I ran across this, and thought it was cool. These CD’s are getting harder and harder to find, and unless you want the old physical disks, getting ISO images is, of course the next best thing.
- Pre-Release Disk 1 – September 1992
- Pre-Release Disk 2 – January 1993
- Disk 3 – April 1993
- Disk 4 – Summer 1993
- Disk 5 – Fall 1993
- Disk 6 – Winter 1994
- Disk 7 – April 1994
- Disk 8 – July 1994
- Disk 9 – October 1994
- Disk 10 – January 1995
- Disk 11 – April 1995
- Disk 12 – August 1995
- Disk 13 – October 1995
Granted these disks replaced the much older Microsoft Programmer’s Library. The new CD’s use a Windows based search & interface program removing the clunky old MS-DOS program that made it feel like trying to view the world through a straw. (Although the up side of the MS-DOS version is that you could easily dump the video RAM and save the contents to plain text).
And in this brave new post Windows 3.0 centric world of Microsoft just about everything regarding OS/2 was dumped, and the seeding of Win32 via Windows NT had started.
Naturally after winning this war, Microsoft withdrew many low end products and just couldn’t compete with the tidalwave that was GNU/Linux.
At any rate for the curious kids down the road that want to see what all the fuss was with Win16, and how Windows 3.0 had changed the landscape removing the force of IBM it’s worth a look.