Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!agate!shelby!portia.stanford.edu!jessica.stanford.edu!aaron
From: aaron@jessica.stanford.edu (Aaron Wallace)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: Windows 3.0
Message-ID: <1990Jun11.174527.11269@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 11 Jun 90 17:45:27 GMT
References: <27@alchemy.UUCP>
Sender: Aaron Wallace
Organization: Academic Information Resources
Lines: 51

In article <27@alchemy.UUCP> thegerm@alchemy.UUCP (Joel Lingenfelter) writes:
>
>    I played with it the other day at work, and noticed that the system takes 
>up a mere 8 mb on your hard drive.

*IF* you keep everything around--including PC Paintbrush, Terminal, Write,
all the help files (they're quite large), "desk accessories", and such.  If
you have no use for these things, getting Windows 3.0 down to under 2 Meg is
certainly possible.

>  In addition, fully installed the thing 
>leaves 192k free in your primary 640k.  Not so hot eh?

No, not so hot at all.  Which is funny since I get about 350K free on a 640K
machine.  The point about Windows 3 is that it isn't restricted to the primary
640K.  On my 4 meg machine I get about 4300K free--and there's a 512K disk
cache installed, too.  After loading Word for Windows, Excel, and Terminal
this drops to 3700K.  How much memory will be free after System 7 is loaded
onto a 1 meg machine, btw?  Win 3 works best with 2 Meg, which is about what
Apple is recommending for System 7 if I remember correctly...

>  Another gripe is that 
>it is not compatible with a significant amount of hardware out there for the 
>ibm world.  

Depends on how you define "significant."  Win 3 works with all common video
standards (and will work with the more esoteric ones as long as drivers are
provided, which they usually are), almost all common printers (and definitely
many more than System 7 will support out of the box), all mice I know of,
and all other hardware that is reasonably compatible.  There are problems with
Win 3 and some 3rd party hard disk partitioning schemes, most of which can be
fixed by reformatting with a supported scheme (i.e. DOS's own).  

>My guess is that system 7 will be well worth the wait, and will 
>make windows look as archaic as ms-dos.  I haven't really fooled around 
>extensively with windows yet, but it doesn't seem all that great, me being used
>to the mac interface.  It is, however, a considerable improvement over the old 
>windows 286...

Those of us in Windows-land are awaiting System 7, too, since we don't get
TrueType 'till after System 7...  Silly marketing agreements...

No, Windows 3 does not give you a Mac interface--that'd be pointless since
Apple 1) already has one and 2) sues people who copy it.  Which is interesting:
most people in the Mac world feel that Windows and the Mac are eons apart;
is Apple the only entity that sees enough similarity to sue Microsoft over it?

>Joel Lingenfelter, Biola University
>"I'm just a student so the university speaks for me..."

Aaron Wallace