How was windows 3.1 back in the day?

[jackschmittusa]

I loved Win 3.1; TT fonts, finally saw WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) apps, etc. Still did file managment in DosShell (DOS 5). Had tons of utilities: IconHearIt, Norton, memory management (hated games that needed expanded memory), stand alone spell checker, multi-media encyclopedia, etc.. The day I got WFW 3.1, set up my home network (NICs were $100 then). I had an amazing machine by then: 486DX-2/66, 16mb ram (first ram I bought was $50/mb), CD rom($400), Thunderboard 8bit sound card, speakers, 14" SVGA monitor (had to add video ram to my mb).

Those were exciting days for me. It seemed that something new in hardware or software came out every week. I think I subscribed to as many as 8 computer mags at one time to keep up with it all. Compuserve and BBSs were the links to the outside world. Fun times for sure.

 

[PingSpike]

I thought 3.11 was crap. I only ran it to load a web browser...it was to god damn slow on the hardware of the time. And of course, all your games ran in dos anyway since they needed every cpu cycle and byte of ram they could get back in those days. Hell, I think the vast majority of my games during 95s reign were still dos apps...but at least that crash hog moved fast enough I could actually do some work on it.

 

[Deinonych]

Originally posted by: Wolfshanze
I personally hated Win3.1... I thought it was a sluggish, resource-hungry hog. As long as Win3.1 existed, DOS was the king of the OS's... that's how bad Win3.1 was.

Games were also about 99% DOS during the entire existance of Win3.1... if you wanted to game, you used DOS, and you avoided Win3.1 all-together. While it may have been "simpler" then DOS, there was little you could do in Win3.1. DOS was really the meat and bones OS of choice... for that matter, Win3.1 was nothing but a resource-hungry graphical shell for DOS.

My experience with Win3.1 was so bad, I wanted nothing to do with Win95 when it came out. Not until the market moved-on to Win95 did I finally give up on DOS. Of course, Win95 was such a damn beta-OS itself, that I was the FIRST in-line to upgrade to Win98... because Win95 felt like such a beta-test.

Nonetheless, I have no fond memories of Win3.1 at all... my memory of OS useage goes from various versions of DOS, to Win95, Win98, WinME and WinXP... I don't even think of Win3.1 as something I used (though I did have it).

Totally agree...DOS was king until Win95 came about. I never ran Win3.1 IIRC - the only Win 3.x version I ran was WfW 3.11, and that was only for basic file and print apps. Everything else (i.e games), I ran in DOS.

 

[Deinonych]

Originally posted by: jackschmittusa
Those were exciting days for me. It seemed that something new in hardware or software came out every week. I think I subscribed to as many as 8 computer mags at one time to keep up with it all. Compuserve and BBSs were the links to the outside world. Fun times for sure.

Yeah, those were the days. I remember spending countless hours on CServe and BBSs as well.

 

[sprockkets]

Those were different days. I never had to reinstall that OS, and the apps never froze. But getting things to work right sometimes was a pain. If you had a 66mhz 8MB ram computer it ran very fast.

Then everyone tolerated Win95 with its stupid way of working things with a registry and it locking up all the time. Macs were better all the time, but never took off for reasons on another thread.

It was nice, and during that time viruses were rare and spyware was not around and neither was anything else due to the internet being in its infancy.

 

[groovin]

Nowadays, of course, only Linux people do that .

since Monad/winsh/mssh whatever theyre calling it now is supposed to come out sometime around Vista server, windows admins might start joining the linux guys in using the command line... as to how much remains to be seen. but even balmer commented that it would be great if MS can make a better unix than linux.

 

[Link19]

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.

Are you serious? I used to think the same thing. Windows NtT I think was based on VMS?

 

[scottws]

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?

Windows 3.1 was pretty, but garbage. All I used it for was Microsoft Works it seemed. I don't think a single game ran on my PC with Windows 3.1. It seemed I had a boot disk for every game. I even learned BASIC so that I could use one disk and have a menu to select the specific game I need the autoexec.bat and config.sys configuration for.

I think the only reason I still booted into Windows at the time was because my dad would have been angry if I made the PC boot into DOS.

