Happy 23rd birthday, Windows 3.0 This week marks the 23rd birthday of Windows 3.0, which came into this world on May 22nd, 1990, and gave the world improved colour graphics and the infamous File Manager. Windows 3.0 was all about getting closer to Apple’s Macintosh after Windows 1.0 and 2.0 fell a long way short of Jobs and Co's WIMPy UI. The MSDOS Executive …
I managed to cut Win 3.1 down to a single floppy that you could boot from. Ran like a tortoise, but helped me repair many a corrupt config.
Buggered if I can remember the details now (nor care), though I'm pretty sure I still have the disk somewhere...
That brings back memories. I had disks dedicated to different boot configurations so that I could have the right memory split to play games like Frontier/Elite or POP.
The sad thing about installing WfW from 3.5" floppies is that you'd almost certainly have to do it again in a few weeks. Sooner or later the system would lock up, and after a forced reboot WfW wouldn't start. So dig out the WfW floppies, plus the EMM386 disk, the network drivers, and the crib-sheet for shoehorning it all into memory, and start again.
Worse than installing to floppies was backing up to them. The time taken to write to a floppy was too short to do anything else, but long enough to drive you mad with boredom.
"I'd you'd copied the floppies to hard drive, install took less than a minute on a slowish 286 with 1Mb memory!"
I'd forgotten that we used to do that. Certainly did make it faster and you could leave it chugging away unattended and come back later. Often set several of them going at the same time when rolling out new hardware.
Think i installed it about 8000 times. Later I had to install nt advanced server from floppy disks, about 20. first time i installed it 3 times in a row until i remembered the password I had used. pillock . I then spent about a months wages on a 1x cd. wow so much of my pathetic cheap life, hmm not sure it all helped me towards a fulfilling life. watching the dickhead software patents battles isn't helping much either.
Is it an operating system? It was really only a window manager which sat on top of MS-DOS.
Sigh. This again. Every time the Reg runs a story about early versions of Windows, someone has to make this comment.
Real-mode Windows was indeed a GUI on top of MS-DOS / PC-DOS. DOS served as a monitor and provided many basic OS functions. Real-mode Windows still controlled the console, though, and since DOS has no process abstraction and Windows application scheduling was done entirely by Windows (cooperatively, using the message pump), even real-mode Windows was handling a number of OS-level functions.
Standard-mode Windows took over more functionality from DOS, notably memory management, and ran in protected mode, though DOS programs ran in ring 0 and so could still play merry hell with the system.
Enhanced-mode Windows was essentially an OS, and only used DOS as a bootloader. Unless you think that Linux is a shell and GRUB is its OS, then it's simply incorrect to say Enhanced-mode Win3 was "only a window manager which sat on top of MS-DOS".
No doubt we'll have to explain all of this again next year.
You need two instances of Explorer to manage files, its still got UI design flaws since Win95 and more awkward for moving or copying than File Manager.
My Archos File Browser is very like File Manager. Why is it Infamous? What was wrong with it?
Mines the one with a Smart Phone, Kindle and Archos 605 in the pocket.
Well, Amiga corp lost the plot which didn't help them much. They had some fantastic plans for the new releases of hardware and OS, plans that all went a "bit" (as in spectacularly) wrong with losing designs, political infights and generally losing the plot.
From discussions I had with Amiga engineers around then, one of the planned (or dreamed) features at the time was for Amiga windowing scheme to be more linked to the display hardware, therefore if a window needed just 2 bit planes, or needed 4 or 8 (or 24 I suspect) it could request this and the window area would be efficiently allocated and managed by the hardware. This way efficiency could be kept, high colour windows would use just the resources they required, low colour windows would use as little as possible and the entire display would be handled in hardware giving extremely fast and efficient windowing operations. Even from the start Amigas had hardware pointers for the mice (it took years for Windows PCs to approach the smoothness of the Amiga mouse pointers), multiple, stackable displays with different colour depths and heights and the evolution of this was to move to supporting different "screen" widths and allow them to be managed as if they were windows.
But things moved on, the Amiga unfortunately faltered and died and here we are now.
The Amiga wasn't the only system doing the rounds at time, there were of course the Atari ST and the Archimedes as well, both very capable systems in slightly different ways. And given choice could always use an expensive PC if your colour palette of choice was Black, White, Cyan and Purple or if you had much more money than sense and could find one, then you could buy and use a Mac - often monochrome and usually very closely tied to the Mac's strength at the time - Desktop Publishing, but very effective for it.
It's nothing to do with people who knew no better.
