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Microsoft Windows was originally introduced in 1985, ostensibly to compete with the Apple Macintosh, and other computers shipping with graphical shells by that time. However, early versions of Windows were not commercially popular, and MS-DOS remained the primary OS used on PC clones.

This changed rather abruptly in 1990, when Windows was now 5 years old, and Microsoft released the Windows v3.0 update. Windows 3 was the first version to enjoy broad commercial success, and it began to quickly supplant MS-DOS as the dominant OS on PC's.

While I'm certain that Windows 3.0 was a superior product to the earlier versions, it's not clear to me which new feature would have finally catapulted Windows into such new heights of success. Speculatively, I would be more inclined to see this sudden success as being either a culmination of earlier factors, or a confluence of fortunate events occurring around the same time.

What is the best explanation for Windows' sudden rise in the early 1990's with version 3.0, taking into account the relative obscurity of Windows for the five years previous?

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Brian H
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    I'd be willing to guess it was a combination of the 386 processor making it easier to protect & segment memory for apps, and improved graphics/resolutions leading to a reasonable UI compared to previous versions. – Joe Mar 02 '17 at 21:44
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    @Joe makes sense, but the 486 processor seems more coincident with 1990 that the 386. – Brian H Mar 02 '17 at 21:49
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    @BrianH 486s were still very rare in 1990. – Stephen Kitt Mar 02 '17 at 22:30
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    @Joe those points may be true for the computer elite but the average person (the primary market) wouldn't have known about memory segmentation or anything better than "386 > 286 which means 386 go faster". – cbmeeks Mar 03 '17 at 13:19
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    One word: Minesweeper – Buhb Mar 03 '17 at 15:01
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    @Buhb no doubt that played a role, but for later versions of Windows (it was added to Windows in version 3.1, after being released for OS/2 and then in the first Entertainment Pack). – Stephen Kitt Mar 03 '17 at 15:21
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    @cbmeeks The computer marketplace in 1990 was a radically different place than today. To put it in perspective, Windows 3.0 sold 4 million copies in 1990 and was considered a huge success. In contrast, the iPhone sold about that many units per week in 2016, which was a slowdown from 2015. 1980's and 90's era computer buyers generally tended to be more avidly interested than today - more serious hobbyists and professional users that'd be more likely to know those kinds of details. (Or at least feel the pinch of the smaller address spaces.) – mschaef Mar 03 '17 at 18:57
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    @cbmeeks I should also point out that the limit imposed by 16-bit addressing is far more onerous than the one we might see today imposed by 32-bit. 64K is a moderately sized text file. It almost takes video, etc. to get past 4GB. – mschaef Mar 03 '17 at 19:00
  • @mschaef yes, I was around for the computer market in the 90's. 80's and even the 70's. – cbmeeks Mar 04 '17 at 21:46
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    @cbmeeks Good to hear. Still, I think it's worthwhile to present the differences for the benefit of those who were not. The scale, general attitude, and aspirations of the modern computer industry are so radically different then they were in the 1980's, and much moreso the 70's. – mschaef Mar 04 '17 at 22:00
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    Older versions of Windows were also very popular - but not as standalone systems. Instead, applications bundled Windows, so you could get all the benefits of a full-blown GUI for your applications without requiring the user to buy (and run) Windows. The most obvious example is of course MS Office, which quickly shaped up to be one of the best office packages. Most people didn't even realize they're running Windows when they started Excel/Word (you didn't get the "shell" - program manager etc., just the one application). But ultimately, it takes time for a product to get really good and used. – Luaan Mar 06 '17 at 13:30
  • One quibble with the question: Windows 3 did not supplant MS-DOS. Windows 3 was a layer that ran on top of MS-DOS. – JeremyP Mar 06 '17 at 16:26
  • @JeremyP I read that part of the question as referring to what people thought of as their operating system: people used to talk about running DOS PCs, with Windows 3.0 they started talking about running Windows PCs. (Of course you're right from a technical perspective.) – Stephen Kitt Mar 06 '17 at 19:57
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    Minesweeper was not in Windows 3.0 (shipped with Windows 3.1). Don't forget those fancy screensaver programs too (flying toasters, Simpsons, etc.) – Matt Balent Apr 17 '17 at 14:21
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    I remember reading in one of the tech magazines like PC World that they had now reached the point where they were no longer going to review new applications written for MS-DOS, but only ones written for Windows 3.0. Customer acceptance of 3.0 had reached a tipping point, and application developers had mostly followed the market. PS: I didn't yet have a Windows machine, but I was not much of a leading edge person, in my own buying choices. – Walter Mitty Apr 25 '19 at 15:06
  • Windows 3.0 was not an operating system. You had to boot into MS-DOS (the OS), then run Windows from DOS. Later it became common to have a boot script that automatically loaded Windows on boot. Modern Windows is now a full operating system. – CJ Dennis Sep 29 '19 at 00:48
  • Also networking was beginning to show up. The network stack took precious memory from plain MS-DOS programs. – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen Nov 17 '20 at 11:44
  • What was the first Windows version that Microsoft started to sell as OEM product to be pre-installed on new PC clones? – UncleBod Nov 18 '20 at 10:25
  • @UncleBod Windows 1.0. I know at least RM, Tandon, Tulip and Zenith shipped PCs with OEM versions of Windows 1.0 (or 1.01). What changed with 3.0 is that Windows started appearing pre-installed by default, rather than as an optional extra. – Stephen Kitt Nov 18 '20 at 10:55

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Stephen Kitt covers the bases well, but I think the majority of the reason relates to fact that Windows 3.0 finally brought 286 protected mode execution to the masses. Even though the 80286 was first released in 1984, Windows 3.0 was the first mainstream platform that actually ran it in protected mode. That made it the first mainstream platform that could present more than 1088K (not 1024K) of address space to a single user process. This may sound like a minor technical issue, but it represents Microsoft effectively addressing a demand from the marketplace that had been only poorly addressed for 6 years prior.)

To give a bit more detail, the 20-bit/1024K 'real mode' address space of the original PC was widely considered to be major limitation, even early on in the PC's life. The original design reserved the top 384K of address space for I/O devices, ROM, etc., leaving 640K of address space for RAM. One of the important software applications of the time was the spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3, and large spreadsheets could easily hit this limit. This was particularly true when running what were known as TSR's. (There are subtleties, but In modern terms, you can think of TSR's as lightweight background processes.)

In parallel with this, 1984's Macintosh release and the 1985 release of Windows 1.0 started introducing GUI's to the mainstream PC market. These added memory pressure, both in terms of the graphics processing and in terms of the fact that they made it possible to run multiple applications at the same time. (In truth, this only came later to the Mac with Switcher and then MultiFinder.)

