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Windows 3.1 is 30 Years Old

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John Thomas8
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Windows 3.1 is 30 Years Old

#1

Post by John Thomas8 »

https://www.howtogeek.com/795478/window ... ars-later/

With 3.1, Microsoft built on momentum gained with each previous Windows release. By fixing major bugs in 3.0 and adding attractive new features, previously nervous OEMs and individual customers came aboard. “3.1 was the green light for major adoption by end users and companies,” says Silverberg. “A ton of bugs were fixed, and 3.1 was much more stable and had better tools.”
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Re: Windows 3.1 is 30 Years Old

#2

Post by RTH10260 »

:daydreaming:

To think that to this day I occasionally use a programmmers text editor Kedit that was built for Win3.1 in character mode implementing the IBM mainframe Xedit editor functionality, then with the appearance of Win95 made compatible with true "windows".
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Re: Windows 3.1 is 30 Years Old

#3

Post by northland10 »

Ain't that lovely. Now I'm off to play minesweeper.
101010 :towel:
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Re: Windows 3.1 is 30 Years Old

#4

Post by keith »

RTH10260 wrote: Fri Apr 08, 2022 7:19 pm :daydreaming:

To think that to this day I occasionally use a programmmers text editor Kedit that was built for Win3.1 in character mode implementing the IBM mainframe Xedit editor functionality, then with the appearance of Win95 made compatible with true "windows".
Me too. I LOVE Kedit. Its my go to editor when I actually need to do some complicated stuff.

I even wrote a work a like for Linux once cause I was going crazy trying to use the linux supplied editors, alas, that got lost in the jungles of time and failed hard drives.
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Re: Windows 3.1 is 30 Years Old

#5

Post by RTH10260 »

keith wrote: Tue Apr 12, 2022 9:13 am
RTH10260 wrote: Fri Apr 08, 2022 7:19 pm :daydreaming:

To think that to this day I occasionally use a programmmers text editor Kedit that was built for Win3.1 in character mode implementing the IBM mainframe Xedit editor functionality, then with the appearance of Win95 made compatible with true "windows".
Me too. I LOVE Kedit. Its my go to editor when I actually need to do some complicated stuff.

I even wrote a work a like for Linux once cause I was going crazy trying to use the linux supplied editors, alas, that got lost in the jungles of time and failed hard drives.
I credit in part a near decade long relationship with a customer to the use of Kedit in late 1992, but that's a whole other story ;)
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Re: Windows 3.1 is 30 Years Old

#6

Post by Mr brolin »

Ahhhhhhh, my very very first small company network I built was Windows 3.11 For Workgroups !!!!!

With BNC coax and having the fun of making it work with WordPerfect for DOS and Lotus 1-2-3 for the same before actually going all in with WP for Windows and Lotus for Windows......

Ahhh the days of making it run with MS-DOS 5.0, with memory management, HIMEM and boot files, CONFIG.SYS and eking out every last kilobyte of RAM

Kids of today with their GUI's and gigabuyes

I remember when real folks had 4 MB of RAM and were bleeding edge!!!! ...... :biggrin: :mrgreen: :oldman:
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Re: Windows 3.1 is 30 Years Old

#7

Post by raison de arizona »

RTH10260 wrote: Fri Apr 08, 2022 7:19 pm :daydreaming:

To think that to this day I occasionally use a programmmers text editor Kedit that was built for Win3.1 in character mode implementing the IBM mainframe Xedit editor functionality, then with the appearance of Win95 made compatible with true "windows".
I had an extensive, was it profile.kex? that implemented my specialized xedit profile. Truly a joy to be able to switch platforms without having to screw around with the editor.
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” —John Adams
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Re: Windows 3.1 is 30 Years Old

#8

Post by bill_g »

Until a year ago or so, I maintained a water dept SCADA system based on a WFW PC. The hardest part was keeping a supply of working 386 and 486 PC's with 3.5" floppy drives around that would run the thing. Pentiums and up got divide by zero errors. It communicated over the air at a wolloping 2400 baud with 286 based remotes running an embedded small kernal OS by the OEM of the system. The WFW offered a user friendly-ish GUI that you had to be in front of to operate. No remote access. No remote desktop. Entirely airgapped.

They purchased a whole new everything from an engineering group, and it became their problem! It included new PLC panels polled over cellular modems tied to a new GUI on modern PC's with a phone app.
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Re: Windows 3.1 is 30 Years Old

#9

Post by Mr brolin »

Now you've brought old horrors back to me.... :biggrin:

PLC's and 3 term controllers, Proportional, Integral and Derivative, 3-15 versus 6-30 psi ...... Then bodging electrical control runs..... :brickwallsmall: :eek:
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Re: Windows 3.1 is 30 Years Old

#10

Post by Reality Check »

My first entry into networking was in a refinery back in the 1980's. We had a small network of IBM 3274 mainframe remote terminals in the central office building used for just a few tasks like time entry. Management decided to deploy terminals all around the refinery and switch over spare parts inventory and maintenance management to the mainframe. That meant we had to run RG-62 coax all of the place. I worked with the electrical contractors to do that and since we had no IT person to maintain all this it kind of fell into my lap. I had everything from the 69,000 volt power system down to data on coax.

