Help needed with OS/2

[VK3DRB]

OS/2 was basically written my Microsoft. IBM kept that secret from their own employees. Employees were banned from using Windows at work, so the biggest users of OS/2 in the world by far were the 300,000 IBM employees. Almost no-one else bothered with it.

I worked with OS/2 up until 1999. The reasons OS/2 failed:

OS/2 was very poorly marketed.
OS/2 was too expensive.
OS/2 was sold by IBM which had no vision, poor leadership and lacked innovation.
OS/2 could not run 32-bit Windows applications in its Windows shell. It could only run 16-bit Windows applications. (Microsoft much have ROFL .)
OS/2 suffered badly from the dreaded BSOD.
OS/2 had an illogical and non-intuitive Presentation Manager (eg: System->Settings->System->etc). It was bad, but admittedly not near as bad as Windows 10 and Microsoft Office is today.

Gates won. IBM lost.

I actually suggested in 1988 in their employee suggestion plan to add in a thumb wheel volume control in their PC speaker. It was knocked back with the reply "There is no foreseeable marketing value in having a volume control for the audio in a PC."  No vision. No future. Hence the main reason why OS/2 was dead in the water.

[Ampera]

I don't disagree. I think I am gonna swap back in my PC-DOS drive. OS/2 is a neat experiment for me, but one with no decent outcome. I like to experiment with older operating systems with my machines. I am in the early days of my retro PC collecting. I have years to go an a lot more things to add, but it has become a really enjoyable hobby.

[NivagSwerdna]

I don't disagree. I think I am gonna swap back in my PC-DOS drive.

[Howardlong]

OS/2 was basically written my Microsoft. IBM kept that secret from their own employees. Employees were banned from using Windows at work, so the biggest users of OS/2 in the world by far were the 300,000 IBM employees. Almost no-one else bothered with it.

I worked with OS/2 up until 1999. The reasons OS/2 failed:

OS/2 was very poorly marketed.
OS/2 was too expensive.
OS/2 was sold by IBM which had no vision, poor leadership and lacked innovation.
OS/2 could not run 32-bit Windows applications in its Windows shell. It could only run 16-bit Windows applications. (Microsoft much have ROFL .)
OS/2 suffered badly from the dreaded BSOD.
OS/2 had an illogical and non-intuitive Presentation Manager (eg: System->Settings->System->etc). It was bad, but admittedly not near as bad as Windows 10 and Microsoft Office is today.

Remember that on the desktop, you had two choices in the early/mid 90s in the corporate office, and that was Windows for Workgroups or OS/2. WFW was incredibly flakey compared to OS/2, trying to squeeze the OS and all those network drivers into the bottom of RAM. A dodgy token ring connection from a WFW client would often bring down an entire LAN segment, and tracing the source of such a problem took a long time. I don't remember seeing Windows 95 or Windows 98 in any large corp offices, but that might just've been my limited exposure at that time. We moved to NT4 on the desktop directly from OS/2.

You're right about the PM GUI, it did end up being a mess, which is a shame because the original PM wasn't bad, it was pretty much a protected mode version of the Windows 3 GUI.

I actually suggested in 1988 in their employee suggestion plan to add in a thumb wheel volume control in their PC speaker. It was knocked back with the reply "There is no foreseeable marketing value in having a volume control for the audio in a PC."  No vision. No future. Hence the main reason why OS/2 was dead in the water.

I wish they'd put proper hardware volume controls especially on laptops, being dependent on soft controls and their lack of responsiveness when you accidentally click an NSFW link is rather irritating!

[vodka]

I think OS/2 was the operating system of choice for those who "hated" Microsoft... justifiable or not.

OS/2 was primarily popular with people that had IBM big-iron.  It was a logical progression from a 3270 to something smarter on the desktop.  OS/2 and Windows had a lot in common.  Presentation Manager (the windowing part of OS/2) was developed in the UK 



IBM Hursley, Such a tough place to work.... it had a pub and tennis courts in the grounds. 

How many people could buy a mainframe for home on 80s?   Answer 0. Only the great corporation could pay it. Furthermore , the old mainframes ocupped many spaces. To my father his corporation tried to give away a "SPERRY-UNIVAC" and he refused the gift because we hadn't space on the flat. Finally, the mainframe terminated on a Catalonia museum.

Now ,you  were comparing the 3270 Terminal with a Personal Computer, it is two things  very different . On mainly , the terminal is a simple monitor, it hasn't CPU neither hardisk.

[Ampera]

I wish they'd put proper hardware volume controls especially on laptops, being dependent on soft controls and their lack of responsiveness when you accidentally click an NSFW link is rather irritating!

I prefer the throw the laptop at the wall method.

