Windows 3.11 Experiences

[Juz400]

Used Win3.11 at college(1993ish) after 4 years of workbench with a HDD and 4MB Ram it was pretty crappy,
slow, memory managment was awful and multitasking was just a joke!

In 1995 I started work in the Testlab for(at the time) the world leader in TokenRing networking equipment.
18 Months of work I cherrish to this day, I was the `technician` for the lab setting up whatever kit was required
for the two test-teams. Purchasing new desktops/servers/laptops and whatever RAM, HDD, cables, software as and
when it appeared on the market, cost wasnt an issue, Servers costing £30k+ a pop, top end IBM stinkpads over £5K each!
We had over 500 different test machines at my last count. The company had been stung badly in the early days for not
fully testing the cards. Lack of space I would guess, a full 255 node network was required!
There was an automatic disk duplicator machine, load it up with 3.5" disks and press go! (Make double sure your
Original is Write_Protected!) Could have done with one of these a few years earlier when I was a mail-trader but I
bet the cost would have made your eyes water! I even got them to get me a nice new modem for my desk, as I might need
to log onto bulletin boards for drivers and such(cough) A US Robotics Dualstandard HST of course!

Had to learn all about win3.11, wfwg, win95, winNT, OS/2, OS/2 warp, Novell Netware and SCO-unixware(LOL)

SCO had to be the worst pile of shit I have ever had the misfortune of touching.
Had to set up a server and a couple clients, I had to got through 30 available servers to find any that you could install
the crap onto, either they couldnt see the SCSI cards and I had them ALL to choose from, wouldnt see the CD-ROM drives or
the install just would not work during or afterwards and that was before I even got to put network cards in or try install
the client machines. Over a week of headaches!

wfwg was just win3.11 with a bit of built in support for tying an office together, largely forgetable.

WinNT 3.51 was interesting as I installed it onto IBM PowerPC and MIPS machines, shame we didnt really have much
productivity software so I could see the performance compared to the Intel machines. I dont remember if NT4 was available
for them. I did start arranging a deal with DEC to get a couple DEC Alpha servers(I managed to convince them that `drivers`
count as `software` development) but they ended up in the ATM(another defunct networking tech) lab and I left the company
shortly afterwards

IBM`s OS/2 and Warp were quite nice to install and use, I prefered the system fonts over Micro$oft, multitasking
seem to work quite well, also prefered the colour scheme in Warp over win95. Shame it never took off outside Banks,
Insurance Brokers and other BIG money customers.

win95 was were it was at though, all the new client machines came as standard especially the laptops.

I remember we had a Sun sparkstation in a corner but nobody knew squat about it and was just used as something to ping(lol)

This was were I got to see the prices for PC hardware, how quickly the market moved, especially in the graphics, sound,
cpu, memory and hdd requirements. Quake was a blast to play at work over the network but I vowed to stayed well out
I mean come on, a sound card costing as much as a new Amiga? will it still be supported/games compatability in 6 months?
Pissing away money constantly trying to keep up with the new hardware(3D had not even started yet!) seemed pointless.
Motorbikes, beer, girls and partying all night were much more fun than sitting at home in front of a computer.

[Mikerochip]

Originally Posted by Juz400

WinNT 3.51 was interesting as I installed it onto IBM PowerPC and MIPS machines, shame we didnt really have much
productivity software so I could see the performance compared to the Intel machines. I dont remember if NT4 was available for them.

It was. I had a Digital Alpha, and I remember NT4 could be installed on MIPS, PPC and the Alpha.

[nathanm1991]

Originally Posted by gimbal

Dementia is a strange thing. My partner is from Spain where it is quite normal that your parents live with you at their old age; grandpa was 99 in the end and didn't remember or respond to much at all; on more lucid days he would recognise his relatives, but there have been days where he did not even recognise his own daughter.

He didn't really remember my partner (his granddaughter) most of the times, but he often asked for me when she was there on a visit but I wasn't: the tall foreign guy, where is he?

Go figure!

God Bless!

[nathanm1991]

this is why I love This Forum. So much to be Learned! what is Novell Netware and am I a Pleb for asking this?

