I don’t know how many of you caught this but yesterday Microsoft announced that Windows 3.11 reached its end-of life. The first comment I saw about it said this “I never heard of a trojan or virus affecting 3.11.  Heck even DOS today would be fine by me.” Was the grass really greener back then though?

Remember XYZ OS? It Was Great

I’ve heard statements like this about every new operating system or office suite for many years now. Oddly enough some people are particularly fond of DOS, Windows 3.11, or especially Windows 95. In their mind’s eye the software didn’t have viruses, didn’t crash (well, DOS usually didn’t), wasn’t “bloated”, and ran on a measly 33MHz CPU with 4MB of RAM just fine. Sounds pretty great right? Wrong.

The software also didn’t do very much (relatively speaking). There was little or no multi-tasking (I upgraded to OS/2 from Windows 3.11 solely to download from BBS‘s in the background). Then there was that arcane 640KB memory limit in DOS you had to deal with.

There was also no Internet (at least what we consider the Internet today); so no WWW, email, blogs, instant messaging, VoIP, or online gaming. Computers also couldn’t do all of the multimedia (music, video, photo editing, record TV, etc) we take for granted today. Here is the real kicker though, they also cost more in nominal and real terms. I remember my first hard drive cost $300-400 and it was only 20MB! I just bought a 750GB drive for ~$100 or so.

Trust Me, It Wasn’t As Good As You Remember It

Here is how I know it wasn’t better back then, if it was, we would all be downgrading back to a 286 running Windows 3.11. A lot of the problems people have with computers today have more to do with the Internet than their OS. If you really want to be as safe from viruses/malware as you were then, don’t connect your computer to the Internet, ever. That will take care of about 99.9999% of your computers problems…and about 90% of its functionality too.

I do have my favorite programs/OSes from back in the day, but they were really only great relative to their contemporaries. That is why I run Vista instead of BeOS or OS/2 (arguably my two favorite OSes of all time). Sure BeOS could boot in 5 seconds on a Pentium 200MHz, but once it was up what would I do with it?