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Ghosts Windows 3.1

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Having wandered recently on the Goodwill second-hand, I came across a cheap tablet designed to work under Windows 10. I paid only a few dollars for it, although the new one sells for more than $ 100. The drivers flew from him, I tried to restore them, after which all tasks, even loading the Start menu, began to slow down very much. This made me install CloudReady , a variation of Chrome OS that works pretty well on a tablet , although it doesn't support built-in WiFi, Bluetooth, brightness, sound, and something else. (An external WiFi dongle helped me!) In fact, it was a challenge for me, as well as an experiment with a Mac Mini for $ 10 . But this is a strange, little useful device (MacBook Pro will not be in any comparison with this fuss with the dongle) made me think about the strange contexts of using Windows, which, in turn, led to the thought of Windows 3.1 - the first truly dominant version of this operating system. In this article I will talk about unusual applications of Windows 3.1.

“You can draw with a pen directly on the surface, leave handwritten notes, as if on paper, and the computer will recognize them. So the keyboard is optional. Such a machine can be taken with you to a meeting or to meet with a client, use it in a very natural way. We will provide the convenience of working with Windows for Pen Computing. "

So Bill Gates in a marketing video in 1991 talked about the benefits of Windows for Pen Computing - an operating system designed for the first tablet computers. Launched in 1992 as a branch of Windows 3.1, the program has become one of many handwriting-enabled systems, including GoPoint's PenPoint. ( Apple also triedHowever, her tablet never entered the market; instead, the company focused on creating the Newton PDA.) At that time, there was strong skepticism towards this industry , and it turned out that it was justified. Despite some successful products for the business market, for example, GRiDPad , it took almost 20 years to appear on the market for a competitive consumer tablet, and it was not created by Microsoft.


Memorex VIS photo taken by renowned console photographer Evan Emos, who released a book of his shots last year (his photos are licensed under Creative Commons). In 2017, Emos wrote on Twitter that this console was the hardest to find for a book. ( Evan Amos / Twitter )

Radio Shack Philips CD-i Windows,


The Philips CD-i was not a good system. An interactive multimedia device created by one of the companies that developed Compact Disc was originally sold as a “home appliance” - a video game console, from which everything that makes the console interesting was removed.

(The device was positioned as something more sophisticated, so, for example, you could buy The Flowers of Robert Mapplethorpe for it - in fact, an interactive slide show.) The

legacy of CD-i was immortalized, probably the most pyrrhic victory of our time: when Nintendo decided “ throw Sony and develop a CD-ROM for Super NES with Philips, this gave the Dutch company access to licenses for Nintendo's two most popular franchises - Super Mario Bros. and the legend of zelda- but not access to Nintendo development resources. Therefore, the worst games in both franchises appeared on CD-i. (However, the developer of these games claims that they were well received at the time , and were criticized later.)

That is, the Philips CD-i, with all its innovations, was not the system to learn from. Even the baseball star Otis Nixon could not sell it .

But for some strange reason, the guys from Tandy, the parent company of Radio Shack, did not understand this and decided that in spite of everything, it was worth copying the CD-i model.


The result of their work was something called the Tandy Video Information System (VIS). The finished device, sold under the Memorex brand at Radio Shack stores nationwide (and touted with this extremely peppy video ), was a strange choice; in addition, it entered the market when both CD-i and a similar device, Commodore CDTV (in fact, the famous Amiga, but, surprisingly, not similar to CD32), already faced difficulties on the market.

A 1992 article on the multimedia market at Philadelphia Inquirer described the benefits of VIS over CD-i and CDTV:

, Tandy Video Information System (VIS), , . Radio Shack, , , CD.

"Standard computer language," speak? What does it mean? The secret of VIS was as follows: in fact, it was a low-power PC (or rather, 286) with a stripped down version of Windows 3.1, compatible only with its hardware (it was called “Modular Windows”, “modular Windows”).

