17 years that Win95 substituted Win3.1: publish full sources

[Fabrizio J Bonsignore]

Windows 3.1 was **officially** superseded by Windows 95 in 1995. Now
it is 17 years. Seventeen years is a typical period of protection for
products which may extended some ways, but now that Win 3.1 turned
into a plethora of more superadvanced OSs, for historical, cultural,
technical reasons Microsoft ought to follow the popular open source
model and publish full, complete, compilable source, data files,
driver files, etc for the popular old OS and its utilities, along with
the necessary compilers, linkers and other tools to make it work. This
would not only preserve the venerable OS but would also trigger a boom
in development and business for the company itself, besides being a
service to the general public.

Danilo J Bonsignore

 

[aftnix]

Windows 3.1 was **officially** superseded by Windows 95 in 1995. Now
it is 17 years. Seventeen years is a typical period of protection for
products which may extended some ways, but now that Win 3.1 turned
into a plethora of more superadvanced OSs, for historical, cultural,
technical reasons Microsoft ought to follow the popular open source
model and publish full, complete, compilable source, data files,
driver files, etc for the popular old OS and its utilities, along with
the necessary compilers, linkers and other tools to make it work. This
would not only preserve the venerable OS but would also trigger a boom
in development and business for the company itself, besides being a
service to the general public.

Danilo J Bonsignore

I suspect they don't have the legacy tools anymore

 

[KBH]

You might be interested in DOS:

http://www.drdos.net/

But the drdos.com website now offers a $20 license and download of a
bootable DOS instead of just the license. So the ftp's of drdos.net
are not needed.


I would recommend running Turbo Pascal 7 on it. But I can no longer
find the French edu website that allowed TP7 downloads to the US
Virgin Islands.

 

[KBH]

You might be interested in DOS:

http://www.drdos.net/

But the drdos.com website now offers a $20 license and download of a
bootable DOS instead of just the license. So the ftp's of drdos.net
are not needed.

I would recommend running Turbo Pascal 7 on it. But I can no longer
find the French edu website that allowed TP7 downloads to the US
Virgin Islands.

Oh, PowerBasic still sells a programming language that runs on DOS.

 

[Wally W.]

Windows 3.1 was **officially** superseded by Windows 95 in 1995. Now
it is 17 years. Seventeen years is a typical period of protection for
products which may extended some ways, but now that Win 3.1 turned
into a plethora of more superadvanced OSs, for historical, cultural,
technical reasons Microsoft ought to follow the popular open source
model and publish full, complete, compilable source, data files,
driver files, etc for the popular old OS and its utilities, along with
the necessary compilers, linkers and other tools to make it work. This
would not only preserve the venerable OS but would also trigger a boom
in development and business for the company itself, besides being a
service to the general public.

Danilo J Bonsignore

That is not at the top of my list of things Microsoft ought to do.

 

[Fabrizio J Bonsignore]

Copyrights can last for decades (or forever if you have Disney's lawyers)and do
not require any disclosure of the work.

Oh, Disney lawyers are all homeless and look and act like cartoons? :|

Danilo J Bonsignore

 

[Fabrizio J Bonsignore]

cf. http://linux.slashdot.org/story/12/...s-to-linux-because-windows-8-is-a-catastrophe

I want to play the EXACT SAME GAMES in the EXACT SAME HARDWARE with
the EXACT SAME OPERATING SYSTEM. Isnt it what they used to build the
next mess? Alas, not possible, the PC was stolen at some time and
there is almost no way to purchase a new one (nor to guarantee it does
not have some virus without complement antivirus). That s market but
suppliers do not even see it because they are neither in engineering
nor in economics but in some metaspace of shady motivations and
already-got-enough-money.

It is like in, the Vatican deciding to wall paper the Sistine Chapel
because it will be easier to maintain (clean up) and may reduce air
conditioning costs... want to buy a postcard with selected deatils of
the mural?

Danilo J Bonsignore

 

[Keith Thompson]

Windows 3.1 was **officially** superseded by Windows 95 in 1995.