Windows 95 was an absolutely HUGE step. It seems primitive by today's standards with no USB support and things like that. But Plug 'n Play, which I think debuted with 95 was a godsend. No more IRQ conflicts to mess around with. Support for more than 8.3 filenames. It was just better in every conceivable way than Windows 3.1.

 

[scottws]

Originally posted by: Soviet
Also having to type "WIN" to make it work as the comp would dump me at the DOS prompt after startup.

I think by default, the autoexec.bat file contained "win /3," which would automatically run the command and take you to the Windows shell. It sounds like that was taken out of your autoexec.bat.

 

[jhu]

Originally posted by: 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.

yes, and system 7-9 were also pos until os x came out.

 

[KeepItRed]

I remember my Windows 3.1 was amazing. Bug-free, and ran Micro-man very nicely!

 

[Markbnj]

Windows NtT I think was based on VMS?

I don't think it was based on VMS, but Dave Cutler, the guy who designed VMS, designed NT for Microsoft, so you can assume plenty of concepts made it in.

 

[gsellis]

Originally posted by: Link19

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.

Are you serious? I used to think the same thing. Windows NtT I think was based on VMS?

Mark answered it. Based on OS/2 and was going to be OS/2 V3 (MS and IBM were going to swap who do major releases until the split after 1.3 was released.) And yep, Dave Cutler came from VMS land and did the architecture. Dave Cutler also raced in the Pro Formula Atlantic series and I bet that there were some MS execs that sweated a bit on the weekends because of it.

 

[drag]

proof:

Windows NT=
WNT
VMS

abcdefghijklmNMopqrSTuVWxyz

They even kept the same name, just moved it -1 on the alphabet.

 

[Noema]

I have fond memories of Win 3.1, but those memories are a bit biased because they are tainted by nostalgia.

My first PC ever came with Win 3.1 installed. It was an outdated box even for its day (circa 1991 - 386 33MHz 2 MBs of Ram and a 40MB hard drive...heh...I have pr0n clips in my current box that wouldn't even fit in that HDD ) and Windows ran slow as molasses in it.

I didn't have much of a clue as to what Win 3.1 was at first. I was just learning how DOS worked because I wanted to play games.

When I realized it was like this shell where you could run Windows applications like Write or Paintbrush I started using it a lot. Specially Paintbrush. I remember liking Windows so much I wondered if I could do away without using DOS...I changed the Autoexec.bat so my PC would boot straight to Windows, and even tried to run DOS games in it (of course they didn't). I remember getting my first SoundBlaster 16 and spending hours upon hours goofing around the Media Recorder...recording funny voices and playing them backwards, running around the house with a Mic and a long cable and recording everything and then speeding it up, plugging my stereo to the PC and recording songs. Once I tried to use a clip from a song as the opening sound in windows...it made Windows take about 15 minutes to boot! Recording a full song at lowest quality would fill half of my puny 40MB HDD. Since there was no internet back then (at least, no internet for most regular people) I'd draw my own wallpapers in Paint. Later I got a hand held scanner (32 shades of gray!!) with which I'd scan comic books and then colour them in Paintbrush, to use them as Wallpapers.

For this reason, when I first read about Win95, which would supposedly be a full fledged OS and not just a shell, I was very exited. I got a 486 just to run Win95, and obtained some pirated floppies from a late Beta (probably a late release candidate, because I had it for ages and wasn't buggier than retail). Of course it ran like crap and crashed every 10 minutes, but heck, it was an OS with a GUI!!!

 

[theMan]

i mostly stuck with DOS, mostly i just played games on the computer, since there wasnt really any internet. i was able to play doom and doom2 on lan with my brother's friends though. 3.1 was my first windows OS, but i just really didnt use windows until 95. i was only like 4 or 5 then.

 

[Poobah]

Now, you guys are making me all nostolgic. I remember running OS/2 Warp, which ran Windows 3.1 applications better than Windows for real did.

An insane mastery of config.sys/autoexec.bat tweaking for those silly DOS games

ArcNet cards and thin coax networking with Lantastic

A speedy 486/25 with 8 megs o ram, 40 meg hd and a 2 meg Tseng Labs ET4000/w32p local bus video card. Mmmmm MMM!

 

[gsellis]

Originally posted by: Poobah
Now, you guys are making me all nostolgic. I remember running OS/2 Warp, which ran Windows 3.1 applications better than Windows for real did.

