Over the course of the 1990s we saw huge developments in the world of PC graphics cards, going from little more than the original IBM VGA standard through super VGA and then so-called “Windows accelerator” cards which brought the kind of hardware acceleration the console and 16 bit home computer users had been used to for a while. At the end of the decade we had the first generation of 3D accelerator chipsets which are ancestors of today’s GPUs.
It was a great time to be a hardware enthusiast, but as anyone who was around at the time will tell you, the software for the drivers hadn’t caught up. Particularly for Windows 3.1 it could be something of a lottery, so [PluMGMK]’s modern generic SVGA driver could have been extremely useful had it appeared at the time.
As many of you will be aware, there is a set of VESA standardized BIOS extensions for video modes. There were generic VESA drivers back in the day, but they would only provide a disappointing selection of options for what the cards could do even then. The new driver provides support for all the available modes supported by a card, at all color depths. Windows 3.1 in true-color full HD? No problem!
It’s unexpected to see Program Manager and a selection of windows spread across so much real-estate, almost reminiscent of the uncluttered desktops from early ’90s workstations if you disregard the bright colors. We can’t help noticing it wins in one way over even the latest version of MacOS at these resolutions though, as anyone who has ever used a 4K screen on a Mac and found the menus remain miles away up in the top corner will tell you. Meanwhile if you’ve not had your fill of 16-bit Windows, how about sticking it in a ThinkPad BIOS?
Who would have thought it, 3.1 looking good!
Or rather, looks as it used to but with a higher resolution it really makes a difference. My guess is that the hardware of yesteryear would not be very happy keeping up with both multitasking and more real estate but very impressive, well done!
Hi. OS/2 1.3 and Windows NT 3.x looked the same.
Motif and CDE on *nix looked similar, too.
CDE looked significantly worse than Win3.1 by default. Color choices were insanely awful, unless you enjoy reading black-on-gray and the weird magenta-y-purple obsession. CDE was the first GUI that I bothered replacing the default theme because it was sooo bad.
Win3.1 had a few cases of black-on-gray but they weren’t godawful everywhere.
OS/2 1.3 and WinNT 3.1 looked the same because they’re intended to. They’re both Microsoft products trying to build off of Win3.1 (which is why WinNT 3.1 was named that, it wasn’t the third version of WinNT, it was the NT version of Win3.1). OS/2 was a joint IBM/Microsoft venture at first before they split and Microsoft turned it into WinNT.
Hi, I read that Windows 3.0 was ugly on purpose (gray icons etc), to make OS/2 1.2 and 1.3 shine.
Funnily, the later released Windows Libraries for OS/2 included the whole set of Windows accessories for free.
So Microsoft was (not so) secretly advertising Windows to OS/2 users – and not just to interested developers.
What was kind of a bold move, I think. It was quite something.
We have to remember that OS/2 1.x installation was bare bone, without any gadgets or utilities.
And those simple Windows accessories used to be a selling point of Windows 1 and 2 back in the 80s.
In the early days, users had bought Windows not so much because they needed an graphical OS or application runtime,
but because they wanted the utilities, too. Notepad, Clock, Write, Terminal, Paint.
These applications, along with the lots of printer drivers shipped with Windows, were quite appealing to early adopters.
GEM was similar. GEM Write, GEM Paint and GEM Draw were straight counterparts to Mac Write, Mac Paint, Mac Draw..
Not all were bundled for free with each copy of GEM, though.
OS/2 (well, the successor to OS/2) was Microsoft’s plan for a real, portable OS successor to Windows, in combination with IBM. When 3.1 was as successful as it was, they wanted to integrate more Windows functionality to OS/2, IBM said nope, and they split. Once that happened, Microsoft’s work on a new, portable OS/2 became WinNT. (Massive simplifications, obviously).
Like I said OS/2 1.3 intentionally looks identical to Win3.1, same as WinNT.
To me Window 3.11, Windows 95/98 themes were the best of all Windows. On my XP and Slackware I always had Redmond theme. I like it because frames are clear (quasi 3D) but thin, and everything was really readable at first sight – I just colored them my way. I wish MS was always adding this as alternative decoration of their OS. You can’t get lost with many windows open. Unlike now when with smaller screens (laptop) they blend to much – at least for my taste.
