Windows 3.1

~ the goodbye ~

Windows 3.1 was released to manufacturing on 6 April 1992 at $149, and over three million copies went out in the first three months. Its predecessor, Windows 3.0 of 22 May 1990, had already sold about two million in six months and around ten million by the time 3.1 replaced it. Those are the numbers that turned Windows from a thing IBM-compatible owners had heard of into the thing they used: at the 3.0 launch only about five percent of the forty million installed PCs were running any version of Windows at all.

Windows for Workgroups 3.1 followed on 27 October 1992 with networking built in, and 3.11 arrived on 8 November 1993. A Simplified Chinese release, numbered 3.2, came out that same month. Windows 3.1J sold 1.46 million copies in Japan in its first year.

Underneath it, MS-DOS was still running. DOS kept the file system and the hardware, while Windows supplied a graphical shell, memory beyond the 640 KB line, cooperative multitasking, and on a 386 some virtual memory. Version 3.1 dropped the real mode that 3.0 had kept for 8086 machines, so a 286 became the floor. The stated minimum was one megabyte of RAM and about six and a half megabytes of disk.

It also shipped without a TCP/IP stack. Getting Windows 3.1 onto the internet meant finding Trumpet Winsock, shareware written in Tasmania, and wiring it to a dial-up script by hand. By 1998, when a dial-up line arrived in our flat in Turkey, somebody else had done that work and Microsoft had put it in the box. That is the practical gap between 3.1 and what replaced it. The 3.1 machines still running by then belonged to people who had no reason to upgrade.

~ the chronicle ~

~ TrueType ~

TrueType is the piece of 3.1 that is still on your screen right now. Arial and Times New Roman shipped in the box, scalable, and they meant a user no longer had to buy Adobe Type Manager to get readable type at an arbitrary size. A font format bundled free with a $149 product became the default typographic furniture of the next thirty years.

~ what shipped in the box with Solitaire ~

Solitaire came with 3.0, along with Reversi. Minesweeper replaced Reversi in 3.1, and Hearts arrived with Windows for Workgroups. Every one of them was free and every one of them needed a mouse, and they reached office desktops at the moment the mouse was still the unfamiliar part of the machine.

The shell was Program Manager for launching and File Manager for everything else: two windows full of icons, with the second one showing you a directory tree you could actually see. File Manager outlived its own era by so much that Microsoft put its source code on GitHub in 2018.

Solitaire went into the World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2019, twenty-nine years after it shipped with Windows 3.0.

~ the last license Microsoft sold ~

Support for Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups ended on 31 December 2001. Most people would stop there, and stopping there misses nearly seven years, because the embedded channel kept running. Microsoft let OEMs keep licensing the classic products for devices long after the retail and standard OEM channels were closed, and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 stayed in that channel until 1 November 2008. John Coyne of the Windows Embedded team posted the notice in July.

Which means the family survived inside embedded devices for nearly seven years after Microsoft had stopped supporting it, and in some of them for much longer. In November 2015, a system called DECOR that fed weather and runway visual range to controllers at Paris Orly failed and disrupted the airport; it ran on Windows 3.1, and the French transport ministry's answer was that modernization was scheduled for 2017.

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