The end of Windows 3.11

Microsoft Windows for Workgroups 3.11 will be withdrawn from the market for good on 1st November. Until then, device manufacturers can still license the old operating system for special applications, like weak processors – of course, this system has not been available to end users, for many years.

1ntroduced in late 1993, 3.11 was the first Microsoft product that supported TCP/IP. That is why this version of Windows, which uses relatively few resources compared to later versions, is still around today in the world of embedded PCs, such as cash registers. News of the discontinuation therefore may also be found in the blog of Microsoft specialist for Windows Embedded, John Coyne.

Like many Microsoft products, the very successful Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was a program that only managed to get things right on the second attempt. As the first Microsoft product with network support, Windows for Workgroups 3.1 was a flop; market competitors at the time – e.g. Artisoft, the Lantastic vendor – joked that it was a "nice try". With Windows for Workgroups 3.11, Microsoft left behind obsolete hardware like the 80286 processor and embraced Intel's 386 processors, which represented a final victory for the x86 architecture.

Even more important was that, along with its own NetBEUI protocol, Windows for Workgroups 3.11 for the first time supported TCP/IP, licensed from a company called Spider Systems. This made it possible to replace the peer variant of the NetBEUI protocol, NetBIOS, which wasn't much more than just a protocol for transferring data packets on layer 3, with the more effective and stable TCP/IP.

The Spider Systems licensed version of TCP/IP, which Microsoft replaced with its own code in Windows NT and Windows 95, was sold to Microsoft under a BSD license and came with a number of TCP/IP utilities. Now, as after 15 years Windows for Workgroups makes its way to the museum, the discussion about whether Microsoft helped itself early on to "open source software" continues to be lively. However, with Windows 3.11, what mattered to the embedded systems vendors was that Microsoft provided a range of embedded OS variants and advice on which one was appropriate to their needs.

(Detlef Borchers)

(trk)