So, in the first half of the 1980's into the second half, there came to be a large demand for techniques for addressing more than 640K of RAM, and there were a few common ways to handle the problem. Some machines would let you allocate part of the top 384K over to RAM, allowing for 704K and 768K configurations, but by far the more popular approach was something called LIM EMS.

LIM EMS was essentially a standard bank switching standard developed by Lotus, Intel, and Microsoft (LIM). Lotus wanted to make it possible to work with big spreadsheets and Microsoft wanted to make it possible to run more applications in real mode 20-bit Windows. What LIM would do is take 64K within the top 384K and divide it into four 16K pages. It then presented a separate multi-megabyte address space that could be mapped into those four pages. While the CPU's native address space was still 20-bit and 1024K, this provided a way to use memory operations to access more than what would normally be allowed in a 20-bit address space, and do so in a semi-standard way. Initially, LIM EMS was always implemented in the form of a hardware plugin card that contained the mapping hardware and EMS memory.

The downside to LIM EMS was that 1) programs had to be specially written to use the memory and 2) it was a bit of a pain to use. Microsoft Windows (as far back as 1.0) addressed these issues at least in part through the use of a handle based memory manager. Unlike traditional malloc/free, which returned a pointer, the Windows memory manager returned block handles. Developers only got the pointer to the block when the indicated to the OS that they actually wanted to use it. This let Windows do things like automatically move blocks around, including to EMS, when they were not in use. (Keep this in mind, it becomes important later on.)

Of course, the real solution to the address space issue was to select a CPU that had a bigger address space. This happened in 1984 when IBM picked the 80286 for the PC AT. The 80286 introduced a 24-bit address space, which was more than even a real-mode EMS 3.2 machine could manage... and it was native to the chip.

The catch was that to get the 24-bit address space, you had to adopt 80286 protected mode, rather than real mode. Unfortunately, DOS didn't support protected mode, and protected mode changed the rules enough that it wasn't necessarily easy to make the switch. Existing applications couldn't run in protected mode, and once a 286 was in protected mode, it was difficult to get it back to real mode. Still, around this time, there were continual rumors of an Advanced DOS (aka 286-DOS or DOS 4.0) that would somehow enable protected mode operation. What this wound up being was the IBM/Microsoft joint effort - OS/2.

OS/2 brought protected mode to the PC, but due to limitations of the 286, it was itself limited. While it could multitask OS/2 applications, running a DOS application suspended all the OS/2 apps, and was subject to all the usual DOS limitations. It was also expensive, only partially complete when it shipped, and had high memory requirements. It wound up not doing very well, while the industry stayed with DOS, etc.

At this point, it's worth pointing out that there are also 80386 machines. The 80386 is expensive, but it has a couple things the 286 doesn't. The most notable (at least for the late 1980's) is what is known as V86 mode. The 80386 has hardware support for running multiple-real mode processes. This is used by Windows/386 and DesqView/386 to run multiple real mode processes at the same time. The 80386 is also powerful enough to emulate LIM EMS with its internal MMU. The 80386 is truly revolutionary. (Note, though, that even under Windows/386, the Windows environment itself runs in real mode with a 20-bit address space...)

There's also Windows/286 around this time. One of the implementation details of the 80286 is that it would actually generate physical addresses as high as 1088K-16bytes. Windows/286 allowed access to this, so-called, high memory area beyond 1MB.

This answer is turning into an epic, but this is the state of affairs when Windows 3.0 is about to be released. 80286 machines have been out for 6 years and 80386 machines for 4. While there are hacks and third party solutions to use the capabilities of these machines, there's nothing that works all that well, and nothing that easily ships out of the box. It's really rather a mess.

This is when a Microsoft Windows developer named David Weise figured out how to run normal, mostly unmodified Windows applications in protected mode:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/larryosterman/farewell-to-one-of-the-great-ones

This is a huge win for Windows, because there finally was a cheap path for people to take their existing hardware and software, and mostly cheaply get to use the capabilities of their system. (The reason this was possible at all is that handle based memory manager I mentioned several paragraphs ago. If using protected mode means following a different set of rules about memory usage, it turned out Windows applications were already mostly following those rules.)

You also have to keep in mind that this represented a huge turning point for Microsoft. They immediately knew it would undermine OS/2 (largely useful for protected mode access) and irreparably damage its relationship with IBM. They of course did it anyway, and made a huge success out of it.

As Stephen points out, there were a number of other significant and very positive changes to Windows, but I think the biggest is that it finally provided a decent answer to the memory question.

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mschaef
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    This answer really resonated with me because it tries to identify the "killer feature" that Windows 3 brought. Certainly PC users with high-end processors and memory must have felt hamstrung by an OS that could not utilize their hardware. Non-PC users did not have this problem. My Amiga, for example, could easily access every megabyte of RAM I could afford for it. – Brian H Mar 03 '17 at 19:29
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    @BrianH Yeah... anything with a 68K was automatically in much better shape. Not only was there a wider address space, it wasn't segmented. MacOS had some self-inflicted issues going from 24 to 32 bit pointers, but nearly as bad as the growing pains from real mode x86. (Developers on pre-32 bit MacOS systems would sometimes store extra information in the top byte of a pointer.) – mschaef Mar 03 '17 at 20:20
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    These are the answers that make this site awesome. This is why I am addicted to this site. – maple_shaft Mar 03 '17 at 21:42
  • Protected mode was important to developers too, for example it was discovered that you could make MakeProcInstance irrelevant by requiring protected mode. – Neil Mar 05 '17 at 10:40
  • @Neil That was Michael Geary who made the discovery. (He was also the key developer behind the amazing Adobe Type Manager.) MakeProcInstance was made irrelevant through the fact that SS was always what DSshould be at the time control was transitioning into a callback. It worked on real mode too. http://www.geary.com/fixds.html – mschaef Mar 05 '17 at 12:14
  • @BrianH PC users also didn't have a problem with that. The main problem was for the programmers, not the users; utilising all the memory was tricky, so many didn't bother. DOS protected memory extenders already made that easy enough - though unsurprisingly, they evolved at pretty much the same pace as Windows. The 386 finally made it quite natural, especially in combination with Windows 3. – Luaan Mar 06 '17 at 13:37
  • @mschaef Sorry, I think I might have got that confused with the far call odd BP rule, but I was sure there was some other more significant benefit of protected mode, if only I could remember it. – Neil Mar 07 '17 at 22:34
  • @Neil Maybe this? Selectors let the OS move blocks around without the application being aware, so GlobalLock looks like it mostly became superfluous: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20041105-00/?p=37383 – mschaef Mar 08 '17 at 00:02
  • @mschaef Not GlobalLock specifically, but far pointers in general - you didn't have to worry about functions being relocated in memory. (Perhaps MakeProcInstance always returned a fixed far pointer, which would explain my confusion.) – Neil Mar 10 '17 at 09:02
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    @mschaef Wonderful job telling this story! And of course thanks for the kind mention. You're right, the FixDS technique worked in real mode. That's what I originally wrote it for, long before Windows 3.0. In fact, it would have worked fine with Windows 1.0 apps! The entire EXPORTS/MakeProcInstance() misadventure really never did need to happen. Raymond Chen has an article on it here, and this page on calling conventions is interesting too. – Michael Geary May 21 '17 at 07:00
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    @MichaelGeary Thanks so much for the note (as well as all you've done over the years to make the profession better.) – mschaef May 22 '17 at 20:38
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    The 8088's segmented architecture design was IMHO vastly under-appreciated, in significant measure because of the poor quality of programming-language support and a shortage of segment registers (adding even one more would have helped a lot). Despite its limitations, it did a better job than any other architecture I've seen since of allowing a machine with 16-bit registers to access about 1024KiB of address space reasonably fluidly, and of avoiding any per-segment overhead beyond the requirement that segments be 16-byte aligned. If the 80386 had a mode that was similar... – supercat Dec 01 '17 at 21:38
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    ...but used 32-bit segment registers, such a mode could allow programs written in Java or .NET to access up to 64GiB of address space while using 32-bit object references (which could be more efficient than using 64-bit references everywhere). – supercat Dec 01 '17 at 21:40
  • @supercat These days OpenJDK Java support compressed OOP's which use 32-bit references shifted left 3 bits (so refering to 8-byte chunks) to give a 35-bit address space. – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen Dec 19 '22 at 20:14
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There were a number of factors involved.