The Amiga may have been superior, and quite possibly there were other systems way ahead of Windows in the race. But they were all proprietary operating systems closely tied to their hardware. Microsoft operating systems, from MS-DOS on, conquered the world because they were good enough and ran on generic hardware. (The generic hardware was a result of lack of foresight at IBM when they built the first PCs.) So manufacturers of PC clones could sell hardware with an operating system installed.
So what about Apple? It's easy to forget that in the era of massive Windows uptake, Apple was an expensive specialist product mostly used by people like graphic designers. If the Apple had been just another general-purpose desktop computer it might well have gone the same way as the Amiga.
Actually, the "generic" hardware wasn't as generic as you might think. One of the biggest weaknesses of any PC and a problem that still haunts new PC releases today is of drivers that provide a way to make all this hardware compatible with each other.
The biggest problem was that Microsoft learned their trade as far as the market went at the fount of Big Blue, so when a new IBM system went in, they had a chance to ram a ton of glossy marketing literature down the unsuspecting throats of the buyers. They simply weren't aware of the competition. Once in there, the business market acted as the shills for the PC, eventually killing the competition by stealth.
As for Apple, they very nearly did go the same way as Commodore. It took a bit of good hype to pull them out of the doldrums; it was called the iMac. But for that system and the marketing that went with it, Apple certainly would have died as so many others did. Not that I'm a fan of Apple, but give them their due.
When I was still in primary school, the classroom a single Archimedes, a few of the lads had Amigas for games, my mate's dad, a hippy musical technology lecturer, had an Atari ST (and a MIDI guitar), and another friend's dad, a graphic designer, had a Mac. There was of course still a smattering of Spectrums, Vic 20s, C64s, Acorns, and a few 8 bit consoles.
Me? I had an 8086 Olivetti with no sound or game port! Still, over the next ten years I learnt quite a bit just getting it and its successors to play games... and eventually the games (X-Wing, Doom, System Shock, many more) came.
Not exactly, but more than a Window Manager. Win 3.1 was a big jump, Win 3,0 was rubbish compared to Win3.1.
The Real and Standard modes very much just a GUI shell to launch DOS Programs. Win 3.0 Enhance Mode a not quite OS, but Win 9x and Win ME not quite OSes either.
WFWG3.11 properly set up with Win32s, 32 bit TCP/IP, good Graphics driver and 32 bit Disk Driver was better than Win95a and as much an OS as Win95, Win98, WinME, which is to say a horrid mish-mash and not a proper OS like NT 3.1, NT3.5, NT3.51 and NT4.0 (You could run Explorer Shell Preview on NT3.51 and Run Program Manager & File Manager on NT 4.0 instead of Explorer Shell).
The Windows programs Word, Excel, Powerpoint were all available at 3.0 launch along with a variety of third party applications, hardly just a DOS switcher.
Standard mode could multitask all three of these office applications in 2Mb main memory and was faster than the more memory demanding 386 Enhanced mode. Biggest accomplishment of Windows 3.0 in my opinion, operating on the installed base of predominantly 286 PCs of the time with such efficient use of machine resources.
Behind the scenes! By current standards the number of people involved in Windows 3.0 development was laughably small. Speaking as one of those involved it felt more like a skunkworks project while a vastly larger number of people in the OS group worked on OS/2 along with another army from IBM. Some features were vetoed for 3.0. I actually recall the words 'if we do all that OS/2 is toast' from a guy well known nowadays as a leading promoter of Windows. 3.1 added missing features. However, I can state for a fact that in May 1990 nobody expected to be shipping Windows on DOS 1995; I'm still amazed that it took over 10 years for Windows XP to replace DOS/Windows for most people.
"Win 3.1 was a big jump, Win 3,0 was rubbish compared to Win3.1."
I remember the first portable system I had (386SX based with a plasma screen) came with MSDOS 4.01 and Windows 3.0, and a 40MByte hard drive.
After trying Windows 3.0 out of curiosity for a couple of days, I decided I'd rather have the disk space back - at the time all the software I had was DOS based anyway and I could see no advantage to keeping Windows.
Windows 3.1 was such an improvement that by the time I got that on a 486 machine with a whopping 250Mbyte drive, it was worth keeping.
My first proper IT job was developing an installation routine for our companies software. I worked out you could install Windows, zip up the C:\WINDOWS directory, test my install routine, and then restore the C:\WINDOWS back to a virgin install. A godsend .... totally impossible nowadays ...
It's possible it had 2 x 2MB and 1 x1MB SIMM chips in it."
Win3.0 on a 386. More likely there were 32 16-pin DIL RAM chips in sockets on the main board and a 4MB expansion card, also with socketed RAM chips. SIMMS (and SIPPs) might have been around but only on the latest "bleeding edge" systems.
