Well, not even Microsoft could make up their mind about it, as the Windows 3.0 box refers to it as a "Graphical Environment" while 3.1 is called an "Operating System".

I've also heard it being called an "Operating Environment" which seems to adequately describe it as something in between those two. But in any case at least 3.1 was used a lot in office environments and for early multimedia stuff so I wouldn't say it was pointless.

LewisRaz wrote on 2023-03-24, 23:15:

Whatever it is, its not intuitive for someone who has not used it before! 😁

Of course it is, draws on all the same interface conventions as it's predecessors like Visi On and Gem, you make it sound real old, still has cassette player play, stop, fast forward symbols in the gramophone app, some GUIs in my day, you had to shake the reins to make it go and haul back on them to make it stop. .. ... 😉

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-03-25, 02:54:

xcomcmdr wrote on 2023-03-24, 22:14:

Windows 3.X is an actual OS. Kernel API, user space API, cooperative multitasking, ...

It ain't DOS.

It aint an OS either, its a GUI extension for DOS.

I has its own kernel, drivers, kernel api, userspace api, memory model, multitasking model, its own executable format (NE format), Win16 apps...

It is an operating system. That's a fact.

It uses DOS as a bootloader and a compatibility layer.

Same for 9x, it is an OS. Entirely.

I'm just stating facts here. There's no hill to die on.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2023-03-25, 08:25:

I has its own kernel, drivers, kernel api, userspace api, memory model, multitasking model, its own executable format (NE format […]
Show full quote

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-03-25, 02:54:

xcomcmdr wrote on 2023-03-24, 22:14:

Windows 3.X is an actual OS. Kernel API, user space API, cooperative multitasking, ...

It ain't DOS.

It aint an OS either, its a GUI extension for DOS.

I has its own kernel, drivers, kernel api, userspace api, memory model, multitasking model, its own executable format (NE format), Win16 apps...

It is an operating system. That's a fact.

It uses DOS as a bootloader and a compatibility layer.

Same for 9x, it is an OS. Entirely.

I'm just stating facts here. There's no hill to die on.

Uh huh

Are you one of these heathens that considers X-windows, KDE, GNOME etc to also be an OS? if not that what exactly is the difference here because Windows 3.1/9x are no different in their behavior of requiring a core OS to function.

We shall agree to disagree here I think.

You disagree with facts and the people who implemented DOS, Windows 3.X, Windows 9X, and beyond, not me...

Suit yourself.

The BIOS is the only true operating system! Everything else is a shell for BIOS!

GigAHerZ wrote on 2023-03-25, 12:57:

The BIOS is the only true operating system! Everything else is a shell for BIOS!

BIOS is before all things. The black monolith has one inside.
Let's start a cult, will come in handy in Fallout events.

I hate to split hairs, but Windows 3.x is kind of both an extension of DOS and its own, unique operating system. Windows 3.x can't boot without the DOS environment loaded first (including XMS memory management and device drivers). Windows 3.x relies on DOS for low-level drive access (although Microsoft later developed a "32-bit" driver for hard disk access) and basic BIOS calls.

However, once loaded, Windows 3.x manages memory itself for all programs including the DOS VM in standard and enhanced modes. It also has its own APIs (Win16 and Win32s) that cannot execute under DOS. Finally, it has its own device drivers for peripherals that can be loaded into Windows with or without the DOS drivers loaded first including video, audio, and networking.

As mentioned earlier, this is all true for Windows 9x. It likewise must boot DOS first with XMS memory management (HIMEM.SYS loads in the background), and it can boot with real-mode device drivers when needed (defined in AUTOEXEC.BAT). Once booted into the GUI, Windows 9x handles memory management and loads its own device drivers. The biggest difference (other than EXPLORER.EXE) is that Windows 9x has a lot more Windows device drivers including disk devices that Microsoft never developed for Windows 3.x.

So, if you consider Windows 9x an unique OS, then I think you could consider the DOS/Windows 3.x combination a unique OS. I do, which is why I have disks with just DOS optimized for DOS only applications, and disks that boot straight to Windows 3.x for Windows applications.

bjwil1991 wrote on 2022-09-19, 03:03:

There might be a DIP switch or jumper block that got set to CGA 80 mode instead of TGA mode and it's either in the back of the computer or inside on the motherboard.

I flashed a modified BIOS for my Austin M1RC and it works (I archived the original to be safe) and I flashed a MR BIOS set for a 286 board I'm going to test later on tonight.

I have yet to get that ECS 286 LX-A working and if the MR BIOS boots up, then I know for a fact that the original ROMs have gone bad or just a fluke somewhere. No battery damage since the board was never used and I have another 286 board I can test out as well which uses SIMM-30 RAM and there isn't a spot for PDIP RAM (late 286 board).