You want to talk about shit controls? I have a Logitech G930. It's a daily struggle to not kill the stupid thing, and when I get new Sennheisers at some point, I am going to literally, and actually send this thing to hell. Maybe I'll make a forum post here for suggestions on how. It has a volume wheel on it that's supposed to control volume. Sounds cool, right?

Did I mention that it works when it wants to? Yes for your around 150USD it was when it came out, you get a headset made of Bakelite, shitty connection, shitty charging, shitty battery life, and broken buttons.

[NivagSwerdna]

Now ,you  were comparing the 3270 Terminal with a Personal Computer, it is two things  very different . On mainly , the terminal is a simple monitor, it hasn't CPU neither hardisk.

It was an evolution... first there was no mainframe access.... then there was dumb terminal access... (with time sharing sneaking in)... and then the terminals became a bit smarter so could draw fields etc.. e.g 3270 and then the 'terminals' started doing some of the processing... and then they did lots of the processing.... operating systems, networking hardware and communications protocols were all evolving rapidly in this period... hardwired serial, token ring, ethernet, netbios,...

[Howardlong]

i would hope they use Linux or BSD,
but unfortunatly enough BSOD's have been foto'd to prove otherwise!

what asshole wants a cashpoint "phoning home" with "telemetry"? 

You can be sure that a retail bank won't deploy anything that is going to need to phone home, a typical infrastructure will be full of different security domains in many different segregated networks with several tiers of security. The Enterprise versions of Windows work differently in this respect and have different licensing models, although I wouldn't be surprised if some of them still run Windows XP.

What the security is around the mini ATMs that you see in hotel lobbies and convenience stores consists of nowadays I don't know, but they'd be nuts to connect it to anything without multiple tiers of security. They may still connect over ISDN or analogue POTS, and nowadays quIte possibly GSM for all I know.

Oh dear! http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-40655653/cash-machine-b hacked-in-five-minutes

[borjam]

Don't confuse NT with Windows 3.x & 9x. It's a totally different beast. The non-NT based versions of Windows were a nasty mess of DOS code and protected mode code. NT was 32-bit from the ground up and much more stable.

I know it was different. That said, NT wasn't even available when we begun the development. And what I said about requiring a reboot for a stupid configuration change was true for NT and some subsequent versions. And anyway Windows whatever is a piece of crap. I will never understand how one of the very best operating system architects in history was capable of perpetrating such a turd. But well, shit happens.

[Zero999]

Don't confuse NT with Windows 3.x & 9x. It's a totally different beast. The non-NT based versions of Windows were a nasty mess of DOS code and protected mode code. NT was 32-bit from the ground up and much more stable.

I know it was different. That said, NT wasn't even available when we begun the development. And what I said about requiring a reboot for a stupid configuration change was true for NT and some subsequent versions. And anyway Windows whatever is a piece of crap. I will never understand how one of the very best operating system architects in history was capable of perpetrating such a turd. But well, shit happens.

I found NT to be fairly stable, compared to WinDOS, but never used the earlier versions, only 4.5 onwards. I suppose it's not Cutler's fault but his bosses. You can have good programmers but if they're set unrealistic targets and a shitty specification, then you'll get crap. Blame M$.

NT was also useless to anybody who cared anything about DOS. To Microsoft's credit, it wasn't meant for those people either.

I suppose that's why it took so long for them to use NT for their main consumer OS.

The better DOS than DOS and better Windows than Windows is a neat concept, but it seems to be a bit under cooked on my end. A game I tried to run (WinCiv) doesn't have any audio, seemed to have palette issues (Although I can say I forgot to change the screen mode to 800x600x16, so my fault there). My sound card is working (It likes to bleat annoying noises at me whenever I do anything) yet it doesn't want to play the simple audio out of the Windows game.

I don't see why that should have been a problem. If the game was designed for 16 colours, then it should run in higher colour depth modes with no issues. If it doesn't, then it's shitty programming, on the side of the game, OS or video card driver developers. The only legitimate issue should be speed: the video card & CPU may be too slow for the higher colour depth.

On a 486, Windows, or even OS/2 is not that great of an idea. Of course it can run it, but I legitimately had trouble running Sim Tower, which is by no means a demanding game.

Have you looked at the minimum requirements for that game? They were quite high for a PC that age: 8-bit colours would have meant a resolution of at least 640x480 (Windows didn't support 320x200 8-bit until 95) which was quite high for a PC of 1994 vintage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTower#Development

[Halcyon]

Windows didn't support 320x200 8-bit until 95

Not true at all. Windows 3.1 supported at least XGA (1024x768). I have a 486 machine right next to me now which is running in that resolution @ 256 colours. It was dependant of video hardware and drivers but even out of the box it supported "high" resolutions:



Edit: Misread and mis-quoted. My bad!

