Windows 3

[hotmailcompany52]

Well, before the forums had The Great April Derp, I was cleaning out my grandad's flat and i found Microsoft 3, all 7 floppys of it! So I took them home. What shall i do with them?

Edited April 22, 2013 by hotmailcompany52

[ComandoCro]

Well, try it out!Might be fun to go back in time and see again how it was back then.

[swiftgates24]

You should...sell it!

[hotmailcompany52]

Well, try it out!Might be fun to go back in time and see again how it was back then.

So, floppys, eh, they go into the disc drive.

You should...sell it!

I think first im gonna copy them all of them onto discs.

[ROFLCopter64bit]

I once put windows 3 on my Nokia N95, which effectively made it a computer.

EDIT: I still have a computer with a floppy drive.

[hotmailcompany52]

I once put windows 3 on my Nokia N95, which effectively made it a computer.

EDIT: I still have a computer with a floppy drive.

Wow, early smarphone! Also, you still have a floppy drive.

[Randox]

This is bringing back fond memories. The oldest OS I can remember used was like Win 4.2 I think. I remember it as my friends upstairs computer, where windows was pretty much the My Computer window. Just a little windows you could drag around the screen with icons in it. Their downstairs computer at the time was Win 95.

I also remember our family computer from when I was like 4, which might have very well been DOS. Sometime I'll ask my brother or parents what it was running, since I never used that one. All I can remember is watching my brother play some racing game in what must have been 8 bit graphics, and that the computer had a slot to accept a 5.25 inch floppy drive.

We don't have that one anymore so far as I know, but we still have the Win 98 computer that eventually followed, complete with floppy and zip drives, as well as a cd burner which I'm pretty sure went up to 8x speed. There is also a TS1000 from 1982 knocking around, though I have yet to learn basic, and I'm a fan of not erasing my work (it's long term storage is hooking it up to a tape recorder).

I find there is something more satisfying about using floppy disks, and to some extend SD cards or CD's. I don't know if it's just because of what I grew up with, or what, but there is something less satisfying about just plugging in a memory stick. I think there is something more real about them, but maybe as I said, it's just childhood memories.

Edited April 22, 2013 by Randox

[Devo]

Well, before the forums had The Great April Derp, I was cleaning out my grandad's flat and i found Microsoft 3, all 7 floppys of it! So I took them home. What shall i do with them?

New coffee coasters?

[ThatBum]

Oh man, Windows 3. Holy crap. When I was a kid, we had a 486 machine from 1988. It had 640k of memory, a 10MB hard disk with an extremely loud stepper motor, a dotmatrix printer, two MIDI joysticks, and a 5.25" floppy drive. God, that thing is awesome.

You should put it on a virtual machine.

[LiquidKameleon]

I still have a floppy drive in my PC. I mean, I could have taken it out when I did the last upgrade, but that would leave me with an ugly hole in the front of the case. And while it's there, it might as well be plugged in and working. I even used it a couple of times

[ThatBum]

I used to have an external SCSI floppy drive, so I could transfer data between my main machine and an HP Omnibook from 1995. It was the only portable computer I had for ages.

[Nibb31]

Windows 3.1 was the first useable and successful version of Windows (there was no such thing as Windows 4, after 3.11 came Windows 95). Before that, it was MS-DOS or proprietary stuff like Amiga or Atari at home.

Windows 3.11 was the first version of Windows that could access the Internet, but had to get Winsock.dll on a separate floppy to do it.

I remember the great joy of installing Windows 95 that came on 25 floppy disks. IInvariably, you would get a Abort-Retry-Cancel error on the 24th disk.

Edited April 22, 2013 by Nibb31

[Grove]

Windows NT 4.0 is a preemptive, graphical and business-oriented operating system designed to work with either uniprocessor or symmetric multi-processor computers. It was part of Microsoft's Windows NT line of operating systems and was released to manufacturing on 31 July 1996.[4] It is a 32-bit Windows system available in both workstation and server editions with a graphical environment similar to that of Windows 95.

