Huh? Did I just write that? Windows 3.1?
I found a few sets of install floppys last winter and between the lot of ’em I had a set of readable floppys so there was only one thing to do – install!
I won’t bore you with the details, but in broad strokes… The target was to be a VM and the server had no floppy drive so I needed to turn the floppies into image files. I also needed to install MS-DOS, making image files from those floppys. The VM provisioning and MS-DOS install went easy enough. But when the VM started the server immediately went to 100% CPU use. Of course it did! In those ancient days there was no reason to cooperate! I installed a small driver that caused it to sleep when it wasn’t busy. Then, on to Windows 3.1!
Things were pretty simple back then. Sure, give me all the regular components, and let’s try some printers, but there are no other applications so don’t bother with that, please. Then…
The first gotcha. Did this mean an option was to install to another floppy? Choosing Cancel to continue is not intuitive, but we have that Start menu today, so…
The remainder of the install was fast! Note the reminder of how to start Windows. Back in those days the machine booted to a C: prompt. You could put the WIN command in the startup file, but no one who knew better would do that. Windows needed a memory manager installed before it would run so a reboot was required.
Gotta love that If Windows does not start line. If at first you don’t succeed, try doing the same thing again. And that’s why no one who knew better put WIN in their startup – quite often something would prevent Windows from starting.
Don’t forget to record your serial number!
I skipped the tutorial.
Apparently I did okay.
The most fun came later when I showed my son what it was like back in those ancient times, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. We played with the various built-in stuff and talked about how things like the clock and calculator had evolved to what they are today, but never did get a printer working.
Why? omigod, why?
This reminds me of when the place we slaved was dumping machines, and I took a station wagon-ful home. My X was in certification classes then, and many of her classmates didn’t have machines; we gave away a ton of 286’s.
However, our former salt mine nearly never erased HD’s before tossing machines, and virtually none of those machines would boot until the “/n” was removed from the end of the “win” command! No network, no windows … hang in autoexec.bat.
Which kind of dinosaurs are we? Carnivores, herbivores or omnivores? :-)