Due to an SSD failure last year, I lost a bunch of my virtual machines, including my Windows 3.11 virtual machine. I don’t actually use these for anything, but I like having these old operating systems at my fingertips, in case, I don’t know, the world is about to end and the only way to prevent it is to run a very specific Windows 3.11-only application. So, yesterday, I recreated the virtual machine.
This seems like an excellent opportunity to link to the original Windows for Workgroups (Windows 3.11) launch event, from October 1992. I’m not even going to try to characterise or summarise this event, because it’s so incredibly Microsoftian and ’90s, the English language simply doesn’t contain enough words to paint an accurate picture.
I grew up with MS-DOS and later Windows 3.x, so this is a strange, somewhat… Twisted throwback to… Let’s call it ‘simpler’ times.
I thought I was the only guy with this “habit”, but recently I’ve found that there’s several people that share it, including e.g. icculus from the Loki hall of fame ( https://twitter.com/icculus/status/823941166148292609 ).
In fact, some days, when I get very stressed, I tend to fire up an empty VM and install some old version of Windows or DOS, just to relax. Kind of works, for some weird reason.
Edited 2017-02-08 11:46 UTC
I have a nearly complete collection of DOS and Windows disc/diskette images, mostly legitimate from my own original physical media, with the gaps filled in from abandonware sites. At one time, back when I still ran XP as my main Windows OS, I had VMs for each generation of DOS and Windows. I’ve lost most of those VMs but I could redo each one from the installation media if I wanted to. Sadly, these days I have less time than ever for fun little side projects like that. Still, I’m a data hoarder so I’ll probably have those disk images until the day I die.
Microsoft appears to have never gotten any better nor any worse at marketing.
I still have a Dos 6/windows 3.11 VM for some old games it works great. I also have a Windows 98 one as well for some older 16bit games I still enjoy. I wouldn’t use them online but for casual gaming why not?
Same here, except on real hardware that still works. Do the math to find out how old all this stuff is, especially because (or why?) it still works as intended without any problem.
I remembered when Windows 3.1 appeared and we could make fun of it while multitasking on Amiga!
Wow. That’s good for a laugh.
I remember using OS/2 to run Windows 3 apps and multiline BBS and some other things.
But my best memory from that era is Windows Sound System 2.0 on Windows 3.11 (I think). A microphone, crude voice recognition and voice control over the computer. It worked quite well. I had it probably 3/4 of the routine things I did set up to be triggered by voice. It was nice, in the era of dial up and downloaded emails, I could walk in, wake up the computer, dial in to the internet, start email and download messages, and about 4 other things. Then when I was ready, i could sit down and everything was already downloaded and waiting for me. It was pretty slick.
And then Windows 95 came out and all of that stopped working. Oh well, “progress.”
By the way, was that Hal Sparks (on Disney now) at the beginning introducing the creative types? Kind of looks like him – I had to look up his name. My daughter likes the show he’s in on Disney.
When I feel nostalgic, I open Firefox and visit archive.org. Runs straight in the browser, no VM needed:
https://archive.org/details/win3_stock
There were four 3.1x variants – Windows and Windows for Workgroups, each in 3.1 and 3.11.
WfW 3.11 was noticeably different from the other three (eg File Manager buttons, and not having standard (286) mode), and some patches were released in two versions – one for WfW 3.11 and one for the other three.
I had WFWG 3.11 and Windows 95 on the same system, partitioned and hidden from each other using System Commander (anyone remember that?) and while Windows 95 had more Flash, I found WFWG 3.11 to be more stable. I’d turn to Windows 95 when I had time to play, but WFWG and Wordperfect 6.0B (for DOS) when I actually had to get real school work done. Getting dial-up networking set up in 3.11 was a real bitch though, because of the weird login/PPP hybrid my ISP used. Windows 95 handled that more easily, though didn’t stay connected as well as 3.11 did.