Apparently according to the Beeb, Microsoft has finally retired Win3.11!
I know, I know, I thought it was long gone too. Although I did mention it was in my web stats last month (and it’s over 1% of vistors so far in November!)
Seems Win3.11 has had a long and illustrious secret careeer as an embedded OS.
I still have an old laptop running it (and Excel 5).
Word on the street is that Linux is clearing up in the embedded space these days.
Anyone else still got a working Win3.11 or earlier/other installation?
cheers
simon
Smurf on Spreadsheets 
Wednesday, 5th November, 2008 at 2:12 pm |
I have an old Gateway running Windows 95 and Office 97, sitting idle in the basement. I think I still have my old Excel 5 disks somewhere, but the thought of turning it on and waiting forever for it to boot makes me shudder.
I also have my old Mac Plus, which I bought back in ’86 when I started my doctoral dissertation. Man, that little 4×6 inch screen was top of the line. We kept it for the kids to play games on, but I don’t think it’s been plugged in for a decade.
Wednesday, 5th November, 2008 at 9:36 pm |
I had a really old IBM PS/2 running Windows 3.1 and Excel 5 (and Norton Desktop, FWIW), but it died last year. It was my safest machine – no browser, no ftp client, only ancient dial-up AOL. It also had Lotus 123 Release 5, and the sad, sad thing is that classic 123 macros running on that ancient machine kept pace with much newer machines running comparable Excel macros under Excel 2003 under Windows XP.
Thursday, 6th November, 2008 at 1:39 pm |
I’m waiting to upgrade from Vista to 3.1!
Thursday, 6th November, 2008 at 1:51 pm |
Win 3.x boots in just a few seconds on modern hardware apparently
Sunday, 9th November, 2008 at 4:23 am |
I bought my first computer, an XT clone, at the Cow Palace in South San Francisco. It came with Windows 3.1. The brief instructions said, “before using any floppy disk, you must format it”, so I slid the 5 1/4 inch Windows disk in and did just that. It’s been steady progress ever since :).
Sunday, 9th November, 2008 at 5:01 am |
Doug – Ouch!
Sunday, 9th November, 2008 at 12:08 pm |
Doug
did you spend long looking for the ‘any’ key?