As the old year breathed its last, Microsoft Corp was sending out final beta releases of Windows 3.1, the version intended to put the final nail into the coffin of OS/2: apart from being substantially faster than the 3.0 release, looking better and managing memory more efficiently, 3.1 is said to be much more robust, so that if an application running in an MS-DOS window crashes, it brings down only that window and not the entire system – although it’s not certain all the spurious interaction problems associated with running two MS-DOS windows concurrently have been fixed – even though it really does need an 80386 chip to perform adequately and the 80386 is meant to have the Multics-style rings of confidence built into the hardware; icons can be customised more extensively and there is better linkage of data so that where there are dependencies between items of data in different concurrent applications, where one item is changed in one application, dependent data is automatically updated in all the others – those in the know wonder if that problem is licked in OS/2 2.0.