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by nathanm1991

when you say a Far Cry from WB3.1 what do you Mean what swings you more to one than the other? of course other than the Fact it's Commodore

- Windows 3.1 was far more inefficient than Workbench 3.1. It was several times the size, required much more powerful hardware, and ran at a fraction of the speed.

- The multitasking in Windows 3.1 sucked.

- Ease of use. Windows has always been clunky. Program Manager, File Manager, etc. were a poorly designed joke.

So to sum up my opinion:

WB 3.1 was far more efficient, absolutely flying on even the worst possible Amiga configuration. Memory usage is virtually zero even on a 512k system. The multitasking was actually usable, the interface was more responsive, and the included software was better.

Not to mention all the nice things WB has that Windows still doesn't have. Commodities, Datatypes, etc.

Edit: All points made obviously include WfW 3.11 as well as Windows 3.1. Although my experiences with WfW 3.11 were slightly more positive, it was still a bloated piece of unoptimised shit that should never have left Microsoft's Beta Testing team (assuming they even had one).

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by nathanm1991

this is why I love This Forum. So much to be Learned! what is Novell Netware and am I a Pleb for asking this?

Ah those NetWare days

Here you go nathanm1991:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetWare

[Anubis]

Colleges used NetWare a lot back in 90s.

[Juz400]

Alot of bigger companys(100+ employees) used Netware in the 90`s, I quite liked the console, installer was usually smooth as butter, came on bigger stacks of floppies(30+) each revision till CDs became the norm!
With the smaller places I worked for afterwards if they had an young IT dept, some form of Unix/Linux for server duties until WinNT started to gain momentum.
Massive companys used all kinds of kit you`ve never heard of. In the early days you kind of went for a bespoke system and it cost a fortune(millions) and after 5 years there would be so much stuff residing in the system
you HAD to keep it running and MD/Board/Shareholder wanted every pennies worth out of it as it cost so much to `invest in` in the first place.
Moving/Transfering your data over to a new system was just not cost effective so you run the new ones side by side. Rinse and repeat!
I worked on the IT helpdesk at one of the UKs electricity suppliers, Im sure they had 30 different teams for each `System` ie Netware, OS/2, Oracle, AS/400 ect.
Christ that was a busy place when something went tits up! Keeps the bills payed tho eh!
This was the first place I came across that used `hot desking` that allowed anyone to use any PC that was free, you log in and all your stuff is loaded from the servers onto your PC, quite cool at the time
but a headache for us as you HAD to log out or you couldnt log in again somewhere else. All your stuff will still be on the PC you last sat at and not on the server. Majority of callers were such people, `caller you are
sat at desk 197 but you are not calling me from that phone? No i was there yesterday and I DID log off, not just switch off the computer`
You were also still logged into whatever servers you use so we had to log into each one and manually kick them off the server. Happy days.... not lol

[Retro1234]

Pretty cool but I had a friend who had bought a cheap PC from a company back then and whenever something went wrong the Helpline would make him install Windows from new took ages - pretty fucked up.

About 10years ago I set up a Windows 3.11 with Calmira II for a friend was pretty sweet machine.

First time I installed 3.11 on PC-Task on my A1200 took all night to install.

Used them at school Login was via a dos like interface - Wrote a little Qbasic program to mimic logging got a few passwords O the good old days.

[nathanm1991]

Originally Posted by DamienD

Ah those NetWare days

Here you go nathanm1991:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetWare

Originally Posted by Hewitson

- Windows 3.1 was far more inefficient than Workbench 3.1. It was several times the size, required much more powerful hardware, and ran at a fraction of the speed.

- The multitasking in Windows 3.1 sucked.

- Ease of use. Windows has always been clunky. Program Manager, File Manager, etc. were a poorly designed joke.

So to sum up my opinion:

WB 3.1 was far more efficient, absolutely flying on even the worst possible Amiga configuration. Memory usage is virtually zero even on a 512k system. The multitasking was actually usable, the interface was more responsive, and the included software was better.

Not to mention all the nice things WB has that Windows still doesn't have. Commodities, Datatypes, etc.

Edit: All points made obviously include WfW 3.11 as well as Windows 3.1. Although my experiences with WfW 3.11 were slightly more positive, it was still a bloated piece of unoptimised shit that should never have left Microsoft's Beta Testing team (assuming they even had one).

