Oh come on, it was only launched 15 years ago. I've had cars older than that.

Still, it's a wonderful indication of how crap can succeed in a marketplace where it adds next to nowt, except a limited ability to run 2 things at once.

I actually have an installation of 3.11 still on a hard disk. It's fun to try it on new PC-hardware and see how amazingly fast it is compared to Vista/XP/NT etc.

A couple of weeks ago I wanted easy access to a sub-sub-directory of a network disk. I could vaguely remember that there was a command in DOS 2.0 (the first version with directories) which allowed old DOS 1.0 programs (which just knew about c:, d: etc) to use those directories. Surely, I thought, it wouldn't still be there 25 years later. I was wrong; the "subst" command is *still* in Windows XP! Am I the first person to use it in all those years?

"imagine what it would be like running windows 3.11 on todays dual core machines"

If you carefully choose your mobo chipset (maybe Intel?) and video card (Matrox) then it will probably work fine, within the limitations of device drivers. Remember, most of us are forced to upgrade OS due to lack of device drivers, rather than any particular desire to fill our new HD with bloated plodware.

Isnt it odd, the Concept of an OS that does what an OS should, Run programs and organise files at a decent pace, fitting into such a small space.

Makes me wonder where we went wrong.

I just realized that I still liked MS & Windows when 3.1 and 3.11 were around! It was only after those versions that I switched to Linux.

I've wished for a long long time for the return or at least the option to use the old Windows 3.1 menu system. It's MUCH quicker than XP or Vista and very logical. You could group all your desktop shortcuts into sensible windows and they wouldn't get blown to bits if you changed screen resolution.

... but astonishingly no one's mentioned BBC Basic yet. Back in the 80's that was the dogs nuts.

Mouse drivers! How could anyone forget mouse drivers..

I might still have a machine with it on somewhere in the loft, I've got some old 386 and 486 machines lurking up there. Most will boot to DRDOS if they still work, but it's possible that there's still a Windows shell. For comparison, there's even still a BBC B Micro and an Archimedes up there.

As for OS/2 Warp, I'm afraid I still have that running on a machine. It's my home mailserver and I have yet to port the custom and highly tuned spam filter program (that still occasionally rejects mail from Reg Hacks) to Linux and hook it into Sendmail or Postfix.

What was wrong with the Commodore PET 64k ram and you had to write all your own software.........

That was computing!

"I still have to deal with Windows 3.1 as we have a couple of CNC machines at my place of work that run on OS/2 Warp."

Pah. I remember seeing a CNC machine running off a Dragon/32 with a hole cut into the top of it to get some signals or other out of it.

You're making me feel old. Real old. Like I should have turned to oil, or something.

I have one hint: "CP/M-80 v 2.2"

//Svein

Windows 3.11 wasn't an OS. It was some flakey collection of graphics libraries and utilities. DOS was the operating system. (7.0 if you took a Win95 machine, ripped out the windows directory, turned off bootlogo, and then installed 3.11. :) )

Some basic math software we had in college ran on Windows 1.0. That version didn't even have any pretenses of being an OS -- it was strictly a "graphic" UI framework. I use quotes because it ran at the super high-resolution 640x400 (monochrome) or the low-res 320x200 with 4 stunning colors.

We were able to program a big 4GL application which ran on PC's or UNIX boxes, run serveral unix terminal sessions, and run remote sessions on other PC's over phone lines for support.

You could snapshot all the .ini files so you could exactly see what installing a program did - and roll back if needed.

It was stable. Basic machines which only needed DOS could be set up quickly.

We could send out replacement PC's - get the users to plug them into a phone line and connect a parallel cable to their problem PC. Then we'd transfer the data and get them up and running no problem - and do all this remotely.

Users could have their machine boot straight into their 4GL application easily - or for other stuff normal users also liked dosshell.

But most important of all - I could copy my entire hard disk to a server or spare HDD - and then when i came back from holiday and found my boss had trashed my machine I could restore it by format c: /s and then copy the files back. And I did this a few times.

Then we had win95 which I avoided at first but then thought I'd try.

Unix apps stopped working, the registry (nuff said), random crashes, now we had to reinstall every freakin time as restoring from backup was impossible, Users didn't like it - they were bakers and just wanted their 4GL app, bloat, more ram needed. Everybody seemed to spend everyday from then on constantly reinstalling the pile of crap. Our system builder said that on identical hardware the install would be different every time.

Fonts did look better though!

Made me laugh when Bill G described win95 as a highlight.

