Found: Complete Boxed Copies of Windows/386 2.11 and Excel

I was just given boxed copies of Windows/386 2.11 and Excel, of the same vintage. I'm normally a pure UNIX guy, but I thought that this was a pretty cool find, as there weren't all that many copies of Windows 2.x sold, IIRC.

Anyone ever use it? I know it was supposed to be pretty incomplete.

- Alex

Pretty neat. Here are some screen shots of Windows 2. I wouldn't say it was incomplete necessarily, maybe version 1 was a little prereleased. It did what it needed to for the time ;-) I mean, compare it to the flurry of window managers in nix and it's pretty similar.

Here's the download for it and a whole bunch of other stuff,

http://www.mirrors.org/archived_software/www.techknight.com/esa/default.htm

Windows 1 and Windows 2 were very similar other than the oddball decision of Windows 1 to have only tiled windows. Win 3's big advantage was the much larger pool of memory granted by protected mode. Running one large app on Windows 2 was easy; running a second large app at the same time took some effort. I wrote a number of articles about Win 2 and interconnecting multple applications into one large structure. Thankfully, I didn't get a job doing so until after Win 3 was released.

Windows/386 2.11 was fairly complete and could do VGA and better resolutions. (800x600 on the Paradise card I own; 1024x768 on 8514 and the ATI clone of such). Some of the utilites were rather lacking. I have never heard any one say something nice about MS-DOS Executive (the default file management tool). The calculator, paint, and terminal applications were very minimalist and replaced for Win 3.

The big problem with Win 2 these days is that the software archives (mainly Compuserve and the MS BBS) of Win 2 applications are long gone. Win 2 games, shareware, bunches of graphical tools, and the real applications that had Win 2 versions just before Win 3 came out all are very diificult to find. Win 2 running WinWord 1.0 and Excel with the freebie prototype Program Manager and File Manager alongside initial Corel Draw is a very different environment than what Win 2 shows up with by default.

I'm going to have to try to track down Word and Corel Draw...I wonder where I'd go to even start looking?

- Alex

I have quite a few different versions of Coreldraw and Ventura, I know I have 1.0 somewhere in my basement, but I'm not sure if I have any that would work on windows 2.x. I'll have to look I guess... I do know my library goes back to the msdos days of corel and ventura, so I might just have it!

Pagemaker 3.0 needed Windows 2.0.

Would be nice to see some late marketing documentation from Microsoft about what Windows applications were out for Win 2.x. Windows didn't hit the big time untill 3.1 was out (and pirated), I started using it when 3.0 came out but was mostly using DOS apps at that point.

Very few people these days know much about Windows pre 3.0, it just doesn't have much of a following (DOS does). Since I jumped from a C64 to a 286 running DOS 3.0 I missed all the earlier versions of Windows (luckily I guess).

One relatively late ad campaign is shown at the GUIdebook Gallery: http://www.guidebookgallery.org/ads/magazines/windows/win20-applications I think I had a longer brochure that came with Windows/286 but I don't know if I still have the boxes from 20+ years ago.

The major commercial apps that came out after that include Ami, Corel Draw, Word for Windows, HP's NewWave. I know WinWord, at least, was quickly followed by a Win 3 update which also included many other bug fixes. I don't know if the updated versions would still work on Win 2. (I had upgraded to Win 3 and never back tested.)

One application that will be very difficult to get is Microsoft Pageview. While it is listed as a Windows app, it was only available by mail from Microsoft as an addon to MS Word 4 for DOS. Microsoft basically ripped out the print preview module from an earlier Windows word processing effort and used it to provide something that competed with Wordperfect's new page preview and graphics insertion tools until Word 5 for DOS got a DOS based preview module. Typing in DOS but adding graphics in Windows created an awkward workflow.

I never saw a copy of Palantir's software and they had the bad luck to go out of business just before Win 3's release.

i got Windows 3.0, box and all.

krebizfan said:

Windows 1 and Windows 2 were very similar other than the oddball decision of Windows 1 to have only tiled windows.

Click to expand...

At the time Apple was claiming that overlapping windows was their idea and they owned it, so Microsoft thought it was safer to release with tiling only, when they actually already had code and such done for overlapping windows - they they (obviously) ended up using it later. Both companies actually stole the whole concept of a GUI and Mouse from Xerox, but that's a bit beyond the point. :3

Raven said:

At the time Apple was claiming that overlapping windows was their idea and they owned it, so Microsoft thought it was safer to release with tiling only, when they actually already had code and such done for overlapping windows - they they (obviously) ended up using it later.

Click to expand...

Windows 1.01, 2.03, 3.0, 3.1, and WFW 3.11 were especially more Mac like.

Windows 286/386 were marketed by IBM and were shipped as an option with the early PS/2 line in 1987.

Raven said:

Both companies actually stole the whole concept of a GUI and Mouse from Xerox, but that's a bit beyond the point. :3

Click to expand...

In Bill's words, "It's like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox, and I broke into his house to steal his television set only to find that you (Steve Jobs) had stolen it before me." Or something like that.