{"id":39893,"date":"2004-04-07T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2004-04-07T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2004\/04\/07\/a-very-brief-anecdote-about-windows-3-0\/"},"modified":"2004-04-07T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2004-04-07T07:00:00","slug":"a-very-brief-anecdote-about-windows-3-0","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20040407-00\/?p=39893","title":{"rendered":"A very brief anecdote about Windows 3.0"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2004\/03\/11\/87941.aspx#88383\">  In an earlier comment, Larry Osterman described why Windows 3.0 was  such a runaway success<\/a>.  He got a little of the timeline wrong,  so I&#8217;ll correct it here.\n  Windows 2.0 did support protected mode.  And it was Windows\/386, which came out before Windows 3.0,  which first used the new virtual-x86 mode of the 80386 processor  to support pre-emptively multitasked DOS boxes.  The old Windows 2.0 program was renamed &#8220;Windows\/286&#8221; to keep  the names in sync.\n  The three modes of Windows then became &#8220;real mode&#8221; (Windows 1.0 style),  &#8220;standard mode&#8221; (Windows\/286 style) and &#8220;enhanced mode&#8221; (Windows\/386 style).  Amazingly, even though the way the operating system used the processor was  radically different in each of the three modes, a program written for  &#8220;real mode&#8221; successfully ran without change in the other two modes.  You could write a single program that ran on all three operating systems.\n  And then Windows 3.0 came out and the world changed.  Sales were through the roof.  I remember that some major software reseller (Egghead?)  was so pleased with the success of Windows 3.0 that  it bought bought every Microsoft employee a Dove ice cream bar.  (Even the employees like me who were working on OS\/2.)  I was sitting in my office and some people came in  with a big box of ice cream bars and they handed me one.  &#8220;This is from Egghead. Thank you for making Windows 3.0 a success,&#8221; they said.\n  It was a strange feeling, getting a thank-you for something  you not only didn&#8217;t work on, but something which totally destroyed  the project you were working on!<\/p>\n<p>  [Raymond is currently on vacation; this message was pre-recorded.]  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In an earlier comment, Larry Osterman described why Windows 3.0 was such a runaway success. He got a little of the timeline wrong, so I&#8217;ll correct it here. Windows 2.0 did support protected mode. And it was Windows\/386, which came out before Windows 3.0, which first used the new virtual-x86 mode of the 80386 processor [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-39893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>In an earlier comment, Larry Osterman described why Windows 3.0 was such a runaway success. He got a little of the timeline wrong, so I&#8217;ll correct it here. Windows 2.0 did support protected mode. And it was Windows\/386, which came out before Windows 3.0, which first used the new virtual-x86 mode of the 80386 processor [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39893\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}