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[Flymetothemun]

I'd transfer them onto a computer, then i'd make one of these.

[ROFLCopter64bit]

See if you can make a dual-boot. If you can, I would like to see how it reacts to immense amounts of ram and storage (you know, 1gb, thats like, too big to imagine!) Or if you can't, do a virtual one and reserve 5 gb for it.

[hotmailcompany52]

So, how shall i go about copying the files on to a computer and how shall i go about installing windows 3 to a bootcamp partition?

Edit: sounds like an awesome

idea ROFL!

Edited April 22, 2013 by hotmailcompany52

[The Destroyer]

Windows 3? Huh?

*Googles*

MY GOD.

[ROFLCopter64bit]

And what, Ubuntu takes 10 seconds?

EDIT: Can you believe an average computer 10 years ago cost $3000 but a very high end one now costs $1000.

Edited April 22, 2013 by ROFLCopter64bit

[Nibb31]

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I really don't remember anyone in the industry referring to Windows NT as Windows 4. It might have been labelled internally as 4.x, but for almost everyone, it was Windows NT, and it actually came after Windows 95.

I also had the extreme displeasure of owning Windows Me, which was probably the worst version of Windows ever.

[ROFLCopter64bit]

I also had the extreme displeasure of owning Windows Me, which was probably the worst version of Windows ever.

Nuh-uh, Windows 7 when it was first released. I hated it. But now how I know how to make it look like Vista, I don't really care anymore. It feels like a SP9001 for vista.

[Crush]

Here is an interesting video. Someone updating from every single version of windows, from 1 to 7. Surprisingly, it worked:

[Grove]

I really don't remember anyone in the industry referring to Windows NT as Windows 4. It might have been labelled internally as 4.x, but for almost everyone, it was Windows NT, and it actually came after Windows 95.

I also had the extreme displeasure of owning Windows Me, which was probably the worst version of Windows ever.

Yeah, I just looked at Wikipedia and it said that, I remember Windows 98 which was cool, never used Windows Me and/or Windows 2000 so for me Windows Vista is the worst of them all.

[Crush]

In my opinion:

The worst Windows version from a technical standpoint was Windows ME.

The worst Windows version from an UI standpoint is Windows 8.

[Grove]

I don't like Win8 from what I've seen, Touchscreen orientation for PC's is bad.

[Foamy]

Touch-screen orientation for PCs has amazing potential, but it's also incredibly difficult. A single operating system from your phone to your desktop is inevitable but that's like the biggest interface change since the GUI was invented.

No one has any experience doing something like that at all, it would be borderline impossible for MS to be able to do it perfectly first time. Just look at how long it took everyone to get mouse/keyboard based interfaces pleasant to use.

I absolutely agree MS made some mistakes with win 8 (forcing boot to start screen) but a lot is suggesting those types of mistakes are being resolved for 8.1 (free and out around a year after win 8 release). So what we're seeing is MS attempting something really new and challenging and then being hammered for not doing it perfectly first try when literally no one else has managed that even with more limited changes.

So, if you look at this with hindsight then what does MS's plan look like? Well, they wanted to make massive changes that they knew they couldn't get right the first time, so they did their best and put out a version designed to test as many of their ideas as they could and greatly reduced its price over their usual offerings. Next, they changed to a yearly release cycle and started hammering out massive improvements using what they learned to create what is essentially win 8.5 in less than half the time a normal release would take, they also decided to offer this for free to Win8 users. This is all at the same time as porting like 95% of the windows code to arm, optimising it for that, then porting all of that to be used on phones.

It's not gone completely smoothly but there's very little precedent to this sort of company wide paradigm shift so overall I'd say they did about as well as could reasonably be expected. My opinion from before Win8 was announced that it is impossible to judge MS on their new plan until at least Windows 9, with the new release schedule that puts us at the end of 2015.