An insane mastery of config.sys/autoexec.bat tweaking for those silly DOS games

ArcNet cards and thin coax networking with Lantastic

A speedy 486/25 with 8 megs o ram, 40 meg hd and a 2 meg Tseng Labs ET4000/w32p local bus video card. Mmmmm MMM!

Originally posted by: Poobah
Now, you guys are making me all nostolgic. I remember running OS/2 Warp, which ran Windows 3.1 applications better than Windows for real did.

An insane mastery of config.sys/autoexec.bat tweaking for those silly DOS games

ArcNet cards and thin coax networking with Lantastic

A speedy 486/25 with 8 megs o ram, 40 meg hd and a 2 meg Tseng Labs ET4000/w32p local bus video card. Mmmmm MMM!

In one of the most twisted things you can do, I ported a Windows 16bit terminal emulator to OS/2 2.x and ran a Windows app from it. But parts of the emulator (a key editor for changing recorded keystrokes) did not get my attention (too much other stuff to do). So, if you open the key editor, it launched the Win16 version in a DOS/Win session. Hey, I still have my "Been there, Done that" shirt with a skyline of Chicago on it.

 

[northern]

Control Alt Delete.................


Remember how fast it booted up?


386SX 33
4 megs of 30 pinn simms
48 meg Hard Drive
Sounblaster Soundcard with a 4x Cd-rom (Needed a degree to get that going most of the time)


Payed $145 Shipped for an 80 meg Hard drive from Fleebay.............lmao, i thought i was bomb, compressed that drive in a less than 6 hrs...................lol


Windows 3.1 was hated by me and everyone on my block......

 

[theprodigalrebel]

I remember the first time I returned home from School and saw Windows 3.1 running on the computer...I remember looking at the Microsoft Office toolbar at the top of the screen and spending the whole of that night playing around with Power Point....

One week later, my monitor started smoking fumes so I had to wait a week before my Dad bought a new one....that's what I remember best about Windows 3.1! The Week my monitor literally started smoking after a high-decibel "pffzzzt" sound that had me fly backwards from my chair! LMAO! However, I won't blame Microsoft for that...just Acer!

 

[northern]

Originally posted by: theprodigalrebel
I remember the first time I returned home from School and saw Windows 3.1 running on the computer...I remember looking at the Microsoft Office toolbar at the top of the screen and spending the whole of that night playing around with Power Point....

One week later, my monitor started smoking fumes so I had to wait a week before my Dad bought a new one....that's what I remember best about Windows 3.1! The Week my monitor literally started smoking after a high-decibel "pffzzzt" sound that had me fly backwards from my chair! LMAO! However, I won't blame Microsoft for that...just Acer!

My big upgrade was to an ACER Computer.................lol

Blazing Pentium 1 133 and it had a cool phone mounted on the side of the monitor aswell, were talking a cool $3200.00 upgrade i had payments of $160 per month or there abouts for that bad boy, widows 95 ............damd those were the days.


ACER GUI..............lol

 

[Woodie]

It sucked. I recall having to install WordPerfect 5.1 (for DOS) because Win3.1/3.11 was so bad.

 

[russell2002]

If their was a windows 3.1.

Was their a Windows 1 !

 

[gsellis]

Originally posted by: russell2002
If their was a windows 3.1.

Was their a Windows 1 !

Yes, but I never saw it. I have seen a copy of 2.0 and it really was just a pretty face on DOS, with some mem management. Never installed or messed with it. It was running in one of our areas for work for using PCs at travel agencies.

Version 3 was a big change.

 

[FrustratedUser]

Originally posted by: jhu

Originally posted by: 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.

yes, and system 7-9 were also pos until os x came out.

Not really. Going from MacOS 7.6 to Win 3.11 was a huge step backwards in terms of everyday use. It didn't get corrected until NT4 came out sometime in '96.
On the Mac you never ever had to fiddle with IRQ settings, ini files, config files, autoexec to make things work.
Just plug in the new hardware and you were done.
Just install the software and youy were done, no need for twaking or anything. OMG what a frikken nightmare 3.11 was. At least 10 years behind it's time. On top of that it was still 16bit. Mac OS was and had been true 32bit for a long time.