On this day, 34 years ago (i.e. in 1992), Windows 3.1 was released.

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tdudkowski@reddit

Best Windows ever. 95 was also a fun. The last I've used as a main OS was Me.
W11 is good for upgrading firmware and Garmin app, I didn't find any other proper use.

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TheGreatRao@reddit

Hate to say it but I miss Windows 3.1.

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Murky-Prize-90@reddit (OP)

The time when Windows used to be a graphical environment that ran on top of MS-DOS.

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compbluewiz@reddit

There's a good article on this topic: https://www.xtof.info/inside-windows3.html

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Jealous_Club_298@reddit

I never used Windows 3.1, I started out with Windows 3.11, it was an improvement.

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Jealous_Club_298@reddit

Actually, it was Windows 3.11 for Workgroups that I used, which had networking and printer sharing capabilities.

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Jack55555@reddit

3.1 for workgroups had those capabilities too. I believe 3.11 also had some bugfixes.

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Pro-Rider@reddit

Our minds were blown away. Going from DOS to a GUI was insane.

Then came the Autoexe.bat which was really nice to go straight to windows. No more

C: CD\win

Then Win.exe

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Pro-Rider@reddit

Yep that’s right Win.com came first then Win.exe it’s been so long I couldn’t remember.

Nice catch!!

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Few_Departure_6830@reddit

What I loved doing those DOS menus, like:

Each with different memory assigments.
1. DOS
2. GAMES

WINDOWS

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YouToot@reddit

I bought an old IBM PS1 and it had a DOS menu after POST that was:

Windows
Doom

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rshawco@reddit

We used drdos (digital research dos, not doctor dos). And the first gui os I had was Geoworks 2.0

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rshawco@reddit

I should set up a nostalgia machine, I wouldn't mind playing some space quest, kings quest, if I could find kingdom of kroz, lemmings, etc. So many good classics

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JangledManes@reddit

Thanks for reminding me of something I'd completely forgotten about.

Spent so long stuck on Space quest, ended up being an English vs American English spelling thing, so infuriating.

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myztry@reddit

It was a whole lot less impressive for those coming from the 1985 Commodore Amiga.

But the brute force of the Intel Processors and the expandability of the IBM PC architecture (for GPUs to come later) made it a necessity even if the OS itself was meh.

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Mynameismikek@reddit

I'd hopped from CP/M, to the Amiga, then Mac, then PC, probably over just a 5 year period. The "C:/>" prompt felt like such a letdown for what was supposedly the "best".

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Wbcn_1@reddit

Yup and then back to DOS again because windows was a resource hog 😆

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Pro-Rider@reddit

Yep I remember games would crash if you were using DOS shell with windows open. You had to reboot and run games in straight DOS 😂

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JasonMckin@reddit

There was no benefit to running a DOS command prompt within Classic Windows. It’s like 8 layers of overhead. The only possible benefit was multitasking.

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Wbcn_1@reddit

I only used it for windows games and Word. I remember using something called DOSx (I think) to run two programs at once in DOS.

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JasonMckin@reddit

If I recall, task switchers and memory extenders were often separate.

Task switchers were usually "terminate and stay resident" programs that would monitor for the user executing some special keystroke (akin to an Alt-Tab) and it would manually swap an active program to disk and swap another program disk back to memory. They weren't actually "running at once," because the program that swapped out was frozen on disk. It was more a way of maintaining active state between multiple programs even though only one actually ran at any given time.

DOS Memory eXtenders were more like sophisticated versions of HIMEM.SYS that allowed you to access more than 640K RAM.

I guess in theory, both could be used at once. It was all insanely kludgy and ugly until Windows and then extremely clean with Windows NT.

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mikegalos@reddit

Or learn how to configure a PIF file.

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JollyQuiscalus@reddit

There was the DOS shell, but I'm seeing next to no nostalgia for it. I wonder if a lot of people jumped straight from 3.x to 6.x and never got to see it.

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Tall-Introduction414@reddit

I had DOS 5 and Dosshell, but I didn't use it much. I didn't feel like it gave me much that I couldn't already do with the command prompt, and I quickly got Windows 3.1 anyway. I felt like Dosshell was a bit of eye candy for newbies, but not that useful.

DESQView, on the other hand, was awesome.

And don't get me started on MS Bob...