Originally Posted by Juz400

Used Win3.11 at college(1993ish) after 4 years of workbench with a HDD and 4MB Ram it was pretty crappy,
slow, memory managment was awful and multitasking was just a joke!

In 1995 I started work in the Testlab for(at the time) the world leader in TokenRing networking equipment.
18 Months of work I cherrish to this day, I was the `technician` for the lab setting up whatever kit was required
for the two test-teams. Purchasing new desktops/servers/laptops and whatever RAM, HDD, cables, software as and
when it appeared on the market, cost wasnt an issue, Servers costing £30k+ a pop, top end IBM stinkpads over £5K each!
We had over 500 different test machines at my last count. The company had been stung badly in the early days for not
fully testing the cards. Lack of space I would guess, a full 255 node network was required!
There was an automatic disk duplicator machine, load it up with 3.5" disks and press go! (Make double sure your
Original is Write_Protected!) Could have done with one of these a few years earlier when I was a mail-trader but I
bet the cost would have made your eyes water! I even got them to get me a nice new modem for my desk, as I might need
to log onto bulletin boards for drivers and such(cough) A US Robotics Dualstandard HST of course!

Had to learn all about win3.11, wfwg, win95, winNT, OS/2, OS/2 warp, Novell Netware and SCO-unixware(LOL)

SCO had to be the worst pile of shit I have ever had the misfortune of touching.
Had to set up a server and a couple clients, I had to got through 30 available servers to find any that you could install
the crap onto, either they couldnt see the SCSI cards and I had them ALL to choose from, wouldnt see the CD-ROM drives or
the install just would not work during or afterwards and that was before I even got to put network cards in or try install
the client machines. Over a week of headaches!

wfwg was just win3.11 with a bit of built in support for tying an office together, largely forgetable.

WinNT 3.51 was interesting as I installed it onto IBM PowerPC and MIPS machines, shame we didnt really have much
productivity software so I could see the performance compared to the Intel machines. I dont remember if NT4 was available
for them. I did start arranging a deal with DEC to get a couple DEC Alpha servers(I managed to convince them that `drivers`
count as `software` development) but they ended up in the ATM(another defunct networking tech) lab and I left the company
shortly afterwards

IBM`s OS/2 and Warp were quite nice to install and use, I prefered the system fonts over Micro$oft, multitasking
seem to work quite well, also prefered the colour scheme in Warp over win95. Shame it never took off outside Banks,
Insurance Brokers and other BIG money customers.

win95 was were it was at though, all the new client machines came as standard especially the laptops.

I remember we had a Sun sparkstation in a corner but nobody knew squat about it and was just used as something to ping(lol)

This was were I got to see the prices for PC hardware, how quickly the market moved, especially in the graphics, sound,
cpu, memory and hdd requirements. Quake was a blast to play at work over the network but I vowed to stayed well out
I mean come on, a sound card costing as much as a new Amiga? will it still be supported/games compatability in 6 months?
Pissing away money constantly trying to keep up with the new hardware(3D had not even started yet!) seemed pointless.
Motorbikes, beer, girls and partying all night were much more fun than sitting at home in front of a computer.

Originally Posted by Anubis

Colleges used NetWare a lot back in 90s.

Originally Posted by Juz400

Alot of bigger companys(100+ employees) used Netware in the 90`s, I quite liked the console, installer was usually smooth as butter, came on bigger stacks of floppies(30+) each revision till CDs became the norm!
With the smaller places I worked for afterwards if they had an young IT dept, some form of Unix/Linux for server duties until WinNT started to gain momentum.
Massive companys used all kinds of kit you`ve never heard of. In the early days you kind of went for a bespoke system and it cost a fortune(millions) and after 5 years there would be so much stuff residing in the system
you HAD to keep it running and MD/Board/Shareholder wanted every pennies worth out of it as it cost so much to `invest in` in the first place.
Moving/Transfering your data over to a new system was just not cost effective so you run the new ones side by side. Rinse and repeat!
I worked on the IT helpdesk at one of the UKs electricity suppliers, Im sure they had 30 different teams for each `System` ie Netware, OS/2, Oracle, AS/400 ect.
Christ that was a busy place when something went tits up! Keeps the bills payed tho eh!
This was the first place I came across that used `hot desking` that allowed anyone to use any PC that was free, you log in and all your stuff is loaded from the servers onto your PC, quite cool at the time
but a headache for us as you HAD to log out or you couldnt log in again somewhere else. All your stuff will still be on the PC you last sat at and not on the server. Majority of callers were such people, `caller you are
sat at desk 197 but you are not calling me from that phone? No i was there yesterday and I DID log off, not just switch off the computer`
You were also still logged into whatever servers you use so we had to log into each one and manually kick them off the server. Happy days.... not lol

