Today in Tedium : Recently, while stumbling around a Goodwill, I got my hands on a cheap tablet designed to run Windows 10. I only paid a few dollars for the tablet, which can be bought here new for more than $100. The drivers were busted, so I had to try to rebuild them, and I found the device would slow to a crawl when tasked with anything, even loading the Start menu. This led me to install CloudReady , a variant of Chrome OS that actually runs OK on it , though it doesn’t support the internal WiFi, Bluetooth, brightness, sound and a few other things. (An external WiFi dongle helped!) Basically, it’s kind of a challenge for myself, like the $10 Mac Mini experiment was . But this weird, barely useful device (the MacBook Pro ain’t got nothing on this dongle game ) got me thinking about the weird contexts of Windows, which led me to thinking about Windows 3.1, the first truly dominant version of the operating system. In that spirit, today’s Tedium is all about Windows 3.1 edge cases. Who needs the Program Manager, anyway? — Ernie @ Tedium

— Bill Gates, describing the appeal of Windows for Pen Computing, an operating system for early tablet based computers, in a 1991 marketing video for Windows . The program, ultimately released in 1992 as an offshoot of Windows 3.1, was one of many operating systems that supported the pen, including Go Corp.’s PenPoint. ( Apple also took a stab , though its tablet never saw the light of day and it instead focused on its personal digital assistant, the Newton.) At the time, industry skepticism was high , for reasons that turned out to be warranted. Despite somewhat successful endeavors in the business market such as the GRiDPad , It took nearly 20 years for a viable consumer tablet to appear on the market—and it wasn’t made by Microsoft.

“You use a pen, right here on the surface, and you can handwrite, just like you can on paper, and the computer recognizes it. So you don’t have to use a keyboard. So a machine like this could be taken into a meeting, or out on a sales call, and used in a very natural way. We’re making sure that it’s easy for people to work with Windows for Pen Computing.”

A shot of the Memorex VIS by Evan Amos, the famed Creative Commons console photographer who released a book of his photographs last year. Amos noted on Twitter in 2017 that it was one of the hardest consoles to find for his book. (Evan Amos/Twitter)

That time Radio Shack sold a Windows-based knockoff of the Philips CD-i, a system everyone hated

The Philips CD-i was not a good system. An interactive multimedia experience built by one of the companies responsible for the Compact Disc, it was initially sold as an “appliance”—a video game console stripped of all the things that make video game consoles good.

(It went for something a little classier, hence why you could purchase a title called The Flowers of Robert Mapplethorpe, which was effectively an interactive slideshow.)

Its legacy was set in stone by what might be the most memorable Pyrrhic victory of modern times: When Nintendo decided to screw over Sony and build a CD-ROM for the Super NES with Philips instead, it gave the Dutch company access to the licenses for Nintendo’s two most popular franchises, Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda—but no access to any of Nintendo’s development resources. Which meant that the worst games in both franchises appeared on the CD-i, of course. (That said, a developer on those games claims they had been well received at the time, with criticism only coming in retrospect.)

Long story short, the Philips CD-i, for all its early innovation, was not a system concept to borrow from. Not even Otis Nixon could sell it.

But for some bizarre reason, the folks at Tandy, the parent company of Radio Shack, apparently didn’t get the memo and thought that it was worth mimicking the CD-i model for all it was worth.

The result of this effort was something called the Tandy Video Information System, or VIS. The resulting device, sold under the Memorex brand name at Radio Shack locations around the country (and promoted in this extremely chipper video), was a strange bet—as it came at a time when both the CD-i and a similar device, the Commodore CDTV (effectively a glorified Amiga, but surprisingly not the same as the CD32), were already struggling on the market.

A 1992 Philadelphia Inquirer article on the standalone multimedia market explained the VIS’ appeal compared to the CD-i and CDTV as this:

Tandy’s Video Information System (VIS), due in October, may have a better shot, say analysts and software developers. It will have the retailing power of 7,000 Radio Shack stores to distribute their product, an aggressive advertising campaign in times for the Christmas buying season, and a product that uses standard computer language, which makes it easier and more rewarding for software developers to create CD titles.

“Standard computer language,” you say? What’s that? Well, the secret of the VIS was this: It was effectively a low-end PC (a 286, to be exact) running a stripped-down variant of Windows 3.1 totally unique to its hardware, something called “Modular Windows.”

In later years, Microsoft would come up with a number of different purpose-built versions of Windows (initially called Windows CE and later Windows Embedded Compact) for devices as diverse as video game consoles, smartphones, personal music players, and even cars. “Modular Windows” was one of the first.

There seems to be evidence that Microsoft planned for Modular Windows to be used beyond Tandy’s devices. A 1992 InfoWorld article highlights the existence of a software development kit specifically for Modular Windows, which one would imagine Microsoft would not create for a single device that was already not selling well. On top of that, a 1992 brief in The Guardian states that “later versions of Modular Windows will be adapted for pocket computers and electronic organizers or PDAs (personal digital assistants).”

Modular Windows was many things, among them a major point of contention between Microsoft and Tandy. In a 2003 Usenet post (ah, don’t get to link to a Usenet post very often), late Tandy engineer Frank Durda IV explained that late in the process of building the VIS, Microsoft attempted to rebrand the entire product with Modular Windows branding, to the point where Microsoft kept trying to hide the logo in the code despite space in the VIS’ ROM file being at a luxury:

The Modular Windows logo in the code that appeared late in the game was probably the key thing that caused the split, with Microsoft sneaking the logo into the ROM at the release candidate phase of the project, getting yelled at to remove it, which they claimed they did, but the next object image, the new MS code was 20 odd bytes larger than the previous one with the logo in it, and 20K larger than the one before that which definitely didn’t have the logo. A disassembly of the latest Windows start-up code showed that Microsoft had hidden the logo but it was still there, and coded Modular Windows so that it displayed the logo if you appended an exclamation point to the executable name you wanted to run, something Microsoft was probably going to direct the third-party software writers to do the moment Tandy’s back was turned.

(It didn’t help either that Tandy wanted to offer some DOS programs due to the fact that many of them were available, but Microsoft resisted that. Sorry, no Wolfenstein 3D on your $700 digital appliance.)

Unfortunately for everyone who might have found a fight between Microsoft and Radio Shack to be incredibly entertaining to watch, the VIS just didn’t sell—collecting dust even after Radio Shack cut the price on the system in half.

“To be honest, this system could have retailed for $39.95 and would still have been a bad value for the consumer—this console is truly that bad,” one collector wrote of this apparently wretched device.

At one point, it probably did sell for $39.95. In a separate Usenet post in 1995, Durda noted that the machine had failed so horribly—it was liquidated via cut-rate sellers such as TigerDirect—that it caused Tandy, an important name in computing up to that point, to put out the white flag.

“Tandy lost somewhere between $50 and $75 million on the development, inventory and failed marketing of VIS,” Durda wrote. “It was the product that caused them to get out of the computer business.”

(Durda himself admitted that only a handful of the titles released were worth playing.)

The result is that the system is incredibly hard to find these days, with reportedly just 11,000 total units sold. (The software is actually somewhat common, however, and is for sale all over eBay.) It’s a remnant of a forgotten era full of bad multimedia devices that existed in a market that didn’t actually care about what they were selling.

Despite that, apparently against all odds, the system has enthusiasts! A few years back, a Blogger user named Sly DC explained how he modded a game that existed only on a demo disc to be self-bootable, then modded the game (a shooter title named Spacenuts) to have graphics that matched his favorite arcade game, Vanguard.