I was putting away some software in our secure storage, and found an unopened still-in-the-shrink-wrap Windows 3.1 on floppy disk. This even predates Windows for Workgroups. I have been doing this too long. Requires a whopping 6 MB of drive space, although 10MB is recommended.
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I question whether it made your PC easier to use…I remember trying to get Warcraft to run on the 386’s in the college lab…
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640K PLUS 256K extended?!
What are we, made of money?!
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If you can get Falcon 3.0 to run with all its expansions, you can get anything to run on a dos machine.
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Yes, that required a memory manager. I’m thinking QEMM, but that was a very long time ago 
I remember that my mom bought some Quarterdeck stock right before Windows 95 released. Bad timing.
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Oh yeah Win 3.1
Had it for quite a while, remember it well.
I would attempt to find a 3.5 floppy drive, move it to HD and attempt to run it on a DOS emulator, but it would be a shame to crack the factory shrink wrap.
Leave that box alone!
Here:
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Thanks Damson! That’s as they say, very cool. Box is back in storage.
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Ha…I remember downloading a million Doom levels in my college lab. Was that a thing? I think it was a thing. Doom levels. Or mods. Or something.
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What gets me is the HDDs… I remember being happy of my new 210 MEGABYTES Hard disk.
Guys, I’ve got images heavier than that on my phone…
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Haha yeah I use to hide gunsjips’ 6 megabytes deep inside wordperfects’ directory structure to get around dads discspace allotment.
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I had a PC with Win 3.0 on it. It made 3.1 look awesome.
But DOSSHELL for DOS 4.0 was da bomb!!
Yeah but one version of dosshell had a funny error! Sometimes when you deleted something it deleted the first file in the root directory (IIRC) as well.
I lost an autoexec.bat that way…
After that incident I created some dummy files with names starting with underscores to prevent that.
…fun times…
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Boxed version, good find! 
As posted already somewhere I found only these enveloped versions of DOS 6.22 and WIN 3.11
yes, I found also that one 
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When I was writing code, I wanted something to edit text at home. I got a Color Computer (Radio Shack) with 4K RAM. I then went out and got the floppy drive for it. It was very fast compared to the Vic 20 I had. That, too, had a floppy reader but, unfortunately, it read the floppy like it read the cassette tape drive… sequentially!
One of the companies I worked for had an NCR Criterion with six 200 MB disk packs. That was 1.2 GB of online storage for a multi-national, 10s of thousands of employees, million record database, and the rest. It was top of the line back then and read in all the code, data, and JCL by punch cards!
Another company I worked for had a Polymorphic 8813 with 8 inch floppies and no hard drive.
The very first PC I ever saw was from Radio Shack and you had to assemble the CPU inside the keyboard and wire everything to a TV out box. Communicating to a printer was done via an RS-232 interface while the printer was nothing more than an electric daisy-wheel typewriter. Some printers had either a ball head or a thimble head. All were noisy and communicated at 300 baud.
Anyone remember acoustic modems? (They were much later.)
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Sure!
I’ll never forget the sounds they were making. The first one I saw was actually an acoustic coupler that my father had. You had to literally put the phone handset into it. And it’s data rate was…dunno. A few baud.
My first own modem was a 14.4 or 28.8.
One can hardly imagine that it was possible to browse with those things but back then websites were much smaller than they were now.
How long would it have taken to download DCS World with a 300 baud modem? LOL…I remember being able to READ the messages as they downloaded.
That number might well be measured in years…
Correct me if I am wrong but I think 300 baud in tcp/ip should be around… 0.0000035 megabytes per second.
If I did the rough math correctly 30GB would take you 27 years to download at 300 baud.
Even a 28.8 modem would take almost seven years.
…and yeah I know by now DCSW is way bigger than 30GB…
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Yes, but as an avid user of the CompuServe forums, it all worked pretty well, and never felt slow.
I remember spending a couple of summer months of '92 in a hotel in Milano near stazione Centrale, and used some alligator clips to tap into the hotel’s analog phone system. That was so that I could get on the the flight sim forums at CompuServe to learn about a recent purchase, Microsoprose F-117A Stealth Fighter.
My modem wanted the standard RJ11 two wires, but the hotel’s phone system had three wires running to room telephones. Necessity being the mother of invention (AKA, not knowing enough Italian to explain my delima), I stripped away some insulation on the three wires and began probing for a dial tone. Once that tone was located, I happily downloaded and uploaded flight sim forum threads from Compuserve. So, here we had a Yank working in Italy, downloading/uploading forum threads from servers in the US via a phone number in Germany. Worked perfectly.
Sidebar
About a week before I checked out, the desk clerk informed me that my phone bill was something like 1.5 gazillion Lira. Oh well. what’s an arrogant and certainly ignorant foreigner to do, but keep on hitting the forums. Two days before I left, while connecting my alligator clips, there was a spark, and neither my modem nor room phone functioned afterward. I was surely going to get a visit from the Carabinieri. But ignorance is often luck’s blissful partner in crime. When I checked out, my phone bill was clear
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