In subsequent years, Microsoft will release many different specialized versions of Windows (first called Windows CE, and later - Windows Embedded Compact) for such diverse devices as video game consoles , smartphones, portable music players, and even cars . Modular Windows was one of the first such versions.

There is evidence that Microsoft was planning the possibility of using Modular Windows in different Tandy devices.A 1992 article in InfoWorld talks about the existence of a software development kit specifically for Modular Windows. Microsoft would not have created it for one device, which was not selling very well anyway. Moreover, in a 1992 1992 brief note in The Guardian it was reported that “subsequent versions of Modular Windows will be adapted for handheld computers and electronic organizers or PDAs.”

Modular Windows meant a lot; among other things, it has become a serious cause of discord between Microsoft and Tandy. 2003 Usenet Post(not so often you can find the Usenet-post link) late Tandy engineer Frank Djorda IV said that at the end of work on creating VIS, Microsoft tried to transfer the entire product to the Modular Windows brand. It got to the point that Microsoft secretly hid the logo in the code, despite the lack of space in the VIS ROM file:

, Modular Windows, . Microsoft ROM release candidate. Tandy . Microsoft , , 20 , . 20 , . Windows , Microsoft , . Modular Windows , , . , Microsoft Tandy .

(The fact that Tandy wanted to sell some of the DOS programs for the system didn’t improve at all, fortunately, there were many of them, but Microsoft opposed this. Forgive me, but no Wolfenstein 3D on your digital device for $ 700.)


Unfortunately for everyone who enjoyed watching the battle between Microsoft and Radio Shack, VIS was simply not for sale - the devices continued to collect dust on the shelves even after Radio Shack halved the price.

“Honestly, this system could be sold for at least $ 39.95, and it would still be uninteresting to the consumer - the console really turned out to be so bad,” one of the collectors of these devices wrote .

At some point in time, she probably actually sold for $ 39.95. In another 1995 Usenet post, Dyorda writes: The car’s failure was so terrible that it had to be sold through discount stores like TigerDirect, and this forced Tandy, who until then was an important name in the computer field, to throw a white flag.

“VIS Tandy lost about $ 50-75 million in development, production and marketing, ” Dyrda wrote . “It was this product that drove the company out of the computer business.”

(Dyurda himself admitted that only a handful of games were worthy of buying.)

As a result of this, the system today is incredibly difficult to find, because only 11 thousand devices were sold. (However, the software is quite common and is actively sold on eBay.) This is a relic of the forgotten era of various poor multimedia equipment that existed on the market, which did not particularly care what was sold on it.

Despite this, in spite of everything, this system had fans! A few years ago , a Blogger user under the nickname Sly DC toldhow he modified a game that existed only on a demo disk, making it bootable, and then modified the game itself (shooter called Spacenuts), replacing its graphics with the graphics of his favorite arcade game Vanguard.

1994 year


The year Microsoft released Windows 3.2. Never heard of her? It turns out that it happened because it was an augmented version of Windows 3.1, sold only in the Chinese market . But why only China? Firstly, this is a large market, and secondly, Microsoft needed a couple of attempts to deal with the introduction of simplified Chinese, and to correct the situation, the company added several input methods to Windows 3.2. If you're curious, this version can be found on the Internet Archive .


The most little-known variation of Windows 3.1 was used in the Commodore machine of the late 90s


Remember, around 1998, everyone thought the Commodore was already dead? It turns out that everything was a little more complicated.

This year, the Dutch company Tulip acquired the rights to the company's trademark, and its subsidiary Web Computers International began selling a device called Web.it Internet Computer - probably one of the most bizarre combinations of computer hardware and software.

According to de Volkskrant[in Dutch], Web International has annexed the former Commodore, including the management of this legendary computer firm. But here the fragility of the system from several participating companies intervened - obviously, after acquiring the name Commodore from the disbanded company, Tulip itself went bankrupt, failing to properly license the rights of Web International. Most likely, all this complicated the marketing of the product.