Each release made Windows look a step or two worse. Then from 7 to 10 (let alone 11) it fell off a cliff.
It’s been too long, so I’m not sure if I preferred 7, XP, or 3.11 anymore…
On the other hand, I did find the screensaver I’d written many years ago. Time to see if it still works…
(pity the source code seems to be gone)
Except for the font improvements when they added ClearType antialiasing. Older font rendering’s just so, so horrible. One of the reasons why Win3.1 was so much better was that the font improvement (TrueType) was just so large in comparison.
Cleartype and anything they’ve done since is still pretty grim. Windows font rendering has always been an abomination.
XP SP2 for the win.
I also set everything to Redmond and Vista was cruddy for many things, but at least it still had that theme available and the start menu could be configured to be usable.
Windows 7 required use of classic/open shell
Windows 10 is close enough, Windows 11 is unusable crap.
We’re doing our computers with KDE Plasma on Kubuntu Linux now. It has to be configured to be usable, but it manages to be ok once things are set up. Still hard to deploy
I can’t tell if me thinking win 3.1 was the “good old days” from nostalgia, or today’s stuff is crap.
Today’s stuff is better if for no other reason than the fonts and antialiasing. Fonts in those early OSes were so, so terrible, especially when they bolded them.
I do miss the days of OSes not polluting your UI with random widgets pulling data from god-knows-what internet source.
On an original IBM CRT monitor from the late 80s, Windows/GEM fonts looked quite okay.
They weren’t nearly as pixelated as they do look now on an LCD.
So ClearType wasn’t needed yet.
Back then, the dot pitch of a cheap 13″ or 14″ VGA monitor was 0,41 mm at worst.
This also had to do with MCGA graphics and mode 13h (320×200 256c).
The big dot pitch of entry class models was a trade-off between image quality (photo realism) and text-quality (VGA).
You can double check the facts, if you want.
An early “VGA” IBM monitor was the model 8512, for example.
It’s from 1987 and was around same time as the IBM PS/2 Model 30.
It was intended for MCGA, VGA and 8514/A, I think.
This PC had an MCGA graphics hardware (8086) or an VGA card (286).
That’s why early games described MCGA/VGA as “PS/2 graphics”.
http://ps-2.kev009.com/pcpartnerinfo/ctstips/ee1a.htm
http://ps-2.kev009.com/pcpartnerinfo/ctstips/7492.htm
More info:
https://www.dosdays.co.uk/topics/monitors.php
Cheap non-name VGA monitors were quite popular in first half of the 90s.
That’s why DOS games in mode 13h didn’t look so awful yet, the low-res CRT mask did still hide the imperfections.
As if being played on an ordinary household TV.
By mid-90s, 15″ and 17″ monitor with 0,21mm dot pitch got more common, I think.
By that time, even an 0,28m dot pitch wasn’t fine looking anymore.
That’s when Windows 95 was on the rise and resolutions past 640×480 16c got more mainstream.
That being said, there had always been CAD monitors, too.
Multisync monitors and digital EGA monitors in the 80s had a very crisp CRT. Hercules, too.
The CGA/EGA games on these monitors looked “pixelated” by intention.
Same goes for analog monitors used for professional use.
VGA was the exception here, really, because IBM wanted to overcome the color limitation.
And since this was restricted to low-res mode 13h (320×200 256c) a matching monitor was needed.
Hence, the trade-off.
Amiga monitors of the time had similar CRT specs to early “VGA” monitors.
The Commodore 1084 monitor has 13″ and 0,42mm dot pitch.
https://www.crtdatabase.com/crts/commodore/commodore-1084
That’s why Amiga games and VGA games looked on par back in the day.
Both had similar CRT monitors and similar resolutions.
Also, many games were being ported from Amiga to VGA PC and vice versa.
Deluxe Paint (D-Paint) was available on both platforms, but had its roots on Amiga.
(Atari ST was also there, of course.)
