Imagine a world without the Outset button. No, I'm not talking active Windows 8. Dig wide into your memory, and you may recall a time when Windows 3.1 ruled the Earth.
Twenty-cardinal age past this month, Microsoft released interpretation 3.1 of its MS-DOS graphical-shell-turned-operative-system. Windows 3.1 became the first adaptation of Windows to be cosmopolitan with new PCs, cementing the dominance of Microsoft's OS on the IBM Personal computer platform and signaling the aurora of the Golden Age of Windows.
In award of this anniversary, let's payoff a optical tour through Windows 3.1. In the chase slides, I'll highlight many of the innovations this multicolored Graphical user interface brought to Windows first.
Program Manager
In front Windows Explorer, there was Broadcast Manager, where you could mathematical group application icons together any way you welcome, allowing for primitive computer program organization. (For viewing files on your computer, you ran File Manager.) It worked well decent, but juggle the many windows could prove tricky–and you could finish up with 50-plus computer program groups filling your CRT screen.
Filing cabinet Manager
File in Managing director let you search the lodge system of your reckoner visually, exploitation a directory corner and an icon-supported position of files. Copying between folders was as unchaste as a drag and drop, which attracted many novice Microcomputer users to Windows.
Microsoft combined File Director and Program Manager into Windows Explorer in Windows 95, and the arrangement has been that room ever since.
TrueType Fonts
The TrueType font system marked the just about distinguished visual innovation in Windows 3.1. On-key Type was actually developed aside Apple Data processor, which–if you can believe IT–commissioned the technology to Microsoft for free. Why? Apple didn't wishing Adobe to monopolise digital type.
Rather than victimization cubic pixels in a electronic image, TrueType described fonts A curves and lines, which allowed fonts to ordered series smoothly to any size. This capability produced awesome printed documents, a monumental cause wherefore Windows 3.1 flourished as a desktop publication political platform. Win 3.1 enclosed 15 fonts with now-familiar names such as Arial, Courier, System, and Multiplication Unweathered Roman.
Built-In Screensavers
Prior to Windows 3.1, if you wanted to save your monitor from CRT burn-in, you either turned it off operating theater installed a third-party screensaver much as After Dark-skinned. In version 3.1, Microsoft included four screensavers: Blank Screen (oooh!), Moving Windows (assorted Windows Logos soaring away), Pavilion (a phrase of your choice scrolling across the screen), and Starfield Simulation (a flight through space, with the stars streaking past).
Course, users could put in many more screensavers, which spawned a back-of-the-magazine cottage industriousness of screensaver plug-ins that functioned more as eye candy than as a true means to protect your monitor lizard.
Minesweeper and Pezophaps solitaria
In the days in front hands-down and ubiquitous access to celebrity-news blogs, role workers ofttimes whiled away their unprofitable hours with games of Solitaire and Minesweeper (well, that and doodling with Paintbrush). Solitaire first appeared in Windows 3.0, but Microsoft introduced the puzzle classic Minesweeper in 3.1, replacing 3.0's Reversi. Some people claim that Windows Solitaire has wasted more hours of productivity than any other PC application.
The Registry Is Intelligent
Windows 3.1 brought many improvements, but it as wel introduced a feature film that would get on the bane of many Windows users: the Registry. We all bed how cushy information technology is for this usage database of out of sight system settings to go jumbled and bring on mayhem on our machines. The Register has survived all the complaints, though: Behind the modern-looking, Metro touch interface of Windows 8, the Register calm down lurks.
Ascendancy Panel
Support in the days of 3.1, you needed only 12 icons in the Control Panel to configure all of Windows; in my Windows 7 Control Panel, I count 52 icons. (Of course, Windows 3.1 took up just 11MB of disk space, versus 23GB for my Windows 7 install–a good indication of the Bone's increasing complexness all over the years.)
Windows 3.1 was the number 1 version of Windows to have a modular Panel. You could sum up new panels to the window shown here simply by copying a uncommon CPL file out into the Windows system folder.
Integrated Images
Windows 3.1 introduced a systemwide agency of embedding and linking different types of files together called OLE, short for Object Linking and Embedding. What does that mean? For good example, you could take a Paintbrush bitmap file and embed IT into a Write Book processing file, as shown here. Only if the bitmap were "connected" alternatively, any external changes in the bitmap would be reflected in the Write file. We take much functionality for granted these days, merely 25 years ago this was a major convenience.
Uniform Open/Save Dialog Boxes
Prior to Windows 3.1, application authors had to code their own Gaping/Economize single file dialogue boxes from scratch for every program, which light-emitting diode to confusing inconsistencies. Microsoft remedied that in 3.1 by introducing a systemwide Open/Save panel system of rules (shown here in Paintbrush) that developers could plug into their products.
Microsoft freshman supernatant sound and video playback as take off of Windows 3.0 with Multimedia system Extensions, released in 1991, but only on new machines. The company made those additions criterial in Windows 3.1, allowing users to play and phonograph recording high-timber digitized audio files using deep cards such equally the popular SoundBlaster Pro. And in Media Participant, users could watch AVI video files–if their hardware could handle the television without choking.
Notepad and Calculator
Neither Notepad nor Calculator originated with Windows 3.1, but these a great deal-ill-used accessories are Charles Frederick Worth a look anyway. Though the appearance of Notepad should live familiar to most Bodoni font Windows users, the cinnamon-red, flat buttons of Calculator may look a little strange. Those buttons are a trace of the time earlier the shaded, 3D-button looking at of 1990's Windows 3.0 became standard. Windows 95 introduced a more "Windows-looking" Calculator three years later.
Task List
In neo versions of Windows, you hold down Ctrl-Alt-Delete to access Task Manager. In Windows 3.1, you pressed Ctrl-Esc or double-clicked happening the desktop to bring up the herald of Task Manager, called Task List. The utility let you view all open applications and ungenerous i if information technology became disorderly. (That wasn't arsenic multipurpose as it sounds, though, since most application crashes at the time took Windows fallen with them.)
Digital Doodles
We'll end our go of 3.1 with an abstract illustration created by my chum in Paintbrush, the ancestor of now's Paint. At a time when nigh Windows PCs supported only 16 colors, Paintbrush functioned as a versatile Swiss USA knife for quick graphics-editing tasks.
The era of Windows 3.1 was a simpler time, only not necessarily a bad one. After all, if Windows misbehaved–and believe me, that happened a allot–you could just quit to Magnolia State-DOS and act that Windows didn't exist.
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