Is there a modern browser that runs on Windows 3.1?

http://superuser.com/questions/423061/is-there-a-modern-browser-that-runs-on-windows-3-1

by ivoflipse • 14 years ago

123 85 14 years ago

cstross• 14 years ago

Hmm. If the server-side app requires CSS/HTML4 and the client has to run on Win3.1, how about writing a proxy? The proxy would present a simplified HTML3.2 interface, and handle interpreting Javascript events and managing cookies to support a session talking to the server?

(It's a horrible kludge, but if it saves $150,000 ...)

ryanpetrich• 14 years ago

Sounds exactly like Opera Mini.

thaumaturgy5• 14 years ago

Proxies like you're talking about are prone to lots of edge-cases that make them less fun to build than you might imagine. Plus, they'd be looking at getting a developer to do it, and any developer that would be qualified to do the job is probably going to charge $100/hour or more. And, the proxy will need a server of some kind to live on.

At that rate, they might as well get a second system.

jonknee• 14 years ago

Or spend a couple hundred bucks and buy a new computer to run the new software...

raverbashing• 14 years ago

Or understand the URLs the page accesses, and make something similar for older browsers (if it's probably just a post with a badge number it's simple, if there is a login step it may be more difficult)

Having said that I have to say I have absolutely no experience reverse engineering protocols used by clock systems and that I never did a Linux version of a Windows only system.

cynwoody• 14 years ago

Any idea what a $150,000 bandsaw can do to a man?

My brother's a lawyer. He just dropped about 20 times that amount on a penthouse in downtown Chicago.

He doesn't yet have a boat, although Lake Michigan beckons. Maybe when he buys his boat, he can christen it the Horrible Kludge!

omgtehlion• 14 years ago

Oh crap. Why on earth all this should be on the same computer?

I would not trust running timeclock software on a bandsaw controller even if it would be latest core-i7/xeon/whatever and QNX or VxWorks.

moylan2• 14 years ago

i wonder if the dust created by the bandsaw wouldn't make it difficult to replace it with a more modern system. we used to use standard office pcs to run a pos system for video shops around ireland. as the systems moved from been shipped with win 3.1 to win xp the processors got faster and the dust in the shops used to clog up the fans. machines pre pentium iii with passive cooling worked fine but anything with a cpu fan could be easily clogged with average dust levels in a pos location.

we also had a few pcs in engineering locations and even the power supply fans on 386s had problems with the dust in those locations. you have to wonder what the dust was doing to staffs lungs. after one particular location killed 1 pc a week for a month we ended up putting the pc in a pair of tights as this filtered out the dust. looked weird but far cheaper than a industrial pc.

but opera 3.62 seems to have support for css and works on win 3.1

haven't touched a win 3.1 system since around 2004 or so.

thaumaturgy5• 14 years ago

One of our clients is an electric motor shop. They're a pretty great little shop, they do work for elevator companies and PG&E and the like.

Anyway, they have a dust problem -- a carbon / metallic dust compound that permeates and settles on everything in the shop. It's pretty ugly.

There are pretty much two strategies for that kind of an environment, computer-wise: construct a cheap acrylic enclosure with a HEPA filter and maybe a fan or two; or, buy a cheap computer and expect to replace it every 1 to 2 years.

andreasvc2• 14 years ago

Mini-ITX mainboards could be called industrial, they come in fanless varieties and are pretty cheap.

thaumaturgy5• 14 years ago

If our clients are anything to go by, it's because:

1. They don't want to buy, maintain, and hassle with a second computer;

2. They don't know any better, because they aren't computer geeks;

3. (Related to #1) They already bought the software and time clock system, they can't get their money back from the vendor, nobody bothered to tell them that it won't work in their environment, and they don't have the money to spend on another system, so they're looking for the cheapest possible way to do it.

pippy• 14 years ago

If they hired someone to figure it out, they could splash out for a cheap tablet.

I agree with the first superuser post. Isolate the win 3.1 machine as much as possible, and use another machine for networking. It's too much of a risk, loosing a hand because you clicked a link and the machine froze is simply ridiculous.

