![]() NT4 in 1996 was (AFAIK) the first bootable Windows CD and back then not every computer supported booting from CD anyway. I recall Windows 95 was more often installed from a CD drive anyway so you just needed a working DOS installation to update, or just use the boot disk since Win95 CD wasn't bootable. Perhaps even stopped someone from pirating Windows but there was nothing to stop copying the CD contents anyway. ![]() ![]() Less disks to duplicate, faster install, smaller packaging. It was called DMF format, and reduced the amount of disks by 15% (roughly). At that time, they had a true grasp on the future of computers. Happy Birthday, Windows 3.1, which came at a time when I was looking forward to things Micros~1 was creating. So evolutionary changes like that are welcome.īUT! THE! REGRESSION! BACK! TO! 2D FLATTY FLATSO FLATASS McFLATFACE (in "modern?" versions) IS! TOTALLY! UNAPPRECIATED!!! As computer systems getr larger you NEED the hierarchical menus, and Program Manager was getting CUMBERSOME. Windows 3.1 made Windows 3.0 *BETTER*, more stable, and so on.īut of course I also liked the Start menu in WIn '9x, particularly because it allowed you to have hierarchical menus. *IT* *WAS* *THE* *WAY* *THINGS* *OUGHT* *TO* *BE* !!! And, the rate at which people ADOPTED THIS NEW WINDOWS INTERFACE was *EVIDENCE* *OF* *SAME* !!! Before Windows 3.0 the user interface was *VERY* 2D FLATTY FLATSO FLATASS McFLATFACE.Īfter Windows 3.0, it was all 3D SKEUOMORPHIC, as was OS/2 1.2. "toolhelp.dll" and common dialogs were a HUGE win for everyone, as was the documenting of previously undocumented functions (though some of that was related to anti-trust investigations).įrom the article: Windows 3.1 sold very well, with an appealing user interface. Yes, the first developer conference I went to was Windows 3.1 in beta. Then at some point near the turn of the century some bright spark at Cisco or somewhere must have thought "why dont we get the switch and the PC / other switch to negotiate the best connection rather than picking a speed/duplex mode at random" We were allowed to take a lot of shit from the users about it though. "oh was on 10meg, who knew" was a ticket closing resolution that infuriated those of us not deemed high ranking enough to investigate or god forbid fix these issues and prevent them happening again. That, and the card opting for 10baseT instead of 100. Indeed this seemed to be the usual cause of any network issues throughout the 90s at the 2 places I worked at. It was discovered after some weeks/months that this was because a switch (that i wasnt allowed to meddle with) was on "half duplex". This was because our connection to the main site was so shitty. Then again, I couldn't understand how my RiscOS machine had a full OS plus desktop plus applications stored (mostly) in 2MB of ROM (RO3) while the clunky WfW required the contents of about 10MB of floppies installing to HDD just for the OS and desktop.Īh I remeber that, I had to rewire the autoexec.bat on dozens of PCs to check for a successful connection to the Novell network and go back and try again if it hadnt worked. Given that up until that point my experience of Windows was extremely limited, and my experience with DOS only slightly better (university was mostly VAX/VMS and I had Acorn at home), I thought I was doing pretty well :-) ![]() Boot from the floppy, magic incantation, take the floppy to the next machine. I created a DOS bootable floppy which included the NE2000 network card driver and sufficient bits to get online with the filestore where I had stashed the contents of the three DOS and five(?) Windows floppies, and could happily be installing (or re-installing or re-re-installing) on half a dozen machines at the same time. Someone much cleverer than I had got a Netware system running, but then left a bunch of bare PCs requiring WfW3.11 etc. Used to copy the contents of the floppies into a separate folder
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