSDOS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS
I did an internship at a telecom research facility around that time. They provided me with a 286 outfitted to run electronics simulations software. It had 2 MB RAM installed on an ISA card (or a predecessor thereof, it's a long time ago). It ran Windows 3.0, sort of. 2 MB was too little, and the thing crashed constantly. Combine that with the clumsy UI (File Manager and Program Manager, for instance) and the mess of applications that hadn't standardized yet (every program used different shortcuts), and the experience was less than stellar.
The contrast with my own Macintosh was huge. If you think us Maccies are smug now, you should have seen us then.
Meh ... ... ;-)
Windows 3.11, on the other hand, THAT was something
Wasn't there some kind of licensing arrangement that allowed IBM to either use Microsoft libraries or else to have access to the APIs for 16-bit Windows, that did not extend to 32-bit Windows applications?
How short memories are.
When OS/2 was launched it was a joint Microsoft/IBM product, and it was touted (by both) as being the replacement for Windows. That's why and how it had good Windows API support from the start. Then Microsoft saw Windows 3+ starting to become a commercial success and decided it wanted to stay with the Windows branding. It was already working on the next version of OS/2, but split from IBM's path and re-branded the new product as Windows NT. IBM then started their own separate development path and produced OS/2 2.0. Existing agreements with Microsoft enabled them to carry on shipping Windows API binaries.
I still have a t-shirt and bag labelled "Microsoft OS/2" which I picked up at a launch event in Geneva.
And compared to NT, OS/2 was a horrible server...
Former OS/2 fan here. In hind sight, one of OS/2's biggest flaws was lack of file permissioning, which NT had. I don't think IBM ever intended for OS/2 to be used as a server OS at all.
OS/2 was originally half an operating system - "Presentation manager" did not exist as it was late for ages. As a piece of bad publicity, I thought this was unbeatable, till the ads, at least in the UK, features Nuns. Talking French? WTF * 2 !!!!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I was doing windows 2.03 dev and os2 when we got the beta and we were, oh my god what are Microsoft doing, this will kill os2 and sure enough it did.
how epically shit it was compared to AmigaOS, in particular AmigaOS 2.0 that came just before. With big marketing you can make the bad product come through.
One major reason for the split was that IBM insisted on programming OS/2 in assembler - over Gates' objections - locking them onto the 386 platform.
At least that is the way I remember it.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
They kind of did with LanMan server, and things like SQL. The OS/2 Extended Edition bundled lots of stuff together, but it was IBM's way of doing things, and I never saw anyone using EE. However I've setup MS SQL 1.0 on OS/2 and it is a NIGHTMARE. Compared to NT where you install NT, then SQL and away you go. But no, Install OS/2, reboot install the lan driver stuff, reboot, install lan man server, reboot make sure you can now create named pipes, and read them, then install sql server. OS/2 refused to bundle in the important bits, that NT and WfW later would all bring in by default. It didn't take a genius to see the rise of the LAN, however it took some major pushes to get into server space. But nobody enjoyed dealing with netware and their NLM crap, once NT hit v 4.0 everyone was dumping it for NT. But the underpinning network aspects of NT were on OS/2 + LanMan. NT just started from that point and had it all built in.
What is weird is how MS saw the LAN, but missed the internet. Even OS/2 3.0 Warp with that woefully useless IAK, provided no LAN access, or any peer to peer networking capabilities.
When OS/2 was launched it was a joint Microsoft/IBM product, and it was touted (by both) as being the replacement for Windows.
Exactly. I worked for a big corporate at the time and we all had PCDos on IBM ATs running stuff like IBM DisplayWrite and, most importantly, a mainframe terminal emulator because the (IBM) mainframe was where our serious stuff was. When Win 3.0 came out we were all handed boxed copies (I recently sold mine) - although Windows was MS, it seemed (to our management at least) the way to go, and was assumed to have IBM endorsement (a corporate essential) because it would run on IBM PCs. Management were unaware of the MS-IBM bust-up.