[snip]

Just a reminder: this is not topical in any of the newsgroups to which
it was cross-posted.

(If you want to follow up to this, you'll need to manually adjust the
newsgroups header.)

 

[James Kuyper]

What give you that idea?

He had "followup-to" set to "alt.dev.null". With most newsreaders I've
used, that means that without a manual adjustment, replies will only go
to alt.dev.null, and not back to comp.lang.c. Does yours work differently?

 

[rugxulo]

Hi,

Windows 3.1 was **officially** superseded by Windows 95 in 1995. Now
it is 17 years. Seventeen years is a typical period of protection for
products which may extended some ways, but now that Win 3.1 turned
into a plethora of more superadvanced OSs, for historical, cultural,
technical reasons Microsoft ought to follow the popular open source
model and publish full, complete, compilable source, data files,
driver files, etc for the popular old OS and its utilities, along with
the necessary compilers, linkers and other tools to make it work. This
would not only preserve the venerable OS but would also trigger a boom
in development and business for the company itself, besides being a
service to the general public.

MS probably has tons of copyrights they can't legally clear for that. Similar
to IBM and OS/2, who has already denied open sourcing any of it. Besides,
which would you want, Win 3.0, 3.1, 3.11? Somewhat different quirks.

Most old OSes don't like newer hardware, esp. higher RAM amounts, which often
confuse them, so you need lots of tweaks and patches. Plus they even lack
drivers, which is more painful. And it's quite hard finding software for older
OSes too. At least, most software these days seems to go out of its way to
only support the "big three", which is a pet peeve of mine.

Anyways, to bring it back on topic to C (barely), you already have enough free
OSes and compilers to play with: Minix (ACK), FreeDOS (OpenWatcom),
ELKS (dev86), Linux (GCC), FreeBSD (Clang), etc. All of those OSes are, more
or less, written in C.

Personally, I like FreeDOS a lot, and DOS is what Win 3.1 ran atop anyways. So
there's still a lot of DOS software out there (though waning in popularity).
So if you're desperate for nostalgia, try that. If you demand a GUI, try
OpenGem (GEM) or the recent port of FLTK to DJGPP.

 

[Heinrich Wolf]

....

Most old OSes don't like newer hardware, esp. higher RAM amounts, which
often
confuse them, so you need lots of tweaks and patches. Plus they even lack
drivers, which is more painful. And it's quite hard finding software for
older
OSes too. At least, most software these days seems to go out of its way to
only support the "big three", which is a pet peeve of mine.

I took my old Diskettes from MSDOS 4.1 up to MSDOS 6 and I took my old 5,25"
Floppy hardware. So I was able to create image files of them. Then I
installed DOS 6 in VMware player. However my DOS 6 is an update and only my
DOS 4.01 is a full version. DOS 4.01 does not install in VMware player. So I
looked in the world wide web and found a DOS 6 boot disk on WinFuture. Then
I installed my old Win 3.0 and my old Win 3.1 . I also found a Super VGA
driver for Win 3.1 on the world wide web. Sometimes it is funny to test a
Delphi 1 application on Win 3.1 .

....

Heiner

 

[syntotic]

Personally, I like FreeDOS a lot, and DOS is what Win 3.1 ran atop anyways. So

there's still a lot of DOS software out there (though waning in popularity).

So if you're desperate for nostalgia, try that. If you demand a GUI, try

OpenGem (GEM) or the recent port of FLTK to DJGPP.

My laptops are sluggish as turtles. I cannot even write as fast as with Win 3.1on 386 +/-. By OS I do mean the GUI part of it... and the API. Tweaking and updating would be a bonus job.

Though I am just about to SHOUT. Stupid Windows, just latency typo and my session goes into REBOOT. Or my computer may be trojaned, I record something and get RADIO IN IT. But I try ubiquituous anti-X protection and it is still the same.

Danilo J Bonsignore

 

[syntotic]

Funny that the GPL license would apply nice here. If last guy summarized it well, do business with MS and you get the code, otherwise go nuts with MSDN...

Danilo J Bonsignore