  • Windows 3.0 introduced a more refined user interface than available in Windows 2.0: more colours, proportional fonts everywhere, smaller icons, and MDI windows (multiple document windows inside an application window)... This made it "obviously" better than plain DOS to many users. Reviewers back in the day perceived this as Windows "growing up", since its new interface was modelled after OS/2's Presentation Manager (and OS/2 was still what a grown-up operating system was supposed to be like back then).
  • Windows 3.0 included better 386 support than previous versions (including Windows/386). This didn't make a huge difference for Windows applications yet (compared to running them on a 286), but it meant that users could run multiple DOS applications at the same time, displaying them in windows on-screen. Most users still had DOS applications they needed, so running DOS applications was very important.
  • While it could make better use of 386s, it still ran well on the very common 286s, and was usable on 8086s (but you probably wouldn't want to really). In 1990, 486s were jaw-droppingly expensive (the realm of servers effectively), 386s were the high end and many people still bought 286s.
  • As pointed out by john_e in his answer (upvote it!), on both 286s and 386s, Windows 3.0 ran Windows applications in protected mode, allowing them to use all the installed memory (without any change to the applications themselves). On 386s, Windows 3.0 could additionally use a swapfile to provide more memory than was physically installed. mschaef's answer gives a lot more detail, as do Andrew Schulman’s two PC Magazine articles on the subject, Windows 3.0: All That Memory, All Those Modes and The Programming Challenge of Windows Protected Mode.
  • Windows 3.0 was much easier to use than previous versions, in particular thanks to its new File Manager and Program Manager (which allowed programs to be logically grouped). In previous versions you started applications from the Executive which was a rather primitive file manager.
  • Windows 3.0 included a few simple but usable "productivity" applications, which were actually good enough for many people: Write in version 3.0 was a passable word processor (fine for letters, homework etc.), and Cardfile was a neat little information organiser (both of these were available in previous versions of Windows). Solitaire made its appearance in version 3...
  • Microsoft managed to get extensive press coverage for the Windows 3.0 launch, far more than previous versions; a quick look through the Byte archives shows a cover story for the launch in June 1990, extensive coverage in the July 1990 issue with a number of in-depth articles, and continued coverage thereafter as more and more software was released for Windows 3.0.
  • Around 1990, Windows software was starting to become usable, with enough features to convince people to switch to Windows to be able to run specific pieces of software: Word for Windows 1.1, Excel 3.0, PageMaker...
  • Last in this list but not least, Windows 3.0 was the first version to be widely factory-installed on PCs. Before 1990, when you bought a PC you'd get a version of MS-DOS, and that would pretty much be it. After Windows 3.0's release, many manufacturers started bundling MS-DOS and Windows with their PCs.

Before Windows 3.0, people who used Windows did so because they had to, typically to run Excel or PageMaker: they'd start Windows, start the software they were really interested in, do whatever they needed to do, then exit the software and exit Windows. (The same was true of other desktop environments, e.g. GEM for running Ventura.) Micros were single-tasking and people just ran one program after another. With the features listed above, it suddenly made sense to run Windows and stay there, even to run DOS software (apart from games). On a 386 with its virtual memory support, Windows could even be a better DOS than DOS... With Windows 3.0, people started adding win at the end of their autoexec.bat, and PCs really became Windows PCs, no longer just DOS PCs.

In following years, memory prices fell, and PC prices fell too; by 1992 a 386DX or 486SX with 4 MiB or even 8 MiB of memory was affordable (at least in North America and Western Europe), and Windows 3.0 was very comfortable to use on such a system. Windows 3.1 improved things further with its Truetype engine and built-in multimedia support in particular, OLE brought composite documents and made multi-tasking indispensable, and Windows for Workgroups brought networking to the (office) masses (easy networking was a killer feature in the early nineties). Eventually games started appearing too (in particular Myst on Windows 3), and the rest is history.

Here's a quote from the June 1990 issue of Byte, to give you an idea of Windows 3.0's reception:

Users of DOS PCs rejoice! Windows 3.0 will breathe new life into your machine. Microsoft has bundled a graphical environment, a suite of desktop applications, a DOS program switcher, a Windows multitasking executive, a V86 multitasker, and a virtual memory manager into a single package.

Windows has long aspired to change the face of DOS computing — not just for Excel or PageMaker addicts, but for the rest of us. A year ago, that transformation seemed unlikely. Today it appears inevitable. Windows 3.0 finally consummates the Windows/DOS marriage. That is good news for the 386 crowd, and it's great news for the silent majority: 286 owners who've lately been made to feel like they have bought an Edsel.