It was a nightmare keeping the terminals working because the coax was run outdoors on poles where it was exposed to lightning, emi from power lines and water ingress. Eventually in the 90's we switched to PS/2 PC's with IBM token ring network cards and token ring cables. That was an interesting and pretty darn reliable network. We ran a mixture of Windows 3.1 and some OS/2. I do not recall why the mix. About 99% of the people used terminal emulators on the PC and did their work on the mainframes. Email was either on IBM VM or a proprietary messaging system that our IT group had written on top of the MMS.

Just before I left to go to central engineering we wired the first office building for Cat 5 and Ethernet. That was only because before we were ready to string cable I called our central IT guys I knew and ask what network cabling we should install. They said FFS run Cat 6 and not token ring.
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Re: Windows 3.1 is 30 Years Old

#11

Post by Reality Check »

Mr brolin wrote: Tue Apr 12, 2022 12:43 pm Now you've brought old horrors back to me.... :biggrin:

PLC's and 3 term controllers, Proportional, Integral and Derivative, 3-15 versus 6-30 psi ...... Then bodging electrical control runs..... :brickwallsmall: :eek:
The 6-30 PSIG stuff was about gone when I started. I worked with many 3-15 PSIG Fisher and Foxboro controllers though.
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Re: Windows 3.1 is 30 Years Old

#12

Post by bill_g »

Mr brolin wrote: Tue Apr 12, 2022 12:43 pm Now you've brought old horrors back to me.... :biggrin:

PLC's and 3 term controllers, Proportional, Integral and Derivative, 3-15 versus 6-30 psi ...... Then bodging electrical control runs..... :brickwallsmall: :eek:
Breathe in through your nose, hold it, breathe out through your mouth.

Better?

:)
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Re: Windows 3.1 is 30 Years Old

#13

Post by Reddog »

bill_g wrote: Tue Apr 12, 2022 6:06 pm
Mr brolin wrote: Tue Apr 12, 2022 12:43 pm Now you've brought old horrors back to me.... :biggrin:

PLC's and 3 term controllers, Proportional, Integral and Derivative, 3-15 versus 6-30 psi ...... Then bodging electrical control runs..... :brickwallsmall: :eek:
Breathe in through your nose, hold it, breathe out through your mouth.

Better?




:)
That’s been my main job since the early 90s. Mainly Allen-Bradley PLCs. The Fisher and Foxboro are still widely used, since they’re diaphragm operated air pressure is the means to control them. Usually with an I to P transducer with the I being 4-20 mA.

The software we used was A-B 6200 series was DOS but ran fine in Windows 3.1. Our shop was turning into an arcade. Everyone was coming in to play Solitaire or Wolfenstein. I got frustrated because I couldn’t open up programs or generate printouts, old dot matrix tractor feed would take hours to print sometimes. I had started printouts only to find it had been interrupted (because solitaire). Now I do PDFS.
One day somehow the solitaire icon batch file got changed to open AB6200 software. When I came in that night I was actually impressed because there were over 20 DOS instances running AB6200 software. The screen was full

I waited a week and the arcade shut down. It turned out that apparently I was the only person who knew how to edit a .bat file. Batch files were great I had several, some pretty sophisticated.
To this day I still don’t feel any guilt.

It’s easier now, I can generate a searchable PDF. That doesn’t waste paper and is quick. I can also cut and paste ladder logic.
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Re: Windows 3.1 is 30 Years Old

#14

Post by Reality Check »

It's hard to fathom now but remember that Windows 3.1 ran on MS-DOS and not the other way around. Windows was just a fancy add on to MS-DOS to provide users a graphical interface into common DOS tasks. It was not until around Windows 95 that Windows began to be incorporated at a more basic level so that the purpose of DOS was just to boot Windows.
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Re: Windows 3.1 is 30 Years Old

#15

Post by John Thomas8 »

I still have a config floppy from a job back in 1992? 1993? Somewhere back then, specialized to work with 3.1 and the programming interface they chose, something that worked with Oracle.

What a sincere pain in the behind.
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Re: Windows 3.1 is 30 Years Old

#16

Post by keith »

Reality Check wrote: Tue Apr 12, 2022 7:40 pm It's hard to fathom now but remember that Windows 3.1 ran on MS-DOS and not the other way around. Windows was just a fancy add on to MS-DOS to provide users a graphical interface into common DOS tasks. It was not until around Windows 95 that Windows began to be incorporated at a more basic level so that the purpose of DOS was just to boot Windows.
Yes, correct.

