Mastodon: the only social network with more Windows 3.1 users than Windows 11 users
I know no one wants to give Windows any credit, but Windows 3.1 was the golden age of computing. The last prelapsarian (that is, pre-internet) era of the PC.

Is this a good opinion? No.

Is it my opinion? Yes damnit.

Bring back progman.exe
Bring back Cardfile
Bring back Paintbrush (not Paint!)
Bring back... uh... the PIF Editor?
I liked the PIF Editor

@tomw

Heresy. NeXTStep was the golden age of computing.

@brianstorms If we're looking at it as an era, it's kinda the same time? (Early 90s)

@tomw

Indeed, all the more reason why NeXTStep towers over any version of Winders. Same early 90s era.

One was brilliant, forward-looking, setting the standard all the way to today. The other was a hack built by a hack company only interested in empire, and led by pirates (“embrace, extend, erode”) incapable of innovation. imho 😉

@brianstorms Yeah but you needed a $10,000 computer! My Win 3.1 computer was free (rescued from the skip)

@tomw In 1988 sure but that changed quickly. By early 90s there were cheaper NeXT machines and NeXTStep ran on Intel PCs too.

(Heck, we had a 1988-era AST Premium 386 w/ 340MB drive and 7MB RAM that, altogether, cost ~$10,000 and then we had to buy SCO Xenix to run on it.)

@brianstorms @tomw spoken like someone who hasn’t used Macintosh System 7!

@chucker @tomw

Sure, I used System 7 on secondary machines at work but I was already spoiled by NeXTStep.

When I'd gotten a NeXTcube around 1990, it just blew Macs away in every way shape and form, and I stayed in NeXTStep as my main desktop OS for years, eventually migrating to a Canon Object.station (pizza box running NeXTStep for Intel) until MacOS X came out circa 2001. MacOS X was essentially NeXTStep with some Mac "flair" and I was ok making the switch, and I'm still using that today.

@tomw i’d like to be one of them, but my stupid emulator won’t talk to me