But despite the likely influence of employees of the former Commodore, the device itself was stylized as the bottom of the Apple PowerBook G3 of that era, complemented by black trim and a trackpad. But, in fact, it was a desktop machine without a monitor with a built-in keyboard, about the same as the Commodore at one time. She looked very attractive - black desktops at that time were still not very common.

Working with partners from IBM and AMD, Web Computers International has created a machine that, thanks to emulation, has backward compatibility with older Commodore machines. But the truly strange and surprising element of the machine was the operating system - a unique specialized version of Windows 3.1 called embOS.

Why Windows 3.1? According to a 1998 interview with Gerard Lindhout of Web Computers International, the company's goal was to create an embedded system for web surfing, but most of the options were not very high quality, and Windows CE at that time did not fit the needs of the company. Quote from an interview with Net4TV :

Then we began to study many other operating systems designed for Internet consoles, for example, QNX, but there were a lot of problems with them. We wanted the consumer to have a wide selection of software that he could download from the Web. Therefore, we chose Windows, and stopped at 3.1, because it had a ROM version that did not exist for Windows 95.

The operating system did not come with the traditional Program Manager, which used to use Windows 3.1, but with the File Manager, a special front-end shell. It also installed a set of office programs that are not related to Microsoft products, in particular, Netscape Navigator 3.0 and the Lotus office suite.


Yes, and the only version of the program that can be found online is in German, although it seems that work is being done on an English translation, and some have successfully hacked this OS .

Perhaps this is the strangest desktop computer in the world - the machine was sold under the name Commodore by a company that did not own it, used Windows 3.1 years after the release of Windows 95, it looked like a powerful Mac laptop of the time, although it was a weak PC desktop. In addition, it was developed as a competitor to WebTV . There are so many oddities here that I don’t even know where to start.

(One question interests me: how connected was embOS to Modular Windows?)

In the end, I would like to talk a little about a man named Peter Tattem. Tattem, an Australian software developer, created Trumpet Winsock. This program expertly took advantage of Microsoft's oversight.

Windows creators, guided by their own approach and looking at the potential of the Internet, did not develop software that allowed users with dial-up modems to directly connect to the Internet, despite the release of Windows 3.11 called Windows for Workgroups , which is specially designed for working on the network.

And here Trumpet Winsock entered the business. In fact, this program provided its own version of the Microsoft Windows Sockets API, or Winsock, which allowed Internet network protocols to communicate directly with Windows graphical interfaces. This opened up many possibilities for using the Internet, especially when the first web browsers like the NCSA Mosaic and Netscape appeared on the scene.

The program sold according to the shareware model was a huge success and was distributed by Internet providers around the world - this is understandable, because it is necessary to use the graphic Internet in Windows 3.1. A few more years, until Microsoft realized the mistake and developed its own way to easily set up dialup Internet connections, Trumpet Winsock was the only solution.

The problem was that all these providers freely distributed Trumpet Winsock and often did not even pay for the full version, that is, the work of Tattem did not receive proper financial success.

In 2011, this story surfaced and gained dramatic development: another Australian computer user named Jacques Chester heard about the situation with Tattem and created the site “Thanks for Trumpet Winsock” , where he conducted a donation collection campaign for Tattem to pay him for than most people in the past illegally used for free.

The campaign attracted a lot of attention and became an important reminder that, having learned about their old mistakes, most people seek to improve. (From time to time they recall her again. Perhaps this article will become another reason.)

How did Tattem himself react to such news? For his part, he was also generous.

“As a gesture of goodwill, Peter Tattem, the sole owner of the rights to Trumpet Winsock, announces a perpetual amnesty for any copyright violations by all Trumpet Winsock users (physical and legal) until January 2011,” the Tattem website says . “However, he reserves all other rights protected by the copyright of Trumpet Winsock.”

The story of Trumpet Winsock got an unexpectedly good ending. We did not have many similar stories from the Windows 3.1 era.

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