Weird, I have the same mobo now, it had a defective 4164 chip(s?) in bank 1, so I replaced them with 256k chips, BIOS still shows 640k total despite bank 0 being 512k (memory in that bank checks out)

Is there a manual somewhere for this board? Can it even do 1 Mb?

*edit - Switch 1 goes from off to on and I got my 1024k! YES!!

Shagittarius wrote on 2023-03-24, 21:27:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2023-03-24, 18:53:

LewisRaz wrote on 2023-03-24, 18:28:

Today I uploaded a video on my Dell 466i and rambled on about it while getting confused by windows 3.11 as I went straight from DOS to windows 95 back in the day.
https://youtu.be/RiKLiMbqu0o

Ive always viewed 3.1 as more of a DOS program masquerading as an OS than an actual OS.

The only reason to ever have used 3.x was for word processing.

There was this somewhat popular thing where you got a program from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and connected to a particle accelerator laboratory.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-03-25, 16:01:

Shagittarius wrote on 2023-03-24, 21:27:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2023-03-24, 18:53:

Ive always viewed 3.1 as more of a DOS program masquerading as an OS than an actual OS.

The only reason to ever have used 3.x was for word processing.

There was this somewhat popular thing where you got a program from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and connected to a particle accelerator laboratory.

Interesting, I can't tell if I should know what this is by you withholding the name or if you don't remember the name?

Referring to the pre 95 period where NCSA Mosaic was the popular web browser and info.cern.ch was the world's home/start page, before those upstarts at yahoo got going.

My experience with the Web started in 94 I think, and I barely paid it any attention until mid year 95, so I'm not familiar with that at all. Interesting though!

In Aug of 95 I moved out to the California Bay Area for my job. They had a T1 line, and Windows '95 became a thing...that's when it really started meaning something for me, before that I wasn't about to pay by the hour. BBS' had everything I cared about.

While Netscape probably wasn't the first browser I had used, its the first I remember using regularly. (Nutscrape for those who lived it)

Today I got my dual-Pentium II 333 system based on a P2L97-DS mobo out. It's a 440LX chipset, so 66MHz FSB. It has 1GB of useless RAM but well...
I run the latest FreeBSD on it. The CPU fans are also half dead, I need to change them.

On a sidenote, are there adapters for USB 3 case cables to USB 1/2 motherboard headers?

Minutemanqvs wrote on 2023-03-25, 16:29:

On a sidenote, are there adapters for USB 3 case cables to USB 1/2 motherboard headers?

Yes, they are on eBay for a few dollars. I have a couple and they work well.

Meatball wrote on 2023-03-25, 17:39:

Minutemanqvs wrote on 2023-03-25, 16:29:

On a sidenote, are there adapters for USB 3 case cables to USB 1/2 motherboard headers?

Yes, they are on eBay for a few dollars. I have a couple and they work well.

Ah indeed they are cheap... https://www.ebay.com/itm/224141908528

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-03-25, 04:01:

Of course it is, draws on all the same interface conventions as it's predecessors like Visi On and Gem

Actually, one of the reasons why Windows beaten the ***p on GEM was that, for some reason, Digital Research decided to no port their MP/M-86 multitask kernel to PC so GEM could provide actual program multitasking. So, even when GEM looked better (at least than Win1x and 2x) and had stuff like vector fonts, better graphics management, it actually provided an API for graphics applications etc... It couldn't support more than one program at time. Also you couldn't run DOS in a Box ofc.
This is actually different of GEM in the M68k, where actually Atari provided a multitask OS kernel in the form of TOS. There you can see the true capabilities of GEM which never made to PC. Later Novell tried fix that by extending TaskMax OS module to provide multitask services to GEM, but with Win95 coming, was already too late for them.

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-03-25, 09:07:

Are you one of these heathens that considers X-windows, KDE, GNOME etc to also be an OS? if not that what exactly is the difference here because Windows 3.1/9x are no different in their behavior of requiring a core OS to function.

Problem here is you aren't separating the components. What you call XWindows here is just a small part of KRNL386 and GDI. This doesn't involve the rest of the components at all. Although KRNL286 and 386 in Win1, 2, 3 and 4 is a DPMI client program, I give you that.
What you call KDE or GNOME in Windows lies in the USER module and part of GDI module.
The "OS Core" as you call it, is in the VMM module, or DOSX for Standard Mode. It has its own memory management, and taps & controls the CPU tables. Provides program protection and manages between drivers, hardware and the DOS VM, which you use when you don't have Disk and VGA drivers mostly.
DOSX "OS services" are simpler and smaller than its VMM countepart, and doesn't support many of the features its big brother do, as preemptive multitasking (in Win3 only for drivers, extended to windows programs and dos boxes in Win95).

