The End of an Era: Windows 3.x
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 5th Nov 2008 16:12 UTC, submitted by Michael
Windows I collect manuals. I have so many of them, that I'm starting to wonder where on earth I'm supposed to put them all. Somewhere in the back of a closet, I keep all my manuals in three huge boxes, with manuals dating from the early '80s to just a few days ago when I bought a new mouse. However, none of them are as dear to my as my extensive, fully illustrated Dutch manuals for Windows 3.0, which accompanied my parents' first PC in 1990. An enormously detailed manual covering every aspect of Windows 3.0 - with special sleeves for the various floppy disks that held the Windows 3.0 operating system. I still have those original floppies, and they're still fully functional. Last week, the era of Windows 3.x finally came to an end when Microsoft ceased to give out licenses for the operating system.
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Booting
by REM2000 on Thu 6th Nov 2008 09:00 UTC
REM2000
Member since:
2006-07-25

The only thing i really miss about Win 3.x was the boot speed, getting to the desktop only used to take a few seconds on older technology.

I remember doing OLE between Word and Excel on a 3.1 machine with 4 or 8MB RAM and had to wait literally 30 mins for it to complete.

Windows 3.1 was ok, however i tended to only use it now and again for work purposes, a lot of the time i remained in DOS. The real revolution came with Windows 95, i remember having a dos box open most of the time as i wasn't used to doing file operations through a GUI.

Reply Score: 2

RE: Booting
by Doc Pain on Thu 6th Nov 2008 17:34 in reply to "Booting"
Doc Pain Member since:
2006-10-08

The only thing i really miss about Win 3.x was the boot speed, getting to the desktop only used to take a few seconds on older technology.


As I usually say: The averge usage speed of software stays the same over the years. The better the hardware gets, the more ressources are required by the software. In the end, you end up with the same feelings about speed. It's a quotient where nominator and denumerator constantly increase, the result stays constant.

But you're right. Booting into something that simple like DOS snd then launching "Windows" didn't take much time, even when run on a 386 system. The applications of those days weren't that big, too (e. g. WinWord 1.1a fitted could be run from one 1,44 MB disk), so launching them was no problem. This changed when MICROS~1 introduced their "Office" suites.

I remember doing OLE between Word and Excel on a 3.1 machine with 4 or 8MB RAM and had to wait literally 30 mins for it to complete.


You didn't try GeoWorks? :-)

Reply Parent Score: 3