6 ms·

I'd like to think it'd have had some subtantial tracktion back in the day, being able to overlay your work windows 3.1 machine with BSD. It has some DDE exchan

I'd like to think it'd have had some subtantial tracktion back in the day, being able to overlay your work windows 3.1 machine with BSD. It has some DDE exchange I haven't tried to use yet, but it'll talk to Excel, so imagine having snmpwalk scripts to poll networks and do real-time excel graphs!? It'd have been awesome.

lproven 3y ago
I deployed Windows 3.1 in production. It was horribly unstable and crashed if you gave it a nasty look. Running BSD binaries on top would give the unpleasant combination of an unstable GUI with weak multitasking, on a primitive OS, plus hard-to-use unfriendly binaries. Not a winning combination. To me, it sounds like MachTen on Classic MacOS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MachTen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MachTen BSD in a window on an OS with no good multitasking, virtual memory, or networking. So, it lets you do stuff the host OS couldn't otherwise do, but it doesn't mean it does it well -- because it doesn't.
- scruffyherder 3y ago
  you clearly havent tried it on real hardware, BOW is pretty awesome. Yes I too was doing IT in the mid 90's and did far more than my share of widnows 3.1 with win32s. If you'd looked into bow it hooks all the timers from dos, and can happily run more than one thing at a time, and preempt them. It's a winning combination for sure, even on my lowly 386 DX 16, I can run word, excel & bow at the same time. It's great!
  - lproven 3y ago
    (?) No, I haven't. I have zero nostalgia for Windows 3.x and no desire to ever run it again. I did write about ArcaOS 5.1 recently: https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/04/arcaos_51/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/04/arcaos_51/ That runs WinOS2 and that was interesting, but it's inside a grown-up OS. That's different. This isn't from the mid-1990s. It's from the early '90s and that was a time of huge rapid change. Mid to late '90s stuff is fun. Early '90s stuff is painful. Windows 3.0 and 3.1 can multitask DOS stuff quite well in their own right; it's Win16 binaries that they can only cooperatively multitask.
    - scruffyherder 3y ago
      Load it on arca https://archive.org/details/bsd-on-windows https://archive.org/details/bsd-on-windows If be more interested if that runs ..

lproven 3y ago

I deployed Windows 3.1 in production. It was horribly unstable and crashed if you gave it a nasty look. Running BSD binaries on top would give the unpleasant combination of an unstable GUI with weak multitasking, on a primitive OS, plus hard-to-use unfriendly binaries. Not a winning combination. To me, it sounds like MachTen on Classic MacOS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MachTen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MachTen BSD in a window on an OS with no good multitasking, virtual memory, or networking. So, it lets you do stuff the host OS couldn't otherwise do, but it doesn't mean it does it well -- because it doesn't.

scruffyherder 3y ago
you clearly havent tried it on real hardware, BOW is pretty awesome. Yes I too was doing IT in the mid 90's and did far more than my share of widnows 3.1 with win32s. If you'd looked into bow it hooks all the timers from dos, and can happily run more than one thing at a time, and preempt them. It's a winning combination for sure, even on my lowly 386 DX 16, I can run word, excel & bow at the same time. It's great!
- lproven 3y ago
  (?) No, I haven't. I have zero nostalgia for Windows 3.x and no desire to ever run it again. I did write about ArcaOS 5.1 recently: https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/04/arcaos_51/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/04/arcaos_51/ That runs WinOS2 and that was interesting, but it's inside a grown-up OS. That's different. This isn't from the mid-1990s. It's from the early '90s and that was a time of huge rapid change. Mid to late '90s stuff is fun. Early '90s stuff is painful. Windows 3.0 and 3.1 can multitask DOS stuff quite well in their own right; it's Win16 binaries that they can only cooperatively multitask.
  - scruffyherder 3y ago
    Load it on arca https://archive.org/details/bsd-on-windows https://archive.org/details/bsd-on-windows If be more interested if that runs ..