[scruffyherder]

I'd like to think it'd have had some subtantial tracktion back in the day, being able to overlay your work windows 3.1 machine with BSD. It has some DDE exchange I haven't tried to use yet, but it'll talk to Excel, so imagine having snmpwalk scripts to poll networks and do real-time excel graphs!? It'd have been awesome.

[lproven]

I deployed Windows 3.1 in production.

It was horribly unstable and crashed if you gave it a nasty look. Running BSD binaries on top would give the unpleasant combination of an unstable GUI with weak multitasking, on a primitive OS, plus hard-to-use unfriendly binaries.

Not a winning combination.

To me, it sounds like MachTen on Classic MacOS.

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

BSD in a window on an OS with no good multitasking, virtual memory, or networking.

So, it lets you do stuff the host OS couldn't otherwise do, but it doesn't mean it does it well -- because it doesn't.

[scruffyherder]

you clearly havent tried it on real hardware, BOW is pretty awesome.

Yes I too was doing IT in the mid 90's and did far more than my share of widnows 3.1 with win32s.

If you'd looked into bow it hooks all the timers from dos, and can happily run more than one thing at a time, and preempt them.

It's a winning combination for sure, even on my lowly 386 DX 16, I can run word, excel & bow at the same time. It's great!

[lproven]

(?)

No, I haven't. I have zero nostalgia for Windows 3.x and no desire to ever run it again.

I did write about ArcaOS 5.1 recently:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/04/arcaos_51/

That runs WinOS2 and that was interesting, but it's inside a grown-up OS. That's different.

This isn't from the mid-1990s. It's from the early '90s and that was a time of huge rapid change. Mid to late '90s stuff is fun. Early '90s stuff is painful.

Windows 3.0 and 3.1 can multitask DOS stuff quite well in their own right; it's Win16 binaries that they can only cooperatively multitask.

[scruffyherder]

Load it on arca

https://archive.org/details/bsd-on-windows

If be more interested if that runs ..