[Zero999]

Windows didn't support 320x200 8-bit until 95

Not true at all. Windows 3.1 supported at least XGA (1024x768). I have a 486 machine right next to me now which is running in that resolution @ 256 colours. It was dependant of video hardware and drivers but even out of the box it supported "high" resolutions:

I know. That's not what I said. It was the lower resolutions which were the problem. There simply wasn't the processing power to do anything with 640x480 8-bit colour, except for static images, even moving objects around in Paint Brush was a pain on a 486. This is one of the reasons why DOS remained popular for games, until Windows 95 became widespread and CPU power increased enough: DOS supported 320x200 8-bit mode.

[Halcyon]

I know. That's not what I said. It was the lower resolutions which were the problem. There simply wasn't the processing power to do anything with 640x480 8-bit colour, except for static images, even moving objects around in Paint Brush was a pain on a 486. This is one of the reasons why DOS remained popular for games, until Windows 95 became widespread and CPU power increased enough: DOS supported 320x200 8-bit mode.

My mistake. I misread. Apologies.

[VK3DRB]

NT was stable - except those using it professionally would need to do a clean install every year else it would slow down the PC. I do not recall having to reinstall OS/2 each year.

Incidentally, I was the first person in Australia to install OS/2. I got a copy from Diskette Replication at the IBM Plant the very day they started replicating the diskettes. Then I installed it on my AT with a whopping 2MB or RAM. No Presentation Manager in those days, I could run a couple of "DOS" sessions at once, allowing me to print whilst I was doing other work. I could also run more than one application at the same time. It blew me away. It worked a lot better than DOS with Sidekick. The BSOD only appeared in the versions that had Presentation Manager.

One of the best text editors ever was the EPM editor which came out with OS/2 Warp. Very powerful, with its brilliant design, use of macros and ease of use. EPM left VI, VIM and all that Unix rubbish for dead. EPM was way ahead of its time. The precursor to EPM was the E3 editor, another powerful editor, which came with some versions of IBM DOS, but for some reason didn't come with MD DOS.

I seem to recall OS/2 peaked out at about 17 diskettes for installation. Painful install, especially if you got a diskette error part way through.

[Ampera]

Alright there must be some confusion with what I said.

Speed is by no means an issue. This is one of the fastest bog standard 486 you can get. At 120mhz, it can almost run Quake (In fact if you do some finagling with the settings, it's playable)

For the hell of it, I installed WinCiv onto my Windows 3.1 installation (Which is pointless because I have the DOS one installed too).

Before I go onto how it went, I want to say my graphics card is pretty fast. It's a VLB card and can handle rapid changes of frames.

The resolution is set to 1152x864 which is the highest resolution that outputs at 60hz. For no good reason 1024x768 won't work at 60hz, even though it's a supported mode all the way up to 75hz. The card can do 1280x1024, but I do not have a CRT to test that with since the refresh rate is so weird.

Anyways, 1152x864x8, I test WinCiv, and because of the 8bpp mode, it's run out of colours and doesn't look right. I'm not really surprised by this though, and it was a similar issue I had in OS/2. The PCM sound works however.

I do want to say for applications that DO support 256 colours on screen, Windows 3.1 works FINE. The 486 has no problem pushing basic OS functions.

My Trio32 only supports 800x600 with 64k colours on screen, not the 16.7m of an 8bpp colour mode. However, Civilization now works fine on this mode with 0 slowdown. The colours are nice, and the audio works.

So, 800x600x(idk is it 17?) works fine. 0 slowdown for 2D applications. SimTower works fine on these modes, it only slows down on higher resolutions because of the massive sprite and animation count.

I don't know what 486 you were using, maybe an SX-25, but this is a more powerful 486.

[timb]

Alright there must be some confusion with what I said.

Yes, however that was very non-standard for that timeframe. (If they were even available.)

In '94 a 486-DX2 66MHz with 4-8MB of RAM and maybe 1MB of video RAM on your non-3D accelerated ISA video card would have been your standard upper tier system. You would have run Windows 3.1 at 640x480@256 Colors (*maybe* 800x600 if you had a VESA card and better monitor).

Most Windows games weren't designed to run at higher resolutions at the time. Some flat out won't run and those that can may do so poorly.

[Ampera]

Alright there must be some confusion with what I said.

Yes, however that was very non-standard for that timeframe. (If they were even available.)

In '94 a 486-DX2 66MHz with 4-8MB of RAM and maybe 1MB of video RAM on your non-3D accelerated ISA video card would have been your standard upper tier system. You would have run Windows 3.1 at 640x480@256 Colors (*maybe* 800x600 if you had a VESA card and better monitor).