Win 3.0 was absolutely awful. It crashed and needed a reboot about twice an hour. It was soon replaced with the improved 3.1. It was not networked of course, but we would share printers in groups of four of us using a switchbox.
At about same time, one guy in our branch, our IT "co-ordinator" (who knew nothing about IT) was given OS/2 as a pilot. We all understood that would be the way to go fo all of us, but the whole thing stagnated (I guess because of the IBM/MS split). OS/2's price (its own, and that of the memory needed to run it) remained too high. I bought OS/2 for home but there were bugs (could have be sorted by IBM if they had their heart in it) and lack of apps. It seemed there was an anti-OS/2 camp within IBM itself.
But people, like our middle-aged management, who had never previously used computers (I had started on a PDP 11) or seen a GUI before, thought Windows and MS were absolutely wonderful. Us younger guys all had home computers by then, and knew better. Ironically, the generation after us also thought Windows and MS were wonderful because they never saw anything but Windows. It led to all the myths that we must now endure about Gates being a genius, inventing the PC, making computing affordable, and such like crap.
But Windows 3 (if we include its 3.1 bug-fix) was a milestone in that it popularised the graphical interface.
SAA is what OS/2's presentation manager was built around. Some pipe dream that the mainframes, as/400's and rs/6000's were going to share a common UI. Well that never happened, and it was a kneejerk thing to push MS out of the UI on OS/2.
Not that it matters, MS-DOS had a lot more device drivers than OS/2, and Windows 3.0's ability to use them made it a winner.
OS/2 was more of a learning tool in how not to push people off of MS-DOS, and instead they moved to Windows, then once machines were fast enough and ME was horrible enough, everyone went to XP Home, and plenty of users are still there.
Death penalty !
I remember seeing Windows 3.0 on a 286 (16MHz with 1M RAM IIRC) and thinking it was a beautiful thing with it's shiny bevelled-looking edges on the buttons. If only I knew then and there that the significant speed hit (compared to DOS) and not-quite bug-free feel was destined to be just as much a long term feature as was the visual appearance...
I waited for Windows 3.1.
One major reason for the split was that IBM insisted on programming OS/2 in assembler - over Gates' objections...
I think both IBM and Microsoft were working hard to undermine each other from the start of the project. IBM wanted to regain 100% control of the PC market and eventually ditch Microsoft. Microsoft on the other hand was trying to break free of IBM and wanted to license the OS to other computer makers on other platforms. Hence the disagreement over assembler and 286 support.
"and I wonder what other Slashdotters think, looking back on Win 3"
I was already well in my coding years when it came out. Seen it, used it, only thing I can say about it is good riddance. Would I care to elaborate? Not really. The only point of view from which the whole topic is somewhat interesting [for me] is software history. Oh, maybe a little bit of nostalgia of childhood comes attached, but with not much connection with Win3. Anyway, I'm not missing crap just because of some "good old times" feeling. They had to start somewhere, but I'm not sad it's long gone.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Windows 3.0 was launched on 22 May 1990 â" I know, 'coz I was there as a SDE on the team. [...] It was a big deal for me, and I still consider Win 3 as *the* most significant Windows' release, and I wonder what other Slashdotters think, looking back on Win 3?
Pleasedtomeet'cha. Some fine work you did on 3.x! Windows 2.11 was the first version I encountered, but we never really considered it more than a wrapper in which one could run Aldus PageMaker (the Adobe InDesign of today) to output to a LasterMaster 1000 typesetter, which was 'the' first dry toner laser that could lay down small serif type that would reproduce on camera.
Windows 3.0 was the first environment one could consider booting into and staying there... we sold a number of them for personal use and its stability for publishing began to rival the Mac (I'm a PC person but pull no punches). Wide adoption for business use in our area did not really start until 3.11 and even 95, but that was mainly because we had done our job 'really well' and had a large installed base of IBMPC/clones networked with Novell and LanTastic running DOS applications. Our customers were comfortable in the DOS environment and we didn't hurry them. Memory and CPU were precious and all graphical environments had plenty of 'hourglass' in those days.
