> TIL Windows 3.1 was running on MIPS It wasn't and didn't. Note the article mentions a bundled copy of SoftWindows. This was a full-system x86-32 PC emulato

> TIL Windows 3.1 was running on MIPS It wasn't and didn't. Note the article mentions a bundled copy of SoftWindows. This was a full-system x86-32 PC emulator in software. https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Insignia_SoftWindows https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Insignia_SoftWindows It ran on lots of OSes as well as classic MacOS. It was the successor of an earlier product called SoftPC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftPC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftPC The later version was slightly revamped to run Windows better, for instance by having some kind of native-code-accelerated GPU emulation. It was in turn replaced by SoftWindows95 which could run 32-bit Windows 9x, although by then, PC performance was starting to catch up with workstation performance. A fast 80486 with local-bus graphics and disk controllers was quite responsive and a Pentium even more so and by the 2nd-generation 3.3V Pentium chips (75/90/100, and for the richer, 120/133MHz) with PCI graphics and disk were getting up to near low-end Unix workstation performance. A software-emulated version of Windows wasn't so desirable any more: you had to buy most of the apps to run on it, and while it was OK for simple productivity stuff, around that time Windows NT 4 came out and now a high-end PC with SCSI disks had a pretty good GUI on a stable OS. Some of those workstation apps started to get ported to x86 NT and you could buy a fast x86 box for a lot less than a UNIX workstation.