Harry Potter wrote on 2025-09-20, 15:28:

In the early 1990's, I had a Win3.1 desktop with Packard Bell Navigator, and it introduced me to Windows and the PC. 😀

Same. I was a bit late to the PC world as a Commodore die-hard. After Commodore folded, I ended up buying a Packard Bell. 486SX 25 with 4MB of RAM, 2x CD-ROM, 240MB HDD, tv tuner/capture card, and voice/fax modem. At first, I was a little disappointed compared to my Amiga, but the abundance of software that exploded once CD-ROM was a thing had me hooked.

I didn't do much with Navigator beyond just playing around with it. But I did later install it on family computers for those less computer literate.

I had an official retail standalone copy of Microsoft B.O.B. for years but never used it. I finally sold it a couple of years ago when I had seen it going for crazy prices.

I used HP's Dashboard when I had Windows 3.1.

Re: Windows 3.1 Must Have Software -

Retroplayer wrote on 2025-08-24, 19:40:

I am really not certain where to put this, but I wanted to discuss the various desktop enhancement "experiments" that was a shor […]
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I am really not certain where to put this, but I wanted to discuss the various desktop enhancement "experiments" that was a short lived rage in the 90s.

Computer manufacturers appeared to be in a competition to create new desktop shells to simplify the experience for new users. I am only familiar with a few and hope to learn about some others from you guys.

1. Packard Bell/Reveal Navigator desktop. This was my first introduction to these and the theme was an office. There were bookshelves, and other analogous items throughout the room. When you opened files, I seem to recall that folders would show up on the desk. My memory could be skewed, but I seem to recall there being other rooms such as a media room for listening to music and watching videos.

2. Microsoft Bob. I knew of its existence, yet I never actually tried it myself.

(The above two are at WinWorldPC if anyone wants to try them out)

3. Of course; Active Desktop. I actually created an Active Desktop for my mother back then based loosely around the CATZ theme to help her learn her computer.

What else is out there?

For desktop enhancements/toys, I never really got into them back in the day, but a friend was really into the Deskmates (Thani specifically) and I had made great strides in reverse engineering the files in an effort to create new characters and animation. Somewhere I have my code to pack and unpack the files. Anyway, since this area was not all that interesting to me at the time, I missed out on a lot of probably cool enhancements. Stuff I would love to see today (I can probably be persuaded to re-launch the Deskmates efforts if I can't locate my old code...)

I messed about with 3 of them a fair bit:
-Litestep
-GeOshell
-BB4Win

The legendary Olivetti Envision was released the same days win 95 was released, and it came with Olitutor, an additional shell on top of windows, basically the same idea as Microsoft BoB released about the same time.

Not sure if it runs on Win 3.x (I never bothered to try) but is likely, given Win95 was just released many tools were actually Win3.x executables.

You can get it here, no need to install anything, just click the exe for the language you prefer.

https://archive.org/details/olivetti-envision-olitutor