It's worth noting that graphical environments, even multi-tasking is pervasive today but it is still a learned skill and there were many people from the DOS era who had optimized their work techniques well into the Windows era. One fellow who dealt with real estate contracts tried Windows said "It can hardly keep up with my typing speed! This is an improvement?" Even the task switching latency of DesqView (which did lag because hard disk was really slow by today's standard) was a source of frustration to him. Most days he'd stay out of it. He'd seen examples of multitasking workflow and was not convinced. "My DOS programs import and export just fine. Exporting useful bits and naming them properly is an essential part of working efficiently. If you haven't done that you haven't finished the job. So... I'm supposed to bring up some old thing and cut and paste paragraphs or sentences of it into a new thing, one at a time, while switching between them? Look here." He shows me a folder with hundreds of small files. "That's my clipboard. I have all the names in my head. Some of the pieces have several variations, but I can import the whole thing and delete the unused parts faster than the graphic environment can scroll a document from top to bottom." He really could too, in the days of green phosphor displays he was able to read while scrolling quickly, while half the characters had fading ghosts of the previous line. He did not fully commit to a graphical environment until it was running on a 486.
For all the early issues, Windows 3 was still a technician's dream. In order to fully appreciate its beauty, you would have had to experience the nefarious and wacky world of TSRs, IPX and 'packet driver' network stacks and DOS 386 memory extenders. When they finally did work they were really stable but it took a wizard's touch. Windows' driver architecture was well designed from the start.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
IBM wanted to go back to being IBM. The pandora's box that their open hardware PC design had released into the world wasn't working out well for the three-piece suits still trying to run the place. The cloners were slaughtering them.
And the market then said 'fuck you' to their shiney new proprietary design. Microchannel and OS/2 were great as long as you wanted to keep spending the 2+ times as much as really stupid people were on real PC/XT and PC/AT boxes. The rest of us were buying Taiwanese clone boxes.
I suppose if you were already a 'Professional' corporate type you'd only just recently relinquished the power of wearing that white coat and being allowed in the 'Machine Room' with the conductive floor, so OS/2 and Microchannel was a real relief. Besides, your boss was paying for all of it anyways.
Being familiar with GEOS for the Commodore 64 from years earlier, Windows 3.0 was a primitive joke.
You could reproducibly crash the systems I used just be clicking around too quickly.
One of [OS/2's] biggest failings was claiming that it was "a better DOS than DOS and a better Windows than Windows"... which i... helps to remove the motivation to build much of anything specifically targeting for OS/2, rather than Windows... and being an 'also runs' OS doesn't get you much traction for adoption.
Even worse, they marketed the version of OS/2 (2.1 AFAIR) which had Windows 3.1 on board already in a virtual machine as "OS/2 for Windows"!
As if OS/2 was some kind of app. It was like the tail wagging the dog, with OS/2 being a grown-up OS and Win3.1 being a dog's breakfast.
one can now wistfully remember the birth of Windows. I was 6 years on Macs (supporting 28 units in a school) at that point, and remember looking at the Mac graphics and then the Win graphics ("I don't care what it takes - bonuses for anyone who can make this OS look sorta like AppleWorksGS!"), the placement of menus inside individual Windows ("How can we make people spend MORE time using our product?" "You mean USE it more, right boss?" "No, just spend more time using it.") and the mouse driver ("Remember that great scene in Bambi when he's on the ice? Let's make that an easter egg." "Sure, boss, we can have a little movie pop up when you hit crtl-alt-shift-esc-b" "No, you moron, I mean right there in the mouse behavior - it'll be a cherished childhood memory every time you try and point to something." It all but turned my mom & dad's Leading Edge D into my happy place. But hey, at least Media Player was included!
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Windows 3.0 was the "big step" but it really didn't mature to something solid until Windows for Workgroups 3.11 even if you were never in a network. But like it has been pointed out before, Windows 3.x sat on top of DOS so it was more of an operating shell.