Originally Posted by Retro1234

Pretty cool but I had a friend who had bought a cheap PC from a company back then and whenever something went wrong the Helpline would make him install Windows from new took ages - pretty fucked up.

About 10years ago I set up a Windows 3.11 with Calmira II for a friend was pretty sweet machine.

First time I installed 3.11 on PC-Task on my A1200 took all night to install.

Used them at school Login was via a dos like interface - Wrote a little Qbasic program to mimic logging got a few passwords O the good old days.

The more I hear the More I Want to Know! Thank you to all who make this Clear for me. I Apologise if I come Across very Excitable I just Love Consuming more and More knowledge on the Platforms I Love and Appreciate

Originally Posted by DamienD

Ah those NetWare days

Here you go nathanm1991:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetWare

did I just learn how to use MultiQuote?

[Hewitson]

After giving Windows such a bashing, I'd like to talk about MS-DOS.

Despite everyone complaining about memory problems (this was never an issue) or sound card compatibility problems (which wasn't a problem if you werent a tightass and bought the proper Creative Labs soundcard).

MS-DOS was fantastic. Fast, easy to use, simple, reasonably stable, and just did what it was told. If it was up to me PC's would still be using it, beats Windows 10 any day of the week in the usability department.

[005AGIMA]

Ah windows.

My first PC (Amstrad 386 DX) came second hand and they guy said "I've re-installed DOS and Windows 3.0 on the hard drive for you, and here are the original disks. But here is also a copied version of 3.1. I'll leave it up to you if you install it".

From that day, and onto 3.11 on my later 486, Windows became "That program that takes up room I could otherwise use for games" :P

Meh....used Paint to re-draw a comic book version of Predator (wish I still had that BMP......oooh....may go searching my backups actually)

And used a pirate copy of Excel to keep a log of my Laser Quest scores.

And probably used Word to do homework.

Other than that, TBH, 3.0, 3.1, 3.11 all blur into 1 for me. Although the jump from 3.0 to 3.1 is noticeable cosmetically.

[ma693541]

We used Windows 3.11 FW on 10 AT PC clones and one server thru "LapLink LAN Cable", only rough guess here. It was funny to send a message to the server and all the PC clones got it at the same time. They had 640KB Ram and 20MB HD. We must not forget all the lovely adventure games for them from Sierra, like the Larry Laffer series, many hours of fun. This was in the beginning of the 90ths.

[nathanm1991]

Windows 3.11 Seems to be like Marmite, You either Love it or Hate and it is Fascinating Thus far to see Everybody else's view have Learnt about a OS I didn't even know Existed too which is a Bonus as I can now go and Read more and more to my Hearts content about it

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by nathanm1991

have Learnt about a OS I didn't even know Existed too which is a Bonus as I can now go and Read more and more to my Hearts content about it

If you're talking about Novell NetWare it's not an OS but a "network operating system"; basically it's various servers and NDS (like Active Directory) etc.. and you'd install the client on other OSs to allow login / services / drive mappings / file management etc.

[nathanm1991]

Originally Posted by DamienD

If you're talking about Novell NetWare it's not an OS but a "network operating system"; basically it's various servers and NDS (like Active Directory) etc.. and you'd install the client on other OSs to allow login / services / drive mappings / file management etc.

Yeah I meant NetWare I maybe should have been More clear buddy I Understand how it Works OS is Probably not the Right term for it no but Still cool to Find out about

[desiv]

There are always the comparisons of Amiga vs ST and Amiga vs Mac and Amiga vs PC, and that got me thinking about the GUI/OS side of it...
So I did some checking and came across this older thread, and it partially fits what I was thinking... So, thread necro (OK, not THAT OLD a thread...)