Todays stuff is crap from a UX point of view. Remember when you could get where you were going in three clicks and didn’t HAVE to use Search to find a known sys app and do it faster? Some people felt that mouse over was the end all be all of UI trickery and actually think people WANT to search for things instead of making them visible. Or if they do, it is interlaced into the menu in 15 different areas with seemingly no regard for its inherent use. Hilariously if you download most linux distros, you will notice a real resemblance to 3.11 with all the little apps that do ONE thing lol. It reminds me of the old days with a bunch of .exes sitting around you use once when setting up and never see again. I loathe the icon only world phone devs try to force us into as well. Sometimes a phone looks like a stapler and with no word underneath, you are left to do as you will. On top of that, my professor friend tells me that around 70 percent of his students enter his class thinking the floppy save icon is a vault lol. If only…
I think this is a case of remembering the grass as having been greener. As someone who’s been using computers almost daily since Win 3.0, I’ll absolutely take today’s problems over those of the “good ‘ol days”.
Having to find and install drivers (without the internet mind you… we had BBSs!) and hoping they’ll work.
Having to manually configure IRQ and com ports. I still remember an error message that read “The IRQ for com port 4 overlaps with the com port 4 IRQ”. So helpful, thanks Windows 3.1!!!
The always fun configuring high and extended memory in your autoexec.bat and config.sys files. I had alternate sets of files depending on the programs I was going to run on my “high end” system with all of it’s 2 MBs of ram!
Diskpart… manually configuring sectors and tracks, and so easily removing the wrong partition or formatting the wrong drive. Still possible today, for sure, but not as easy with everything GUI.
Serial MECHANICAL mice. Serial keyboards. No USB. No multitasking. Setting up a network was the wild west. BIOS updates without backup BIOSs. Nearly every minor change needed a reboot. 1200 baud external modems because you needed that last ISA slot for your new 8 bit sound card. And on the subject of modems, I remember downloading a screensaver on AOL or MSN that was about 1 meg, and having to let it go overnight night!
Installing Linux… ’nuff said!
OMG, it’s only viewing the old days from afar that makes them look good in comparison. Trust this old man, things are WAY better today!
At the end of the decade we were already into the third and forth gen 3D cards. They were popping up un developers hands in the first half of the 90’s. 3DFX Released Voodoo 3 in 1999. In 1999 I was working with NVidia with the first shader cards.
Yes, but to us mortals (laymen, casual gamers etc) not into 3D gaming that wasn’t apparent at the time.
By 1996/1997, the 3D accelerators were still consiedered a “fad” by some folks (magazines etc).
There were considerations that SIMDs like MMX are the future and that dedicated, fixed-function accelerators were just a shortlived fashion due to CPUs still being in their infancy.
So it’s no wonder that merely a fraction of us PC users/gamers had owned an Voodoo card at the time, actually.
Back in the 90s, there also was the consideration that RISC architectures such as Alpha, MIPS or PPC might supersede x86 eventually.
Which we now sort of see happening with ARM and RISC-V, but delayed by 20+ years. Speaking under correction, I’m just a layman.
I am In my late sixties i started with gwbasic and dos before windows 3. then 3.1 then wow 3.11 we are now are given millions of colors dos and win 3 only have a 4 color palette 3.1 had 16 colour palette and wow if you had 128meg Video card
Hi, that’s right for the default drivers that shipped with early Windows.
WfW 3.11 was the first or among the first one to ship with 256 color drivers, I think.
Sometimes, even early Windows did run with lots of colors, though.
This link is quite interesting: https://tinyurl.com/3yt49y7a
I have used all the Windows’ versions, when they took out Win 95, they said it was plug n play, it was nothing of the sort, until Windows 10 & 11 came.
Windows 10 is better “plug and wait for the updates”
Still have my original MS-DOS 6.2.something 3.5” floppies … just not quite sure what to do with them but can’t quite bring myself to get rid of them yet. :)
Keep them as a license, so you can legally use MS-DOS 6.2 in an emulator/VM? 🤷♂️
(Especially if the green COA document or the manual with the serial number is part of it.)
Seriously, MS-DOS 6.2 is still useful. You can use it with DOSBox, too.
DOSBox can boot from a hard disk image, so you can run programs that do mess with HDD/FAT directly.
So you can run things like defrag, scandisk or data base programs.
Or a copy of GeoWorks, which may need to see real DOS in order to function.