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Stephen Kitt
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    IMO the biggest factor was your last ("but not least"). Having a new machine boot up into Win 3.0 on its first power-up was a game change. If OS/2 had managed that there would be few who remembered Microsoft Windows as anything more than an also-ran, like Microsoft Bob. (Remember, when Win 3 came out, Microsoft was still telling people that OS/2 was the future.) – RichF Mar 02 '17 at 22:36
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    I agree (and see my first point for OS/2). I put that point last though because the others explain why Windows was finally an attractive proposition for manufacturers to bundle... – Stephen Kitt Mar 02 '17 at 22:40
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    While not a factor right at the release of 3.0, the Windows Game Extensions (precursor to DirectX) came out for Windows 3.1 and was eventually a core part of Windows 95. DOS was still king for gaming prior to this because it gave programs full hardware access: Windows was king for gaming after this because it abstracted the hardware while still giving great performance, so games no longer needed support for specific graphics and sound cards. –  Mar 03 '17 at 15:47
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    I got my first version of Windows as a bundle with Word 1.1, can't remember if it was 3.0 or 3.1 though. I had definitely been interested previously but never enough to purchase it. – Mark Ransom Mar 03 '17 at 21:31
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    @MarkRansom that would likely have been Windows 3.0; by the time 3.1 came out, the current version of Word was 2.0. – Stephen Kitt Mar 03 '17 at 21:39
  • Wow, OS/2! I haven't thought about it in a while. Back in the day, many people called it "Half an OS". :) – Robert Columbia Mar 04 '17 at 16:23
  • I think that Byte quote at the end of this answer goes to illustrate the point made in the comments to the question: the PC landscape was very much more geared toward enthusiasts back then. Besides the specific points, which are obviously going to change with time, just look at the kind of terminology used and compare that with computer magazines of today. – user Mar 04 '17 at 22:43
  • Though, wasn't the use case for running many Windows applications prior to Windows 3.0 the application including a pretty heavily restricted Windows runtime, which basically was a part of the application? So you'd start the application, which loaded its Windows runtime; when you were done, you exited the application and that caused the Windows runtime to unload and bring you back to DOS (or whatever other environment you normally ran; I recall various more or less simple menu programs being very much in the vogue, if you didn't use an all-out solution like Norton Commander or PC Tools). – user Mar 04 '17 at 22:46
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    @MichaelKjörling I'm not sure about "many"; Excel 2.0 included a run-time version of Windows 2.0 which it would use if you didn't have the full Windows 2.0. I'm not aware of any other application which did this, although I dare say there were some... I do know people who configured Windows 3.0 (and 3.1) so that it ran a single application (instead of Program Manager), and exited when that application exited, achieving the same effect. – Stephen Kitt Mar 05 '17 at 08:38
  • Come to think of it there was a "run-time" version of Windows 3.0 too; Microsoft used it for their "working model" demos of Excel and Word. – Stephen Kitt Mar 05 '17 at 09:10
  • I recall Word being a driver since it was mostly WYSIWYG, unlike Word Perfect. The later improvements in Windows 3.11 for workgroups let businesses more easily share files and still use a terminal emulator to connect to the old mainframe(s). Everyone besides gamers wanted a GUI and OS/2 and OS/2 Warp just didn't feel right. As nerdy as I was and am, I wasn't conscious of using protected mode on my 386sx. It was all about Word and Excel and a DOS boot disk for games. – Todd Wilcox Mar 06 '17 at 07:26
  • @Snowman There was a several year gap between win95 and when win9x displaced DOS as the primary gaming platform and dual boot for gaming faded away to a niche activity. Part was development lead times and DOS having a bigger potential market. But Windows overhead was perceived as a performance penalty while gaming (not sure how big an issue it was in reality) and not all DOS games played nicely with it so some times you had to boot to dos even if you didn't want to. (There wsa another round of this going from Win9x to Win 2k/XP because NT farther limited DOS hardware access.) – Dan Is Fiddling By Firelight Mar 09 '17 at 18:54
  • "Write in version 3.0 was a passable word processor" -- Write was around before 3.0. A copy of it was bundled along with Windows 1.04 with my 286, which was manufactured in 87. It may not have been part of Windows per se, but it was widely distributed anyway. – Jules Jan 03 '18 at 06:19
  • @Jules you missed this part about Write and Cardfile: “both of these were available in previous versions of Windows” ;-) – Stephen Kitt Jan 03 '18 at 09:16
  • "Most users still had DOS applications they needed" - we still do, Sopwith! – Maury Markowitz Apr 25 '19 at 19:22
  • I worked on parts of Microsoft OS/2 when Windows 3 came out. My impression was that MS were taken by surprise by the success of Windows, which had previously been seen as a stop gap, and that OS/2's lack of support for a 386 mode began to be seen as a limitation. – Mark Williams Apr 28 '19 at 07:01
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    @MarkWilliams They were likely more surprised by the success of Windows in general than the specific success of Windows 3.0. Larry Osterman tells a story that implies they knew exactly what they had in 3.0 and what it was likely to do in the market. https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/ms/davidweise.html – mschaef Jan 11 '23 at 14:37
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One reason that Windows 3.0 was popular with software authors: it included a DOS extender, meaning that on 286 / 386 processors Windows programs could run in protected mode and access as much memory as the computer had, rather than the 640k allowed by PCDOS.

john_e
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    This was already true of Windows 2.1 (which could even use EMS on 8086 computers). – Stephen Kitt Mar 03 '17 at 10:33
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    As I understand it, the 286/386 versions of Windows 2.x could run in protected mode, but programs were still limited to 640k. That's how it's described at https://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/2011/06/01/windows-3-0/ for example. – john_e Mar 03 '17 at 11:05
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    Ah yes, you're right, the kernel ran in protected mode but applications still ran in real mode. – Stephen Kitt Mar 03 '17 at 11:12
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    Windows/286 was real mode with the A20 gate disabled. This gave access to a paragraph less than 1088K, through the use of the HMA. Windows/386 had a protected mode VMM sitting underneath a real mode Windows kernel. You can think of it was DesqView/386, but with Windows as the GUI.. the main benefit was background processing of DOS apps. – mschaef Mar 03 '17 at 15:33
  • @john_e The DOS extender wasn't important for Windows 3.x applications. They didn't need it. Windows 3.0 already run in protected mode on a 286/386 machine, thus they had access to all the RAM. The DOS extender was only important for DOS applications that are using a DPMI DOS extender itself and thus were Protected Mode programs. The PM was requires to brake the 640 KiB memory barrier for code and data. The EMS solution was only usable for data, but not for code. – Coder Mar 24 '24 at 17:27
  • @Coder Win16 doesn't have a file access API, so 16-bit Windows programs have to use the DOS-style INT21h API. And to do that from protected mode they need the DOS extender – john_e Mar 24 '24 at 18:29
  • @john_e That might be true. But it's not DOS, that does this job in the background after Windows is loaded. It's windows. This might interest you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vJQv4rgHYE&t=4935s – Coder Mar 24 '24 at 18:33
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For me, the main advantage of Windows 2.0 over MS-DOS was that I could configure my printer just once and then all Windows programs used the same configuration. Also it printed graphics better than most DOS applications. But overall, Windows 2.0 was basically a technology preview of things to come...

