news.bbc.co.uk — "An application has expectedly quit. Windows 3.x has come to the closing moments of its long life. On 1 November Microsoft stopped issuing licences for the software that made its debut in May 1990 in the US. The various versions of Windows 3.x (including 3.11) released in the early 1990s, were the first of Microsoft's graphical user interfaces .."
Nov 5, 2008 View in Crawl 4
hufflepuff17Nov 5, 2008
Oh bummer they retired the first rip off of the apple graphic interface, what will I ever do...
silfirielNov 5, 2008
flastaff, why?
pleasejustdieNov 6, 2008
@dbActually pentium was classed as a 586 and pentium 2 was classed as a 686. The instruction set is x86, but the processors were classed 80568 ad 80686 (or 586/686) which were eventually dropped with just calling the pentium 3 a pentium 3 and x86 compatible.
myztryNov 6, 2008
Actually Windows was what was called a Dos extender. The Operating system was still Dos which is why you could run out of memory doing simple things like loading 'mscdex' (Microsoft CD extension) drivers on a machine with several Meg of RAM.Luckily, IBM cross licensed the GUI from Commodore (Amiga) for OS/2 (in exchange for IBM's Rexx scripting language) , and Microsoft then branched from that collaboration to create OS/2 V3 which was later renamed to Windows NT.There's a whole lot of the AmigaOS inside Windows (both licensed and stolen) which a lot of people don't realize because NT was based on old technology at the time, and few of the current generation were actually using modern computing a quarter of a century ago.
mrbitchNov 6, 2008
@elementop RE: " You young whippersnappers! :)I cut my teeth on the Sinclair ZX-81, with a whopping 2K of memory. "I waited an extra year and bought a Z80 CPU powered TRS-80 with 16K of RAM, running an "OS" of " Level II " Microsoft BASIC...I know, I was just greedy for more power and RAM...
tamaskoNov 6, 2008
This account has been closed by the user
elranzerNov 6, 2008
Windows XP is just Windows 2000 with enhancements. Seriously, 2000 offers no advantages over XP anymore.
carlososNov 6, 2008
I'm so happy that I never had to use ME. I went directly to 2000 when it came out even though my Processor was below the minimum. I could still run Windows 2000 faster than 98SE because I had much more RAM than the minimum or recommended. (I believe it was 256MB)
arthaguruNov 6, 2008
Pissed Up
celotilNov 7, 2008
Bit late to reply to correct mistakes, but it's a matter of public record and I'm a stickler for details.1992 was when I got my first IBM-compatible PC - I was thinking about my age then, 16, and typing the year, so that's that error.As far as actual first computers go, my Dad had bought this little blue box thing that attached to a black and white television by screwing into the rabbit ears antenna wire sockets and used a knob to control a line on the television screen. There was a second, smaller, box with a knob for player two. There were four versions of Pong on that blue box, selectable by a large switch. Wish I could remember the name of that toy.The first computer in the house was a Commodore Vic-20, bought around about when I was 2 and half, nearly 3 years old. I had a fairly good grasp of reading then, thanks to Mum reading stories to me while tracing the words so I could draw a conclusion between the sounds of words and what they looked like, so I got to read the manual and learn how the Vic-20 basically worked.Barely six months later the Vic-20 was traded in for a Commodore 64, and that was the main computer in the house till I was about 13. We had Magic Desk II and a printer, so I used to write my assignments on it - when I was allowed; penmanship tended to count towards grades in primary school.When the C-64 died I was disappointed, but I got more interested in other things, like camping, cycling, sailing, and when my parents bought the 386 in 92, I started learning about that - amazed that there was a copy command with which I could use to share games with my few friends who also had IBM-compatible PC's.
ralphsmoleJan 23, 2009
It's downloadable at: <a class="user" href="http://www.classic-gaming.net/applications/list/8/">http://www.classic-gaming.net/applications/list/8/</a>
niyazkFeb 9, 2009
nice article !! more microsoft and windows related news - <a class="user" href="http://techb.net/category/windows/">http://techb.net/category/windows/</a>