I had most versions back in the day and had fun with both.
On the PC, I had used a lot of DOS and most of the Win versions, and even some GEM for PC. ;-)
Have to admit (like some others) I preferred AmigaOS/Workbench to Win 3x.
Although the original Workbench/AmigaOS REALLY needed a file manager. I got one with my external floppy drive (CLIMate) and it made using Workbench SO much better. I think not including a basic file manager was a big mistake.
I mean, I could (and did) live in CLI/Shell land, but for someone who didn't want to, there should have been a basic file manager included. IMHO.

But that got me thinking about Amiga/MS timing...
(Note: these dates are google/wikipedia based, so take with a bag of salt, but should be close-ish)
Commodore ---------- Microsoft
AmigaOS 1.1 1985 - Win 1.0 1985
AmigaOS 1.2 1986
AmigaOS 1.3 1988 - Win 2.0 1987
AmigaOS 2.0 1990 - Win 3.0 1990
AmigaOS 2.1 1992 - Win 3.1 1992 (and 3.11 and WfW apparently - busy year for MS)
AmigaOS 3.0 1992
(Really? 2.1 and 3.0 were released in the same year?)
AmigaOS 3.1 1994
------------------------ Win 95 1995

Think I'll stop there...
The Amiga OS/GUI was always more than a few years ahead of MS...
I don't think most people took Win seriously at all until the 3.x versions. (*) And I much preferred 1.3 to 3.x... I didn't really play with AmigaOS 2.x much, but did with 3.0/3.1 and loved them...
I mean, this isn't a surprise. MS was playing catchup all the way to Win 9x, and started out behind on that one.
(And yes, I know. MS wasn't competing with AmigaOS at all... I'm guessing it wasn't even on their radar...)
And, as mentioned before, having a better OS/GUI doesn't matter if the software/hardware people want is available on other platforms...

But just putting it down like the above reminds me how much ahead of the curve the AmigaOS system was...
People talk about the Amiga hardware being advanced (which it was early on), but the OS too deserves its love... ;-)

IMHO
(Yeah, doing some more googling, looks like sales of both Win 1.x/2.x were under 2 million copies total, and then in the first year of 3.0's release, it sold 4 million...)

[Aulapatchuc]

I avoided completely buying a PC with windows 3.x. I waited for Win95 which had a proper GUI finally. 3.x GUI was a joke compared to my Workbench install.

[Megalomaniac]

My impression, then and now, is that a Workbench was always superior to a Windows of the same era and on similar hardware, until Windows 95. It wasn't until Windows 3 that Microsoft could match 1.3's feature base, and that was the year Workbench 2 was released (on very high-end systems, it didn't reach the masses until late 1991 admittedly). We can only wonder what a Workbench 4 designed around say an 8Mb 040 could have achieved had Commodore lived longer.

[Photon]

I had to use W3.11 in 1991 on a very expensive PC for work. It was fairly horrible to get stuff done on. Anything that wasn't editing text in a very limited fashion or run some simple generic application, it struggled. It took them 7 years to make a slow and frustrating Mac copy.

As soon as you needed to do something of actual worth, like programming, making graphics, hmm well there was no way at all to make music worth the name. You could sequence MIDI, like on the 8- and 16-bits. As soon as you wanted that, your OS had no decent editor or compiler, and graphics programs were like on the Mac. Who doesn't want to draw ellipses and fill them with patterns? The only decent graphics program was a cheesy Deluxe Paint II clone with much less features. And of course for the editors, IDEs and compilers you were back in 1981 with full-screen text mode windows where you could move a block cursor 1 char at a time with you mouse to click on menus - if you were lucky.

What did it do, from you just moving your mouse (not even clicking)? Nobody knows, but it showed the hourglass and rattled the harddrive. That is what I remember Windows for. Always the hesitation, the rattling of the harddrive, and seeing the hourglass for 25% of the day.

I had used GeoWorks, which came with many more usable applications, more polished user interface, and ran like a horse on steroids compared to Windows. GeoWorks really made Windows look like a second-rate product. The contrast was shocking.