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Windows 3.1 in my BIOS? It's more likely than you think

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Re: Windows 3.1 in my BIOS? It's more likely than you think

#4

Post by sciolistse »

fimdomeio wrote: post #3

There's something fishy here. start button is a windows 95 thing not windows 3.1

It says he's using Calmira, to make it look like windows 95. You can see that the padding on the start button and status bar are a bit off, if you look closely. (Also of course the minimize/maximize buttons on the applications are unchanged.)

Re: Windows 3.1 in my BIOS? It's more likely than you think

#6

Post by GrryDucape »

MS Windows of some 3.x variety was apparently the original selected GUI for the Atari ST, intended to be running from ROM… however, MS couldn’t apparently get it to fit in less than a couple of megabytes, hex dumps of the code would show a hell of a lot of redundant x86 stuff in there, like references to hercules drivers and all manner of bloat that they couldn’t strip. They seemed to be disassembling the binaries to translate to 680×0 assembly and kludging it that way rather than from source, which was always rumoured to be a complete mess for the early windows versions. Anyhoo, apparently Trammiel got pissed at MS for lack of progress on shrinking and refining it and went with a version of GEM instead.

Re: Windows 3.1 in my BIOS? It's more likely than you think

#8

Post by lifthrasiir »

DowsingSpoon wrote: post #7
speps wrote: post #2

Please use the author's page directly: https://sakamoto.pl/weblog/07-windows-3-flash-edition/

Why?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.

(Except when the original source is not casually consumable without the context, but the original post is quite readable.)

Re: Windows 3.1 in my BIOS? It's more likely than you think

#9

Post by wk_end »

GrryDucape wrote: post #6

MS Windows of some 3.x variety was apparently the original selected GUI for the Atari ST, intended to be running from ROM… however, MS couldn’t apparently get it to fit in less than a couple of megabytes, hex dumps of the code would show a hell of a lot of redundant x86 stuff in there, like references to hercules drivers and all manner of bloat that they couldn’t strip. They seemed to be disassembling the binaries to…

Windows 3.0 came out in 1990, whereas the Atari ST came out in 1985, so that story definitely doesn’t check out. Windows 1.0 came out in 1985 (though still much later than the ST) so maybe it was that?
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