Don’t forget Windows 3.0 and 3.1 – they will come in handy
Windows 3.0 – the main thing is optimization
From the very name of Windows 3.0 it is clear that it became the third in the family of operating systems with a graphical interface. To be more precise – shells for MS-DOS. It became the first commercial success of Microsoft’s new platform for personal computers. The most important components of Windows were rewritten in assembly language, which made the OS faster and the software itself lighter, which was important at a time when hardware resources were limited.
The main features were VGA support and a virtual memory system, which made the system more flexible. The OS needed 512 kilobytes of RAM and 7 megabytes of hard disk space. I note that not all computers of the early nineties of the last century were ready for such a resource-intensive system.
Windows 3.1 could run with 4GB of RAM, but there was no such PC
April 6, 1992 is the second date that every PC user needs to remember. Version 3.1 debuted. Don’t be guided by 2021 standards, where a one after a dot means a minor update that will often not be noticeable at all. It was this version that managed to become the first relatively widespread one. I write “relatively” because in those days a PC was not something everyone needed. Moreover, it was not even a thing needed in every office. We managed without him.
First of all, support for True Type fonts has appeared. It gave font developers a high degree of control over how the fonts they created would be displayed and their size.
The operating system developers abandoned support for real mode, which was in the previous version. Does not support memory protection, multitasking, or code privilege levels.
A registry has appeared – a centralized database of settings and values necessary for the operation of software and hardware. Today, when Linux users are told about the complex Terminal, they counter with the fact that many failures in Windows have to be corrected through the registry editor.
In theory, it could access 4 gigabytes of memory in 386 Enhanced Mode. Of course, in practice, this amount of RAM for the first half was fantastic. The previous version was capable of working with a maximum of 16 MB of RAM, which was also a lot.
Previously I wrote why Windows 10 is more convenient than macOS or Linux .
You need to know about the platforms considered, since they contain the advantages and disadvantages of Windows that smoothly flow into each other.