Another thing, Catholicism never got out of beta. They are still working on the same code base as 2000 years ago. Can't keep people's attentions if you don't add new features.
I was raised devout Catholic. I got over it.
Beta?! We're on at least Catholicism 4.0 between the First Vatican Council, the Second Vatican Council, and the Council of Trent!
Actually we sold a lot of machines in 85/86 with Hardrives Kaypro 16s, Z-151's Z-158s. We also did a lot of business adding hard drives. 30 mb RLL was very popular. Windows 386 was 2.1 but it was sold as Windows 386 and only ran on 386. Again very few people bought it.
Why run DOS apps under Windows 3.11? Really simple. So you could run more than one at a time. That was Windows 386 and Windows 3.0's big feature. You could actually run a something like ACT! and your application at the same time! Formatting a floppy would still bring a system to it's knees but that is why they sold preformated floppies!
Netscape? You better get a copy of Trumpet Winsock first! Yes the browser plus 3.11 and Microsoft Office really helped. Truth is that only one part of Office really carried the day. That was Excel. Word was also a major also ran until Excel came out. And yes I had a copy of Word 1.0 back in the day. They also came bundled with the Zeniths. Nobody wanted it. They all wanted Wordstar, PFS:Write, QnA, and later WordPerfect.
Oh, I'm not saying that there were NO HDs back in 85/86/87, but I think you'd agree that the number of machines that were floppy only probably outnumbered HD systems by a pretty wide margin -- maybe three to one (or more).
Ah! That's clearer now. Okay, I agree re: Windows 386 then.
Yes, of course you could, but my point was more that you could be running Windows apps. (Or you just formatted the discs in DOS of course...)
I agree Excel helped to carry the day but a big piece of that was because it was so interoperable with Word. There were a LOT of holdouts from 1-2-3. When Word finally vanquished WordPerfect 5.1/6.1 that was as big a deal IMO.
Windows 1.0 was a total failure. Nobody used it. I worked at a computer store at the time and people would ask us to take it off the drives of the compter because they had no use for it. Windows 2.0 was also a total failure. Only when Windows 386 and WIndows 3.0 came out was Windows usable. Even then most people didn't use it. It just slowed down their dos programs. Only when Windows 3.11 came out did WIndows become popular. Mostly to run DOS apps. Windows won because Microsoft just gave it away for the longest time. Almost nobody would have paid for it. That is why all the others failed. Most people wouldn't pay for a program to run programs! Microsoft used the drug dealer method to win market share. But to call any version of Windows before 3.0 as not a failure is just not valid.
I call shenanigans!
* Windows 1.0 was MS-DOS EXEC. It didn't have an installation. Also, what drives are you referring to? As I recall hard drives were pretty scarce in 1985 (heck, even into 1988 when IDE really got going), as most XTs (and early ATs) were dual floppy systems!
* Yet Windows 2.0 manged to be successful enough that Apple sued Microsoft (in a 189 point lawsuit) over the same look & feel they "borrowed" from Xerox.
* Also, Windows/386 was a version of Windows 2.1. So much for it being a failure.
* Exactly how did running Windows 3.0 slow down DOS programs when you had to shell into Windows from DOS? Unless you put Win (or Win: to avoid the spashscreen) into your autoexec.bat, it was a manual process to load Windows!
* For that matter, why run DOS programs on Windows 3.11? You still had to shell to it from DOS, though by this time some companies had begun changing the autoexec.bat on their machines (Blackship, Fast Data and Dell come to mind).
BUT! By the time it was released (31 December 1993), Microsoft Office for Windows was already on version 3, and 4 was out a few months later. Nevermind the competing products like Lotus Smartsuite 1994, cc:Mail/Microsoft Mail or even AutoCAD . Or a little thing called Mosaic, which of course led to Internet Explorer... which also ran on Windows 3.11... as did Netscape. Have you ever heard of Novell Netware or Windows NT 3.51? WfW was the corporate client du jour for *years* (they bought it, mostly) and it's success paved the way for Windows 95.
As opposed to what... using bright, shiny polychromatic plastic cases?
Apple, the largest Tech Company in the USA. Yeah, who cares!
Largest by what standard? By revenue, it would be Hewlett-Packard, followed by IBM, Dell and Microsoft and would take 3 Apples to make one HP.
You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred. -- Superchicken