I still have my original disks and run it in dosbox for old games that just won't run anywhere else.

And the WIN 3.11 community is alive and well! http://oldfiles.org.uk/

What? You never heard of lagging edge geeks? We use the old stuff because it's FUN!

(And guess what? We can run DVDs, USB, and any other new tech on it, just because people tell us it ain't possible!)

I'm 28 and have used Win 3.11 as recently as 2000. I had changed jobs from a company using NT4 and felt pretty dirty. Thankfully I moved to a new project and got some newer kit shortly after that.

I have a functioning Trash-80 CoCo at home sitting next to my Odyssey 2. I was the only 6 year old anybody knew back then who could use BASIC.

I'm gone man, solid gone... <cue music>

Well, I say use: I mucked about with it while staying with the Agèd Parents over the holidays, and only because it was pissing down with rain outside. Dreadful stuff, went straight back to Motorola-based computers, with occasional forays into DOS if unavoidable.

My god, I have just remembered how I set that old 486 of mine to boot.

Mod'd Autoexec that gave a menu of either Doom, Doom II, Heretic, DOSShell or WfW3.11

God, those were good times :-) DOSShell pwns Win 3.11 for ease of use and speed.

Steven R

PS: I turned 26 last weekend and now feel very, very old!

I once used Windows 3.11 long time ago. Even longer ago, I used Windows 1.02. But that was back in the 8080 and 8088 days. No internet back then.

Couldn't understand the fuss about "for Workgroups" when we already had a proper Netware 3 network. Yes, the NDS in 4 & 5 is brilliant for management, but the speed never seemed as good as 3.12.

We're still using DOS 6.2 on one quite important machine - it works, so leave it alone.

Tandy TRS-80. ZX-80/81. VIC-20. Commodore 64.

Win 3.11 were bloody luxury. We used to have to go 14 miles through snow carrying the family and hopping, because we could only afford one boot, and the nearest source of spares were 3 light-years away. It took so long to get the memory right we used to have to wake up 4 hours before we went to bed. Aye, but we were 'appy. Tell youngsters that today and they won't believe you.

Windows 1.0 was a command shell for MSDOS.

Windows For Workgroups was a memory manager, file system, network system, and video system. It ran the memory in 80386 mode. The idea it ran 'on top of MSDOS' is true only in the sense that Linux is 'really only ROM BIOS with a few command shell files', ie not true at all.

There was continuous development of the MS OS from DOS 1.0 to Windows 98 ME, when it was killed and replaced. WFWG was part of that, but, it wasn't Win 3.1, it wasn't DOS and it wasn't a command shell.

People who think that even the original version of WFWG was 'not an OS' either never looked at it, or wouldn't know an OS if they tripped over one.

"Can any of you claim truthfully to have even seen Windows Version 1?"

Yup, at school. It wasn't text mode, although the MS-DOS executive shell was rather text-heavy. There weren't any apps installed with it though, as we were using Windows 3.0 on the 486s and Windows 2.something on the 186s (and I remember well the chunky hourglass cursor that Windows 2 used!) I suspect the teacher just found an old 186 box and installed Windows 1.0 on it to humour me.

Better than that, as a leaving present I was given the (RM branded) Windows 1.0 manual, a ring-bound tome of several hundred pages (including a dozen or more on the painting program, together with pages of mono sample pictures!)

NB - those RM Nimbus 186s were a real PITA. They wouldn't run Lemmings, even though it ran well enough on an XT. Turns out you needed a special program to make them PC-compatibile, but damned if I knew that at the time!

The 486s we had played a mean game of serial-cable deathmatch Doom though, providing you booted them from a floppy!

I've used it. I don't see much difference between it and contemporary Windows except the modern stuff is, well, just HUGE. It all went downhill when MSFT discovered C++ (and what they thought were objects) if you ask me; they never quite got the idea so they now do 'cosmic scale spaghetti'.

One thing about the millenium bug. I've got a very old XT clone from about 1984 or 5 in the attic. Jan 1, 2000, I was up there with a box of floppies with every version of MS-DOS and PC-DOS from about 2.1 onwards booting them up. Everyone got the date right. Of course I knew this was going to happen because of how the date's held (won't have a problem for another ten years or so) but it was nice to prove it. But then that's what comes from listening to journalists and authoritative sources.

Our POS system couldn't run its back end software on anything but DOS. We had an AMD K6-3+ @450 Mhz w/ a whopping 256 MB RAM running LanTastic 8.0. Also had DR-DOS 8 for a little while.

Worked great.