h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Windows 3.x died today.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7707016.stm

I don't know how you would like to mark the occasion, but those of us in the UK will note that it's Bonfire Night tonight.

I started using it in the office in around 1993 - I remember we had a few mouse-driven GUI applications a lot earlier than that, but up to then the operating system and office applications were just flavours of DOS and its clunky graphics.

Were you a Windows pioneer?

.. I started with pdp11 and vax/vms ... I am really old ...
so for quite some time I thought windows 3.whatever was something that just wasted memory and disk and was meant for sissies mostly because wordperfect 4.something didn't use it.

I seem to remember there was a time I knew the difference between several types of memory above 640k, or I could talk about that anyway .. but I must admit that's rather foggy by now

just remind me .. what was wrong with ms-dos?

i have only ever had a shot of an emulated version of windows 3.1 but i have used a mac classic a few times, does that count?

mini

Window's 3.11 Ah yes I can remember it well
May it rest in peace.

Happpi you must be almost as old as me if you remember Vax
What about RPG2 programming language.?

RPG .. mmm.. no, that was IBM wasn't it? I was into Fortran (IV :P ) and assembler

Yeah running on a System 36 Machine Then it was "updated" to run a distributed manufacturing system running on Cobol.

I was born & bred on VAX/VMS, too. It was by far the easiest of all the operating systems to use.

I remember once writing a spoof version of the Monitor command, so that when anyone typed the command it displayed a series of doctored performance screens, making it look like one of my colleagues' programmes was bringing the system to its knees.

.. old fart alert .. I did the vms systems programming course .. highlight was rewrite the keyboard driver, capture someone else's keyboard interrupt vector and route all input to the blackhole page

People sometimes ask what it was like before E-mail, but we were all using things like DECMail/VAXMail. There just wasn't any need to communicate with people we didn't already work with.

I always found windows 3.11 a bit clunky... windows 2.err 0 I think was fun though but neither never really seemed to do anything amazing enough to replace the Truely easily customisable power of DOS 6.22 endless fun writing batch files only to find out I had* to go into win 3.1 in order to alter some of the parameters relating to the scanner
I wonder.... I'd really love to get my old 486 (which still has DOS 6.? and win 3.? running on it) working again

*fond memories of fractint*

Ahh fond memories Electronic Data Interchamge, Automater Mi, Pseudo Code scripts CSV , tell me again what wrong with DOS?

... yes ... some details are coming back now .. to haunt me

let's try not to get too sentimental

(* anyone remember Honeywell 316?? or 516 ?? even 4000 / 4500?? I hesitate to admit that I do remember those .. really old *)

I don't remember those models but I do remember Honeywell DPS6 "mini" computer running a Honeywell Distributed Manufacturing System. and its query system QR6

.. mm .. the 316 had a batch operating system and a fortran compiler on magnetic tape and 4k memory