Comments on: Early Windows applications

By: Yuhong Bao

Yuhong Bao — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 04:09:54 +0000

In fact, at least COMMDLG, along with some other DLLs from 3.1, were bundled as part of the 3.1 SDK for installation on 3.0.

By: Neozeed

Neozeed — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 02:35:36 +0000

You are correct in that windows 3.1 or a small copy of it is hiding in the '1st stage graphical' install of the windows 9x series...

I'm not sure if there ever was a retail 'Windows 3.1' runtime, nor any 'Windows 3.1 working model' type software either. I just remember that when Windows 3.1 came out people were just buying it.. And at the time I had a CGA card so I had to install Windows 3.0 then update to 3.1 to maintain the CGA driver...

shell & commdlg are part of 3.1 and used in all kinds of '3.1' capable applications, while dungeon/zork f2c is built with QuickC for Windows which was targeted to Windows 3.0 ....

But it's interesting with all the stuff buried around that time period.

By: nandhp

nandhp — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 02:30:30 +0000

Windows 95/98/ME Setup did the same thing. MINI.CAB on the Windows CD contains a "Mini-Windows" 3.1 that is used when Setup is run from DOS.

However, dependencies become an isssue if you want to use it for anything besides WINSETUP.BIN. Without SHELL.DLL and COMMDLG.DLL you can't run anything more sophisticated than WINVER, TASKMAN, or WINTUTOR. With those DLLs, however, most of the Windows 3.1 games and accessories seem to work. And the file expands to just 896K plus your applications and DLLs.

In theory, this implies that Windows 3.1 was being sold to end-users until Windows XP came out at the end of 2001 -- a period of nine years.