I remember when my dad got a Hewlett Packard with 3.11 at the time at WalMart on sale. Like $1000, which was a big deal back then. Ah, those were the days!!
It was a PoS then as now.
It was already working on the next version of OS/2, but split from IBM's path and re-branded the new product as Windows NT. IBM then started their own separate development path and produced OS/2 2.0.
Minor correction. Microsoft - Dave Cutler's team - were working on the OS that was going to replace OS/2 (OS/2 "New Technology") that was then turned into Windows NT 3.1 and successors after the (surprising) Windows 3.0 success.
IBM took the "old" OS/2 code (that both they and Microsoft had worked on) and tarted it up into OS/2 2.x and successors.
Windows NT and OS/2 have no common ancestor. They are completely different OSes from bottom to top.
One major reason for the split was that IBM insisted on programming OS/2 in assembler - over Gates' objections - locking them onto the 386 platform.
At least that is the way I remember it.
I think you are remembering IBM's insistence that OS/2 ran on their shiny new "AT", with it's 286 processor when the 386 was already out on the market.
Win 3.0 was absolutely awful. It crashed and needed a reboot about twice an hour.
Rubbish.
It was soon replaced with the improved 3.1.
It was two years between Windows 3.0 and 3.1.
As I recall, the early versions were superficially similar to GEOS, but I didn't find them as practical for my school work. For most of my computing tasks at the time, however, I ran standalone programs from the MS-DOS prompt.
Biggest accomplishment of Windows 3.x was how it drove the development and adoption of Linux. Got me to install an early SuSE distro with a 0.9x kernel.
It's hard to describe, if you haven't experienced it, how drastic the difference was. I marveled at the capabilities of my PC after it ran Linux. It could easily hold its own against UNIX workstations five times as expansive.
I would have to agree. This was the first Microsoft GUI that "got it right". The first version that I kept using for more than a few hours after installing it. Win 3.1 really polished it off with TTF fonts and networking.
Bringing a unified GUI to the PC fundamentally changed the device.
The icon based launcher meant the user didn't have to learn names and what they did. Just look for the picture of cards and she could be playing Solitaire.
Similarly the menu bar and WYSIWYG lowered the skill requirement such that just about anybody could accomplish "something" with a computer. It also let a lot of people that should be running cash registers at McDonalds become bookkeepers. I suspect Excel has bankrupt a LOT of small businesses.
But you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
OS/2 had networking (really good networking) and multitasking. Lan Manager (based on OS/2) as well as Novell (worked with OS/2) had file permissions. So they produced a product with those 3 facets.
Windows 3.0 was the point where a reasonable priced graphics workstations became available to our architectural office. It wasn't just about the Windows release but about 486 pricing of under $4000 equivalents in our markets. Graphical word processing and a laser printer replaced an DOS\DRDOS+GEM machine attached to a Olivetti electric typewriter. The 1280x1024/60 display alone cost about $2000. It was a steal at the then prices elsewhere.
I was running OS/2 at the time. OS/2 had the absolute best terminal emulator available at the time. And on the NCR computers we were stuck with at work, the DOS window of OS/2 was a better behaved DOS then the DOS that came with the NCR machines. As for the "multi-tasking" of Win 3.0 - Desqview did it better, even on an 8088 machine! And finally, The CASE tool I was running would not run on Windows. (I ran Dual boot anyway).
i think i remember win3.0. ... uhm .. wing commander, joystick and soundblaster was around there?
it didn't have tcp/ip but it did have a "dialer" and "terminal" (not the linux terminal) which could connect to and "see" another computer.
(pray there was no lightning looking sideways at the telephone cable carelessly tossed out the attic window and down to the first telephone socket.)
also it could show you a "dos" prompt in a window.
i remember downloading *.fli (?) files from bbs and getting first taste of animated graphics.
also there was a *.fli of camera moving over mars.
also first chat, remote file download and reading how-tos (walk thru leisure suit larry) : )
also
-
there was also a "atari" computer somewhere?
