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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?
The Amiga did it better and earlier.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.
The last version of Windows to never have had a remote exploit in the standard distribution.
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 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
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".
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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>