Actually there is a little experiment, where, if you could program GRUB to provide the least of XMS and Disk services compatible with what Win9x expects at boot time, you actually could boot Win9x directly from GRUB bypassing DOS, as long as you provided VxD drivers for Disk and VGA. Sure you would lost Dos Box support and DOS compatibility failsafe falldown, but the OS would run Win32 applications with multitasking just fine. This was used by Novell in their lawsuit against Win95 and DOS ties.

Shagittarius wrote on 2023-03-24, 21:27:

The only reason to ever have used 3.x was for word processing.

I remember using it for editing and mixing audio samples using a software called Wave Editor that came with my SBPro, or was it SB16? Also, in the small business sector Win3.11 became really ubiquitous because of its networking capabilities. At least where I live. But yeah, as a kid I was more interested in DOS, cuz that's what all the games were running on 😁

Cheers!

Tested the DVD-ROM I picked up on Monday. It powered on but had the common ejection problem, and something was rattling inside. It was the exact same model (Lite-On SHD-16P1S) in this video and, fortunately, one of the clip on front bezel was already snapped, making it much easier to remove. I simply rinsed the rubber band with IPA and voila! The rattling stuff was -- guess what -- that snapped clip of the front bezel. 😆 And it could read some CD-R discs I burned more than 20 years ago successfully!

IMHO those PATA/IDE interfaced optical drives are far more valuable than SATA drives in retro computing: they can be used on computers from PC/AT to some early DDR3 era motherboards, with no need of SATA drivers (needed by Win9x at all times and WinXP during installation). By the time SATA became mainstream the need of optical drives started declining rapidly.

How many rigs do you actually feel like you NEED in order to enjoy this hobby? I just ran through a mental check of what rigs I would absolutely NEED to have.

* Middleweight 486: Gateway 2000 Desktop AT, Win95, Intel 486DX2 66, 8MB RAM, Trident ProVidia 9685 PCI, Soundblaster 16 3rd Gen w/ Real OPL2, 500MB HDD
* Middleweight 586: Baby AT Socket 7 430TX Motherboard, Win98FE, 32MB RAM, Intel Pentium MMX 200, S3 Virge 325 PCI, Soundblaster 16 2nd Gen w/ Real OPL2, 2GB HDD
* Punchy Pentium III: Dell Optiplex GX1 500MBR, Win98SE, Intel Pentium III 500, 384MB SDRAM, NVIDIA RiVA TNT2 M64 PCI + Voodoo 2 12MB, Soundblaster LIVE Gold! + Soundblaster AWE64 Value, 80GB HDD
* Blazing Pentium III: Compaq Deskpro EN, Win98SE, Intel Pentium III 1GHZ, 768MB SDRAM, NVIDIA GeForce2 Ultra 64MB, Soundblaster LIVE Gold!, 80GB HDD
* "All things GeForceFX": ABiT VT7 Socket 423 VIA PT880, Windows XP SP2, 2GB DDR 400, Intel Pentium 4 HT 2.8GHZ, 2GB DDR 400, ASUS GeForce FX5950 Ultra 256MB AGP, Soundblaster Audigy2, 320GB + 500GB SATA HDDs
* Shaders 3.0: Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI Socket 939 nForce4, Windows XP SP3, AMD Athlon 64 3500+ @ 2.2GHZ, 2GB DDR400, EVGA GeForce 7900GTO 512MB, Soundblaster Audigy2ZS, 120GB SSD + 500GB HDD
* DX10/DX11: ASUS P5N-D LGA775 nForce 750i, WinXP SP3 + Win7 Dual Boot, Intel Core2 Extreme QX9650 @ 3.0GHZ, 8GB DDR2 1066, Gigabyte GeForce GTX 760 2GB, Soundblaster X-Fi XtremeMusic, 3x 500GB HDD
(I really plan to move this system over to a X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty and SSD for the OS partitions)
* My modern gaming rig: ASUS Z87 Deluxe Premium, Windows 10 Latest, Intel Core i7 4770S, 16GB DDR3 2133, AMD Radeon RX5700XT 8GB, Soundblaster Z, 8TB storage onboard.

I feel like this is the minimum to play every game from 1990ish to modernity without any glitches or issues and with at least a semblance of period correctness. Counter arguments? I feel like between drivers introducing compatibility issues with GPUs and OS introduced compatibility breaks eliminating any one of these would leave me with atleast a couple of years in which games released that have issues on the system above or below it.