It’s formally the end of an era – even though Windows 3.11 (aka Windows for Workgroups) hasn’t been sold for PCs for some considerable time, Microsoft has still been licensing it to embedded device manufacturers right up until the present day. However, now they’re finally pulling the plug.
I’m actually impressed they kept it up this long! Most serious enterprise software vendors will support product lines for 10 years at a stretch, but it’s been 15 years since WFW was released – that’s pretty impressive.
So why do I care? Well, in a way WFW is ‘special’ to me because it marked the start of an era when I was genuinely glad to use Windows. I’d used Windows 3.0 and 3.1 at home before then, and they were ok for the odd bit of word processing but most of the time I was pottering about in DOS because that was where all the action was (I remember one of my friends at the time going on about how much he liked Slackware instead, but foolishly I ignored him). However at work, a PC with WFW on it replaced my green-screen terminal which only had access to a proprietary mainframe and a proprietary Unix system (SCO System V if I remember rightly – ugh). So I welcomed WFW with open arms 
Over the 90′s I spent a lot of time deploying & developing on various Windows systems, and generally enjoying it. I enjoyed playing with all the new stuff coming from Microsoft in fact, because they were changing the way things were done, for the better compared to what I’d used before. Looking back it seems such an innocent time
It didn’t last though. In the early noughties, I perceived MS becoming more and more self-obssessed, inward looking, and dedicated to their vested interests as a primary motivation, and decided I was seeing a very similar pattern to what had made the old proprietary systems so limiting a decade before – an incumbent protecting their monopoly, more than innovating for the better. The feeling that I was part of something exciting, interesting and positive ebbed away, and my cynicism reached record levels. You might call it an IT worker’s mid-life crisis It’s hard to put an exact time on it, but I think 2001/2 was the tipping point where I went from ‘relatively happy Windows developer’ to ‘ready for a new way of doing things’. Open source entered my world at about the same time.
So, for me WFW brings back nostalgic memories of a time when, even though it might not have been fantastic, Windows was something I would choose to use over alternatives, and the future looked bright – Windows was going places and changing life and work for the better. How times have changed. Or maybe it’s in fact me who has changed?
July 11th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
I’d wager both. I remember programming in Pascal on a 3.11 machine in the first year of 6th form, then they were upgrading to 95 I think. I didn’t realise 3.11 was still going.
I think you might see it in some mobile libraries throughout the country though…
July 12th, 2008 at 2:05 am
I actually found Windows 3.11 to be quite oppressive after finally giving up my Amiga.
Sure, the hardware was much more powerful and PC games were much more impressive ( I remember DOOM just came out ) but the OS was kind of clumsy and , frankly, ugly.
I remember it was Windows 95 that really started my “relationship” with MS OS division going.
I still consider their desktop GUI handling with the taskbar and the start button to be the best around. I have tried countless WMs under Linux and other systems and I have yet to find a better way to handle desktop interaction.
July 12th, 2008 at 5:27 am
yes it’s a pity you didn’t find the Amiga in it’s day. When people were paying intense amounts of money for a green screen text box I was staggered as to why. Until Win95 came out I wasn’t the slightest bit interesting in MS stuff. Mac are kind of the same thing today and the best thing they ever did was to delete os9 from existance. So in a way I think you are having a similar experience to ‘Amiga people’ with osx, but it’d be more like win3.1 vs osx when it was dos vs amiga os
July 12th, 2008 at 11:41 am
Actually I had an Amiga for about 3 years prior to getting a PC, and an Atari ST before that (and mostly Spectrums before that!). I moved to the PC because I could do more to it for the money, the Amiga ended up being a bit limiting unless you had the money to buy the high-end versions. I remember being thrilled to have my first PC with 4Mb of RAM instead of my (upgraded with unofficial RAM) 1Mb Amiga, for far cheaper than it would have cost me to get the Amiga workstations. Commodore screwed up and thought they could charge a ton just because they had a few custom chips (which were fun, I’ll admit), but at the end of the day the world moved on.
I still only used Windows 3.11 at work really, I was coding in DOS (assembler and C mostly) at home. It was definitely a step up from working with only remote mainframes. Windows 95 was also the first Windows I used extensively at home.
As for the start menu, personally I don’t like it anymore. It’s ok, until you get a shedload of things on it, then it becomes useless. Personally I nver touch my start menu in Windows anymore, I have a toolbar with all my most common apps on it and Launchy to find everything else. That’s why OS X works great for me, I just use the dock for the most common apps and Quicksilver for everything else. No need for a cluttered start menu at all.
July 12th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
My start menu is 3 columns wide and I can’t find anything anymore. It’s really annoying. I was surprised to hear that 3.11 was still being sold.
July 12th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
You definitely need Launchy. My start menu is 4 columns wide and getting close to 5, which makes it completely unwieldy and useless. I never use the task bar either, Alt-Tab is infinitely faster and friendlier to my RSI.
The search they added to the Start menu in Vista helps, but it’s really just a band-aid hiding the fact that the Start menu idea just doesn’t scale, so putting everything in the universe on it doesn’t make it more usable (particularly on mobile phones – whoever thought that was a good UI design needs to be shot). It’s so 1995, time to move on – there are better ways.
July 12th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
On my main WinXP workstation, I just manually organize my Start Menu into categories. I also have my taskbar set up vertically, so there’s a lot more space on it for stuff. The taskbar is also set to stay underneath everything, but I can bring it up using the Windows key. I use Alt+Tab for switching between apps, mostly. I don’t use My Documents at all; its stuffed with junk automatically dumped there by different applications. Here’s a screenshot of how I’ve got things set up:
http://img2.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/95136686df.png
I might also try Launchy though.
(Note that in the screenshot, the small help-file icon fourth from the top left in the middle block of icons, is a link to the Ogre API .CHM file!)