Even putting the machine in a VM would be too much work. You'd have to port the custom drivers.

gouranga2• 14 years ago

VNC client and VNC server on another PC.

jcurbo• 14 years ago

next question, VNC clients for Windows 3.1?

gouranga2• 14 years ago

Install IE4, Java and use the Java VNC Client.

bashzor• 14 years ago

It's just sad to be required to run Windows 3.1 in 2012.

davepm• 14 years ago

Im still running 3.1 on 4 machines at work (slightly related to OP, we sharpen the bandsaws!). The thing is that the company that makes the machines is well known for their extortionate prices, so for us to update is not feasible. We just installed newer machines for everything else so the crappy old 3.1 boxes run only what they must to keep the machines running. I would love to try setting up a newer pc to run these machines, but there is so much propriety hardware and software in there that I keep putting it off for another day!

artursapek2• 14 years ago

It's weird to think anything exists anymore running such old software. It feels like it just wouldn't even work now. I know that's absurd, but that's how it feels.

My friend sent me a video today of some guys hacking on Mac OS 9 at a hackathon he went to and it just felt odd to even look at it. It's been a solid decade since I've seen OS 9 alive and breathing, it feels like a friend who died long ago or something. And as far as Windows goes I don't think I ever saw anything before '98.

It's a peculiar feeling.

sown• 14 years ago

I know that IBM sells a punch card emulator.

pjscott• 14 years ago

Ah, so they're emulating the punch cards, now. Progress!

driverdan• 14 years ago

Why? If it works why do they need to upgrade? The problem is that they're trying to use the machine to do something else, which they shouldn't.

aswanson2• 14 years ago

I love the top ranked comment on that site: This is a bandsaw...you're using dos with a gui...this is a bandsaw...

mgkimsal• 14 years ago

Yeah...

What's odd about this is that, 20 years ago, that would have been 'state of the art'. Assuming the bandsaw hasn't changed, and the computer's still working, there's nothing inherently wrong or bad about having Win 3.1 control the bandsaw.

What's bad is trying to use that machine for other purposes - I'd suppose the manufacturer wouldn't support the software if they found out anything else was being run on the machine.

Look at the number of man hours wasted on everyone commenting on this question/topic! :) I'd imagine they could have got a $300 laptop to log in to the timesystem, put it next to the bandsaw computer, and have been done with it. But for some reason(?) they'd prefer to spend time dicking around trying to reuse 20 year old systems to save a few bucks.

Did I miss the reason why they're trying to run both on one system?

aswanson2• 14 years ago

The main reason I garnered was that the boss didnt understand the danger/inanity in doing so.

zandorg• 14 years ago

Perhaps they could reverse-engineer the Windows 3.1 software and get it to run on XP?

Can't tell from the details why the software won't do Windows XP.

thaumaturgy5• 14 years ago

Why would you think that someone whose day job is running a shop with a $150,000 bandsaw would have either the experience, tools, or inclination to reverse-engineer complex industrial control software?

It's likely they don't have installation media or any other reasonable way of transferring the software to a Windows XP system, even if it would possibly run in that environment.

exim• 14 years ago

Oh, how I'd love to have DOS/Win3.1 or OS/2 programmer job these days... :)

groovy2shoes• 14 years ago

Those were simpler times, weren't they? Back then you could practically feel the electrons coursing through the metal, and you were their master! You felt so powerful when you could orchestrate every action of those machines. These modern systems with their virtual memory and their context switching... they're taking away our rights!

jmspring• 14 years ago

There are an amazing number of vertical apps that still use win 3.1/dos/even win95.

Heck, a number of ATMs run on recent OS/2 incarnations.

There might be hope...

tatsuke95• 14 years ago

Sounds like the bandsaw industry, from sharpening to operating, could use some disruption.

I'm only half kidding. There are tons of niche commercial/industrial processes that can use 21st century solutions. They're just hard to see unless you're in them, which is why non-technical people sometimes have brilliant ideas.

DanBC2• 14 years ago

There are a lot of vertical markets that could do with innovation.

Match up industrial chassis, with low power PCs, really good electrical noise filtering, really good air filtering, a locked down environment and good firewalls etc, and then offer to quote for interfacing it to existing machines. (Which is mostly just finding the right interface boards and connectors and software.)