Windows 3.0 let you run MS-DOS sessions in their own window, making it more user-friendly for multitasking than Desqview. Also it supported 256-color VGA.

Windows 3.1 was where Windows really took off. It added support for sound cards and had much nicer fonts.

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    It's hard to overstate how much the printer support mattered... particularly if you had an oddball printer (like my family did in its Toshiba P321). – mschaef Mar 03 '17 at 15:31
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    It was the combination of the printer driver and proportional fonts that convinced me Windows was the future. – Mark Ransom Mar 03 '17 at 21:39
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    My recollection is that Windows 1.0 (yes, I actually used it) was basically a really bad graphical shell for DOS. Windows 2.0 was marginally useful, and solved the memory and printing issues. Windows 3.0 was good enough to use, and Windows 3.1 was good enough that you didn't want to use anything else. I switched to OS/2 for a short period of time because it seemed like it would be a better platform - then switched back to Win 3.1 when it turned out it wasn't. – Bob Jarvis - Слава Україні Mar 05 '17 at 04:10
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    OS/2 had the problem that by the time 2.0 rolled around, they were advertising it as a better Windows than Windows. For a while, they could actually achieve some of this promise, because the IBM/Microsoft joint development agreement gave them access to the Windows source. This let IBM bundle OS/2 with a custom version of Windows optimized to run under OS/2. Of course, the agreement ran out, and all IBM had really achieved was to undermine any motivation developers might have had to target OS/2. I think all those OS/2 versions accomplished was to advertise for Windows. – mschaef Mar 05 '17 at 22:56
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    (I should point out that OS/2 did have a long life in certain niche applications... ATM's and dev workstations in some IBM mainframe development shops come to mind.) – mschaef Mar 05 '17 at 22:57
  • @BobJarvis To be fair, there were a few things that put Windows 1.0 down - not only did it have to run on extremely low-powered computers (thanks to IBM's business strategy), but it was also fraught with legal difficulties; a lot of the features had to be disabled or crippled because of infringement claims. But yeah, Windows 3.11 was the real winner for me - great networking (for the time), and a pretty good system overall, with decent applications. If only the application installers didn't insist on replacing system DLLs all the time, grah. – Luaan Mar 06 '17 at 14:13
  • @mschaef The fun part is that Microsoft used just that strategy to make everyone use MS-DOS/Windows - make all software run on our OS. The whole computer industry was a huge mess where any interoperability was a huge premium, and here comes MS OS that runs pretty much everything ("important enough"). OS is a platform, so you want the OS that runs the most applications; while everyone else was too busy vendor-locking, MS claimed the users by breaking those locks. OS/2 failed in a big part because IBM didn't understand what they were doing - they just mimicked MS, badly. – Luaan Mar 06 '17 at 14:17
  • @LuaanI don't know if it's completely fair to say they just mimicked Microsoft. OS/2 2.0 did contain things like the Workplace Shell and SOM that were novel IBM contributions. Where they dropped the ball is giving either ISV's or end users a reason to care. – mschaef Mar 06 '17 at 14:35
  • One thing that ended up being a SERIOUS limitation to widespread use of WinOS/2 (the mode that basically gave every running Windows app its own virtual instance of Windows) -- it pretty much REQUIRED 16mb to not suck, and right around the time OS/2 Warp came out, the price of RAM skyrocketed for a year or two. Making matters worse, most PCs had 8 SIMM slots, and most people who wanted to use WinOS/2 originally bought PCs with 8mb (8 x 1mb) of RAM. So you were hit with a double-whammy... you had to buy four expensive 4mb simms (~$800, if I recall) AND toss your original eight SIMMs. – Bitbang3r Jul 13 '17 at 05:26
  • From what I remember, W1.0 and W2.11 were a Mac lookalikes. W3.0 had 3D buttons and some kind of memory protection that W2.0 didn't have. We had to deliver quite a big S/W suite in W2.11. It used to randomly crash - didn't figure it out until we ported to W3.0. W3.0 was cheap compared to OS/2 and WNT3.51. – cup Apr 28 '19 at 21:37
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TL;DR: The success of Microsoft Office, proprietary data formats and the ensuing marketing strategies thereof, undercutting the competition, collusion cooperation with OEMs to lease MS software preinstalled on their products, and probably most importantly: landing deals with IBM and their longstanding contracts with them while retaining the ownership of certain IPs giving them market control over products that they sold to IBM and other companies ("Merchandising!"), and to a lessor extent: ease of use via the company who first brought us GUIs.

Windows is what most early PC computers came with, is what you needed installed to run other Microsoft products, and historically is what other users needed to also be running to facilitate the useful exchange of documents which were written with their software.

"This program requires Microsoft Windows to run."

There was nothing sudden about Microsoft's "aggressive marketing" and the predatory strategies (United States v. Microsoft Corp.) that they use(d) leading to their domination of the market. Windows 3.0 and Microsoft's success as a whole is indeed a culmination of earlier factors. This answer focuses on why everyone had it, as opposed to what made it distinctly better than other operating systems.

The confluence was the fortunate event of the explosion of the PC market, where OEMs began to sell computers with preinstalled operating systems, which due to Microsoft's marketing strategies was largely corned by versions of DOS and Windows. The company's perpetual existence and continued success, and the budding PC market in general, owes its greatest dues almost entirely to contracts that they and other companies had with IBM.

IMO, the was no "relative obscurity" of Windows Microsoft software in the years previous - they held an iron fist over the entire PC industry until only very recently.

One year prior to the release of W3.0, they released Microsoft Office, which today is used by approximately one seventh of the world's population, and at the time of its initial release required a Windows operating system to run. [citation needed] And at the very least, until 2007, required recipients of Office data to be running Office to be read.

Microsoft Office prior to Office 2007 used proprietary file formats based on the OLE Compound File Binary Format. This forced users who share data to adopt the same software platform.

