Despite being nostalgic for Windows 3.1 to the point of wanting to develop some kind of retro-hobby project for it that I lacked the tools to develop as a kid, I think Gravis from Cathode Ray Dude says it best about the default Windows 3.1 UI design in his review of Norton Desktop.
…that and, as a geeky kid who once knew how to use edlin, when I had the opportunity to experience the Windows 3.x UI without a full MS-DOS behind it via Windows NT 3.x, I found it novel but it also imparted a sense of uncomfortable helplessness that I didn’t get from the Macintosh SE (complete lack of a command line notwithstanding), Windows 95, or Windows NT 4.
Funny enough, I think it’s the same feeling I get from iOS. It feels like you’re one bug away from having something important lost outside the manufacturer-blessed viewport for want of good-quality tooling to browse and interact with the overall system.
I had the same feeling. In Windows 3.1, DOS was a recovery environment, and could be booted from a floppy if all else fails. Initially in NT, particularly with NTFS, there was very little prospect of recovery if anything went wrong.
There was also a familiarity aspect to it, of not really knowing what the equivalent of config.sys is, and not wanting to find out, because … little prospect of recovery.
True… but it wasn’t just that. It also felt sort of like I was trapped in something like At Ease (i.e. an application launcher for kids or unskilled workers) with only a toy file manager to manipulate the system. Compare the Macintosh where, even if you didn’t know how easy it was to make a bootable GUI disk (just click-drag the System folder), the shell was less “a program launcher with a toy file manager” and more “a file manager with a favourites menu as a token application launcher because they’ve embraced ‘you interact with everything through the file manager’ as their principle for how to polish up the user experience”.
Windows 3.1x UI was designed to hide the filesystem from you. Macintosh UI was designed to embrace it to the point where, prior to OS X’s turn to UNIX, as a developer, you’d better design your filesystem layout on the assumption that users would explore everywhere and poke at everything.
In academic terms, Windows 3.1x and iOS are application-oriented GUIs which get lazy on the rest, while classic Mac OS is a document-oriented GUI that’s backpedalled a bit from the Lisa being so purely document-oriented that you couldn’t launch an application directly and had to tear a blank document off a “stationery pad” file as a workaround.
Huh, I never noticed before that Windows 3.x was app-first, while Macs were file-first. But that fits.
For me, I strangely felt more at ease in File Manager than I did in DOS, maybe because seeing the files laid out visually helped me get oriented (and stay oriented, in the case of moving files around). It probably also helped that I learned Windows before DOS, so File Manager was the more familiar one.
Nothing strange about that. I certainly agree that bare COMMAND.COM is worse than having some kind of more structural thing… but I was 8 at the time, so I can’t clearly remember exactly what I did before Windows 95 came around two years later and brought things up to the standard the Macintosh set a decade earlier.
I think I might have seen Windows 3.1 as better than nothing and relied on things like a trial copy of WinBatch off my CD-MOM Companion CD to make up for how limited Windows 3.1 felt to a kid with QBASIC.EXE and a copy of DOS Power Tools by Paul Somerson (which teaches you stuff like how to make simple batch-file-enhancing .com files using the assembler built into debug.com).
DOS and even a GUI-less UNIX terminal has that same sense of being un-anchored and adrift if you don’t have something like the invariably-pirated copy of XTree or Norton Commander to give some spatial awareness. (No clue if we had one and I’ve forgotten it, but, if so, it hasn’t survived in the floppies I kept from my childhood.)
Funny enough, the web has always had that same “un-anchored and adrift” problem to some degree or other.
…and I just realized I’d forgotten to reply to the post itself.
I suppose all I have to say is that it feels like QEMU is the wrong tool for the job. (Probably because I’m very focused on choosing stuff that should still be supported for my use-case in ten years.)
Something like 86box which is explicitly intended to blend DOSBox-esque support for that era of computing with QEMU/VirtualBox-esque support for providing a virtual NIC that can see the Internet seems like a better choice. (Link is to Flathub for extra “should just work”-ness.)
I strongly prefer the Windows 3.11 user experience to anything that came after. This is almost certainly nostalgia but it’s true.
