How was windows 3.1 back in the day?

[fr]

I hated how not customizeable the Program Manager was. Having only 8 character filenames was sort of a downer too.

 

[*kjm]

Originally posted by: Wolfshanze
I went from an Amiga 3000 with workbench as my OS to a DOS/Win3.1 PC... the OS interface was a definate backwards step... Amiga's WorkBench OS was far superior to Win3.1... it wasn't until Win95 that PCs got to a "modern" GUI.

Ditto for me. I went from workbench to Win 3.1 and saw how bad it was and moved to OS2.... man did IBM screw up! They had a better OS than Win98 way back then. IBM's thinking was there was no money in software.... the big money was in hardware

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: fr
I hated how not customizeable the Program Manager was. Having only 8 character filenames was sort of a downer too.

Of course hopefully you didn't use Program Manager and instead used Norton Desktop for Windows First product I developed for them.

 

[diapickle]

revolutionary

 

[spherrod]

Originally posted by: Soviet

Originally posted by: spherrod
I enjoyed using Windows 3.1 - although i did most stuff in DOS back then, I remember being amazed at high colour wallpapers and sounds though

Originally posted by: Wolfshanze
I personally hated Win3.1...

Mixed feelings about it then. I barely remember anything about the OS, there was a free game called "ball" where you played as a ball and it was a similar view to sonic 3D. Also having to type "WIN" to make it work as the comp would dump me at the DOS prompt after startup. As for functionality of the OS... i was also like 8, so i got no idea.

I get the genral idea it was decent enough, but people were better off sticking with DOS or w/e.

As a gamer DOS still ruled, but it was the beginning of a Microsoft interface which anyone could grasp and use. There were issues, but on the whole it was a very important step towards where we are now

 

[vegetation]

I too came from the Amiga scene and found win 3.1 a big POS in the day. However, the cheap but powerful hardware, combined with a bright future ahead for MS made me switch. Never regretted the day I built my first 486dx2-66 with win 3.1 installed. And never touched my Amiga 4000 after I sold it a few weeks later. I just simply enjoyed cheap hardware and plentiful software.

 

[talyn00]

Originally posted by: LouPoir
From dos 6.2 to windows 3.1 was an amazing change. What a difference. It was then downhill for Microsoft until WinXP.

IMHO

Lou

I seem to remember running Windows 3.1 over Dos 6.22

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: vegetation
I too came from the Amiga scene and found win 3.1 a big POS in the day. However, the cheap but powerful hardware, combined with a bright future ahead for MS made me switch. Never regretted the day I built my first 486dx2-66 with win 3.1 installed. And never touched my Amiga 4000 after I sold it a few weeks later. I just simply enjoyed cheap hardware and plentiful software.

Sounds similar to me (I had #37 I think it was of the first Amiga 1000 run)
Bill

 

[Wolfshanze]

I thought I was the only guy left on the planet who knows what an Amiga computer is/was. Yeah, I saw the writing on the wall software-wise, and prices were cheaper too in the PC-world, so I switched... I kept my Amiga 3000 for a while longer (I had sooo much software for my Amiga), but eventually it became a big dust collector compared to my super-hot 66MHz 486, that I traded it away for some sweet WWII collectors models.

Oh well... I've been building my own PCs ever since.

 

[SynthDude2001]

I liked it at the time...then again I was 8 years old in 1992 when it came out, and used it probably from the time I was 9-10 until I was 12-13 or so. So I couldn't really judge its technical merits all that well, but I used it a lot...windowed multitasking seemed like a big thing to me at the time. DOS was definitely still better for games until around Win95/Win98, but it was nice to have a usable GUI when you wanted to as well.

 

[Malak]

Originally posted by: SynthDude2001
I liked it at the time...then again I was 8 years old in 1992 when it came out, and used it probably from the time I was 9-10 until I was 12-13 or so. So I couldn't really judge its technical merits all that well, but I used it a lot...windowed multitasking seemed like a big thing to me at the time. DOS was definitely still better for games until around Win95/Win98, but it was nice to have a usable GUI when you wanted to as well.

Was still using DOS for games even with win9x.

 

[PC Freak]

I liked 3.11 and was scared to go to 95. When I ordered my laptop I wanted 3.11 but they told me I had to go with 95. So I did.

 

[RebateMonger]

I used Windows from 1.0 until present.
But, I always disliked using it until Windows 95 came out. It was pretty slow and couldn't multitask very well. Printing something would stop Windows dead until the printing was done.

I ran Windows 2.x to 3.0 under DESQView (a DOS-based multitasking quasi-OS). I'd flip over to Windows when I needed to run Excel or a Windows application. Otherwise, I worked in DOS windows, using WordPerfect or PCTools or whatever.

When Windows 3.1 came out, you had to run it in Protected Mode to get many features. This meant that DESQview wouldn't run on top of it any more. So sad.

 

[networkman]

Windows 3.1 had a major fix over Windows 3.0.