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JollyQuiscalus@reddit

There was also Norton Desktop. I think the alternatives knew to add windows, while doing that in DOS shell prior to the release of Windows 3.0 might have lowered the incentive to get Windows

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Tall-Introduction414@reddit

Norton Desktop for Windows 3.x, and Norton Commander for DOS. I was a big fan of the Norton Utilities suite in the pre-Windows days. That was the kind of software that convinced me that I needed to learn C and assembly!

I think you might be right about Dosshell being limited as to not compete with Windows. I remember seeing it on display model PCs quite a bit, if they weren't powerful enough for Windows 3.1.

Norton Commander, of course, spiritually lives on in the surprisingly popular Midnight Commander for Linux.

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mrmcporkchop@reddit

I just installed Midnight Commander on my BunsenLabs linux install I put on an old netbook to play around with. I forgot how much I liked Midnight Commander.

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DeepDayze@reddit

Now that's a great distro and I've used it on older machines as well.

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mrmcporkchop@reddit

I had used BunsenLabs on the netbook for several years but when I dug it out for some projects to test it was several versions out of date and didn't have a good upgrade path. Trying fresh install of the newest version did not like my Intel i915 video or something. Tried nomodeset and things were still weird, booted into safe mode and everything was super unstable and running at 100% cpu for quite a while where I was sure it wasn't just startup processes finishing. So I went back one version from current and installed and tried it and everything went really smoothly so I just settled on that for the time being and my needs. I was happy to see how fast it still was (relative to the hardware if course) with jumping ahead several distro versions. Does a decent job with Atom N570 and 2gb ram. Chrome is pretty usable if you stick to 1 tab. Thunderbird isn't bad either. As long as you're realistic on what it is and don't ask too much of it.

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JasonMckin@reddit

Wasn’t DOSSHELL almost like a free fork of MS-DOS Executive in the same way that QBasic was a free fork of QuickBASIC?

The DOS 4.0 to 6.22 transition was extremely notable, because it was this weird time before OS/2 and Windows had matured but where there was still competition with PC DOS and DR DOS and where hardware was really stepping up so managing bigger HDDs and RAM actually required OS improvements.

To me, DOS 4.0 was a major shift in architecture and then DOS 7.0 with VFAT etc.

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hamburgler26@reddit

I used DOS heavily and never even saw the DOS shell growing up. Hell I've got a DOS machine up and running now and still haven't used it.

I do have Norton Commander on it though. I had a friend who's computer had that or something like it on it but never had it at home.

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CobraG0318@reddit

I loved dosshell as an alternative to windows when things didn't like being launched from windows. Changing it to gui/vga mode with mouse. Chef's kiss. Iirc, they just recycled windows 2's engine as basically just a file manager.

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algaefied_creek@reddit

I had a 486 as a kid and I preferred the DOS Shell to use with Word for DOS and for organizing and playing my games (including the floppies checked out from the library)

My mom used Word in Windows though and was not happy when I messed with autoexec for some reason (games-related probably) and windows wouldn’t load after

Oopsies

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JasonMckin@reddit

Couldn’t Windows 2.0 also be classified as a GUI?

The transition from DOS command prompt to Windows 95 was much smoother than a mind blowing step jump, esp since everyone knew what to expect from the Mac.

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486Junkie@reddit

For me, it's making it let you choose to boot to either DOS or start Windows by editing the config.sys file with the menu options, entering the menu item in [] for config.sys

MENUITEM=DOS, Boot to MS-DOS MENUITEM=WIN31X, boot to Windows 3.1X

[COMMON] DOS=HIGH,UMB BUFFERS=15 FILES=40

[DOS] DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS

[WIN31X]

and using autoexec.bat as

@Echo off goto %Config%

:DOS

Goto END

:WIN31X set path=C:\DOS;C:\WINDOWS;%PATH% Win Goto END

:END

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SenorPeterz@reddit

Autoexec.bat preceeded Windows 3.1 by many years, my friend!

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RolandMT32@reddit

Windows was the only GUI environment I knew of at the time, but I found out later there was also GEOS (AKA GeoWorks Ensemble), which some say was probably better than Windows. There was also OS/2 from IBM.

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milqgames@reddit

I remember as a kid that my aunt's PC would boot DOS and then enter Windows to try it out, like Harvard Graphics. But I saw it as just another application, operating via DOS commands was more comfortable for me as a kid. Fun trivia.

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Equivalent-Radio-828@reddit

Was around then. And I had already worked on the IBM and owned a McTosh Lap Top with an extended RAM memory drive 500 MB. All they had was the basic Microsoft software. The internet wasn’t made available to the public until 1995 when Java was released. jdk development kits.

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turnips64@reddit

Ermmmm….no! The Internet was “available to the public” before 1995!