(What I cannot find is the number of W3.0 boxed copies sold to end users versus all the licenses of it granted to OEMs, though I suspect the latter to dwarf the former - I've never even seen a boxed copy of W3.0, and it's the only version of Windows that I've never installed save for Vista and W10)

DOS (Disk Operating System) was the operating system that brought the company its first real success. On August 12, 1981, after negotiations with Digital Research failed, IBM awarded a contract to Microsoft to provide a version of the CP/M operating system for use in its new IBM Personal Computer (PC). Microsoft purchased a CP/M clone OS called 86-DOS (originally known as QDOS for "Quick and Dirty Operating System") from Seattle Computer Products, which IBM renamed to PC-DOS. Around 1983, Microsoft collaborated with several companies to create a home computer system, MSX, which contained its own version of the DOS operating system, entitled MSX-DOS; this became relatively popular in Japan, Europe and South America. After Columbia Data Products successfully cloned the IBM BIOS, quickly followed by Eagle Computer and Compaq, PCs manufactured by other companies flooded the market.

Its arrangement with IBM allowed Microsoft to have control of its own QDOS derivative, MS-DOS, and through aggressive marketing of the operating system to other manufacturers of PCs, Microsoft became one of the major software vendors in the home computer industry. Microsoft continued to expand its product line in other markets with the release of the Microsoft Mouse on May 2, 1983. Microsoft Press, a book publishing division, debuted on July 11 the same year with two titles: Exploring the IBM PCjr Home Computer, by Peter Norton; and The Apple Macintosh Book, by Cary Lu.

In August 1985, Microsoft and IBM partnered in the development of a different operating system called OS/2. On November 20, 1985, Microsoft released its first retail version of Microsoft Windows, originally a graphical layer on top of its MS-DOS operating system. In 1987, Microsoft released its first version of OS/2 to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).

In 1989, Microsoft introduced its flagship office software suite, Microsoft Office, a bundle of separate office productivity applications, such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. On May 22, 1990 Microsoft launched Windows 3.0, a new version of its operating system boasting features such as streamlined user interface graphics and improved protected mode capability for the Intel 386 processor; it sold over 100,000 copies in two weeks. Windows generated more revenue for Microsoft than OS/2, and the company decided to move more resources from OS/2 to Windows. In the ensuing years, the popularity of OS/2 declined, and Windows quickly became the favored PC platform.

During the transition from MS-DOS to Windows, the success of Microsoft Office allowed the company to outpace its competitors in applications software, such as WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. Eventually, Microsoft Office became the dominant business suite, with a market share far exceeding that of its competitors.

– Microsoft, newworldencyclopedia.org (headers and citations removed, emphasis added)

Undercut the Competition (and unnecessarily* incorporate planned obsolesce under the shroud of the prevention of software piracy)

I further suspect that almost all versions of Windows were or still are offered to OEMs at a(n optional cost) loss, just like Microsoft's game consoles, as you could either buy a free standing copy of their operating systems for a few hundred dollars, or basically get a free computer at the same or less price point by buying a computer that came with it preinstalled.

Aside from software piracy, that's why certain versions of Windows don't like it when you drastically change the hardware in your computer. How would they sell you "The White Album" again if it just still worked when you clicked play (or in terms of any given OS, simply migrated or installed it) on a new device?

[*] Unless you are a gamer or a designer using graphically intensive programs, there hasn't been a need for a "better" computer or operating system for at least the last 20 years.

Functionally, from a UI standpoint, there isn't much difference between Windows 3.0 and Windows 10. Both have a point-and-click GUI. The next step IMO (which I thought would have been motion control, like the Wii) is likely to be thought or eye controlled. So until we invent a better mouse, Microsoft is the company who got it right first and continues to do so, offering us the tools (we don't really need) to satisfy our own 'two-foot-ides'.

Long story short in a single word, be it software and/or hardware: bundling. An extent to which Apple has taken to a new level with their proprietary software and hardware and why their market share has increased so much in the recent past: they took a page out of Microsoft's book. The same one Gorge Lucas was so apt to read: retain the rights to your IP, become a company giant, and use that power that you now have to enslave the universe through keen marketing of the merchandise that you sell, but somehow still own, because your lawyers are awesome.

