I want to downgrade to MS Windows 3.0

On Tue, 9 Jul 2019 19:18:48 +0100, "Apd" wrote:

"Andy Burns" wrote:
Mark Lloyd wrote:
wrote:
I want to downgrade to MS Windows 3.0.

Did you get internet access with it?

Do you get wafers with it? (M. Python reference)

Presumably he will re-use his Trumpet Winsock licence, or maybe install
Windows for Workgroups 3.11 rather than Windows 3.0 :-P

Presumably he's taking the **** but yes, Win 3.11 would be better.



Please don't mix up Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Windows 3.11. They
were two very different things. Windows 3.11 was a very minor upgrade
to Windows 3.1; the primary difference was that Windows 3.11 contained
a few extra drivers.

"Ken Blake" wrote:
On Tue, 9 Jul 2019 19:18:48 +0100, "Apd" wrote:
"Andy Burns" wrote:
Presumably he will re-use his Trumpet Winsock licence, or maybe install
Windows for Workgroups 3.11 rather than Windows 3.0 :-P

Presumably he's taking the **** but yes, Win 3.11 would be better.

Please don't mix up Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Windows 3.11. They
were two very different things. Windows 3.11 was a very minor upgrade
to Windows 3.1; the primary difference was that Windows 3.11 contained
a few extra drivers.

Ok. WfW it is. Personally I'd go with Win2k, being the last lean and
mean NT based OS from MS. You can run Win3 progs on that. Then if
someone wrote a browser for it with up to date transport protocols
and the latest html additions we'd be laughing. No ads or slurp, No
dot NET or Powershell based exploits and a fast system as well.

On Tue, 09 Jul 2019 03:57:12 -0500, wrote:

I want to downgrade to MS Windows 3.0. My computer came with Windows 10.
I hate it. I've been using Windows 3.0 since around 1989 or thereabouts.
How can I remove Windows 10?

Format C:

I have Windows 3.0 on floppy. But this computer dont have a floppy slot.

It don't?

How can I add the floppy thing I need to read these floppies?

Get a USB floppy thing from ebay.

After that, I wont have any trouble. I've installed Windows 3.0 many
times in the past.

I have an Acer One running Windows XP. I could upgrade it to 10.

On Thu, 11 Jul 2019 11:19:57 +1000, Lucifer
wrote:

On Tue, 09 Jul 2019 03:57:12 -0500, wrote:

I want to downgrade to MS Windows 3.0. My computer came with Windows 10.
I hate it. I've been using Windows 3.0 since around 1989 or thereabouts.
How can I remove Windows 10?

Format C:

I have Windows 3.0 on floppy. But this computer dont have a floppy slot.

It don't?

How can I add the floppy thing I need to read these floppies?

Get a USB floppy thing from ebay.

Does Windows 3.0 have a USB driver? That seems doubtful.


After that, I wont have any trouble. I've installed Windows 3.0 many
times in the past.

I have an Acer One running Windows XP. I could upgrade it to 10.

On 7/9/19 3:57 AM, wrote:
I want to downgrade to MS Windows 3.0. My computer came with Windows 10.
I hate it. I've been using Windows 3.0 since around 1989 or thereabouts.
How can I remove Windows 10?

I have Windows 3.0 on floppy. But this computer dont have a floppy slot.
How can I add the floppy thing I need to read these floppies?

After that, I wont have any trouble. I've installed Windows 3.0 many
times in the past.




Here you go


https://classicreload.com/platform/windows%203.x

In article , Char Jackson
wrote:

I have Windows 3.0 on floppy. But this computer dont have a floppy slot.

It don't?

How can I add the floppy thing I need to read these floppies?

Get a USB floppy thing from ebay.

Does Windows 3.0 have a USB driver? That seems doubtful.

no

Char Jackson wrote:
On Thu, 11 Jul 2019 11:19:57 +1000, Lucifer
wrote:

On Tue, 09 Jul 2019 03:57:12 -0500, wrote:

I want to downgrade to MS Windows 3.0. My computer came with Windows 10.
I hate it. I've been using Windows 3.0 since around 1989 or thereabouts.
How can I remove Windows 10?
Format C:

I have Windows 3.0 on floppy. But this computer dont have a floppy slot.
It don't?

How can I add the floppy thing I need to read these floppies?
Get a USB floppy thing from ebay.

Does Windows 3.0 have a USB driver? That seems doubtful.

The BIOS emulated storage as a "1440 KB hard drive".

If the OS is capable of using the BIOS 0x13 extension,
then it might work.

What little I recollect of DOS experiments here,
is storage never seemed to need a driver. The
exception was the ATAPI devices, and there were
several drivers for those.

The BIOS has a number of emulations. For example,
a USB ZIP drive or a parallel port ZIP drive,
might appear as a "100MB hard drive" or a
"250MB hard drive". If the storage device is
from an era the BIOS is unfamiliar with, then
perhaps no emulation is offered.

When the OSes changed to doing "hand-off" and the
OS would refuse to use a 0x13 emulation, that's the
era where storage drivers became an issue. Then you
had I/O space ATA drivers or PCI space ATA drivers.
And those used "familiar" addresses with respect
to the BAR (base address register). That sort of thing.

These experiments were never high on my todo list.
Getting a stinking "sys A:" floppy to do the right
thing, might take me several days of address map
putzing, and lots of hair loss. Some of my early
machines were a doddle. Later machines revealed
to me, how little I knew about address maps, and
why we need to "punch holes" in them. And booting
a floppy over and over and over again, gets boring
after a while.

