This month it is exactly 30 years ago that Windows 3.1 appeared, the Windows version that really caught on with the general public for the first time. To make it run smoothly you needed a reasonable system, at least for that time. We look back at these ancient Windows, and: what do you still see in contemporary Windows versions?
Windows 3.1 appeared on April 6, 1992. Its predecessors were received only lukewarm and turned out to be hardly useful for serious applications. 3.0, which was released in 1990, gave some hope, but that version still contained far too many buggy things.
We still see a surprising amount of things from those original version(s) of Windows in the current Windows versions. For example, Windows 3.1 introduced TTF fonts that we use to this day. Also, real multitasking was finally possible.
That meant that a lot of people couldn’t run Windows 3.1 in the beginning. The minimum system requirements were a 286 CPU and at least 1 MB RAM. CGA graphics were no longer supported. You have to bear in mind that many still had an XT based on an 8086 at home, often armed with a CGA graphics card.
To really make optimal use of Windows 3.1, you needed an 80386, and they were quite expensive at the time. But thanks to 386 Enhanced Mode you could finally multitask DOS applications and really use them simultaneously, a novelty for many!
Dragging windows and the registry
Also brand new in Windows 3.1 was the ability to drag and drop files and icons, and it proved to be a keeper to this day. In 3.1 another feature was also introduced that should not have been a permanent fixture: the registry.
Quite usable under a small-scale OS such as Windows at the time, but has been a source of misery on modern PCs for many years now. The registry is a database containing all Windows settings, programs, drivers, etc. At a time when there wasn’t much of that, no problem. But modern operating systems solve this differently and much more securely. You simply save a settings file per program.
That offers many advantages. If something goes horribly wrong with your OS, you can simply reinstall it without destroying the rest of your software and settings. You can also create separate partitions for system, programs, and data. Very clear and very safe. If something ever goes wrong with a program (or settings file), simply reinstall the program.
Something like macOS (but certainly also various Linux variants) make optimal use of these kinds of possibilities. The central registry in Windows is much more risky. If it gets corrupted or polluted, it will irrevocably lead to system problems and even crashes or simply won’t boot anymore. Up until about Windows XP, occasionally reinstalling your Windows was common practice to keep your system up and running.
Also read: Customize Windows 10 Registry: 15 Tips
Later Windows versions made the registry a bit more manageable, but it is still a source of many problems. Especially because an average end user cannot make sense of it at all. Thirty years ago it was no longer the most obvious way to choose this as the central pivot, now it is completely obsolete.
But Microsoft can no longer just switch to something else, that would cause a huge misery in terms of compatibility. This shows once again what a specific choice from a distant past can have for consequences in the present.
Hardware hungry
The memory hunger of Windows has also remained. The minimum system requirement of a 286 with 1 MB RAM yielded nothing useful and a lot of software barely ran at all. More memory helped (with a Megabyte or four it started to become usable) and only with the already mentioned 386 it became useful.
Fortunately, the affordable 386SX soon appeared on the market, the ‘poor man’s version’ of the 386. Internally 32 bits, externally 16 bits, which meant that all the cheap and already existing adjacent chips from the 286 motherboards could be used. Although the 386SX was significantly slower than the 286, it offered all the extra capabilities of the 386 architecture, including serious multitasking.
Windows 3.1 versions
Windows 3.1 had several revisions. Windows for Workgroups 3.1 added network options and 3.11 was the ultimate ‘final version’ of this series where everything fell into place. They were also the days when the tying packages containing Microsoft Office were sold along with Windows 3.11 for a ridiculously low price. It quickly pushed the then gold standard for word processing WordPerfect out of the market. And to this day, made Office the new standard for both business and home users.
This tying has also caused the price of expensive software packages in general to collapse. The latter may have been an unintended effect of this promotion, because from that moment on Microsoft could no longer ask for the main prize for Windows and Office, far from it. In the end we have even reached the point where Windows is ‘free’ and you take out an Office subscription for a few tens a year.
Multimedia and games
What also stood out about Windows 3.1(x) were the multimedia capabilities. Video for Windows was introduced, with the still well-known .avi file format. And also – not unimportantly – the first steps were taken to make gaming under Windows possible. WinG was used as an aid for this.
Also for Windows 3.1x, the first video cards with a GPU that significantly accelerated all kinds of 2D things. Think of building up screen parts, but also drawing things like lines, circles and so on. Hardware acceleration for the user interface was still brand new at the time, now it is so standard that you only find out what an enormous impact it has if you start your Windows system (or otherwise) in safe mode.
3D did not yet play a role in the days of Windows 3.1x, it only started very carefully with its successor: the legendary Windows 95.
Changing times
Windows 3.1 can certainly be regarded as the ‘primordial mother’ of modern Windows. Sometimes sadly and sometimes fortunately, old principles from the dino era of the PC are still present under the hood. Furthermore, you used to opt for a certain operating system much more consciously. If you went for DOS and Windows, you knew for sure that there was a mountain of software available. At that time, standardization of file formats, for example, hardly played a role.
Today it is different. It doesn’t matter much anymore whether you run macOS, Linux or Windows as the OS. File formats are effortlessly interchangeable, programs are more than enough for all platforms. Furthermore, more and more people are working in a browser, where the OS doesn’t matter at all. Your software platform runs somewhere in the cloud; it then no longer matters at all which underlying operating system is running there.
So you can ask yourself whether Windows in its current form will survive another 30 years. There is a good chance that the old Windows will be left behind sometime in the near future. And an under-the-hood Linux-running version appears. With perhaps the same appearance as now, but much easier to manage because heavy legacies from a gray past are finally done. You can still run old software, in a virtual machine on demand.
Run Windows 3.1 in your browser
Would you like to experience what Windows 3.1 felt like? Then you can now just in your browser via this link†By the way, you can find a lot more charming historical software on that site. Nice to play with (again) on a rainy afternoon!
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