Mazura
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  • Welcome to Retrocomputing. Thanks for the detailed answer; this really puts it into context. – wizzwizz4 Mar 04 '17 at 07:33
  • This is a fascinating answer to a much broader question than what was asked. I did enjoy reading it... – Brian H Mar 04 '17 at 16:05
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    While it definitely was an important factor in Microsoft's later dominance of the PC software market in general, I don't think Microsoft Office was much of a factor in the success of Windows 3.0; Office only really became important with version 4.0, which was indeed bundled with lots of PCs. (Although the cut-down Word 6.0 / Works bundle was quite popular too.) In 1990, PCs were only starting to be bundled with Windows, and not many had extra software. – Stephen Kitt Mar 04 '17 at 21:17
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    I'd also disagree with the novelty of bundling PCs with operating systems; all non-kit micro computers came with some form of operating system. PCs were unusual in that there was a choice, although that didn't stop Microsoft from monopolising the operating system market (and then the general productivity software market). – Stephen Kitt Mar 04 '17 at 21:20
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    It's easy to forget, but both Lotus and WordPerfect dropped the ball on Windows versions of their software and Ashton-Tate essentially dropped the ball completely. At the time Windows 3.0 was released, there was very little in the way of competition for either Excel or Word. (You can argue that this is because of Microsoft's misdirection of the industry towards OS/2, but for single product companies like Lotus and WP, they should've been on Windows as a safeguard, if nothing else.) – mschaef Mar 04 '17 at 22:05
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    The bundling argument has always been a bit odd to me. Around the time of Windows, it was easily possible to have a DOS, Windows, a memory manager (QEMM), disk utility (Norton), networking stack (Netware), drag drop enviornment (PCTools or NewWave),all on the machine as separately bought and paid for licenses. By the time Windows95 rolled around, it was essentially all bundled into the core OS product for about a quarter the total price. Bundling eliminated some market opportunities, but was wholly better for the consumers.) – mschaef Mar 04 '17 at 22:10
  • "Functionally, from a UI standpoint, there isn't much difference between Windows 3.0 and Windows 10. /.../ Microsoft is the company who got it right first" From a UI standpoint, there isn't that much difference between the Xerox Alto and Windows 10. If you want a more mainstream product, try the original Apple Macintosh, which predated the first public release of Windows by a year. In the context of GUIs of old versions of Windows, it's actually Windows 2.0-3.11 that are the odd ones out by doing away with what we today call the taskbar. The taskbar wasn't new in Win95; it was in Windows 1! – user Mar 05 '17 at 12:00
  • Yes, Windows 3.0 had a far better shell (the Program Manager) than did Windows 1.0 (the MS-DOS Executive), but I don't see any reason why a Program Manager-like shell couldn't have shipped with Windows 1.0, had the desire and the time to implement it been there. The system as a whole was also far more polished by the time 3.0 came around, but that's just what happens when you have had several major upgrades and five years to work on the thing. (What's really fascinating is how it is possible to run well-behaved Windows 1.x applications on any 16- or 32-bit version of Windows.) – user Mar 05 '17 at 12:02
  • @MichaelKjörling The Xerox Alto was the real explorer, yeah. But it was far from a micro-computer - that's the real revolution Apple and Microsoft managed (coöperatively even, at least partially). They actually managed to squeeze most of the goodness of Xerox GUI to a computer people could afford. But there's plenty of advances from MS that Alto didn't have - the most familiar today would probably be the mouse wheel. I still agree that all the groundwork was laid out at Palo Alto, though, and many of the basic affordances are still in use today, because they just work. Brilliant UX. – Luaan Mar 06 '17 at 13:53
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    I don't see how a 2000s anti-trust case has anything to do with the sales of Windows 3.0 (or why everyone else was free to bundle any software they wanted, but not MS, but I digress). All around, your answer reads like a rant, which isn't a very nice way to answer questions on the SE network :) If you want to show that Microsoft used dirty practices to become the software leader it did, show the alternatives. Who didn't use proprietary formats? Who didn't bundle software? And are you seriously saying that contracts are evil? Office run with bundled Windows and on Apple PCs. – Luaan Mar 06 '17 at 14:06
  • @MichaelKjörling Are you sure it's possible to run Windows 1 applications on 32-bit Windows? I don't know either way, but one thing I do rememeber is that Windows 3.0 introduced a bit within the .EXE file that marked a program as clean to run under protected mode (Windows 3.0 Standard and 386 Enhanced Mode). If the bit wasn't set, and you tried anyway, Windows would complain that the executable might not run. It would be interesting to see what modern 32-bit windows does with an un-marked EXE file. – mschaef Mar 06 '17 at 14:52
  • @mschaef See the first and second screenshots at http://toastytech.com/guis/win84.html for an example involving Windows 8. I also recall that there are other examples on that site somewhere, including source code(!), but can't find them at the moment. – user Mar 06 '17 at 15:48
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    @Luaan The Alto was expensive, yes (though not extremely so for a computer of its day; remember that we are talking early 70s here, not even mid-70s), but it did introduce a lot of the elements we now take for granted in GUIs, and I think its form factor can qualify as a micro. Yes, the mouse wheel was a later invention, but there are other things I think Microsoft still hasn't picked up on -- select and middle-click to copy and paste, for example. (Which, once you get used to it, is an extremely nice to have feature!) – user Mar 06 '17 at 15:52
  • @MichaelKjörling The problem with that is you'd change the meaning of a control, which is always tricky. Middle mouse click already has a meaning - it's used for scrolling when you don't have a mouse wheel (and horizontal scrolling if your wheel doesn't support that). And it's a bit too contextual for my taste, but that's just me. I know people who use different mouse buttons for copy&paste and seem to like it very much - it just never felt appealing to me, since I always have one hand on the keyboard anyway, Ctrl+C/V easily in reach. Though a mouse button is certainly easier than that. – Luaan Mar 06 '17 at 16:17
  • "Who didn't use proprietary formats?" Don't forget that everybody and their dog had a binary to glyph mapping of their own. Not only were there dozens (hundreds?) of code pages in MS-DOS on the IBM PC, every other system pretty much used its own way of mapping from binary values to character glyphs. Many basically (but not necessarily entirely) agreed on 7-bit ASCII, even though I'm pretty sure variations existed for a long time, but by the time you moved into the national characters realm... oh, joy. Remember how every terminal program worth its salt had built-in character set conversion? – user Mar 06 '17 at 20:44
  • This answer is, I'm afraid, fundamentally factually incorrect. WordPerfect and Lotus 123 were the dominant office programs in 1990, and while the switch to Windows as the primary user interface started taking its toll on both of them beginning in 1990, it wasn't until several years later (after the release of Windows 3.1) that Winword and Excel became the dominant programs in the field. See https://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/book/wordprocessor/word.html for stats -- adding up Word for DOS and Winword vs WP DOS and WP Win, 1993 was the first year in which MS was the market leading word ... – Jules Jun 22 '18 at 08:15
  • ... processor. Indeed, the analysis on the page I linked to concludes that MS used the popularity of Windows to achieve dominance in the Word Processor field, not the other way around. https://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/book/sheets/sheet.html shows a similar story for Excel, with it becoming dominant sometime around the end of 1992 and start of 1993, long after the Windows 3.0 boom took place. – Jules Jun 22 '18 at 08:27
  • If I recall correctly Word 6 for Windows explicitly contained code in the installer to make it impossible to install in the Windows 3.1 emulation in OS/2. – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen Feb 03 '19 at 09:40
  • I'm quite sure I used Word for DOS for years before I tried Windows. – Mark Ransom Jun 23 '21 at 04:19
  • @Jules You are correct. Word achieved dominance because there was a Windows version of it and WordPerfect (the then dominant WP) was late to the Windows party, and when it finally got there it looked awful - it seemed like they just wrote a Windows shell for the DOS product. – JeremyP Jun 23 '21 at 06:07
  • @Jules History was repeated with Lotus 123 and the Win32 version. Excel had a Win32 version pretty much as soon as Win95 came out. Lotus were late with their Win32 version and Excel took over. – JeremyP Jun 23 '21 at 06:08
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TL;DR application support

I worked for Microsoft in 1991, on their own version of OS/2. OS/2 was designed for the future, and was seen as the successor to DOS. It was never designed to be back compatible with DOS, as it ran in 286 protected mode and DOS ran in 286 realmode. By design, you couldn't mix and match. Eventually OS/2 gained a single DOS box, which kludged the 286 back into realmode, but was clearly a temporary measure. OS/2 was never designed to leverage the virtual 86 functions of the 386. And once IBM designed something, they stuck to it!

By contrast Windows 3 could run in 386 mode and cater for multiple DOS sessions, each running a full application and OS. For a business this was a much better return on investment. Businesses didnt want to dump all their DOS applications and replace them with OS/2 or Windows equivalents, but they did want to run 123 in one window, Word Perfect in another and switch between them. So OS/2 was designed for a future without DOS and Windows was designed to be a better DOS than DOS. The market chose, and were happy to buy 386 machines, for which Windows 3.0 provided more support, in order to do this.