Try running Windows 3.0, drop into a DOS prompt, and then run CHKDSK/F

 

[FrustratedUser]

Originally posted by: Soviet
I remember having it, and i think it was the first GUI windows, was it any good? Or was it considered garbage like ME is garbage today?

Was there any big difference between 3.1 and 95?

3.1 / 3.11 was a huge POS. I came from System 7.6 on the Mac and I was paralyzed. Nothing worked.

 

[cker]

At the time it knocked my socks off, until I got my hands on a Mac. Not too much later I ended up doing PC and Mac support as my primary job. MacOS, had Appletalk which was pretty useful for Mac-only offices. 3.11 was a major pain to get reliably networked. For all its warts, though, I liked it because our main application was office apps - word processing and spreadsheets. Windows may WYSIWYG word processing much, much nicer. WordPerfect 6 for DOS, anyone?

File Manager was a nice file management shell, though. Or perhaps I'm just remembering it as cool, since it was the first one I got any time with.

 

[josh609]

I remember using Windows 3.1. It was great. I used to play a football game on it. (Anyone remember a football game that had no NFL license that worked on windows 3.1?) I also remember playing Carman Sandiego, and having to put in 10-15 different floppies to play it. Ahh, I miss those days.......in a way.........I also remember playing a game called Commander Keen. (Anyone else remember that?) I also remember Duke Nukem and Wolfestein 3d. Those were the days, 20MB HD 25MHz CPU, and a few K of ram............

 

[fr]

I remember those days! I had different boot disks that would give me max conventional memory or max XMS memory, or CD-ROM support for DOS games.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: fr
I remember those days! I had different boot disks that would give me max conventional memory or max XMS memory, or CD-ROM support for DOS games.

Yeah. It was amazing. I probably had ten boot disks, one for each game. I was a Config.sys wiz!

 

[TSS]

same here... me and my dad made boot disks for everything...

game wise, i only used windows for what i use flash now, simple golf games and one game of yathzee. hardly ever booted up wordpad, though the file explorer was a nice toutch. i had a monster pc back then, 486SX @ 25mhz, 4 mb ram and 700 megs worth o' disk space (actually, 200 on the first and later bought a 500 mb disk with it). i played on it from the time i was 3 till i got my P3 600mhz when i was 13 doom, wolvenstein, commander keen, duke nukem (couldnt get 3d to run though), command and conquer, one must fall 2097... played alot of great games. can tell me anything, but nothing these days can beat the games from the 486 era, gameplay wise .

funny thing though, i recently hooked it up again (still worked like a charm save for some CD-player cleaning needed) and i was browsin my C: drive, dos directory... came across a command called "dosshell" or something like that. and guess what? it was a file explorer! looked bloody alot like windows. only without paint and such, black & white GUI, but the same file explorer as windows had/still has.

 

[jjones]

I used the File Manager as the shell in 3.1 instead of the Program Manager; had done lots of tweaks too. I loved it at the time.

 

[joker790]

it was great for its time

Signature:
[spam link deleted]

 

[thujone]

the only 2 words i remember from back then...

segmentation fault.

and i also remember netscape 3 taking forEVER to load on a 386 lol

 

[pkme2]

If anybody remembered the 5-1/4" floppies days, then Windows 3.1 was a godsend. It made working with a computer enjoyable especially if one wasn't a keyboard person. Win 3.1 will always be my most favorite O/S.

 

[gsellis]

Originally posted by: bsobel

Originally posted by: Link19

Did you ever use OS/2? Or any of those so-called superior Unix variants? Windows dominated the market and still does for a reason. The core has nothing to do with it.

I did use OS/2. I thought it was great and so much better performance and more stable than Windows 95/98. Windows only dominated the market because Microsoft had the control that no one else had. They still do today for the same reason. Most people thought that any OS that didn't have the name Windows meant it wasn't the point and click interface and thus not easy to use. That is how Microsoft was able to gain the control so easily. At least now, we are using a decent OS based on NT. Windows NT was a fine and respectable OS. Windows 95/98/ME are not.

MS had no control prior to Win95. OS2 failed since Microsoft bent over backwards for developers and IBM tried to use developers as a source of income.

QFT from a member of Team OS/2 (and still remember the winning slogan (from Tim ? ?) for the NT rename contest of "Needs Transputer")
And FTR, MS and IBM owned OS/2. NT's code had parts of OS/2 in it and it showed in a hex editor.

3.11 was ok. It was full-on geek-tech to get multiple network adapters working. I had some app, that I cannot remember the name of, that I used to change win.ini and system.ini files on startup so that it would do ethernet, token-ring, no network, and wireless. Oh, was Win95 soooo much easier to do on that front. MS finally got Novell and their stuff to work right in 3.1 and 3.11 so that Black Screen of Death went away with IPX loading (the first, real source of BSOD, which is on record internally at MS as being coined by my current boss). Hey, it was a great platform for Solitare too!