On Tue, 18 Nov 2025, Wayne S via cctalk wrote: Windows 3.00 was the last version that could run on 5150/5160 (PC/XT) (below a 80286) In Windows 3.10, the setup porgram demanded some RAM above !M (A20 being used to get that high memory chunk) In August 1991 (tenth anniversary of 5150 (PC) reloease), Windows 3.11 beta copies were given out at the Microsoft Developers Conference. Bill Gate was a no-show, because he was in NYC on national TV being interviewed about the PC anniversary I was dropped from the beta program when I declared that SCANDISK was a disaster, and would eventually require a recall of DOS 6.00, When they did the "FREE" "Stepup" from 6.00 to 6.20, they let it continue to be blamed on the disk compression, although SCANDISK was actually the cause of the specific problems that warranted the replacemnt. Details available on request. STAC Electonics ("Stacker"?) had previously been in negotiations and technology information sharing, to be included in 6.00. Some usual unreliable sources claimed that STAC had demanded a royalty for inclusion of HALF the DOS price! When the deal collapsed, STAC sued Microsoft for infringement, because Microsoft hade kept some of the STAC code; Microsoft counter-sued, because STAC had started using some of the code from Microsoft. BOTH suits won! But Stac was awarded more than twice the damages that Microsoft was; Bill Gates said, "I'm having a bad day." (What I might say if I couldn't find the $20 bill) Microsoft released DOS 6.21 (same, but with no compression software provided) Then Microsoft wrote or commissioned a non-infringing compression, and released 6.22 (same, with non-infringing compression) I'm not sure whether Windows 95 could run on 80286; but most later versions required 80386[SX] or above. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com

On Wed, 19 Nov 2025, Anders Nelson wrote: OOPS! MAJOR ERROR I meant SMARTDSK, th disk cacheing program Nothing [much] wrong with SCANDISK. Well, DOS 7.00 SCANDISK wouldn't do "EX-FAT", nor reset the "dirty bit", rendering an entire drive useless and "unrecoverable" by normal users. (Monty Python mentioned "naughty bits", not "dirty bits") Win 3.11 installed SMARTDSK at the beginning of install. And, by default, it did WRITE cacheing (with any write it would declare that the WRITE had been completed without error, before it even tried). If there was a hard error, the only critical error option was RETRY. If that didn't recover, the entire install had to be forcibly aborted, with NONE of the successful part left on the disk! When I told Microsoft Beta management about it, they said "that's a hardware problem, not our concern"; They didn't appreciate my attempt to explain that when the OS encountered a hardware error, and knew about it, it had an obligation to gracefully rcover, work around, or exit, not jam up. SSTOR and SPINRITE could find no errors on that part of the disk! But Install always broke at the same place. I copied a hadful of nonsense space-taker files onto the disk, so that Install would be writing to a slighly different place on the disk; that worked! Without write cacheing, you could/would, after retry, write down which file had failed, IGNORE the error, and go back later to manually re-install that file. (one of the very few situations where IGNOREing an error was justified) If the user shut off the computer before the write actually got done, . . . I had a girlfriend who went back to college; in the morning, she would stand, with her coat on, pulling on the paper while her homework printed. Then, the instant that the DOS prompt returned, she hit the power switch. The write cacheing also re-arranged the sequence of writes "for greater efficiency"; instead of writing the file, and then writing the directory entry on each file to be written, it would write all of the directory entries, and then write the file contents. If the user shut off the computer before that completed, . . . Besides user actions, a power failure would cause the same problems. Yes, I know; REAL computers have uninterruptible power supplies? Using a laptop, instead of a desktop, also mitigates most of the power interruption problems. For DOS 6.20 "To repair the problems with compression", they made WRITE cacheing off by default; if the user deiberately turned write caching on, it would not rearrange the write sequence, and, when a progam exited, it would not give the DOS prompt until all of the writes were completed. THAT fixed the worst of the "problems with compression", that people griped about. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com

On Tue, Nov 18, 2025 at 7:38 PM Michael Mulhern via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote: I wasn't a MS customer at the time (in 1985, I was full-on into DEC minicomputers at work - literally zero PCs - and Commodore + old DEC at home). Some time in the 90s, I came across a boxed set of Windows 1 that I still have for hysterical raisins. I do confess to using Win 3.1 at work in 1995 (different companies entirely), specifically WfW 3.11 to be able to use TCP/IP to talk to all the UNIX and Linux machines. Having tried Windows 1, I can see why Windows didn't really catch on until Windows 3.x. -ethan

Yeah our windows manager sad that Win XP was the version that had everything converted to run on 32 bit. Prior to XP, there were some utilities and drainage vers that were still 16 bit. Sent from my iPhone

-- --Carey

On 19/11/2025 4:51 pm, Bill Degnan via cctalk wrote: My favorite environment when I had to use DOS or Windows was the MKS Toolkit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKS_Toolkit), basically an attempt to create an environment as close to UNIX as was possible on MS-DOS. Julf

On 11/19/25 4:31 PM, Carey Schug via cctalk wrote: GEM

On Wed, 2025-11-19 at 12:06 -0500, Bill Degnan via cctalk wrote: GEMDOS was the ATARI 520/1040 system. There's an emulator for it called Hatari.

On Wed, 2025-11-19 at 11:20 -0800, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: I think it was Spencer Katt who wrote "Using Windows NT is like having a child help you."

The only good thing about Bob was the GeoSafari game. It was surprisingly entertaining. RayRay On Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 2:20 PM Fred Cisin via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote: