Windows 3.0 — The First Commercially Successful Windows

Windows 3.0 is the version of Windows that Microsoft released on 22 May 1990, and the first to be a large commercial success. For almost five years after Windows 1.0, every version of Windows combined had sold fewer than two million copies; 3.0 sold four million in its first year alone. Windows 3.1, released almost two years later on 6 April 1992, was its refinement. The two are often searched for together, but they are different products, and this article keeps them apart.

What Changed in 3.0

Microsoft's own history of Windows says that in 1990 "Windows starts to look like the versions to come." The change was both on the screen and underneath it.

Microsoft credits a new wave of 386 PCs with helping drive the popularity of Windows 3.0, and says that with full support for the 386, programs ran noticeably faster.

Three Operating Modes

Windows 3.0 ran in one of three modes, depending on the processor and memory available.

Describing 386 enhanced mode, Microsoft's Raymond Chen writes that "there were actually three operating systems running at the same time." In charge was a 32-bit virtual machine manager running in protected mode; the first virtual machine ran a copy of standard-mode Windows, and each of the others ran a copy of MS-DOS for a DOS session. Windows was still called a 16-bit operating system, he explains, because the applications it ran were 16-bit.

The Launch in New York

In May 1990 Microsoft staged a large launch event in New York. Steven Sinofsky, who would later run the Windows division, recalls it as one of the earliest examples, and certainly the most expensive, of a major event for a single Microsoft product. The event was relayed by satellite to conference rooms on Microsoft's campus.

It sold quickly. According to a Motley Fool retrospective, 100,000 copies went in the first two weeks. IBM, however, declined to pre-install Windows 3.0 on its PCs because it was still pushing OS/2, then about three years old. Microsoft instead signed up around 30 PC makers to bundle it.

The Split from OS/2

The success of Windows 3.0 changed Microsoft's relationship with IBM. The two companies had signed a joint development agreement in August 1985 and had been building OS/2, the intended successor to DOS, together. Sinofsky writes that Microsoft and IBM had jointly urged developers to treat OS/2 as the long-term platform.

Once Windows 3.0, running on top of MS-DOS, began to sell, OS/2's advantages became mostly theoretical, in Sinofsky's account. Within 1990 the joint development came apart; Microsoft left OS/2 to IBM and moved its weight onto Windows. Microsoft's own history says the scale of the success caused it "to revise earlier plans."

How Windows 3.1 Differs

On 6 April 1992 Microsoft released Windows 3.1. It is easy to confuse with 3.0, but the differences are clear-cut.

The Computer History Museum gives 3.1's retail price as $149, and the InfoWorld figure compiled by TIME puts its sales at three million in roughly its first three months. A Japanese-language Windows 3.1 arrived in 1993; Microsoft Japan put first-year shipments at 1.46 million packages.

So many of the features remembered as "Windows 3.1", TrueType fonts and Minesweeper among them, were not in 3.0, while Program Manager and 386 enhanced mode were 3.0's own.

What Came Next

On the user base that 3.0 and 3.1 built came Windows 95 in 1995. It remade the screen with the Start menu and taskbar and gave Win32 applications preemptive multitasking, while still having to run the 16-bit applications written for Windows 3.1. The seams that left are covered in the Windows 95 article.