Microsoft stopped publishing licences for Windows 3.X as of November 1st, finally discontinuing its first successful mass-market graphical PC operating system, which had struggled along for over 18 years.
Microsoft released the initial version of Windows 3.0 in May 1990 and set the pattern early for its business model of repeatedly extracting more revenue from customers for essentially the same software by churning out several point-release versions with bug-fixes and small improvements in subsequent years, culminating with Windows for Workgroups 3.11, which added basic LAN networking, and Windows 3.2 with Simplified Chinese language support.
The company discontinued further maintenance support of Windows 3.X at the end of 2001, but it was still used as an embedded operating system up until now. Business applications it supported included point-of-sale cash registers, banking ATMs and ticket printing systems.
Embedded computers running Windows 3.X still drive the inflight entertainment systems on some aging Boeing 747s flown by Virgin and Qantas airways, according to the BBC. Those systems will likely be transitioned to newer hardware running embedded Linux, we imagine.
Windows 3.X was basically just a layer of windowing software that Microsoft overlayed on Bill Gates' ripoff of the command-line clone of CP/M, 86-DOS, that he renamed as MS-DOS.
It ran almost reliably, as long as one didn't ask it to chew gum and walk at the same time, mostly because it used clunky 'co-operative multitasking' round-robin program scheduling.
Hardware interfaces setup and memory management were handled statically at boot time and required third-party add-on software in order to accomodate persistent auxiliary tasks.
Microsoft eventually improved on those early 'features' of Windows 3.X, but Windows still ran on top of DOS all the way up through Windows 98 and Windows ME, and some might claim that Microsoft's more recent operating systems are still running on DOS underneath.
But it ran on the primitive hardware that was available at the time it came out, with early versions needing only an Intel 8086/8088 processor running at 10MHz or better, 640KB or more of RAM, only seven megabytes of disk space and a CGA, EGA or VGA graphics card.
Yet it's the end of an era, we guess, though we don't recall it with any fondness. Shudder.