I know it's terrible quality but finding video from these old Apple events seems to have been recorded on VHS, and then re-recorded using the 'best' video capture technology for under $100 of the era leading to some really poor quality. Such is the internet I guess.
I didn't buy a first generation but I did have a 2nd generation 333Mhz green iMac to run OS X Server 1.0 ... Who wasn't excited for the prospects of the next millenium?
While messing around with Windows/386 and talking to others going through their old stuff, I’d forgotten that in the box was a working model of Excel. Since I only have the physical diskettes for 2.03, I did dump the disks for 2.11 when I had that.
Envelope with the demo
At this time in history the big spreadsheet that defined the PC was 1-2-3 which took the spreadsheet mantle away from the CP/M spreadsheet who in turn took it away from the progenitor VisiCalc on the Apple II. And this was the chance to define the new spreadsheet for a whole new platform.
Excel started out on the Macintosh, but with version 2 it was time to come to the PC for the new and exciting Windows 2 platoform. And to get people to try it out the key was free working demos.
Automated demo
I thought it was interesting that it comes with a demo showing off the ability to take data from several spreadsheets and make a 3rd with data. Oh what an exciting world 1989 was!
Oddly enough I couldn’t directly import text (csv) data into XL, but I could use Excel 3 to create a version 2 xls with my current top blog stats and then create some graphs.
So first, here is from the blog stats package wp-statistics:
wp-statsChart in Excel 2
And there we go in Excel 2. Since I have Excel 3, here is it running under WineVDM on Windows 10:
Excel 3
Obviously the higer resolution helps for moving stuff around. And the legend doesn’t resize in either, but in Excel 3’s larger display it and move stuff around.
Needless to say this stuff is down right primative in 2018, but it’s always fun to check out ‘professional’ tools from 30 years ago.
I found myself unable to sleep and went looking at the masm386.c in the old GCC 1.2 line of code to discover what everyone had figured out at the time, that it was interesting to include it, but it didn’t do anything at all as it was never called in GCC.
So for some other reason I thought it’d be fun to mess with MASM386 the assembler that was in the original NT pre-releases up to the 3.1 DDK (maybe later, I dont’ have the 3.5 SDK/DDK on hand).
D:\temp\i>type hi.c
#include
void main(){printf("hi!\\n");}
D:\temp\i>cl /c /G3 /Gd /Fahi.asm hi.c
Microsoft (R) 32-bit C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 8.00
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corp 1984-1993. All rights reserved.
hi.c
D:\temp\i>masm386 /Ml hi.asm hi.obj nul.lst nul.crf
Microsoft (R) Macro Assembler Version 5.NT.02
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1981, 1989. All rights reserved.
0 Warning Errors
0 Severe Errors
D:\temp\i>link hi.obj -debug:none -out:hi.exe /SUBSYSTEM:CONSOLE -defaultlib:LIBC -defaultlib:OLDNAMES
Microsoft (R) 32-Bit Executable Linker Version 1.00
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1992-93. All rights reserved.
D:\temp\i>hi
hi!
Yes this was a total waste of time. Some things work, while other files explode for seemingly no apparent reason.
Windows NT 3.1 Pre-Release from October 1991
What is interesting is that it’s the same reported version from the 1991 pre-release.
With of course it making an appearance on the Microsoft OS/2 2.00 betas & SDK.
OS/2 2.0 build 123
The only thing more insane to waste time on is converting a.out to OMF…
I stumbled onto these three disks, seemingly out of place in history. Windows/386 version 2.0 is a strange one in that it shipped to OEM’s in late 1987, making it & Xenix part of the initial 386 wave of Operating Systems/Environments and beating out not only the OS/2 launch in 1988, but taking advantage of the 80386’s v86 mode, something that OS/2 wouldn’t be able to do in a shipping product until 1992.Â
This version itself appears to be a retail version of Windows/386 lacking any clear OEM identification that was so prevalent for the era. Indeed setting it up it offers a few interesting platforms:
Getting this to run was a little bit of a challenge as much as I prefer Qemu, these older 2.0x versions of Windows/386 have a BIOS/disk incompatibility with the hypervisor resulting in errors reading the hard disk. Although PCem/86Box have no such issues. I think it’ll run off floppy/CD-ROM/Network without any issue though.
Windows/386 v2.03
Once installed it reveals itself to be version 2.03 of all things. While I was hoping for some kind of retail version of 2.00/2.01 this appears as close as it may get as it has more in common with the PCjs version of 2.01 (which you can try live on his site!)