Paul

On 7/10/19 10:28 AM, Apd wrote:

[snip]

Ok. WfW it is. Personally I'd go with Win2k, being the last lean and
mean NT based OS from MS. You can run Win3 progs on that. Then if
someone wrote a browser for it with up to date transport protocols
and the latest html additions we'd be laughing. No ads or slurp, No
dot NET or Powershell based exploits and a fast system as well.

I lie W2K too. It was the best version of Windows. Except for being
unable to run modern software.

BTW, the last version of Firefox that run on W2K was 12, old but a lot
more modern than IE6.

--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"Never build a dungeon you wouldn't be happy to spend the night in
yourself. The world would be a happier place if more people remembered
that." - Terry Pratchett

On 7/10/19 8:58 PM, Char Jackson wrote:

[snip]

Does Windows 3.0 have a USB driver? That seems doubtful.

The first version of Windows to support USB was 95. Maybe all you need
is for the firmware (BIOS/UEFI) to support USB. Anyway, what I'd
probably do is use a VM like I did with 95.

BTW, 95 was available on either floppy or CD. I used the floppy version
to upgrade from 3.1 (that failed because of not enough RAM, nothing to
do with floppies).

[snip]

--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"Never build a dungeon you wouldn't be happy to spend the night in
yourself. The world would be a happier place if more people remembered
that." - Terry Pratchett

"Mark Lloyd" wrote:
I like W2K too. It was the best version of Windows. Except for being
unable to run modern software.

Most of my old software is still fit for (my) purpose.

BTW, the last version of Firefox that run on W2K was 12, old but a lot
more modern than IE6.

I have it and it still works for many sites but not those using the
newer encryption on some https connections.

On 7/9/19 12:55 PM, Carlos E.R. wrote:

[snip]

Probably this one applies:

BIOS Int 13 - the 8.5 GB limit

At most 1024 cylinders (numbered 0-1023), 256 heads (numbered
0-255), 63 sectors/track (numbered 1-63) for a maximum total capacity of
8455716864 bytes (8.5 GB). This is a serious limitation today. It means
that DOS cannot use present day large disks.

AFAIK, that isn't DOS but the BIOS in an older machine. Before that it
was 504MB. I currently have a couple of old (Pentium) machines with that
8.4GB limit.

These limits had to do with the 8-bit registers used to pass parameters
to BIOS. The original was:

CH = cylinder number (bits 0-7)
CL = sector number in bits 0-5, cylinder number (bits 8-9) in bits 6-7
DH = head number (never higher than 15)

That is, 1024*63*16 = 1032192. Since sectors hold 512 bytes, this is
516096K (or 504M). This was the limit at the time I first had a hard
drive ($300 for a 30MB drive).

Later systems used the high 4 bits in DH to specify bits 10-13 of the
cylinder number, so you could have 4096 cylinders (over 8GB).

At one time DOS did have a 32MB limit (FAT had a 16-bit "number of
sectors" field). This limit was in effect when I first got a hard drive.

DOS 4 (or DR-DOS 3.4) added a "huge" version of FAT16 that used 32 bits
for this field. 32 bits allows 32^2-1 sectors (2TB), a limit not
reachable until FAT32 introduced with DOS 7.1 (supplied with Win 95B and
Win 98).

--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"A man cannot be happy who believes in hell, any more than he can
sweeten his coffee with a pickle." -- Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible
Worth Reading And Other Essays

Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 09/07/2019 19.42, Mark Lloyd wrote:
On 7/9/19 8:49 AM, Paul wrote:

[snip]

Take your $300 6TB hard drive, and using an HPA,
clip it down to 2GB.

2GB is the maximum file size under DOS (NT operating systems made that
4GB) on FAT file systems.

FAT allows partition sizes up to 2TB (use DOS 7.1 for FAT32). although
there might be some lower limit somewhere.

[snip]

https://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-4.html

Probably this one applies:

BIOS Int 13 - the 8.5 GB limit

At most 1024 cylinders (numbered 0-1023), 256 heads (numbered
0-255), 63 sectors/track (numbered 1-63) for a maximum total capacity of
8455716864 bytes (8.5 GB). This is a serious limitation today. It means
that DOS cannot use present day large disks.

The BIOS limit and the DOS limit are two different things. As long as
the BIOS can access *part* of the disk to boot the OS, the running OS
can use disk drivers which circumvent BIOS limitations [1] and (as
mentioned) a FAT32 filesystem, much, much larger than 8.5GB. (Depending
on the sector size, FAT32 could go as high as 2.2 to 17.6TB (yes, 'T')
per volume/partition.)

See for example what the FreeDOS [2] Wikipedia page says about this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeDOS

"File systems

FAT32 is fully supported and is the preferred format for the boot
drive.[41] Depending on the BIOS used, up to four Logical Block
Addressing (LBA) hard disks up to 128 GB, or 2 TB, in size are
supported.[42] There has been little testing with large disks, and some
BIOSes support LBA but produce errors on disks larger than 32 GB; a
driver such as OnTrack or EZ-Drive resolves this problem."

[1] Such as Disk Manager from OnTrack, EZ-Drive from Micro House and
even SpeedStor from Storage Dimensions.

[2] FreeDOS is not applicable to the OP's 'needs', because it
doesn't/can't (fully) support Windows 3.x, but MS-DOS offers similar
functionality, especially in the 7.0/7.1 versions.