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biffmalibull@reddit

More stable than 11

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sjoskog@reddit

This felt so revolutionary back then. I had my first PC with Windows 2.0 (because we knew nothing about them and had purchased it just because my dad's friend had similar). It was okay for some basic gaming... Then friend of mine installed 3.1 for me (just few years later he installed also Linux). It was like whole new world would have opened. Quickly upgraded also 286 to 386 to get all the features.

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PuttingFishOnJupiter@reddit

"Windows 3.1 was released", and it is still out there, running wild. Feeding on spinning rust found on Conner Hard Disks, and the remains of slightly newer Seagate platters. It can't boot without DOS, so it strives to keep feeding on whatever 386 or 486 computer hardware it can find. Devouring Cyrix, C&T, ALi, and if pressed, Intel processors. Take care people. Being infected by Windows 3.x xan cause memory loss, confusion and

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ciauii@reddit

forgetting to complete one’s sentence.

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dunzdeck@reddit

Remind me, why is there an "install windows" icon inside windows?

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ciauii@reddit

IIRC this app allowed you to install and remove components and its title was more along the lines of “set up Windows” rather than “install.”

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drjonase@reddit

Normally I feel old but somehow this fits my feelings (so actually confirming I am old)

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mi7chy@reddit

Remember my early exposure to internet via Windows for Workgroups plus Trumpet Winsock and Netscape Navigator.

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dunzdeck@reddit

Hell yeah I weirdly thought of Winsock yesterday

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Pursueth@reddit

Man this image is so warm and fuzzy for me.

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nearsingularity@reddit

I remember.

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Royal_Stay_6502@reddit

I already used GEOS by then.

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MousseHuge8339@reddit

My first "Windows computer" was a 286. Ine day, I found a box of Windows 3.0 installation floppies that were simply thrown in the trash, still shrink wrapped and left curbside.. And there were multiple copies. Maybe the floppies came from a business that upgraded to 3.1 or switched to something else entitely, but I took some of the floppies home and installed it. I thought it was pretty cool being able to dial into my Unix shell account with Terminal while at the same time having Notepad open to copy/paste with as opposed to being stuck in a single task with dos. I might have been using a 3rd party Dos task switcher but it was so long ago I just can't remember. But having a windowed GUI was a big upgrade.

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ReadTheManual-First@reddit

This is legendary. You are so lucky!!!

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TulipFarmer27@reddit

And Windows For Workgroups was not far behind.

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restlessmonkey@reddit

Who else used Windows before it supported mice?

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hblok@reddit

I saw Windows 2.0 at some point, and it reminded me a bit of Norton Commander.

However, I think it already used a mouse.

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mikegalos@reddit

Nobody. Windows 1.0 supported a mouse.

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SpartanMonkey@reddit

I just redeployed a Windows 3.1 system yesterday at work after replacing the power supply and backing it up. Pentium-100 with 40mb RAM. Running like a champ. It controls a tool used to inspect silicon carbide wafers.

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wbr1958@reddit

I was used to the command prompt from CPM and DOS, but I also got used to a GUI using GEM to run Ventura Publisher for print layout.

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O_martelo_de_deus@reddit

Eu usei e programei nele, fiz um programa para gerar desenhos técnicos em formato DXF ( AutoCAD ) que era usado sem modificações até 2018, naturalmente eles usavam o modo de compatibilidade, hoje não sei se ainda usam, mas para um programa feito apenas em Visual C++ 1.0 e o livro do Petzold para o SDK do Windows 3.1 durou muito.

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postmodest@reddit

The thing that blows my mind is how the time between Windows 3.1 and OS/2 Warp 4 seemed like a decade. It was under 3 years.

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bagpussnz9@reddit

we had a heap of automated testing tools - each needed 2 machines, one with windows 3.11 and another dos with a special card - elverex seems to come to mind.

We were in nz and they shipped from Ireland - getting support was so much fun. Makes me want to cry just thinking about them.

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MrJason2024@reddit

The first OS we had on our home computer. Like most elementary school kids I had exposure to Classic MacOS at school but a lot of fond memories with it.

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RolandMT32@reddit

Windows 3.1 was more of a graphical environment that ran on DOS rather than a full OS.

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DeepDayze@reddit

Same could be said of Win95/98. WinME was the first that moved away from DOS then WinNT/2000/XP ditched DOS entirely and became OSes in their own right.

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RolandMT32@reddit

Yes, I used those versions of Windows and I remember.

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MrJason2024@reddit

I am aware of that.

