Microsoft Retires Windows 3.x

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Microsoft has officially retired Windows 3.x after 18 years. Wait. What? Who knew they were still handing out Windows 3.x licenses? That has to be some kind of record.

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 to win huge worldwide success.
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I wanna know who actually bought a license in the last 3 years or so.
 
Microsoft maintained support for Windows 3.x until the end of 2001, and it has lived on as an embedded operating system until 1 November 2008.

As an embedded system, it was used to power such things as cash tills in large stores and ticketing systems.

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That makes a whole lot more sense.
 
Holy crap, I thought that thing was dead long ago, I guess someone at M$ forgot when they got caught in the buzz of 95 selling like hot cakes, or just realized it was still running and should have died in 96.
 
wow, I read this earlier I guess everything is finally moving away from DOS finally.
 
Any way to easily emulate 3.11? Thinking of trying it out just for nostalgia, but not if it's too much hassle. Don't want to install it as an OS.
 
That sucks...It was stable and ran well for me. I install it on all my new systems. I saw no reason to upgrade. Now I am forced to.
 
I want my progman.exe back! I remember when I used win95/98 I would use progman instead of explorer as the shell. To this day on vista I still have my start bar to auto hide! lol
 
PS. wouldn't mind if Vista has a win3.1 theme either! Maybe throw in some transparency on the titlebar?
 
Wii printing money? Psh...

Windows 3.xx = the real money printer!
 
I just got a copy from my grandfather with license. A friend is gonna let me borrow his USB floppy drive so I can make images of the disk and them set up a VM. Still working on getting DOS 6.22 (looks like the same friend) and I got a key from Win98 and have a disc image. Trying to workout what would make the perfect environment for folks that never quiet made it out of Windows 98/3.x.
 
Jeez, I remember buying that in high school. Pretty amazing that they kept to going for so long.
 
nst6563 said:
Now what will M$ run on their servers for those "I'm a PC" commercials?
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lol

18 years is a long time to be handing out licenses to an OS that was replaced 13 years ago. I wonder if they are doing the same thing for Win95? :rolleyes:
 
Hey, not everyone uses PC's for pr0n and games. :)

I would bet part of its long run was for legacy support for old scientific instruments. Trust me... there are still a lot out there. Up until six months ago, I was still using an HPLC with a Windows 3.11 workstation. It worked very well.
 
Apple can think elitist all it wants.

Microsoft is laughing all the way to the bank where it has $40 billion in CASH. And now we know where some of that cash is coming from! :D
 
OHNOEZ!!! Not WIndows for Workgroups!!@!@ how will i sleep tonight....
 
billgates.jpg


mmm sexy!
 
I'll bet Microsoft was selling thousands of these licenses to banks and shops which have their own, non-net-connected till and computer system. Win3.x has the advantage of having a very low memory footprint and being 100% compatable with MSDOS programs.
 
You would be surprised what is running on old OS's.

I currently work on BIG laser photo printers that use old PIII 433 CPUs running Win 95 in Dos mode to run the inner workings of the machine. The would work in plain old Dos, but 95 came with the Computers so thats what they use.

Don
 
It is amazing to think of how many things that we deal with in life are probably running on 3.11 platforms and are working extremely well
 
Dr_John said:
Hey, not everyone uses PC's for pr0n and games. :)

I would bet part of its long run was for legacy support for old scientific instruments. Trust me... there are still a lot out there. Up until six months ago, I was still using an HPLC with a Windows 3.11 workstation. It worked very well.
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QFT, I used a UVVIs last week with windows for workgroups on it. Same thing with a few old GCMS's we let the students use and the old R2D2 looking NMR machines (they use Solaris though). I got really frustrated when I realized it had no USB ports and two floppy drives (one small one real floppy). Ugh. Had to save my data to a disk. Find a computer with usb ports and a floppy (easier to find) and then transfer my data to the usb drive. ALL so I could edit it on my computer.
 
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