My impression was that MS were slightly caught by surprise and promptly jumped ship on OS/2 when they could see which way the wind was blowing.

Mark Williams
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DOS programs all had unique interfaces, each had their own graphics and device drivers and each had their own fonts. Cut and paste did not exist. Each new program had to take all these into consideration. Windows alleviated this overhead for the developer and at the same time gave the user experience continuity.

Even though you could launch older DOS programs, it just felt dirty and primitive. Better hope your printer was supported and you really liked one of the ten fonts offered ( I'm looking at you Printshop ).

I would have to say that the icing on the cake was NETWORKING. Network setup in DOS was dicey at best and expensive (cough-Novel-cough). With Windows you just bought a cheap network card and it just worked. In my own experience this lead to network gaming.

I guess my take is that not unlike the iPhone paradigm, in it's own way, it created a better ecosystem for both developers and users.

Kevin
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  • Welcome to Retrocomputing Stack Exchange. Thanks for the answer; it explains in detail some of the reasons that people would have prefered Windows. You might want to take a look at the [tour] to learn a bit about how the site works; it's a little different from forums and Brandname Answers™ sites. – wizzwizz4 Mar 03 '17 at 07:21
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    Windows 3.0 didn't include networking. That came later, with Windows for Workgroups 3.1. With Win 3.0, you still used LANTastic, Netware, or whatever you wewre using in DOS. – Greenstone Walker Mar 03 '17 at 09:58
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    @GreenstoneWalker - you are correct, but I would be interested to see statistics about whether Windows "took off" at 3.0 or at Workgroups - my own recollection was that in my company it was at Workgroups... Prior to that only bleeding edgers used Windows, after it, everyone. – Grimxn Mar 03 '17 at 16:57
  • @Grimxn It didn't matter much for homes - most people didn't have multiple PCs. But for a business, it was a huge money saver - not only was it much cheaper than the competition (Novell and friends were very expensive), it also didn't build on dedicated/hired network admins/consultants (which was commonly seen as a great source of revenue at companies like Novell, IBM or Oracle). And when those people decided to buy a home computer, why wouldn't they buy the one they use at work? They already know how to use it :) – Luaan Mar 06 '17 at 14:23
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Stephen Kitt wrote: "Last in this list but not least, Windows 3.0 was the first version to be widely factory-installed...". This is indeed a necessary (but not sufficient alone) factor in Windows taking over the (home) world. In background, I started in software development in 1977 and retired in 2013 (all with IBM); this bridges from the days when software was mainframe & given away to the dominance of OO, web software and SAAS. I was part of the (large) IBM team working with M/S on Windows/OS2. What I have not seen mentioned anywhere here is HOW Windows 3.0 became widely factory-installed. It was simple: M/S told PC makers that if they did not pre-install Windows in a partition (meaning it was one choice for the user to boot up) along with the universally-used M/S DOS, their copy of the next M/S DOS updates would likely be delayed (forever, or long enough to kill their market share). Some may call this savvy hardball marketing, some may call it extortion. The result was, naturally, that Windows 3.0 was suddenly available on all PCs. The fact, as noted elsewhere, that it was a fairly decent OS with some useful features led users to try it and then get hooked on it. I cannot site any documentation for my assertion, but I doubt this surprises any of you. It was common knowledge among folks in PC hardware & (to a lesser extent) software at the time, you can check with other greybeards you know for verification.

user3276207
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Hardware with more RAM could have been a big practical issue. I remember buying a cheap second-hand 80286 PC around that time, with 1 MiB of RAM and Windows 2.0 installed - though its previous owner warned me that Windows wasn't useable.

Windows 2.0 itself would just about run, but trying to load any application resulted in literally minutes of memory paging before enough of the OS got out of the way to make room for the app.

But of course a 1 MiB 80286 PC running MS-DOS was a perfectly useable computer - and with a 20MHz clock it was pretty fast for those days as well!

user3840170
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alephzero
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    Unfortunately this doesn't quite answer the question. It actually implies that Windows 3 was worse than MS-DOS. Please make it explicit that you're comparing pre-Windows 3 machines to post-Windows 3 machines, and not Windows 2 to MS-DOS. – wizzwizz4 Mar 03 '17 at 16:58
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    20 MHz 80286? That must have been a pretty late production of the CPU then. (I remember an 80386 that ran at 16 MHz.) And frankly, "literally minutes of memory paging" sounds like an exaggeration given a 1 MB RAM system. Contemporary HDDs at the time might have managed high single-digits megabytes per second throughput; even if you add seek delays due to fragmentation, I have a hard time seeing swapping taking more than maybe a second. And I'm trying hard to remember if Windows 2.0 even supported swapping to disk (as opposed to on-demand page loading and eviction), though it seems doubtful... – user Mar 05 '17 at 12:08
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    There were 80286 chips clocked as high as 25MHz shipping in mainstream PC's . The Dell System 220 is a good example of a relatively mainstream 20MHz model. These fast 286's all post dated the beginning of the 386sx/dx era, and were mainly positioned as less expensive but still fast DOS PC's for people without the need for 386-specific support. IIRC, a fast 286 could outperform a more expensive 386sx machine. (It was also the case that Windows 3.0 in standard mode could be faster than in 386 Enhanced mode.) – mschaef Mar 05 '17 at 18:57
  • A company named Wietek (or something like that) made those fast 286's. I remember wanting one. – Scott Goodgame Jun 29 '17 at 08:10
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    @user, nope, literally minutes is right. I installed Win 2.x (prob 2.11) on my 286/12MHz, 1 MB RAM, 65 MB RLL HDD for about 1 hour in 1991. Formatted HDD first as a quick delete. Took 4..5m mins to boot, so painful I began timing it all. Moving the mouse around the screen caused solid HDD activity as it just hovered over certain items, remember a 40 secs and a 2 mins. Shutting down took over 4 mins to get the mouse to the menus, through them to powered off, all solid HDD activity. Went to back to DOS, machine worked fine and fast for years. Remember it clearly. 1 sec is spectacularly off. – TonyM Nov 19 '20 at 12:15
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Many interesting answers here but I would say that the number one reason(s) without any shadow of a doubt is Microsoft Word for Windows and Microsoft Excel for Windows in combination with the fact that Windows 3 was the first really usable version of Windows.

That's probably all there is to it. We can argue about technology and stuff forever, but what sold Windows 3 is a combination of a UI and application software that people found easier to use than the competition.

JeremyP
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Also bear in mind that PC performance was just becoming adequate for a proper GUI, and also display resolution - while Windows would run on CGA it was of limited usefulness and for most purposes you’d be better off with a character display.

Frog
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