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points by lproven 3 days ago | 0 comments

This is one of those moments you are surprised to learn when someone has discovered something you just knew.

Freecell was the demo app in Win32s for Windows 3. It is thus several years older than NT as a retail OS.

I have downloaded Win32s and extracted Freecell from it, just to play the game on Win10 LTSC and Win11. Probably more than once in fact.

The default Freecell in 21st century Windows is an ugly blinged-out mess, and in minimal installations, there are no games at all. This is the quick easy way around it.

[–] fredoralive 2 days ago

Win32s was concurrent with NT 3.1 (1993), and requires Windows 3.1 (1992) as 3.0 doesn’t know how to load PE EXEs. However it also appeared in Microsoft Entertainment Pack 2 in 1991, so a Win16 version that will run on 3.0 and predates NT does exist.

[–] lproven 2 days ago

The beta was the year before NT.

https://winworldpc.com/product/win32s/beta

Win32s beta: October 1992.

NT 3.1: July 1993.

That's long enough to gestate a human being. And back then, a year was a long time. :-)

[–] toast0 2 days ago

NT prereleases started in 1991

https://winworldpc.com/product/windows-nt-3x/nt-os-2

I was not really active in computing back then, so I don't know how widely distributed these releases were, but NT was clearly gestating longer than Win32s.

[–] lproven 2 days ago

Not hugely, and on the metred local call dialup in the UK it would have been phenomenally expensive to download it.

I was working in IT and I deployed NT 3.1 in production in 1993. I never saw the betas.

Win32s was a small floppy sized thing, and some installed it just for the game, I think.

[–] jasomill 3 days ago

Win32s was developed and released concurrently with Windows NT. It was a compatibility layer for Win32, which didn’t even exist prior to Windows NT.

[–] lproven 2 days ago

As I note above, Win32s was around the year before NT 3.1.