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Linus Torvalds Celebrates 20 Years of Windows 3.11 With Linux 3.11-rc5 Launch 113

Posted by samzenpus from the check-it-out dept.
hypnosec writes "Linus Torvalds released Linux 3.11-rc5 yesterday wishing that it would have been a lovely coincidence if he were able to release final Linux 3.11 as on the exact same day 20 years ago Microsoft released Windows 3.11. 'Sadly, the numerology doesn't quite work out, and while releasing the final 3.11 today would be a lovely coincidence (Windows 3.11 was released twenty years ago today), it is not to be,' notes Torvalds in the release announcement."
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Linus Torvalds Celebrates 20 Years of Windows 3.11 With Linux 3.11-rc5 Launch More

Linus Torvalds Celebrates 20 Years of Windows 3.11 With Linux 3.11-rc5 Launch

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  • Best DOS window manager (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Ever made

    Captcha: Birthday

  • I feel old (Score:5, Insightful)

    by philip.paradis ( 2580427 ) on Monday August 12, 2013 @01:22PM (#44544127)

    I've got many memories of evenings spent with Windows 3.11, although I spent far more time in DOS back then. Later on, I spent a few few years with Linux (starting with Mandrake) as my primary desktop OS, and wound up with Mac OS X for the last few years.

    I'll still raise a toast to over a decade of Debian or FreeBSD on the server side for anything I care about.

    • Re:I feel old (Score:5, Informative)

      by Hatta ( 162192 ) on Monday August 12, 2013 @01:54PM (#44544561) Journal

      For those feeling nostalgic, Windows 3.11 works in Doxbox quite nicely. Grab the microsoft entertainment pack and play some skifree.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Ah, memories. I remember the day my brother and I were playing that game. He discovered that you could go faster using jumps properly. Well, he was playing and finally passed the Yeti and kept going. The Yeti disappeared off the top of the window and he kept going for at least another minute or two. He then stopped and said, "I think I outran him." Right after saying that, the Yeti comes charging down and eats him. After about 20 seconds of silence, he closes the window and mutters, "I hate that game

      • Seconded. Those Entertainment Packs have other fantastic games too: Chip's Challenge, Tetris, JezzBall, Taipei, etc. 2D graphics implemented using only Windows GDI, and damn solid shit.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

          I played the hell out of Chip's Challenge. It was pretty much the only reason I saw to have Windows installed, at the time.

        • They had to be good games, because they certainly couldn't rely on flashy graphics. There is still an active community for Chip's Challenge, an open-source implementation of it, even today.

      • Re:I feel old (Score:5, Interesting)

        by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Monday August 12, 2013 @03:18PM (#44545565) Journal

        Grab the microsoft entertainment pack and play some skifree.

        No need!

        http://ski.ihoc.net/ [ihoc.net]

        It's been recompiled for modern Windows and it runs great under wine as well. It also works fine on the largest monitors you're likely to have.

      • For those feeling nostalgic, Windows 3.11 works in Doxbox quite nicely.

        That or you could just bash your head against a brick wall until you begin to taste brain. Using Windows 3.1/3.11 felt about the same.

      • Great, thanks! If I eat something bad and need to throw up, I'll use that pack

      • Meh. Chip's Challenge is where it's at. And Jezzball. :-)

        Those were great games.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

      I never did run Windows 3.11. I was on DOS 3.1 until 6.2 came out with doublespace. Windows 95 because Road Rash wouldn't run in DOS. W98 when none of the newer games would run on W95. XP when XCP vandalized my computer and I didn't have drivers (lost the CDs).

      I got Mandrake then when XP started getting flaky. Turned out that Linux is just more fault-tolerant than Windows; Windows crashed every hour or so, Linux kept chugging until that power supply failed completely.

      This notebook is running W7, because I'm

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by isorox ( 205688 )

      I've got many memories of evenings spent with Windows 3.11, although I spent far more time in DOS back then. Later on, I spent a few few years with Linux (starting with Mandrake) as my primary desktop OS, and wound up with Mac OS X for the last few years.

      I'll still raise a toast to over a decade of Debian or FreeBSD on the server side for anything I care about.

      Well I had dos 5 originally (with dosshell), then at some point windows 3.1 and 3.11 on a dos 6.22 background, then of course windows 95, installed on about 50 floppies.

      Moved exclusively to debian in summer 2000, and them to ubuntu in 2006. I have a mac laptop too which I use for testing programs (that I write on the linux machine), and I have a small windows fanless machine for the same reason.

      So my main machine has moved from a 286 mainly running railroad tycoon and qbasic, to a thinkpad running mainly fi

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by msobkow ( 48369 )

      You feel old?

      I cut my teeth writing Z-80 machine code (not assembler) for the TRS-80 Model I Level I and POKEing it into memory, saving periodically to cassette tapes.

      BIOS? DOS? What's that?

      A *real* machine has a ROM interpreter and boots up instantly because of it. There is no need for a "BIOS" when you can just program to the hardware. :P

      • Ah, a fellow Z80 fan :). I think there's still two Sinclair ZX81s sitting in a box somewhere at my dad's house, likely with the old cassette deck as well. The one I used had a little black and white security monitor/TV hooked up to it for video, with a luxurious full size keyboard from an industrial floor spliced into it to provide relief from the horrendous membrane keyboard.

