[JayGuerette]

"I'm not sure why it is that Windows 3.1 is the go-to when people name a Windows OS of this era."

It's because business was the primary market for PCs and Windows 3.11 added a network stack and changed everything. Networking was no longer an arcane science that required 3rd party software. Office networks became almost trivial to set up. The impact of this on the world is impossible to overstate. Everybody who used Windows in this era used Win 3.1(1).

[dleslie]

Windows 3.1 also hit a sweet spot for OEMs; with RAM becoming larger and cheaper, and 486 PCs delivering speed. That was when PC games that targeted Windows started to arrive in reasonable numbers.

[0xcde4c3db]

Microsoft also made a big push at this time for preinstalled Windows to be considered the baseline configuration instead of treating it as an optional upsell. It probably also didn't hurt that 3.1 was when Windows was seen as having properly matured (cf. Vista vs. 7). Basically, the 3.1 era was when Windows went from being a novelty/luxury to being everywhere practically overnight.

[tadfisher]

I don't think any of the common suspects targeted Win 3.1 (or its beta version of Win32). Most of them shipped with a DPMI kernel (Dos4GW being common), which Win3.1 happened to also provide, but I can't recall if, say, DOOM even ran under Win3.1 at the time as 4GW did a lot more than DPMI.

[exe34]

> no longer an arcane science

No, it became what some of us called "plug and pray". You plug it in, and it's supposed to work. You install the driver, reboot, uninstall the driver, reboot, clear some temporary files, re-install the driver, try a slightly different driver on the same disk, uninstall the driver, reboot, re-install the driver, and it suddenly works! Then you reboot it and it stops working again.

[ch_sm]

that‘s how I remember it.

[caspper69]

I remember it differently, as I rarely encountered office networks then, and when I did, they were still 3rd party (Netware mostly).

The reason I always remember 3.1 is that 3.0 was a "big" upgrade, but it was a dog, so they released a vastly-improved 3.1 pretty quickly, so many people got that as the default, and the upgrade was pretty widespread.

This was over maybe a 4-year period in the mid-90s. My memory may be hazy, and I was a university student, so my exposure may have been limited, but myself and my friends never really reference 3.11 because it wasn't used/needed, and indeed most of us used Trumpet Winsock as a TCP/IP stack (3rd party) until the release of Windows 95.