That was OS/2 2.0, the 32-bit version released well after Windows 3.0. Windows 3.0, unlike the contemporary 16-bit OS/2 1.x, allowed one to finally use all their RAM (plus virtual memory in 386 enhanced mode) and multitask DOS applications, which could also use extended memory. See: http://virtuallyfun.supergloba...
Yes. IBM's reluctance to charge less for the SDK was the lynchpin of the split. This is why Bill Gates is known for saying, "Developers, developers, developers".
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Windows 3.0 was the first version I used to any significant degree. It looked so high-tech, though to 2015 eyes it looks like something from the old stone age. It did some cool stuff. It also gave us General Protection Faults, the predecessor to the Blue Screen Of Death.
For a long time I recommended Windows 98 to non-technical users. Some people claimed there was a USB implementation for Windows 95, but after careful study I have come to the conclusion they were mistaken. My first exposure to Windows 95 was an early alpha (I worked for the evil empire at the time) that crashed and required reformatting the hard disc after attempting to reconfigure the mouse.
I was intrigued by some of the other options out there. I sent my resume to Quarterdeck - I thought DESQview was neat - but only got a thanks-but-no-thanks postcard back.
...laura
From the article: "It became the first widely successful version of Windows and a rival to Apple Macintosh and the Commodore Amiga on the GUI front."
The GUIs of both the Amiga and the Macintosh were far more advanced than Windows 3.0. Windows 3.0 did allow DOS to run in windowed mode but only for text applications. Windows 3.0 was the first version of Windows I ran at home, although I did find and experiment with Windows 1 and Windows 2 on PCs at the university I attended. While native Windows applications could be windowed in Windows 3.0, the GUI was still not anywhere object oriented like either Amiga or the Mac.
In other non-GUI respects, Windows 3.0 still ran on top of DOS and supported cooperative multitasking, which was very limited and buggy. Memory management was a big issue with Windows 3.0. The Macintosh also supported cooperative multitasking at this time, but the Amiga was already five years into supporting preemptive multitasking which is what pretty much all modern home computer operating systems use today. And both the Mac and Amiga did so much better with memory than Windows 3.0.
I seem to recall windows 3.1 taking up ~10 megs of hard drive space. I couldn't believe how bloated that seemed. Why not just use dos? You could fit that on one floppy disk!
Meanwhile, on the next shelf over there were some really colorful boxes of Visual Studio for $99, including the bundled copy of NT 4.0. Laugh all you want at Ballmer screaming about "Developers", MS got it.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
The limitation period expired, so Bill Gates can't be sent to jail anymore for this criminally bad product
Hear, hear! Windows 3,0 had collaborative multi-tasking and virtual memory. Nothing compared to a real OS, but it was still way better than System 6 that Apple was selling at the time. But then Apple had advanced to a hierarchical file system like MS-DOS 2.0. Worst of all: there was no command processor, so you had to write a C application for everything you wanted to do. Jobs solved this by removing the keyboard altogether and flattening the rest to make the iPad.
Win 3.0 was absolutely awful. It crashed and needed a reboot about twice an hour.
Rubbish.
I should know. In particular it crashed every time you printed something from WordPerfect for Windows, which we needed to do a lot (for memos - had no email then). Fortunately the print job did get through first. Maybe it was WordPerfect's fault, I don't know, don't care now. Windows 3.0 frequently crashed when WordPerfect was not running too.
It was soon replaced with the improved 3.1.
It was two years between Windows 3.0 and 3.1.
I am talking about where I worked. We did not get Windows 3.0 the moment it came out. We did get 3.1 the moment it came out though, having found 3.0 so awful we hoped 3.1 was better, and it was. They should have called 3.0 the beta.
Microsoft - Dave Cutler's team - were working on the OS that was going to replace OS/2 (......Windows NT 3.1 and successors after the (surprising) Windows 3.0 success.
