Re:Windows93
by core-questions on Monday March 02, 2020 @03:18PM
(#22468454)
My brother could crash Windows 3.1 in Standard Mode just by mashing the keyboard in some particular way that I could never reproduce. Never took more than 10-15s of elbows on keys before we got a BSOD on an otherwise stable machine.
A few years ago I let my young son examine a keyboard connected to a Linux computer with a locked screen and in a few seconds he showed me my first kernel panic. I never figured out how he did it.
Completely unrelated, but you just brought back some wonderful memories of the elementary school computer lab when all the students would mash the shift key when they wanted help, so when the whole class got stuck, there would be a chorus of motherboard buzzers. Good times.
There were add-ons that added animated tricks to the window manager even back in the Win3.1 days. Nothing like you get with more modern GPU-based compositing techniques as everything had to be done in software and CPUs were not all that fast, but you could get animated icons, windows that slid or faded into view, and other such.
It was slow and jerky, even on what was high-end kit at the time, but that didn't stop people playing.
Running such software was a first class way to bring on a blue-screen, or in "standard mode" just hang everything, of course!