Questions tagged [windows-3.x]
Microsoft Windows 3.0, 3.10 and 3.11 (including for Workgroups). Use [windows] instead for Windows NT 3.x.
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What key factor led to the sudden commercial success of MS Windows with v3.0?
Microsoft Windows was originally introduced in 1985, ostensibly to compete with the Apple Macintosh, and other computers shipping with graphical shells by that time. However, early versions of Windows ...
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How do I create a boot menu to select between Windows and DOS?
I was not a PC user before Windows 98. But I remember one of my friends was using a boot menu in his 486 machine to select between Windows/DOS.
The menu was like:
1. EMS
2. XMS
3. Windows
If we ...
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What algorithm did Microsoft use to dither colour in early versions of Windows?
In the late 1980s to mid 1990s, most consumer-class video hardware was not capable of displaying greater than 16 colours at a time. To create the illusion of greater colour, software often "blended" ...
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Why does part of the Windows 98 Setup program look older than the rest?
When installing Windows 98, the part of the setup process where you enter things like product details looks... different. The scrollbars, buttons, title bar and such look more like they belong in ...
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Why did Windows pick 260 characters as the maximum path length?
I just got burned by the 260 character path limitation in Windows. Why did Microsoft decided to limit paths to 3 characters for drive + 256 characters + 1 character for the terminator? Mac OS of the ...
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How did Windows 3.1 implement multitasking?
Windows in its earliest days was simply a shell that ran on top of MS-DOS, which means that Windows 3.1 itself was actually just a standard MS-DOS application like any other.
Yet, MS-DOS is not a ...
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Why did Mac OS 7 perform poorly with virtual memory enabled?
A comment in another question about supervisor and user modes in the Motorola 68000 processors, claimed that "performance was abysmal" with virtual memory enabled. An InfoWorld article about System 7 ...
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Sound driver for DOS or Windows 3.x that used the PC speaker?
Long ago in a galaxy far far away, back in the early 90's, I worked for a crappy clone company as a phone technician. At the time, 386SX/25's were common for in-house technical support / customer ...
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Is there a better way to the 6 disks install of Windows 3.1
I want to install Windows 3.1 on my MS-DOS 6.22 Machine. I have the 6 disk images. But I only have 1 or 2 spare Floppy disk that I can write the disk images onto. One way I can think of is to write ...
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Why the DOS extender and DPMI were unavailable to DOS programs on 286 standard mode of Windows 3.0
An old article on Windows 3.0 from PC Magazine (June 11, 1991, page 348) said that:
Using standard mode, the Windows DOS extender and DOS Protected Mode Interface (DPMI) are available to Windows ...
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How did Microsoft take over Winsocks (Windows Sockets)?
In the early days of the Internet, Windows users had to install an application called "Trumpet Winsock" in order to use Internet apps like e-mail, FTP, WWW, etc. There were competitors, but Trumpet ...
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