On Thu, Jun 9, 2022 at 10:05 AM Martin Iturbide <martiniturb...@gmail.com> wrote: > I was wondering if you know some links, articles, hints about all the > software and fixes that can be installed on Windows 3.1 .Like if someone did > the exercise on how he will tune/pimp his own Windows 3.1 today.
I ran Windows for Workgroups, 3.11. a sort of corporate flavor of Windows 3.1, for some time. I don't recall security patches for it as we have now. The thing to remember is that Win 3.1 was a 16 bit multitasking shell. running on top of single tasking DOS. Windows serialized communications with the file system so DOS could be used. I had a Unix machine at home before I got a PC running DOS. DOS from version 2 bprrowed concepts from Unix, like tree structured directories, pipes, and I/O redirection, but implemented them differently due to DOS limitations, When I got a PC, I wanted it to look and act as much like Unix as possible. The best solution proved to be a commercial product called the MKS Toolkit. It was created by Mortice Kern Systems, a consulting engineering firm in Canada, They wrote it for internal use, but when they felt it was sufficiently developed, they released it as a product. It became "the tail that wagged the dog", and their primary business. The biggest enticement for me was a complete implementation of the Ubix Korn shell, with everything save asynchronous background processes (because DOS didn't *have* those.) It also had a full implementation of the Vi editor. Installed in fullest Unix compatibilty mode, the Toolkit's INIT,EXE program replaced COMMAND.COM as the boot shell. Turn on the PC, and when booting completed, you saw a screen with a Login: prompt. Enter a userid and optional password. INIT called LOGIN, which looked in a Unix compatible /etc/passwd file for it. If it found a match, it changed to whatever was defined as that ID's home directory, and ran whatever was defined as its shell. I had IDs that ran COMMAND.COM, 4DOS, the Toolkit Korn shell. and DesqView. Exit them, and you returned to INIT, which presented a Login screen. I could switch environments without rebooting. Just log off and back on again. The XT clone had a meg of additional memory courtesy of an AST 6-Pak card, with 512K allocated to a RAMdisk and 256K to a dick cache. Drivers for those and my mouse were loaded in CONFIG.SYS and available in all environments. When I was logged into the Korn shell, you had to dig to discover you *weren't* on a real Unix machine. When I migrated to a 386 machine capable of running Win 3.1, I kept the setup, and used it to expand what I might do with Windows. When you booted into Win 3.1, by default Program Manager was your GUI. But it didn't have to be. There were an assortment of shareware and freeware Program Manager replacements you could substitute. Which Windows used was defined by an entry in the SYSTEM.INI file. I could shift between Windows GUIs the same way I shifted DOS environments. I had IDs defined to use custom versions of SYSTEM.INI. When I logged into one of them, the custom version got copied over the SYSTEM.INI file Windows read when it invoked, and it came up usimg the GUI the ID specified. Exit Windows, and I was back in INIT and could restart it using different GUI without rebooting (or not run Windows at all, and log into a DOS session.) The replacement GUI I wound up normally using was Workplace Shell for Windows, a freeware product from an IBM developer that implemented as much of the OS/2 Workplace ahell as possible under Win 3.1. Among other things, it eliminated Program Manager imposed limitations on the number of Program Groups, and permitted icons on the desktop. Transition to Win95 when that appeared was simplified because I already had a lot of th new capabilities Win95 offered. Lacking something like the Toolkit to make switching GUIs easy, you can still play with the replacement GUIs. You'll just have to boot to DOS and diddle the SYSTEM.INI file with a text editor. *Finding* them may be a challenge, ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