Lednakashim2• 14 years ago

I worked on programming cutting robots and I can that they were extremely computationally intensive. They needed to constantly perform SVD to find stable solutions. There is a lot of innovation in this field (applied robotics).

rmATinnovafy2• 14 years ago

Yikes!

Reminds me of my last programming job.

I was working on a commercial printing company. It did a lot of products for the banking industry. The print machines were pretty old, and made by Xerox. So old, in fact, that most of the wiring/sensors were one-off replacements done by the technician in charge.

It was (still is) a mess. A computer running Windows 98 (this on 2011) talked to a Linux box. The Linux box then sent the job to the board on the machine. It was all done in Java, except the low level stuff that ran C.

The machines broke constantly, and they required some Oracle certified dev to come down and "fix it" (which cost thousands of dollars).

One day, I asked my boss "Why don't they just buy new machines? It costs more to keep these running than to buy a new ones."

His answer opened up my eyes to the corporate/bureocratric culture of mediocrity:

"This works."

And to to top it all off, the production manager wanted me to write him a "little" program for the Windows 98 machine. The program would be used to keep track of prodcution for the whole department.

Unbelievable.

Duff• 14 years ago

There's probably some corruption in there as well. Management doesn't give a crap about the work function, and only one vendor is qualified to respond to the maintenance RFP. So some old-timer is probably making a mint "maintaining" the system.

rmATinnovafy2• 14 years ago

You are totally right.

I forgot to mention that they are locked in to Oracle and Microsoft. My job was to develop a C# based system, but they made me use VS 2005 Express (!@#$%), because they would not buy the latest version/license.

That job taught me a lot about how not to treat your programmers.

Too• 14 years ago

Simply incompetency, "When you don't know what you're doing you fear change."

ericabiz• 14 years ago

1) Buy a more modern computer with Windows 7, etc.

2) Set up a virtual machine with Windows 3.1 on it to run the bandsaw controller.

3) Now you can get any modern browser, still have the bandsaw software running, and not have to deal with multiple computers.

Lagged2Death• 14 years ago

I find it a little hard to believe that anyone would try to build a band-saw controller on a Windows box in the way suggested by the post and assumed by so many of the comments.

It seems likely that the Windows PC is just a job manager and GUI for a simpler embedded controller that actually controls the band-saw. A standard PC doesn't have, as standard equipment, any I/O capabilities suitable for machine control, after all. When I did software for industrial controls, most of the controls that had PC interfaces were built that way; an embedded controller in the machine, running a real-time OS, actually actuated all the relays and optos and was responsible for all the safety interlocks. The PC would talk to that controller through a serial port and put a pretty face on the front of things. If the PC crashed, the operator wouldn't be able to run the machine, but the machine wouldn't go berserk.

I understand why someone would say that running a browser on the Win 3.1 machine is a bad idea, but it may not really be that bad.

mbell2• 14 years ago

This likely the case but I'll also add that we have no idea what "bandsaw" this is. I think everyone is picturing a massively complex machine with automated feed mechanisms, computer controlled adjustments, lasers measuring blade sharpness, etc. That may be the case or more likely (in my opinion), its a much simpler device. Like on/off and a maybe a couple sensors.

As for the real time nature of this system, find it doubtful its that critical. Your not worried about micro-seconds when your talking about big 3-phase motors that take minutes to speed up or slow down.

benmccann• 14 years ago

It's the saw you'd most commonly use to cut irregular or curved shapes. http://metalworkingmachine.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ba...

treetrouble2• 14 years ago

Total hypothesizing and speculation here but...

I work with audio and music software (in which timing accuracy is a major component). Timing accuracy 20 years ago was generally far, far better than a modern PC. The Atari ST is still the gold standard -- with regard to timing it makes Ableton Live 8 running on OSX look/sound like garbage. Without multitasking, whatever program you were using could prioritize timing over the GUI and other components in a way that a modern name brand OS won't allow

Again, pure speculation here but this may be the case at least to some degree for Win 3.1 because there aren't as many network services and other bells and whistles running in the background. It may even be the case that Win 3.1 doesn't have real multitasking. Maybe someone can chime in on that

baddox• 14 years ago

That's interesting. I've also done a lot of music production (just amateur stuff, as a hobby) with software like Reason, Ableton Live, and Cubase, and I've never noticed any shortcomings regarding timing accuracy. Latency is always an issue, so a good audio interface if imperative, but that's the only performance issues I've encountered. What exactly are the shortcomings of modern systems regarding timing accuracy?

treetrouble2• 14 years ago

It's not something that's easily perceptible unto itself unless you get into very radical inconsistencies. As an example using arbitrary numbers, a quarter note would be 500 ticks one time and 493 ticks the next and so on...