....Windows NT and OS/2 have no common ancestor. They are completely different OSes from bottom to top.
My understanding is that NT had quite a bit of OS/2 in it. It is true that Dave Cutler and his team members were recruited by MS from DEC, and came with with the the source code of a DEC OS called Mica (an evolution from VMS but later cancelled), and this (and Cutler's experience in DEC) was used in creating NT. DEC later got an out of court settlement from MS over this stolen code. Reference. Nevertheless, some elements of OS/2 were also used, like the printing sub-system I believe.
Seeing that MS had rights to OS/2 and wanted a new OS in a hurry following the breakdown of their partnership with IBM, it would be suprising if they had not used parts of OS/2.
Sure it is significant as a precursor to later Windows, but it wasn't a big deal. I always felt MS-Dos was far superior, and didn't find much use for Windows 3.0 or 3.11 (despite having them installed). Windows 95, however, was HUGE - it felt like the whole world jumped on the Win95 band-wagon. I still used MS-Dos as much or more than Windows 95 (did so until around Windows 98SE, and didn't really quit using Dos until after Windows 2000). I always felt MS-Dos was forced to die prematurely. Still, MS-Dos and Windows 95 are the most significant Microsoft operating systems in their history. I do not foresee them ever having the same impact again.
My understanding is that NT had quite a bit of OS/2 in it.
It doesn't. They are completely different architecturally. NT was a 32-bit, multiuser, heavily multithreaded, built-for-SMP, portable, mostly-microkernel OS.
OS/2 was... Not.
Seeing that MS had rights to OS/2 and wanted a new OS in a hurry following the breakdown of their partnership with IBM, it would be suprising if they had not used parts of OS/2.
In a hurry ? It was five years between the start of NT's development ('88) and its first release ('93).
"And the Dark Lord made Orcs in mockery of Elves, and Trolls in mockery of Ents; and he made DOS in mockery of CP/M, and Windows in mockery of Macs, and NT in mockery of Netware; and he made Excel in mockery of VisiCalc, and Explorer in mockery of Navigator, and Word in mockery of WordPerfect; and he made MSNetwork in mockery of America Online; and on every side his foes fell reeling, defeated one by one as he crushed them by sheer weight of numbers, his hosts darkening the plain; and in the twilight years of the Second Millenium the Free Peoples of the West said, Lo, let us face this pestilence and destroy it, lest he turn all of Middle-Earth into a nest of foulness. And they forged the One OS, and they called it Copland; and they gathered their allies, the IBM Host and the Riders of Motorola, and they prepared for the final battle." Unfortunately, we lost the final battle, and the Darkness of Microsoft has swallowed up the land.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
And Windows 3.1 lost real mode support. You could run Windows 3.0 on an 8086 with an EGA screen and 640KB of RAM (I did - the machine originally shipped with GEM). I think 3.1 still have 286 protected mode support, but didn't work very well unless you ran it in 386 enhanced mode. It was a bit sad that the version of Windows that required an MMU didn't use it to implement memory protection...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Living a sheltered life I never saw a Apple or Mac back in the mid nineties, but the Internet came into being on the PC with the CSLIP for Unix Connection and Netscape. That was pretty great, and the viruses were able to gain a worldwide foothold which was nice also.
'I don't know what it's called. I just know the sound it makes, when it takes a man's life.' ~ Four Leaf Tayback
That may not have mattered had OS/2 done a good rapid development kit, and also done a good job getting OEMs (there were hundreds at the time, in contrast to single figures today - aside from Dell, HP, IBM (now Lenovo) and Acer, there were Gateway 2000, Micron, Zeos, MidWest Micro, Tagram, and hundreds of other PC vendors.