Despite being nostalgic for Windows 3.1 to the point of wanting to develop some kind of retro-hobby project for it that I lacked the tools to develop as a kid, I think Gravis from Cathode Ray Dude says it best about the default Windows 3.1 UI design in his review of Norton Desktop.
…that and, as a geeky kid who once knew how to use
edlin, when I had the opportunity to experience the Windows 3.x UI without a full MS-DOS behind it via Windows NT 3.x, I found it novel but it also imparted a sense of uncomfortable helplessness that I didn’t get from the Macintosh SE (complete lack of a command line notwithstanding), Windows 95, or Windows NT 4.Funny enough, I think it’s the same feeling I get from iOS. It feels like you’re one bug away from having something important lost outside the manufacturer-blessed viewport for want of good-quality tooling to browse and interact with the overall system.
I had the same feeling. In Windows 3.1, DOS was a recovery environment, and could be booted from a floppy if all else fails. Initially in NT, particularly with NTFS, there was very little prospect of recovery if anything went wrong.
There was also a familiarity aspect to it, of not really knowing what the equivalent of config.sys is, and not wanting to find out, because … little prospect of recovery.
True… but it wasn’t just that. It also felt sort of like I was trapped in something like At Ease (i.e. an application launcher for kids or unskilled workers) with only a toy file manager to manipulate the system. Compare the Macintosh where, even if you didn’t know how easy it was to make a bootable GUI disk (just click-drag the System folder), the shell was less “a program launcher with a toy file manager” and more “a file manager with a favourites menu as a token application launcher because they’ve embraced ‘you interact with everything through the file manager’ as their principle for how to polish up the user experience”.
Windows 3.1x UI was designed to hide the filesystem from you. Macintosh UI was designed to embrace it to the point where, prior to OS X’s turn to UNIX, as a developer, you’d better design your filesystem layout on the assumption that users would explore everywhere and poke at everything.
In academic terms, Windows 3.1x and iOS are application-oriented GUIs which get lazy on the rest, while classic Mac OS is a document-oriented GUI that’s backpedalled a bit from the Lisa being so purely document-oriented that you couldn’t launch an application directly and had to tear a blank document off a “stationery pad” file as a workaround.
Huh, I never noticed before that Windows 3.x was app-first, while Macs were file-first. But that fits.
For me, I strangely felt more at ease in File Manager than I did in DOS, maybe because seeing the files laid out visually helped me get oriented (and stay oriented, in the case of moving files around). It probably also helped that I learned Windows before DOS, so File Manager was the more familiar one.
Nothing strange about that. I certainly agree that bare
COMMAND.COMis worse than having some kind of more structural thing… but I was 8 at the time, so I can’t clearly remember exactly what I did before Windows 95 came around two years later and brought things up to the standard the Macintosh set a decade earlier.I think I might have seen Windows 3.1 as better than nothing and relied on things like a trial copy of WinBatch off my CD-MOM Companion CD to make up for how limited Windows 3.1 felt to a kid with
QBASIC.EXEand a copy of DOS Power Tools by Paul Somerson (which teaches you stuff like how to make simple batch-file-enhancing.comfiles using the assembler built intodebug.com).DOS and even a GUI-less UNIX terminal has that same sense of being un-anchored and adrift if you don’t have something like the invariably-pirated copy of XTree or Norton Commander to give some spatial awareness. (No clue if we had one and I’ve forgotten it, but, if so, it hasn’t survived in the floppies I kept from my childhood.)
Funny enough, the web has always had that same “un-anchored and adrift” problem to some degree or other.
maybe i just dont get it but the image works just nicely with qemu from debian bookworm? QEMU emulator version 7.2.11
according to one github user, the problem doesn’t always appear
…and I just realized I’d forgotten to reply to the post itself.
I suppose all I have to say is that it feels like QEMU is the wrong tool for the job. (Probably because I’m very focused on choosing stuff that should still be supported for my use-case in ten years.)
Something like 86box which is explicitly intended to blend DOSBox-esque support for that era of computing with QEMU/VirtualBox-esque support for providing a virtual NIC that can see the Internet seems like a better choice. (Link is to Flathub for extra “should just work”-ness.)