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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?
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.
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
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".
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.
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...
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.
I remember in around 2000 the cable TV network we 'subscribed' to crashed.... about a dozen channels were showing the Amiga boot screen and were stuck until someone came along and fixed them. Was quite funny at the time.
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing an editor and a MTA.
...people who grew up on PC or Macs would naively ask "what's the point of multitasking?" That's one of the reasons IBM flubbed the market as they thought it wasn't ever going to be that big except as a front-end for major back office applications...
IBM was a mainframe and mini-computer company that also sold micros. IBM understood multitasking better than anyone else, but they also understood that as soon as micros could multitask, had networking and became multi-user (file permissions) the market for minis and mainframes would shrink. IBM's PC strategy from the mid '80s to mid '90s could be summed up as using their influence to prevent networking, multi-tasking and file permissions from happening on the same platform at the same time.
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.
The Amiga was a very closed proprietary design from a single company. The whole design depended on closed-source ASICs (each given a girl's name) clumped together to provide the 'advanced' graphics and sound features.
It couldn't scale up, and it was single sourced and a closed architecture from a single company. It was never, ever, going to survive in the era of incremental megahertz/megabytes, and the rise of the phillips screwdriver hardware hacker brigade.
Proprietary closed crap designs are nice, up to a point. Then you realize how boxed in it makes you.
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>
That explains why in the mid '80s to mid 90's IBM was busy in a joint venture with Microsoft first and alone afterwards... to produce a PC system with networking, multi-tasking and file permissions and even 32 bits (OS/2).
Wasn't IBM forced into doing this by the roaring success of a company called Netware? Yeah, Netware. Remember them?
The reason the PC succeeded was not because it was great out of the box... it was because of legions of 3d-parties hacking DOS with TSR add-ons that expanded the capabilities of the machine. Microsoft would play catch-up, incorporating the best of what was out there (e.g., memory managers), finally culminating in Windows, which was more than just a GUI... it was memory management, standardized device drivers, and networking packaged together.
IBM was always late to the game. The RS/6000 line came late after Sun, Apollo, and DEC had already proved a market for desktop workstations (except for academia, did the PC/RT even count?) Then, they realized that Microsoft and Netware were slowly hacking the PC into a multitasking, networked workstation for a fraction of workstation prices. Businesses could buy 5, 10 Windows PC's for the price of one workstation, and manage it themselves without a service contract. By the time OS/2 came along, the war was already over, because as lousy and crashy as Windows could be, it had become ubiquitous, and anyway, when you want to sell MILLIONS of PC's, it's never about the OS... it's about the killer app(s) that runs on it. Windows was a platform to sell copies of Word and Excel. Nobody had any reason to write any killer app for OS/2 when they could write it once for Windows and get rich.
That joint-venture? Too little, too late, again. IBM in the 80's and 90's was a string of awful decisions, and before it was over it was entirely feasible that the great IBM would disappear entirely (check out their stock price, rock-bottom in 92, 93).
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
You know just because you all hated the leather background in the Mac address book does not mean you need to get rid of shininess, chrome, depth perception, and other features which actually helped the user distinguish which Window was active.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! Give me my damn skuemorphism back. It works fine. I know NO ONE and I mean NO ONE besides hipster graphic designers afraid to have anything modern looking on their portfolio as other hipster artist look at them before hiring them. It creates a cycle of race to the bottom of less graphics, less detail, blinding white, 72x text.
SKUEMORPHISM != REALISM folks and MS appearently thinks it does.
http://saveie6.com/