I think OS/2 could have been a success had it been in the hands of someone other than IBM at that stage - a smaller company whose very success depended on OS/2 - as opposed to IBM, for whom it was just another small piece of a puzzle lost somewhere in the store. Such a company could have capitalized on the anti-Microsoft sentiment amongst ISVs, a number of whom found themselves competing against Microsoft despite making products that helped in the success of Windows. Companies like Borland, WordPerfect, Lotus (before IBM gobbled it), Symantec, and a good number of others. Such an approach could have ended up first in viable tools for OS/2 (from Borland, Symantec, Watcom et al) followed by viable apps, like Lotus SmartSuite, WordPerfect Office Suite and others. Given viable apps at the time, a good number of vendors would have offered the choice of OS/2 to customers, along w/ Windows. In fact, during the long delay in launching Windows 95, OS/2 could well have filled up the vacuum - just like Linux filled up the vacuum while the UNIX wars were going on.
The other great mistake that IBM did was pulling the plug on OS/2 for PPC. By the time it happened, it was obvious that OS/2 for Intel was going nowhere, so a good strategy would have been to port OS/2 to the PPC, and make it available as an alternative to MacOS for Mac clonemakers, when Apple, w/ a newly returned Jobs, pulled the plug on them.
Not just that, in addition to all of those, NT was designed to be portable across microprocessor architectures. It was originally developed on an Intel i860, then a DECstation 3000 - which was how the MIPS port was the first to be developed. That way, a lot of the x86 dependencies were gone, although some were brought back in the x86 version.
It wouldn't matter, as SMP was becoming a thing, and don't forget the coming x86_64 along with the ability to run on RISC. OS/2's kernel was largely untouched from early MS OS/2 2.0 betas, and the device drivers were still 16bit assembly. IBM's L4 port of OS/2 cost such an incredible amount of money, and it produced an OS with no networking, and was dreadfully slow as well. IBM wanted BIG money to run OS/2 in SMP, meanwhile NT workstation supports two processors out of the box. You can guess which I was running on my dual proc P100.
With NT you run basically the same OS on the desk and the server, so for many dev's to make a 'server' version was all too easy. And compared to NT, OS/2 was a horrible server. I'd take NT's registry over the insane config.sys any day. Not to mention one goof in config.sys and you can't boot.
OS/2 could have been made to become more NT like, but IBM clearly wasn't up to the task, instead they were basically maintaining the same codebase from MS OS/2 2.0 circa 1991.
At the time in question - which the GP seemed to be discussing - SMP was NOT a major thing. Even amongst the UNIXes, the only x86 UNIX was Sequent's Dynix. SMP didn't become major until Intel's core architecture was out, and that too was due to Windows NT - Intel realized that since Windows 2000 was the only Windows in the market, they could make all their CPUs multicore, and the OS would handle it - since it was no longer based on the Windows 95 platform.
But as I mention above, I agree - IBM was unequal to the task.
writes a lot like a millenial that wishes he was born before 1990.
So in terms of actually getting stuff done (eg. memory management) MSDOS was there to do it - thus for all practical purposes the Win32 was running on top of MSDOS. It wasn't "just a bootloader" as various people in this thread have been ranting about.
enough ram to run without swap file thrashing. Price was high as well
These two are related. OS/2 needed 16MB of RAM to be useable back when I had a 386 that couldn't take more than 5MB (1MB soldered onto the board, 4x1MB matched SIMMs). Windows NT had the same problem - NT4 needed 32MB as an absolute minimum when Windows 95 could happily run in 16 and unhappily run in 8 (and allegedly run in 4MB, but I tried that once and it really wasn't a good idea). The advantage that Windows NT had was that it used pretty much the same APIs as Windows 95 (except DirectX, until later), so the kinds of users who were willing to pay the extra costs could still run the same programs as the ones that weren't.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
NT
I happily ran OS/2 v3 on a 386/33 with 4MBs of ram for quite a while. Had to use an alternative shell to the WPS and be careful about your config.sys and how many sessions you opened, at the time I ran a lot of DOS and Win16 apps but it worked pretty well though I was sure happy when I upped the ram to 8MBs. The big difference between Windows and OS/2, OS/2 was more modular and you didn't need to load everything and could even have a simple full screen text session much like DOS
On the other hand, my brother bought Warp v3 and installed everything on a 4MB system. It was unusable so he gave it to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The really scary thing is how much of Windows 3.0 is still to be seen in Windows 8. If Windows 3 was the launching pad to great versions of windows later, I'd say let's celebrate this event. But that the product has stagnated as junk for so long makes me shudder.
