Welcome back to the Adventure!
This is Adam, and today we are looking at how to run 32-bit applications under Windows
3.11.We will get started right after this.
Windows 3.11 is a 16 bit operating environment that runs on top of dos, which is a 16 bit
operating system.
on it's own Windows 3.11 would not be able to run 32 bit applications.
However, Microsoft released Win32s, a 32-bit application runtime environment for Windows
3.11.
It allowed some 32-bit applications to run in the 16-bit operating system.
Win32s was a partial implementation of the Win32 Windows API from early versions of Windows
NT.
the S stands for subset, as Win32s lacked a number of Windows NT functions.
This means we are limited to programs specifically designed for the Win32s platform.
However, some 32 bit programs work correctly.
We will be exploring this in future episodes.
First we need to locate the Win32s install package from the Internet.
Let's open our Internet Tools and go to Internet Explorer.
We will also need the File Manager and I have a text document with the URL.
This will be included in the description of course.
No right-click is available at this time so we have to copy and paste using the Edit Menu.
So I don't want it to bug me when the page won't display correctly.
However, this one does!
what do you know?
That is fascinating on it's own.That is a website that exists in 2017 that you can still
get to in Internet Explorer 5.
So we will go back to the File Manager.We will need to go to the root of C: and create
a directory.
I want to call it Temp.
This is where some temporary files will go to.
Now we have our temp directory.
Now we will go back to the Internet .What a cluttered work space we have.
Okay, so if we scroll down this page we have a download link for Win32s.
So I do want to save this file to disk and save it to that temp directory.
Like so! and thats what downloading a file looked like back in that day but much slower
obviously because it would be dial-up internet.
It actually specifies here that it would take between fifteen and twenty five minutes at
the 14.4 kbps speed.
So we are going to go back to our file manager and here in our temp directory we now have
a file we can run.
so in our temp directory we now have a setup executable which we will run to install Win32s.
The path is fine c:\windows\system.
Very good!
installed successfully.
We are going to go ahead and install Freecell and that as a success.
We are back after Windows restarted.
We have our Freecell application here which is a 32-bit application normally we would
not be able to run it in Windows 3.11, but it does!
Unfortunately i'm not familiar with how to play the game.i never learned.
Okay, so one more interesting thing to look at if we go to our File Manager I pulled a
file from a Windows 95 installation.
That is the calculator program from Windows 95.
Now we do still have the calculator program under accessories.
The windows 3.11 version So we will do a quick side-by-side comparison of those two apps.
Yeah, Microsoft Windows 3.11.
Let's see what this one says.
aw, it also says 3.11 thats interesting.
But yeah, this was taken from a Windows 95 installation.
Alright, well that concludes our look at running 32-bit programs in windows 3.11.
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