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zipbyiomega@reddit

Feels like yesterday...

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Kiwi_eng@reddit

Win 3.1 was of no use to us using AutoCAD, as we needed every ounce of performance out of our 386 and 486 clones. We had adopted XtreePro as a front end which could be programmed to automate some drawing management tasks. We resisted change until NT3.51 came out.

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Curtis@reddit

MAXIS

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Murky-Prize-90@reddit (OP)

I installed the first version of SimCity for Windows to get the application group.

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NeilSilva93@reddit

El MAXIS

Did it have El Sim City?

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Murky-Prize-90@reddit (OP)

I installed a fresh copy of the first version of SimCity for Windows which was compiled of the same month and year this version of the graphical environment released to get both.

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pumukl@reddit

Windows NT looked simiar!

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be_super_cereal_now@reddit

It had a familiar look and feel, but that's where the similarities ended. NT was a completely different operating system.

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juliuspepperwoodchi@reddit

Legit, this is why XP sucked ass and 2000 was actually decent

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be_super_cereal_now@reddit

XP and 2000 were both based on NT. You probably didn't like the visual facelift of XP which is fair, but under the hood XP and 2000 were largely the same.

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juliuspepperwoodchi@reddit

I misspoke and intended to say Me. I remember people thinking that "Millennium Edition" and 2000 must be the same thing and I had to constantly correct them.

Me was based on MS-DOS, not NT.

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mikegalos@reddit

Me was based on Windows 95, 98 and SE but not MS-DOS.

It's a common misconception that the 9x family ran on top of MS-DOS but it didn't. It would load an MS-DOS instance during boot but only if there were real mode drivers in CONFIG.SYS or real mode applications in AUTOEXEC.BAT. In those cases the MS-DOS instance was to provide a vm to support those legacy real mode components.

If no real mode items were called for, Windows would switch to protected mode and boot with no MS-DOS in memory until needed to run an instance of an MS-DOS application.

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Eric848448@reddit

Windows 2000 may be the best thing Microsoft did until Visual Studio Code.

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juliuspepperwoodchi@reddit

I was a sublime text acolyte for years, a new hire last year got me to try out VS Code and I've been using it ever since, I'm pleasantly surprised.

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MechanicalTurkish@reddit

VS Code is great. I use it on my Windows, Linux and macOS boxes

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Eric848448@reddit

I’ll never debut from a command line again.

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RolandMT32@reddit

Yep. Windows NT came out of Microsoft's former relationship with IBM working on OS/2. Windows NT was actually based on OS/2 and could even run command-line OS/2 software, until Microsoft removed that later (in Windows 2000 or XP, I think).

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cryptogege@reddit

NT was not based on OS/2, though. It was written from scratch, and was originally supposed to become the next version of OS/2, until Windows 3 was released and became a big success. The only OS/2 code in there was the support for 16bits OS/2 binaries.

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RolandMT32@reddit

Interesting.. I thought I had heard that when Microsoft left the OS/2 project, IBM allowed Microsoft to take a copy of the current OS/2 source code at the time, and I thought I'd heard Microsoft continued to develop that into Windows NT. And I also thought that's why the earlier versions of the OS/2 GUI looked so similar to Windows 3.1 (and that Microsoft probably had kept that look & feel for the first versions of Windows NT).

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mikegalos@reddit

Opposite. When the divorce happened, Microsoft had the rights to OS/2 1 and 2 along with Windows. IBM got the rights to OS/2 1, 2 and the exi8work on 3 and a source code license for DOS through 6 and Windows through 3.x which they used to give Warp Windows compatibility.

NT OS was a separate project that Microsoft planned to pitch for a later OS/2 but that had not been agreed to at the time of the split. NT OS was developed in-house at Microsoft by a team headed up by Dave Cutler and his DEC West team (down the street from Microsoft) who quit DEC when DEC management killed the Prism project for an OS to replace VMS.

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cryptogege@reddit

So what happened that, MS and IBM worked together on the 16bits OS/2 1, which was not a great success. Then they started to work on OS/2 2, which would be the first 32bits version. But the difference in culture made things difficult, and at some point they decided that IBM would finish OS/2 2, while Microsoft would work on OS/2 3. It was initially called OS/2 NT, it was a pretty ambitious project, a portable OS across multiple CPU platforms, with multiple personalities, it could run DOS/Windows, OS/2 binaries. But then Windows 3 happened, and Microsoft decided that fuck OS/2, the new OS would have Windows as its main personality (but would still run 16bits OS/2 binaries), and they just adopted the Windows UI of the time

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mikegalos@reddit

No. Windows NT was a brand new state of the art operating system not in any way based on OS|2. In fact, it ran the APIs for Windows, OS|2 and POSIX above the core operating system.

