3.1 - 30 Years ago...

Seems longer…

https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/07/windows_3_1_30/?utm_m…

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Yes it does…

Ah, the beginnings of WFWG 3.11… one of the early PC network OS’s. (lan only) WFWG was a rather stable OS, over DOS 6.x. Do not forget, this is loaded on a fresh OS load. Gotta wipe the disk, usually! I saw many corruptions based on “shareware”/“freeware”/3rd party SW of the time.

ww.so.whoremembersFREEWARE.pl/stillusesaFREEtexteditorfrom19…

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Oh, it should/will work with most Windows OS’s.
It’s a 16 bit program that only edits text files.
Let us know if it still works, above W11…

https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/~steveb/cpaap/pfe/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmer%27s_File_Editor

ww.editing.BATfilesfordecades.pl

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I liked 3.11

Ken

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I liked 3.11

Yes screw the Registry.

Although it was funny that the Amiga could MultiTask since day one in 1995 :slight_smile:

Although it was funny that the Amiga could MultiTask since day one in 1995 :slight_smile:

And the UNIX O.S. was around since the late 1960s, and it could do multi-tasking. It still does. And Linux could do it from the beginning, somewhere around 1991. I started using Red Hat Linux 5.0 in 1998 when I could not stand Windows 95 anymore.

I currently run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 and it runs my 16-core CPU with ease. RHEL3 ran an older machine of mine with two 32-bit Xeon processor chips in it. This in 2003 (IIRC).

Unix for personal computers predates MS-DOS, and already had:

  • multitasking
  • both symbolic and hard links, handled by the OS

The latter allows a single file, occupying one set of blocks on disk, to exist in two (or more) directories simultaneously, which is extremely useful for multi-version disk backups and sometimes useful for other purposes. The functional difference is that a symbolic link can point to a file ANYWHERE but is not tracked (the file being pointed at can be deleted or renamed, leaving a dead symbolic link), while a hard link can only point to another file within the same logical partition but is tracked so deleting the file from ONE directory does not mess up other entries pointing at it.

Later versions of MS-DOS eventually had some support for multi-tasking. They also added “shortcuts”, which look a lot like symbolic links but are not handled by the OS. The only programs I know of that understood them are Command.com and the Windows Explorer. And I’m not sure about Command.com.

NTFS - the file system used by Windows NT and family, not MS-DOS - has the ability to do symbolic and hard links (and the OS handles them), but Microsoft STILL hides this ability from the user.

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And the UNIX O.S. was around since the late 1960s, and it could do multi-tasking. It still does.
I know lots of text based systems could way older, Unit, IBM, HP, Digital all had multitasking machines.

Should have clarified with a graphical user interface and something that could be bought for home use.

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And the UNIX O.S. was around since the late 1960s, and it could do multi-tasking. It still does.
I know lots of text based systems could way older, Unit, IBM, HP, Digital all had multitasking machines.

Should have clarified with a graphical user interface and something that could be bought for home use.

Well, UNIX could do windowing no later than with the development of the X Window System in 1986.

http://web.mit.edu/6.033/2006/wwwdocs/papers/protected/xwind…

Certainly, Linux could use the X Window System. I know for sure that Red Hat Linux 5.0 used it. Linux would run on some pretty primitive hardware. I think an Intel 8086 was the minimum, but I am not sure of this. In other words, that was enough.

I think I had more trouble switching from DOS to Windows than any of the changes of versions of Windows.

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