The comments at the end are marvelous.

I get

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I presume they're referring, not to blog comments by visitors, but to Chen's own comments (or commentary, if you prefer) in the footnote at the end.

That was a wonderful read

Chen is a marvelous writer. Punchy sentences replete with wisdom.

> What was new in Windows 3.1 was a special handler for Ctrl+Alt+Del which tried to identify the program that was not responding and give you the opportunity to terminate it.

This worked 1% of the time. Because of the cooperative multitasking in win 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98 and Me the usual way out of this was reset or power off. Sometimes pressing the Ctrl+Alt+DEL will reboot the computer.

> This worked 1% of the time. Because of the cooperative multitasking in win 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98 and Me the usual way out of this was reset or power off.

Only Win 3.1 used cooperative multitasking (and only when running on a 286). All others used preemptive multitasking.

I stand corrected.

Windows 3.1 on a 386 used preemptive multitasking, yes, but only between Windows as a whole and other DOS programs you were running. Within Windows, win16 apps were cooperatively multitasked even on a 386.