The most common "fault" back then was the chips "creeping" out of the sockets due to "thermal creep". A quick press on every socked chip, with a satisfying click from the culprits, job done, customer happy.
Notepad was in Windows from version 1, FWIW.
I don't recall what all was in Windows 1, but I worked on IBM's "DOS and Windows Kit"1, a software bundle for the PS/2 (particularly the Model 25, which IBM intended as a Mac killer2). It included Windows 2.0 or Windows/286 for the 286-equipped models (Model 50 and Model 60), and there was a decent set of apps with Win 2: Paint, Calc, etc.
The Kit added Function Editor, which was basically a mathematics typesetting tool that could print or export as bitmap, letting you embed formatted mathematical expressions in documents; Grapher, which was a data-plotting app3; an interactive tutorial; and some other goodies. If you were going to buy a PC for an undergrad, it was a pretty good value at the time. But it wasn't advertised and I doubt many copies were sold. Then Windows 3 and MS Office came out just a year or two later, and while that combination was significantly more expensive, it was also considerably more capable.
1Which did eventually ship; I saw it on sale once in a university bookstore. In the few years I worked for IBM, I contributed to two projects which became actual shipping products, and one that became an open-source package that's still around and apparently still used. Really quite remarkable luck.
2At which it was a dismal failure. The '25 wasn't a terrible machine - we used to use one for network monitoring and as a Telnet terminal - but it didn't have much going for it, either.
3Unfortunately it didn't also do business graphics (bar charts and the like), which would have made it useful for more students. 123 and Excel were great for that, but legal copies were generally too expensive for students.
In school we had a lab of hard-drive-less terminal RM Nimbus 386 PCs.
These booted Windows 3.0 via the BNC connected 10Base2 network to a server in the back room which supplied the OS.
They were generally left on at the login screen, as bootup times were up to 5 minutes.
My first PC in 1995 was a 486 running Windows For Workgroups 3.11 - I was familiar with the Program Manager, the built in Accessories such as Write and Paintbrush, and the overall Windows UI from those school machines.
Soon after, Win95 turned up, Pentiums ushered in the Multimedia PC era, and it grew from there until recently when Tablets changed casual computing. We may be going back to the time when a PC is for the dedicated, and a Tablet is an internet appliance for the facebookers.
It's even more fun on an IBM XT at 4.77Mhz running in VGA mode... you can't use colour (as that requires a driver with 286 code) and you get to see the dialog boxes in eg Write draw before your eyes!
That was 20 years ago, mind you... I wanted a copy of Windows after using it at school and after finding one in the local paper it was most disappointing to see how chuggy it was on the PC I had.
Have you actually tried running Windows 3.0 on an 8MHz 8086?
Yes - the PS/2 Model 25. Had to do some testing under Win 3 to make sure some customers who had the machines could run the latest version of a package we sold. That was for a former employer.
The Model 25 and Model 30 ran Win 2 pretty well. The Model 30-286 even ran Win/286 reasonably well. But Win 3 added too much for those low-end systems, even in Real mode (which was all that would run on an 8086, of course).
This brings to me a misty-eyed remembrance of holding a mouse for the first time. Prior to that, my life was filled with DOS, CP/M, Wang WP, DisplayWriter. and other things with small monitors and massive floppy disks.
What really kicked off the success of Windows was MS Office. MS Word 1.0 wasn't too good, but I remember being wowed by Word 2.0c. Like garlic bread, it was the taste of the future.
I still miss Norton Editor though, using EDLIN was such a pain in the arse.
1) Dig out DOS and Win floppies (they might still read - mine did)
2) Dig out USB floppy drive (I prefer Sony but any will do)
3) Fiddle with VMWare (or similar) configuration
4) Patch VM with stuff from Electrical Interweb (e.g. tweaked SVGA drivers from Zamba's excellent VMWare Page -http://www.scampers.org/steve/vmware/)
5) Play suitable music (e.g. http://www.officialcharts.com/archive-chart/_/1/1990-05-26/)
Nom, nom, nom...
Windows 3.0 was the only version of Windows I pre-ordered and eagerly awaited. It was what broke us free!
I got the disks and installed it the day it came out.
2 months later the Lotus User Group's quarterly newsletter came out and said that unfortunately Lotus 123 used different memory management so couldn't work with Windows 3.0
They released an update a couple of days later after I told them how I got it working the day Windows 3.0 came out.
Windows 3.0 is what released us from the 640k memory limit and that, for me, makes it the greatest release of Windows ever. It was the game changer.
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