        I've got to admit that I greatly preferred moving to an AT&T PC-6300 8086 box. It felt like a supercomputer by comparison, and wa

      • Cassette tape?? You were lucky. We used to *dream* of having cassette tapes. We had it rough. After going to high school for 14 hours a day, day in day out, we had to POKE our machine code into memory, run it, and if the machine didn't crash, had to write another program to PEEK it out again while we took snapshots of the screen with a Polaroid camera.
    • I recall one occasion where I was helping a colleague help his sister over the phone work w/ Windows 3.11 w/ her mouse disabled. Like using the ALT and arrow keys to navigate and select the choices. Was an interesting exercise on a disabled system.

  • Linus still even come up with an original version? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 12, 2013 @01:29PM (#44544197)
    What a loser. Just let your project stand on it's own instead of always trying to copy everyone else.

  • Does anyone else think the headline is link bait? I do, sadly!

  • And there's the difference (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sjames ( 1099 ) on Monday August 12, 2013 @01:29PM (#44544207) Homepage Journal

    If Linux was a proprietary OS like Windows, Marketing would have been so rabid for the idea that they would have successfully forced the premature release.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      What like Microsoft does with almost all their products? // Sorry I'm sure this is flame-bait, but I just intend it to be funny/ironic.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sjames ( 1099 )
        It's funny how a simple statement of fact can end up being considered flamebait.

  • What?? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dishwasha ( 125561 ) on Monday August 12, 2013 @01:41PM (#44544363)

    I thought Linux added on networking to the OS a LONG time ago.

  • "... while releasing the final 3.11 today would be a lovely coincidence ..."

    Apparently Linus does not know the meaning of the word coincidence. If he had hit the target date deliberately and with advanced planning, it would not have been legitimately called a coincidence.

    • Re:there are no coincidences (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BitZtream ( 692029 ) on Monday August 12, 2013 @02:16PM (#44544849)

      Actually, it shows he does understand the word, as he would never plan a release time based on something silly like that, he would always do it based on quality and readiness ... in which case, it would be a coincidence if it happened to be released today.

      It didn't happen, and thats why its not a coincidence.

      • Yes, sure, but if he REALLY wanted to pay homage to the spirit of windows 3.11 he should have released an early beta.

  • 16 bit windows lives on. In the form of the windows installer.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tibit ( 1762298 )

      Windows 95/98 installer, because IIRC NT-based ones use itself for the installer IIRC.

      • Last I heard, that was not true. Your not running NT until the first reboot.

        • 95 and 98 use a graphical installer that ran under windows for the early stages of install. You could either run the first part of the installer under your existing version of windows (if upgrading) or if you ran it from dos it would load "mini windows" which afacit is a very stripped down win3.x. IIRC the installer required the hard drive to be already paritioned and formatted as it would use it for temporary storage space. After the first reboot the system was then running windows 9x as it sorted out the

      • Many older 32 bit programs come with a 16 bit installer. Back when 64 bit systems were the hot new thing this caused quite a few problems. You had to either find an extraction utility and do manual installation/registry edits, or you had to install it on a 32 bit machine with something to see what changed, and bundle those changes into a new installer.

        Of course, Windows XP x64 didn't help there. It was just like XP, except almost no one provided drivers for it, and you had to disable code signing to inst

        • What bothers me is that VMware can run 64 bit and 16 bit code side by side, why the frak can't Windows! Yes, VMware does much more than just context switch and VMware does actual binary translation and processor emulation, but FFS, Microsoft could have easily added a 16 bit interpreter to make it work.

          • What is even more amusing is that wine can quite happilly run win16 applications on a 64-bit linux system.

            Afaict the only reason 64-bit windows can't run win16 applications is that MS couldn't be bothered to implement/debug support for it.

  • Nevermind that arcane Linux crap, I want to try this Windows 311 thing. That retro 8 bit UI does look like a direct ripoff of IOS 7, but it sure is a welcome change from Metro. I hope Apple just sees it as a complement but they'll probably sue Microsoft over it.

  • It seems appropriate to celebrate the release of a Windows version with a pre-release edition of Linux.

  • Sgt Pepper brought his band to play.

  • one one see it? I pulled it out of the dryer and one was missing. I need both to connect.

  • Windows 3.?? made me switch to Linux. At some point Windows' reliance on the x86 real mode and other hacks had me look at the squandered possibilities of the M$ empire and also at possible ways out. While one of my buddies switched to OS/2 I switched to Linux.

    Since then I had only in the rarest case any chance to actually program for Linux while on the job. Fortunately I mainly do embedded programming nowadays and have to work with VxWorks, VDK, or no operating system at all, which is great.

  • Now we need a Linux version of Bob.

  • Linux 3.11... So, it's actually happening. I thought it was sarcastic, but now I see the prophesy was self fulfilling. [markmail.org]

    In other words, we'd have an increasing level of instability with an odd release number, depending on how long-term the instability is.

    - 2.6.<even>: even at all levels, aim for having had minimally intrusive patches leading up to it (timeframe: a week or two)

    with the odd numbers going like:
    - 2.6.<odd&gt: still a stable kernel, but accept bigger changes leading up to it (timeframe: a month or two).
    - 2.<odd&gt.x: aim for big changes that may destabilize the kernel for several releases (timeframe: a year or two)
    - <odd>.x.x: Linus went crazy, broke absolutely _everything_, and rewrote the kernel to be a microkernel using a special message-passing version of Visual Basic. (timeframe: "we expect that he will be released from the mental institution in a decade or two").

    - Linus

  • I'm just waiting for Linux 3.14 and then to see the version numbering go wild in the subdigits.
  • Quit giving birth to my kittens!

  • can't wait 20 more years for linux xp-rc5

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