OH NO! Its the end of Windows 3.11!

[Josh]

Source

For those that were not aware, we recently announced that effective November 1st, 2008, OEM's will no longer be able to license Windows for Workgroups 3.11 in the embedded channel. Now we all know that it's been long gone in the standard (retail/OEM) channel, but one of the unique things in the embedded business is that we allow the classic OS products to be sold longer than the other channels. it's *finally the end of an era!

[lanux128]

omg! another one bites the dust. but seriously does anyone really buy Win3.11 anymore?

[Josh]

Actually, We have several machines running it at work.

[lanux128]

wow, i hope they're not recently bought machines.

[Darwin]

I love 3.11 WfW. I have a virtual machine set to run it and still play with it sometimes. It's how I cut my teeth with windows. Before that, it was all DOS or some terrible Tandy (RadioShack) thing, the name of which I can no longer remember.

[Renegade]

I love 3.11 WfW. I have a virtual machine set to run it and still play with it sometimes. It's how I cut my teeth with windows. Before that, it was all DOS or some terrible Tandy (RadioShack) thing, the name of which I can no longer remember.

-Darwin (July 11, 2008, 09:05 AM)

Hahaha!

I remember the Tandys. I had a Tandy 1000. It ran DOS. Version 1. Then I got version 2.

When I finally got Windows 3.1 on a new machine, I rigged it so that all the DOS commands were run as if the machine was UNIX. So "ls" was "dir" etc.

Wow. 3.11 is gone. It's about time!

[mitzevo]

oh noez

[Deozaan]

Carp! I need to find a an old copy of our Windows 3.11 diskettes so I can set up a VM and play old DOS games that don't work with DOSbox.

[lanux128]

Carp! I need to find a an old copy of our Windows 3.11 diskettes so I can set up a VM and play old DOS games that don't work with DOSbox.

-Deozaan (July 11, 2008, 11:38 AM)

*sigh* i wish i could have more time to play ye olde games.

[iliiad]

Carp! I need to find a an old copy of our Windows 3.11 diskettes so I can set up a VM and play old DOS games that don't work with DOSbox.

-Deozaan (July 11, 2008, 11:38 AM)

why would you need Windows 3.11? can't you play those DOS games in... well, DOS?

[40hz]

I love 3.11 WfW. I have a virtual machine set to run it and still play with it sometimes. It's how I cut my teeth with windows. Before that, it was all DOS or some terrible Tandy (RadioShack) thing, the name of which I can no longer remember.

-Darwin (July 11, 2008, 09:05 AM)

The mind makes merciful deletions after severe trauma. At the risk of bringing back our pain, the "Tandy thing" was called TRS-DOS. Usually called "triss-dos" by Tandy, or "trash DOS" by just about everyone else. That was back in the days of the "proprietary" DOS debacle where there were actually compatibility issues between IBM's PC-DOS and all the other versions out there.

The big (in every sense) TRS-II ran XENIX as it's preferred environment.

I kind of have a soft spot for those old battleship gray doorstops. They were responsible for my first paid consulting job. Got a whole $5 for solving a Visicalc problem.

I also had a lot of fun with (and made quite a bit of money off) Win 3.11 and WFWG. Quite a "rad" beastie for it's time. Of course, back then a "power user" was anyone who used device=ANSI.SYS in their config, and knew how to make and change a directory.

It was fun, but the party's over. What can we say except "See ya around kid."

[f0dder]

About time

[Deozaan]

why would you need Windows 3.11? can't you play those DOS games in... well, DOS?

-iliiad (July 12, 2008, 01:55 AM)

Maybe. I was fairly young in the Win 3.11 and DOS days. All I really know is that the command prompt in WinXP is just a fake DOS, but the command prompt that was available when we had Win3.11 had all the old drivers and things that games were made for back in the day.

[f0dder]

why would you need Windows 3.11? can't you play those DOS games in... well, DOS?

-iliiad (July 12, 2008, 01:55 AM)

Maybe. I was fairly young in the Win 3.11 and DOS days. All I really know is that the command prompt in WinXP is just a fake DOS, but the command prompt that was available when we had Win3.11 had all the old drivers and things that games were made for back in the day.

-Deozaan (July 12, 2008, 01:36 PM)

XP isn't a "fake DOS", it's simply a shell which happens to look a lot like the old command.com / DOS shell

Win3.x ran either 16bit realmode or 16bit protected mode (aka enhanced mode), and was stll based on DOS (iirc even used DOS internally), which is why most stuff ran fine inside a 3.x DOS box. Even win9x required DOS to boot, although it basically didn't use DOS once it had booted (unless you had unknown device drivers, in which case you'd be running in "reduced performance compatibility mode", and various stuff would thunk down and call the DOS drivers... very slow).