I always thought that 3.1 was critical because it worked just that bit better that made it usable in many more scenarios.
Sort of like the jump from 95 to 98. 95 was a huge leap but had so many problems that people were often sticking to 3.1 but with 98 you simply had to modernize.
GEM was better. Especially given the limited memory of the machines.
So, the fact that YOU didn't operate a Microsoft OS is evidence enough that Microsoft wasn't making strides to position itself as a monopoly in the PC market? Being at the time partnered with IBM, and for whatever reason, fair or not, actually gaining market share.
Almost certainly WordPerfect's fault. The early versions of WordPerfect for Windows were awful, and by the time they released a decent one the market window had closed.
Windows 3.0 was not the best OS ever, but it was much more stable if you ran the GOOD Windows applications that were available at the time (things like Ami Pro and PageMaker) and/or used it to task switch between DOS programs running in windows. And you really really wanted to run it in 386 enhanced mode if possible; real mode was far less stable.
The Workplace Shell also took more RAM too, which was a problem back in 1992. But it is still unfortunate that MS turned the OS/2 2.0 project into a fiasco.
IBM took the "old" OS/2 code (that both they and Microsoft had worked on) and tarted it up into OS/2 2.x and successors.
And after that MS attacked it using unethical tactics. And don't forget their attacks on DR-DOS, including Win9x dependence on DOS helping Caldera continue it's lawsuit against MS. Now you see why this is why one of my favorite topics.
Yea, it is frustrating to watch DRAM manufacturers profiting while MS had to fit Win95 into 4MB. Of course, this is not the only unethical tactics MS used to attack OS/2 later on. PX00307 mentioned "32-bit Windows extenders" while ignoring the problems.
There was a product called DesQview, that did all that before win3 ever came out. And it did it better, more reliably, faster, and with the existing app. software.
Not the oly one: There was Multi-User Dos, by Digital Research. Yes the one who did CP/M and DR-Dos, and was the company to talk to when IBM looked at making PCs.
It was a Multi-thread OS with multiple users and multiple consoles and terminals, like an old DEC or IBM mainframe, but it ran Dos apps. Not just one per user, the users terminals could have several threads or "virtual terminals". It originally was 8086 and 80286, ours ran on 386, and was upgraded for later BIOS versions and CPUs. Even had an API, similar to Sockets, for talking between apps.
But, it was not a QUI, just a Dos command line. Although many of the Dos apps looked "sort of GUI" by using smart terminal commands. (That included Clarion for Dos.)
I never looked at MS Windows until Win95, because I was much more impressed with Muli-User Dos. And it was still used for the main computers until XP came out.
A bit late I know, but I'm having a bit of a tidy-up and I just found a boxed copy of OS/2 Warp (3.00). It comes with:
1 installation floppy
13 floppies containing the base OS
4 floppies with display drivers
3 floppies of printer drivers
14 floppies of additional software
so you're looking at a total of 35 3.5" floppies to install the whole thing.
They also had it on CDROM as well.
I missed 3.0, if the truth be told. My first computer was a 386 with a 40 MB hard-drive that came pre-load with MSDOS and Windows 3.1. In those halcyon days, I used my machine for writing, hanging out on newsgroups and little else. Yet somehow, hard-drive space started to seem a little thin on the ground and I realized that, having decided that Word was absolute shite compared to WordPerfect 5.1, that I deleted the entire Windows directory system and stayed happily in DOS-land for years to come.
Oh, and extenders like DOS/4GW didn't work either. Dad was under the false impression that our computer's primary purpose was something other than video games. Poor guy.