Windows 3.11, that is. Ah, those were the days, weren't they?
So I did a little looking and found a bit torrent download of the Windows 3.11 installation disk (a whopping 11.3MB
).I fired up MS Virtual PC 2007, and (after some finagling and a DOS boot disk) installed Windows 3.11.
As you might imagine, even on a VM, Windows 3.11 was as spry and responsive as a nervous fox on meth after a pot of coffee and a Red Bull when installed on my modern PC. Indeed, it was quite surprised to find itself running on a Celeron D (currently overclocked at 2.94GHz) with a full GB of RAM and a 1GB virtual hard disk. After figuring out how, the installation (along with an installation of MSDOS 6.22) took perhaps 8 minutes!
I have recorded my experience with a few pictures:
Here we see the intial screen after booting the computer. As you old timers will recall, 3.11 did not boot, but had to be called from the DOS prompt!
I change to the Windows directory...
and type the command to summon Windows 3.11!
BEHOLD!!!
The default Windows 3.11 desktop
Solitaire! What PC would be complete without it?
Now this one caught me off guard. Who'd have thunk that we needed an antivirus back in 1993? Seems MS was concerned about security...
And thus ends today's game.