It can be measured by recording the audio on a (timing accurate!) dedicated system and analyzing the waveform

Subtle as it may be, timing accuracy has an essential impact on how we perceive music as a whole. This is one contributor among a few as to why vintage drum machines and sequencers have become so sought after as software-baed music production has become more prevalent. The Akai MPC series (at least the 2000XL and previous) models have been found to have the most consistent timing of any machine with the Atari ST being the strongest computer sequencer.

Sorry, I don't have time to cite this stuff (breaking my own rule) but it should be easy to google

As an aside, poor timing accuracy can be a reason why in pulse-based music that some human musicians "just suck" even if they're otherwise proficient. Or some musicians are "just have it" even though they're playing something unremarkable

dvhh• 14 years ago

Indeed windows 3.1 provide cooperative multi-tasking instead of our modern preemptive multitasking.

Cooperative : it is up to the current thread/process to give up its CPU usage, meaning that if a thread is stalled the whole system is considered crashed (except for interrupt, which allowed for windows to recover via magic keys ).

Preemptive : The system govern the use of the CPU and arbitrary take CPU usage from the thread/process.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_multitasking#Cooper...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preemption_%28computing%29

muppetman• 14 years ago

Why does no one want to actually _answer his question_? It's one of my major gripes with tech forums these days: Someone asks a question about "How can I do X?" and instead of providing an answer, everyone piles up to say "HAHAH X is so stupid, you should be doing Y".

I actually preface some of my questions these days with "I realise X might sound silly, but I'd like to do it so please answer the question instead of telling my why I shouldn't be doing it"

Stop it already. Or at least ANSWER THE QUESTION and then politely suggest why you think it might be a bad idea.

ricardobeat3• 14 years ago

What kind of knife should I use to behead a 5.8' average-build man?

Jimmie• 14 years ago

Equating killing someone to using an old OS is a terrible straw-man argument.

yew2• 14 years ago

Do you want full separation of the head at the neck? You might be able to manage that with a knife, but a specialized bone saw is more likely to get the job done.

I believe most modern medical procedures use powered saws, specifically because of the difficulty of cutting bone.

If you insist on using a knife, a high-quality steak knife and some time will do.

(That's a ludicrously absurd comparison, by the way. But you already know that.)

kevinpet• 14 years ago

I'm sure the bandsaw mentioned in the SO post would do it quite easily.

__alexs• 14 years ago

I don't know but there's some good advice on what to do with the body in this thread. http://ask.metafilter.com/7921/If-you-killed-somebody-how-wo...

icefox• 14 years ago

For what it is worth we got Arora (QtWebKit) working on windows 98. It isn't Win 3.11, but the closest thing to an answer.

http://arorabrowser.blogspot.com/2009/01/modern-webkit-brows...

talmand• 14 years ago

You know, I have the same complaint. It seems there are too many who find it more fun to berate and humiliate as opposed to offering help when someone has a problem.

bigiain• 14 years ago

http://perl.plover.com/Questions.html

Anybody who's been around a while has seen this happen before - probably many many times.

You don't think answering the question "How can I run complicated and probably out-of-support software on the same out-of-support-and-vulnerable machine that controls a _bandsaw_?" is not the right thing to do?

CamperBob2• 14 years ago

Why does no one want to actually _answer his question_?

Because it was a stupid question. Running a networked time clock application on the same Windows 3.1 machine that runs a band saw is a stupid idea.

You don't do anyone any favors when you try to sugarcoat the obvious.

thatsiebguy• 14 years ago

This is kind of pointless. NComputing already does this over ethernet.

Lednakashim2• 14 years ago

http://www.fdisk.com/doslynx/lynxport.htm

Is there a modern browser that runs on Windows 3.1?

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