It always makes me nostalgic – as a fairly young man my first proper computer (ie, the first one my dad let me use) was a 3.1 box and, all things considered, I don’t actually do much more on my 3.6gHz tri-core with it’s 4gig of ram than I did on that little box with it’s megahertz of processing power and kilobytes (maybe megabytes) of memory. Okay, so web pages are more dynamic, but essentially microsoft word and the internet are the same technology – and the games are more realistic, but I could waste just as many hours back then as I can now.

The most important thing to me, however – the loss of Paintbrush. Paint just doesn’t have the same feel – it isn’t right. I actually hate the windows 7 paint, and preferred Paintbrush to winME/98/XP/vista paint.

On another note, however – does this technically mean that we’re free to download 3.1? Or does it take more than that to count as abandonware?

Microsoft and Apple focus on the big OS’s for Netbooks, PC’s, laptops, etc.

Windows 3.x is not the environment the programs run in, they run in MS-DOS and Windows 3.x displays them. Therefore, there is not really a compatibility factor.