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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?
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.
Cheap software tools is what made Windows. While IBM was demanding $2000+ for an OS/2 SDK, MS was willing to give the SDK away to people who bundled it with their tools, and of course we had the $99 era of compilers including Visual Basic, Quick C, Turbo C and others.
OS/2 1.x did not have any cheap/discount compilers.
RIGHT!
The Amiga Workbench was multitasking - the first of its kind for "microcomputers" and it was the bread and butter of airport displays, sports announcers annotating where basketball or football players were moving on the field, and real-time "video toaster" displays for TWO DECADES after.
It was only in the late 2008-9/2010+ timeframe that Windows replaced Amiga displays for those things for realtime video annotations.
So yes, the Amiga did it first better. (Grandparent was right)
The Amiga did it for longer than anyone (sorry, Parent)
So sorry the mods are like 15-20 years old and are bored by history and facts.
E
Early versions of Windows are like remembering a rotten tooth aching and oozing. I'm still not using Microsoft products.
Yes, Amiga was miles ahead. By then I had a decade with Apple ][ and Mac ... no way I could downgrade to DOS with a Windows disguise.
Windows was sold to business. It had been said that no CIO would get fired for buying IBM. Well the mantra was shifting. Buying Windows was safe for Fortune 500 decision makers. According to conventional wisdom, Mac & Amiga were for hippies and weirdos.
Windows was the Lowest Common Denominator (LCD) in the purchasing equation. The generic hardware and software were relatively inexpensive and all the hackers were offering dBase solutions for businesses. That combination was a nightmare for the business that just wanted results, no hassles.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Windows 3.0 (and subsequent in that series) was not an operating system, it was a windowing environment. Remember, it still ran on top of MS-DOS, and it was still effectively single-tasking in that switching tasks paused the previous task.
Windows was not a true OS until Windows 95, as I recall the history.
There were others, like GEM, that never really caught on despite their relative quality.
But (to change the subject a little) I think the "big one that got away" was OS/2. A pity that IBM didn't know how to market it.
It was not even an operating system yet. It was just a graphical environment running on top of DOS.
Circumcision is child abuse.
OS/2 3.0 had TCP/IP networking as standard. Remember that in the timeframe of OS/2 2.0 and 2.1, there wasn't a clear leader in LAN networking, with IPX, SNA and others also widely used in small office and enterprise networks, so it made sense for IBM to ship it as an optional addon. In the same timeframe, Windows 3.x not only didn't ship with a TCP/IP stack, but you had to get one from a third party.
Windows 95 was still sitting on DOS to a large extent, just not as visibly or largely as before. When you "shut down" windows and got the black screen with orange text that said you could now turn off the computer, if you typed the MS-DOS "mode" command with an option like 40-column you unmasked the hidden DOS prompt and could still use the computer.
Windows 95 worked like a lot of 386-enhanced DOS-based games did, loading itself after using DOS as a means to get the program loaded. '98 and ME were similar, though when they tried to strip most of that out of ME they made things screwy.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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
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.
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/M...
"Ran on" is an imprecise term. Windows 95 was bootstrapped into a special MS-DOS7 environment by a MS-DOS7 boot loader (DOS io.sys loading win.com loading win kernel, then user, gdi, etc. and finally the shell). But when up and running, Windows 95 and Win32 programs did not run "on" DOS in the way most people would interpret that statement. Windows 95 was a 386 enhanced protected mode pre-emptive multitasking multithreaded OS for Win32 applications.
Win 9X didn't run 'on top of' DOS. This explains it better than I ever could:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnew...
There's two different things here. The Amiga's place in the broadcast TV and video effects world was it's features that allowed the graphics card to synchronise to an external vsync, and to generate TV standard signals, such that mixing live video signals and computer graphics was trivial.
Separate to that was the ability to render complex 3D scenes, usually not in real time. For that, you needed (at that time) the most powerful CPU and FPU.
Presumably for the most part Babylon 5 needed the latter, not the former.
No it sure wasn't.