Windows for Workgroups 3.11

Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was a minor-ish revision of Windows 3.1 released December 31, 1993. Windows 95 was still 20 months away and IBM was threatening to make a dent in the 32-bit OS market with OS/2, so Microsoft backported some of the Windows 95 code to Windows 3.1 to make it more 32-bit as a stopgap measure.

But the user experience overall was much more like Windows 3.1 than Windows 95. The enhancements were mostly under the hood.

Not just workgroups in Windows 3.11

Windows for Workgroups 3.11, was codenamed Snowball, and it introduced support for 32-bit file access, drive sharing, group calendaring, and built-in fax capabilities.

But the network improvements were notable, at least for those who were going online at the time. The new 32-bit networking that replaced DOS-based networking or a 16-bit Winsock utility was faster, more reliable, and easier to set up than earlier DOS-based networking methods.

Windows for Workgroups was capable of networking with Windows NT and later versions of Windows, and if you loaded TCP/IP, it could run the Windows 3.1 version of Internet Explorer. I loaded Windows 3.11 and Internet Explorer 5.5 on my 486 for giggles, and while it ran, it wasn’t a pleasant experience and wasn’t practical. Few modern web sites can render in a browser that old. Today, it’s a curiosity. But in 1994, it was significant.

Sharing files with newer versions of Windows is probably a more practical use of the technology today, but you will have to enable SMBv1 on most newer Windows versions. This introduces a vulnerability, so be careful about enabling it on all your machines.

Faster disk access

The name Windows for Workgroups suggested it was for networking. But people ran Windows 3.11 even if they didn’t need networking. It included three new 32-bit drivers, VFAT, VCACHE, and IFSMgr. These made disk access much faster because it included higher performance, protected mode disk caching that replaced DOS-based Smartdrv. Windows 3.11 bypassed MS-DOS and directly accessed the disk, either via the BIOS or, ideally, the 32-bit disk access previously included in Windows 3.1. This feature was a backport from the then-unreleased Windows 95. Microsoft’s advertisements for Windows for Workgroups 3.11 even called it “the 32-bit file system from our Chicago project.”

Windows 3.11’s 32-bit file access should not be confused with 32-bit disk access, included in both Windows 3.1 and 3.11. 32-bit file access provided a 32-bit code path for Windows to directly access the disk bus by intercepting the MS-DOS Int 21H services while remaining in 32-bit 386 protected mode. Earlier versions relied on MS-DOS to handle it in 16-bit real mode. 32-bit file access did not need 32-bit disk access to work. But the two worked better together than either on their own, as long as the underlying hardware supported it.

Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was hardly revolutionary. But it did its job, buying Microsoft a bit more time until Windows 95 was ready.

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.