Windows wasn't "standalone" till Windows NT - and then just sorta barely.
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Re: Windows 3.1 is 30 Years Old

#17

Post by John Thomas8 »

keith wrote: Wed Apr 13, 2022 1:48 am
Windows wasn't "standalone" till Windows NT - and then just sorta barely.
NT: OS2 with the intelligence taken out.
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Re: Windows 3.1 is 30 Years Old

#18

Post by keith »

John Thomas8 wrote: Wed Apr 13, 2022 2:20 am
keith wrote: Wed Apr 13, 2022 1:48 am
Windows wasn't "standalone" till Windows NT - and then just sorta barely.
NT: OS2 with the intelligence taken out.
Nah. More like the DEC10 opsys with the dumbness taken out. I dunno what the DEC opsys was called.

But I take your point. OS/2 was probably technically superior to NT at the time, but it didn't really have a future upside. Even IBM didn't like it much (except for the guys that wrote it, of course).
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Re: Windows 3.1 is 30 Years Old

#19

Post by Mr brolin »

Quick tangential leap.....DOS --> IBM --> OS/2 --> Lotus Notes...... :biggrin:

Fort a short period of time I was employed by IBM, in the UK for a major "Desktop to Data Center" outsource they were doing..... Long story short they fecked up the process so badly at one point that actually lost the wet ink signed copy of the contract and had to go to the client and ask "Pretty Please can we have a copy". Bid folded and for months I was in paid limbo being paid out of the residual budget for a project that no longer existed.

Anyway, to Lotus Notes

One day I tried to logon to Notes to look at my never filling email folder to no avail, I could logon but no access to the address book, in fact no access to the IBM Global address book.

Turned out ( I was told about a week later) a senior PA/Secretary had been with IBM for about a million years and had over time been moved from project to project and delegated access to delegated access and no one had ever actually reviewed her access rights.

On day of retirement she had been all proactive and clearing up her emails etc and deleted what she thought was her very very large accumulated address list.......... with her nested, accumulated and very, very, very privileged access rights

Is was actually the UK and EMEA GAL and Lotus being very good at replication promptly wiped the entire UK and EMEA GAL pretty much everywhere...... :thumbsup:
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Re: Windows 3.1 is 30 Years Old

#20

Post by keith »

I can believe that totally 100%

I worked for IBM Global Services for about 10 years and grew into a hate-hate relationship with Lotus Notes.

I was working in clients offices and every time a client happened to be nearby when I was doing some trivial admin task, like say, trying to apply for leave, they would be aghast that such a flagship product, that the sales reps were constantly pushing on that client was so gawd-awful slow and ineffective. No way anybody was going to buy it after watching it in action in a real life application by what should be its greatest proponent.

SWMBO uses it everyday now in her job with a Government agency. Near as I can figure, it is still just as bad as it was 20 years ago. I don't understand how IBM hasn't sunk it years ago.
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Re: Windows 3.1 is 30 Years Old

#21

Post by RTH10260 »

Lotus Notes was spun off from IBM "recently"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Software

IIRC in Europe a Notes user group took over part of the remaining ecosystem.
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Re: Windows 3.1 is 30 Years Old

#22

Post by bill_g »

Reddog wrote: Tue Apr 12, 2022 7:27 pm That’s been my main job since the early 90s. Mainly Allen-Bradley PLCs. (snip)
Good times. Sounds like there are a bunch of us here on FB together.
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Re: Windows 3.1 is 30 Years Old

#23

Post by bill_g »

John Thomas8 wrote: Wed Apr 13, 2022 2:20 am
keith wrote: Wed Apr 13, 2022 1:48 am
Windows wasn't "standalone" till Windows NT - and then just sorta barely.
NT: OS2 with the intelligence taken out.
I really liked OS2 Warp. Snappy. Stable. But it never got market share and died on the vine unfortunately.
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Re: Windows 3.1 is 30 Years Old

#24

Post by qbawl »

OS/2 was great. My department Tech Services (a bunch of mainframe systems programmers) used it as our desktop for many years. Long after it was "gone' it would pop up in the oddest places. Our 3850 MSS ran it internally with no customer facing interface iirc.
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Re: Windows 3.1 is 30 Years Old

#25

Post by keith »

RTH10260 wrote: Wed Apr 13, 2022 7:56 am Lotus Notes was spun off from IBM "recently"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Software

IIRC in Europe a Notes user group took over part of the remaining ecosystem.
Hah! IBM sold it to HCL in 2018. SWMBO thinks she's using a 2010 version! Effing government cheapskates. They may be phaseing it out though.
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