> Tech companies might spend their time pushing the latest and greatest, however, the job posting is a reminder that not everyone is on the express train to modernization.

I have to wonder: in what way would Windows 11 be an improvement over Windows 3.11 for this use case? Other than "Windows 11 is still supported, and 3.11 is not"?

replacement hardware -- Windows 3.1 doesn't run well on modern hardware

replacement hardware -- hardware that plugs into Windows 3.1 machines doesn't tend to have a place to plug into modern hw (serial ports, most notably. And before you say, "USB!", remember USB wasn't a thing for Windows 3.1),

application support -- it is safe to assume the authors of any application running here are not easily reached.

skilled work force -- finding someone who knows how to deal with Windows 3.1 or the hardware that it runs on is getting difficult

Interest in becoming a skilled workforce -- no one looks at "Windows 3.1 administrator" as a good stepping stone in their career in 2024

security -- Sure, Windows 3.1 didn't offer a great "attack surface" like modern OSs do, but remember: Windows 3.x security was pretty much non-existent -- remember the login you could get through by tapping the ESCAPE key? There aren't really many "security updates" for Windows 3, because there wasn't any security.

Your ideal employee should have all the modern professionalism we would expect (remember: it wasn't common in the 1990s, we were still making stuff up as we went), be smart enough to understand this is NOT a stepping stone in their career, but be stupid enough to be good with that.

If you ignore all that, sure, the windows 3.1 application will probably work just fine for them.

> replacement hardware -- Windows 3.1 doesn't run well on modern hardware

Since DOSBox is so portable, and Windows 3.1 is so light, this setup could run on much more hardware than current Windows.

And it runs just fine as a VM.

It looks like all of that falls within the "Windows 11 is still supported, and 3.11 is not" case.

At the length of this thread and nobody has suggested a TWAIN Driver

You, sir, are Evil(r). Almost Evil(r) enough to be a member of the Google Board of Directors.

Damn, I wish that I had thought of that...

Depends rather what else is on this network that the thing needs to talk to I suppose. Win3.11 networking was, as the article points out, kinda... weird. It's possible that there's some other component has just been updated that now, when faced with a Win3.11 client just goes "The **** is this?" and refuses to talk to it.

Networked 3.1... A scary prospect. In charge of movement of hundreds of tonnes of machines? Possibly even more so.

But, still, I would consider it a much smaller attack surface and a hell of a lot more comprehensible than many more recent efforts.

The 32 bit TCP/IP worked OK. NetBeui wasn't so good.

and what EXACTLY was wrong with IPXODI & NETX?

don't answer that

Microsoft was what was wrong.

The thing about Windows 3.11 is that it's so simple, well known and light by today's standards that its response times are very predictable and thus it pretty much fits the bill for real time applications.

DOS, yes, it basically was a real time OS. Or perhaps more accurately, a program loader with a file system, and your application owned the hw, and thus could be as real-time as needed.

Windows 3.x was simple by today's standards, but pushed hard -- and unsuccessfully -- against its design limits (based on the HW it was designed for -- but because of the design, simply putting it on a fast machine with large amounts of memory didn't really fix anything). My memories of it was that it had anything but predictable behavior. There are reasons people were very excited about Windows 95 when it came out (and of course, reasons they were very disappointed).

I used to teach admins how to get the most out of 640kb for DOS and how to integrate Windows 3.1x into their network. Drivers were interesting, especially when you plonked them into extended memory.

Then there was the exra memory taken up by the enhanced redirector. I eventually wrote a basic redirector which could do all the enhanced redir stuff (proper logons etc.) by reverse engineering the ethernet packets. And it worked!!!

When Windows 95 came along I (eventually) had wrote a script for a custtomer to update Win 3.11 to Windows 95 over the network (without losing user data) - which was a great improvement over the customers tech support option which was to walk around with about 80 floppy disks and rebuild them one by one.

MS used to produce a book which detailed so much of the Registry. It made supporting Windows so much nicer.

Then the registry exploded in size, MS stopped telling everyone what could be done via the registry and...*sigh*. Good times.

@AlanSh

I used to teach admins how to get the most out of 640kb for DOS and how to integrate Windows 3.1x into their network. Drivers were interesting, especially when you plonked them into extended memory.

It seems you can apply to the job. Dunno about your German skills,,,

Deutsche Bundesbahn are good at training.

Ah. The long ago days of extended memory, expanded memory, extended-expanded memory... Stuff that made the memory models in early versions of Mac OS look good. And memory management on Macs stunk until OS X...

Thanks, but I think that I'll pass.

Around the time of Windows 3 a number of simple but "important" applications were written with early versions of QuickBASIC AND VB. QB was handy for opening up a (serial) network port and reading/writing something from/to expensive machinery: e.g. download results, write them into a file, check that they were OK, and then clear the results from the machine...

when the were replacing the old slam door trains on Connex, they were a test bed for a lot of the more modern trains you see now. I used to sit at the front due to where the exit was for my station, and they used old Toshiba Satellte laptops for their serial port in them days (about 15/16 yrs ago) which was a surprise then as the laptops I had used for a number of years were serial port lacking. I did joke about trying to sell them my old stock of Satellite pro's. (480/490 CDT IIRC)

Often the techie was "rebooting" the train and doing some code work in those days