Forum Home
Press F1
 
Thread ID: 50158 2004-10-12 04:30:00 Windows, the way it used to be!!! Terry Porritt (14) Press F1
Post ID Timestamp Content User
280460 2004-10-13 03:11:00 I still have a copy of Windows 1.01 on a 1.4 floppy. (the old 5.25s died) I tried it again last year. Had to partition the HD to a 20Meg partition and install DOS 3.2 and it sort of worked OK. No splash screen though, something funny with ansi.sys. paulw (1826)
280461 2004-10-13 08:23:00 I presume Windows 1 ran on an 8088 (or was it an 8086) CPU. I suppose it must have run in 640K. Dolby Digital (160)
280462 2004-10-13 09:45:00 I downloaded Windows 1 off DC++ once, but never installed it.

I'm kinda glad that I didn't............. :D
agent_24 (4330)
280463 2004-10-13 16:51:00 And the amazing thing all this was only twenty years ago.
What I liked was no plug and play. You installed your drivers and that was it. No downloading new drivers every five minutes. In fact, no downloading anything.
A twelve inch monitor.and any resolution you liked as long as it was 640 x 480.
Ram at over $100 a meg.
DOS, I loved. I still have disks for DOS 6.11. Must try them one day and see if they will work on a Pentium 4.
My biggest laugh was reading an article about how hard it was to use DOS, having to remember all those commands. (All 40 of them) The same article went on to laud Word 6 and it's 120 keyboard shortcuts. I dillagently tried to remember them all. Used to spend more time looking up the shortcut than I did typing.
I still think the best computer I have ever owned was a 486 DX4 100. with a whole 32 megs of ram and a 400 meg hard disk. Running DOS 6.11 and Windows 3.1. And a "giant" 15 inch SVGA monitor. I could now use 800 x 600. Amazing!
Jack
JJJJJ (528)
280464 2004-10-15 00:55:00 > My memory of 3.11 seems to be quite different!! I
> used it at home and on a two different Novell Netware
> 3.12 LANs and I have to say (in my experience) it was
> a dog!!
>
> Heaps of crashes and lockups!! ... General Protection
> Errors, etc.
>
> Remember - no protected mode and cooperative
> multitasking not pre-emptive as from 95 onwards.
> Win95 wasn't perfect by any means but it was a big
> improvement on the DOS\Win3.11 combination.

I think m$ at the time was trying hard to insure that NetWare would not work with windows.

My 3.11 install worked well right up till I updated to win2k 2 years ago.
ugh1 (4204)
280465 2004-10-15 01:15:00 Since Win 3.11 has such a small footprint and needs only a very small amount of RAM would it be possible to use some of you RAM as a RAM drive and load windows 3.11 to that? it would be super speedy. Pete O'Neil (250)
280466 2004-10-15 01:32:00 Even on a 2MB machine I often used a ram disk to hold command.com and a few other files --- that made DOS really quick. There was the other trick which compressed .exe files, and removed the big zeroed buffer blocks. That made loading quite a bit quicker as long as the CPU decompression was quicker than the loading from disk. Graham L (2)
280467 2004-10-15 03:34:00 A great idea Peter, a bit of a search threw up this site with instructions for installing a ram drive:
www.jankie.net

It was interesting to read about using himem.sys from Win98 in Windows 3.11.
Terry Porritt (14)
280468 2004-10-15 09:00:00 Windows 3.1 works with 4MB of RAM, that I know from experience. george12 (7)
280469 2004-10-15 09:00:00 I'm feeling crazy. I'm gonna install DOS and Win 3.1 on Virtual PC. george12 (7)
1 2 3