The PCjs version of 2.03 has 138 setup files (not counting the PIFs), compared to the eBay’s 141, while the PCjs 2.01 has 59 files.
That said, well it’s Windows/386 mostly from 1987 with slightly updated EGA/CGA VMM drivers from early 1988 that just didn’t quite make the cut. To me what is confusing, is that it identifies as 2.03 while it’s closer to 2.01 in file count and functionality, unlike 2.03 it really ought to have been a 2.02, if there even was such a thing.
Windows/386 2.03 in CGA
Otherwise it’s really not all that interesting short of the timestamp. It’ll run on CGA/EGA *IF* you have the proper adapter in place, although VGA is compatible, the environment will detect that it’s not actually the proper card and refuse to run. I tried to put in the 2.01 CGA/EGA drivers, but that resulted in an OS version mismatch (I didn’t check if 2.01 was locked to the Compaq OEM of MS-DOS)
No mixing drivers!
I installed the infamous pair Word & Excel. Despite Word 1.1a demanding at least Windows 2.11, it appears to run okay. Excel 2.1d loaded without complaining. There isn’t very much convential memory for either, but they both can use expanded memory, which the hypervisor can create and share out without any emm386 or any equivalent driver. I can only imagine the incompatibles of trying to balance these drivers at the time, and how much the coming DPMI specification was needed.
Memory trouble in Windows 2.x
 And as the old saying goes the three top problems in Windows version 2 is memory, memory and memory. Trying to run anything graphical will exhaust convential ram, forcing you to single task anything graphical which kind of defeats the whole point of Windows. You go from this:
BattleTech CGA in a Window
To this:
Windows is out of memory!
Oh well it’s 1987, and users were kind of used to being disappointed as such. It’s really no wonder why Windows 3.0 became the smash it it was.
And of course you can't talk about Windows/386 without this gem. (Video in MPEG-1/Audio MPEG-2 care of JSMpeg).
There was a shift years ago from the old help system that has it’s roots going back to Windows 3.0, and was certainly one of the killer features of Windows 3.0, the hyperlinked and searchable help files. They were a form of compiled RTF files, and could also embed image resources, and later audio & video with the evolution of Windows. This allowed for a platform for early multimedia encylopedias and other refrence books of sorts.
Starting with Windows Vista, however the WinHelp engine was being retired out for a CHM or compiled HTML help engine. And for a whlie there optional updates and later downloads to re-enable WinHelp. However starting with Windows 10 the downloads no longer work.
All is not lost however, if you copy any of the 32bit WinHelp programs from NT 3.1 onward it will still function on Windows 10. And thanks to this great post on TenForums, you can re-enable the hook so that Windows 10 will integrate again with WinHelp.
@echo off
set crtpth=%CD%
takeown /f "%windir%\winhlp32.exe" >nul
icacls "%windir%\winhlp32.exe" /grant *S-1-5-32-544:F >nul
copy /y "%crtpth%\winhlp32.exe" %windir%
icacls "%windir%\winhlp32.exe" /setowner "NT Service\TrustedInstaller" >nul
echo.
echo Done.
echo.
echo Press any key to Exit
pause >nul
WinHelp from Windows NT 3.1 refresh on Windows 10
And there we go, now I can load obsolete refrence docs from great old programs like Visual C++ 1.10 for Windows NT!
Naturally Microsoft removed all this stuff as it was a security risk, in that they apparently never revamped or updated it, so yeah it may be another infection vector.
So I came across this recently, and unlike the previous version I had for Windows 3.1, This version is for Windows NT. And unlike the Windows 3.1 version this version does actually run on the shipping version of Windows NT 3.1, and thus will work all the though including Windows 10 on x64. The setup program unfortunately doesn’t complete leaving it ‘unlicensed’ however it’ll still run.
The diskettes for the Windows 3.1 version I have are dated 11-23-93, but once installed the compiler is actually from February of 1993, with the Windows NT version being dated October of 1993.
So the nice thing with the Windows NT version is that you don’t have to mess with the compiler, and linker, it’ll just run. And just like Visual C++ 1.0 / 1.10 for NT the linker doing a release build will always result in an exe being at least 2 megabytes in size.
I know that this is pretty much useless for 99.9999% of people. Yes it’s ancient Fortran. Yes Fortran PowerStation 4.0 is far more comprehensive. Yes after it was sold to Compaq as part of some deal over the collapse of Dec & Windows NT, then sold out to Intel. And GFortran is free.
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