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Cybrknight@reddit

It was nice, but still lagged behind AmigaOS at the time. Especially for multitasking.

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mikegalos@reddit

But could run on lots of vendors' hardware unlike Amiga and Macintosh.

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mikegalos@reddit

The first time we included a video file in a Microsoft University course.

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IrieBro@reddit

OS/2 version 2.0 was released in the same month. OS/2 was an order of maginitude better than anything from m$. My first sip of mickey$oft haterade.

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SuperLeroy@reddit

Same. OS/2 2.1 with essentially a better windows 3.1 was the best choice for 1993

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CoCo3Papa@reddit

Still running it! (well, under DosBox-X)

I'll never update!

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brianswedehanson@reddit

And I was 39 . Shit I’m old. Think I still had my first computer then, generic 286.

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sidusnare@reddit

It's been downhill ever since

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NotAnAlreadyTakenID@reddit

3.11 was so much better.

It seemed like every other version was awful.

3.11 good ‘95 bad ‘98 good 2000/ME bad XP good Vista bad 8 good

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fondow@reddit

The changes between 3.1 and 3.11 were minors. And the bad/good cycle every other release didn't start until later. It would be more like: 1.x bad, 2.x bad, 3.0 not bad, 3.1x better, win95 (especially osr2.x) good, win98fe bad, win98se good, winme bad, Xp good, Vista bad, 7 good, 8 bad, 8.1 better, 10 bad, 11 very bad.

And on the nt branch, it could be something like nt3.1 mostly bad, nt3.51 not bad, nt4 good, 2000 good

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NotAnAlreadyTakenID@reddit

My memory is imperfect, so I deserve some grief for my ratings, but thanks for confirming my memory of oscillating quality across editions.

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Firov@reddit

What?! 2000 was one of the best operating systems Microsoft ever made. Absolutely rock solid and extremely fast. The only minor issue it has was the potential for compatibility issues because it was based on the NT kernel.

I stuck with 2000 until XP 64-bit released.

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MousseHuge8339@reddit

It wouldn't surprise me at all if there are still a lot of ATMs and other non consumer systems still running 2000. Not sure if this should be seen as a good thing or a bad thing. I hope they are getting security support from somewhere.

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AfterDark3@reddit

2000 and ME aren’t even the same operating system. ME is a 9x based OS with a DOS based command structure whereas 2000 is an NT based OS that is more similar to XP.

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ojokenobi@reddit

Where did 7 go?

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JRMC2002@reddit

La Mejor interfaz mucho más práctica queblasnactularez y más sencillla

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fuzzy-panics@reddit

Ahh memories. The first computer that I used, and played games on had Win 3.11 on it, as well as MS-DOS. Double clicking to close a windows on the top right side was supported all the way until win 7. Love that throwback.

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Scoth42@reddit

There's still some windows even on 11 you can close by double clicking the upper left, but it's mostly legacy programs and a few old leftovers that still have the legacy titlebars rather than the fancy integrated/minimalist one

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FPVGiggles@reddit

Plz someone cross post to theydidthemath sub

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Consistent_Cat7541@reddit

34 years ago, Mac users (and frankly everyone else, asked "how do I close the windows?"

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bleeeer@reddit

Love the Spanish names!

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O_MORES@reddit

I think you might want to watch this video: where Windows 3.1 (Spanish edition) gets installed on a Ryzen 9 on bare metal, from actual floppies.

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PiratesOfTheArctic@reddit

I loved that dos icon, still do come to think about it, quite funky

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Admirable_Cry_3795@reddit

Also included (at least the one I got did) an introductory version of Visio.

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digwhoami@reddit

...and dog shit sotfware was made into the mainstream.

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AfternoonPenalty@reddit

I still have a boxed version of Windows 3,0 in my shed, but thanks for making me feel old :D

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gmezrns@reddit

Es increible como ha avanzado la tecnología en estos 34 años, más aún teniendo en cuenta los avances en AI de los últimos años. Aun así, es imposible el poder explicar lo que esas máquinas tan "sencillas" despertaban en nosotros. Yo era un niño que a penas alcanzaba al teclado del ordenador de su hermanos con esas primeras versiones de Windows y nunca he sabido por qué motivo aquél aparato llamaba tan poderosamente mi atención.