We should be approaching the 25th anniversary of Windows. IIRC Windows 3.0 came out in 89 or 90. It didn’t perform very well and 3.1 is the version that really sold. Especially Windows for Workgroups which had Networking except for TCP/IP. Microsoft screwed up there and didn’t include it. Microsoft had their own networking protocols that no one liked. We installed TCP/IP on every pc at my job.
Remember creating PIF files to run DOS software in Win 3.0? There was a period when the DOS programs had no support for Windows. That quickly changed in Win 3.1 It came with pif files for the popular word processors, spreadsheets, databases etc.
Has Microsoft said anything about celebrating the 25th anniversary of Windows?
Firefox is celebrating their 10th anniversary right now. They’re pretending Netscape never happened.
:eek: I had no idea there ever was a release of Win 1 orWin 2. I certainly never saw it… I bought my first PC in 86 and it came with DOS 2.2. No mouse, no hard drive, and certainly no windows.
Win 3.0 is the one I first saw and it came out in 1990. My dept bought 5 Zenith 386’s with Win 3.0 preinstalled.
I played around a little with Windows 1 and 2, but this was well after Windows 3 came out. You are correct that Windows 3.1 is where things really took off. Not very many people used Windows before then. I used Windows 3.0 for a while and there wasn’t that much of a difference between 3.0 and 3.1 at least from a look and feel point of view. Windows 3.1 obviously had some added capabilities but I didn’t really need any of them at the time. Before Windows 3 I just used Dos. I didn’t have any need for Windows.
Windows 1 and 2 were more like Dos shells than real user interfaces.
Microsoft celebrated the Windows 25th anniversary back in 2000:
I remember pif files. I guess that makes me an old fart. I also remember NetBUI, as much as I would like to forget it.
ETA: I actually started out on punch cards, then went to the TRS-80, then Commodore computers, then PC. That Windows stuff was new-fangled tech.
I got a computer for high school graduation the summer of 1992 that came with Windows 3.0. It was an IBM PS/2 and it was originally configured to launch on boot into a very simple IBM program manager, of which, Windows 3.0 was an option. I “upgraded” from the PC DOS that it shipped with to DOS 6.22 down the way and that blew away the autoboot to the IBM program manager. All through school I used that computer with 3.0 but for most of my college years “Windows” meant 3.11 (Windows for Workgroups), which was the first Windows with built-in networking support.
Got to see/work with a beta version Windows “Chicago” (95) during a summer job while in school. Memorable moment!
I guess Microsoft just celebrates their company anniversary. I would have thought the launch of windows was worth making a fuss over too. Maybe even issue a 30th year anniversary edition of Windows.
I’m still surprised that Windows 3.11 succeeded. It was painfully slow on a 386. I recall we didn’t try to run Word Perfect or Lotus under windows. Just too slow. It was much less hassle running them under DOS. We only started windows when it was needed. Nearly all my programs then were DOS. I even had a DOS menu shell. My pc booted up with that Menu Shell that listed all the programs. I could arrow up and down to start up any program I wanted or exit out to the DOS prompt. I can recall asking friends,* why do we need windows*?
We sold a Windows database product. I guess it would have been mostly on WFW 3.11, but I don’t remember much before Win95.
It was slow and demanding and sometimes crashed. It would take more than an hour to run a critical end-of-month report.
It replaced spreadsheet based systems where people took all week to create a critical end-of-month report, where you started on your end-of month process 3 weeks before the end of month, where your end-of-month process only came around once every month because it took a month to do the calculations and presentation, report to the board of directors, then clean up, do any other odd jobs, and start over again.
Windows 3 was a graphical user interface, which people liked. But it was also a memory management system and a printer management system, which made it possible to create generic programs that didn’t have to have dedicated screen support for every new graphics card, and dedicated printer support for every new printer.
Our users paid for the GUI wordprocessor, and the GUI spreadsheet, and the GUI database system, and the GUI program manager. Those things didn’t make less work: like our system, they made it possible to do things that were not possible before.
Win 95 was the first one that was really functional, as far as I am concerned. And Win XP was the most functional of all. It’s been downhill since there.
No I don’t recall pif files. Probably just as well. I do remember unnumbered IBM-DOS. It was retronamed 1.0 when DOS 1.05 came out. The most functional implementation of DOS was 6.1 and then I went to Windows. Incidentally all the Windows before Win-2000 were just shells on DOS. Since then the underlying OS has been NT and the “command prompt” is just an imitation of DOS, but there is no DOS underneath.
