I believe there is a Registry of sorts in Windows 3.1, but is largely empty. It was only in the Windows 95 era that it ballooned into what we have today. Coming

I believe there is a Registry of sorts in Windows 3.1, but is largely empty. It was only in the Windows 95 era that it ballooned into what we have today. Coming (at the time) from an Amiga perspective I was bemused to realize that if 3.1's progman.ini file was damaged, that the program groups in Program Manager (think of each group as a node in Start -> Programs, basically the user-oriented files and executables from a software install) could just disappear! While there's a slight performance hit, one would think it would be more robust to scan the disk for .grp files every boot and build this data dynamically in memory. I have always assumed this was done because 3.1's memory management was complete crap, necessitating that Microsoft "write everything down". Ditto for 95, and being a much more ambitious OS, there was that much more to write down. Then the third party vendors jumped on board. Fast forward to 2023 and this legacy still persists when it doesn't have to. I could be blowing smoke, but this has always been my thinking. An old joke: Registry was derived from the Latin word registratum, which means "put all your eggs in one basket".