Most Windows games weren't designed to run at higher resolutions at the time. Some flat out won't run and those that can may do so poorly.

Yeah my system is far superior. I have an Am486-DX4-100-SV8B (8 kilobytes of write back L1 cache) running at 120mhz (40mhz FSB overclock) on a VESA Local Bus Socket 3 board. I have 32MB of FPM RAM and a 32-bit Local Bus VESA compatible card by Diamond/S3 (Probably some of the fastest cards of the time were by them)

It's by no means an out of the ordinary 486 as far as retro collecting goes, but it is still a very powerful machine for a 486. It's almost as powerful as a Socket 4 pentium.

[tooki]

On a 486, Windows, or even OS/2 is not that great of an idea. Of course it can run it, but I legitimately had trouble running Sim Tower, which is by no means a demanding game.

Have you looked at the minimum requirements for that game? They were quite high for a PC that age: 8-bit colours would have meant a resolution of at least 640x480 (Windows didn't support 320x200 8-bit until 95) which was quite high for a PC of 1994 vintage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTower#Development

Alright there must be some confusion with what I said.

Yes, however that was very non-standard for that timeframe. (If they were even available.)

In '94 a 486-DX2 66MHz with 4-8MB of RAM and maybe 1MB of video RAM on your non-3D accelerated ISA video card would have been your standard upper tier system. You would have run Windows 3.1 at 640x480@256 Colors (*maybe* 800x600 if you had a VESA card and better monitor).

I think you guys need to revise your timelines a tiny bit, your memory is a bit hazy, I reckon -- by 1994, 640x480@8 bit was not unusual at the low end, and the very high end was actually SXGA (1280x1024).  Remember, Windows 3.0 (released in 1990) was most commonly used with 640x480@4-bit, but 8-bit was common during its lifespan. By 1995, when Windows 95 came out, 800x600@8-bit was the recommended configuration, and 1024x768 was not unusual on beefier systems.

Looking at the ads in the Sept. 1994 issue of BYTE, I see that even ordinary laptops had 640x480 and 800x600 displays at 8-bit. The high end for Windows PCs (not even counting high-end workstations like Intergraph and Sun) was 24-bit color at SXGA, 3D acceleration was just beginning to hit the scene. It looks like the mainstream was unaccelerated 1MB SVGA, which allowed for 800x600@16-bit, with the CPU being the real bottleneck in that mode.

(For reference on the Mac side, the 1987 Mac II was the first to support external displays, and it supported 640x480 at 4-bit by default, 8-bit with VRAM upgrade. By 1991, high end Macs, namely the Quadra line, supported 1152x870@4-bit, and 8-bit with a VRAM upgrade. By late 1993, even some consumer Macs like the Performa 475 supported 1152x870@4-bit out of the box and 8-bit with added VRAM. Of course, such a display cost many times more than the consumer computer itself!)

In '94 a 486-DX2 66MHz with 4-8MB of RAM and maybe 1MB of video RAM on your non-3D accelerated ISA video card would have been your standard upper tier system. You would have run Windows 3.1 at 640x480@256 Colors (*maybe* 800x600 if you had a VESA card and better monitor).

Most Windows games weren't designed to run at higher resolutions at the time. Some flat out won't run and those that can may do so poorly.

Yep, with the caveat that most graphics-intensive PC games of the time (think 1993's Doom) ran on straight DOS for performance reasons, usually in EGA and other low-res color modes. It wasn't until Windows 95 that most games became "native" Windows applications.

[Zero999]

Alright there must be some confusion with what I said.

What confused me was this sentence:

A game I tried to run (WinCiv) doesn't have any audio, seemed to have palette issues (Although I can say I forgot to change the screen mode to 800x600x16, so my fault there).

I thought you meant 800x600 16 colours. Now I realised you probably meant 800x600 16-bit, i.e. 2¹⁶ colours.

Anyways, 1152x864x8, I test WinCiv, and because of the 8bpp mode, it's run out of colours and doesn't look right. I'm not really surprised by this though, and it was a similar issue I had in OS/2. The PCM sound works however.

I'm interested why a game of that era would require such a high colour depth, when 8-bit colour was normally as high as it went, unless you paid silly money for a graphics card.

I can't comment on OS/2 but in 8-bit graphics modes, Windows used an adjustable colour palette with 20 of those colours were fixed (Windows 9x changed four of the normally fixed colours according to the colour scheme, earlier versions didn't), so the colours of GUI didn't change. The current active window, always set the palette, which meant that other windows behind it, often went odd colours. There was also often a delay between changing palettes so it would take a second or so for the correct colours to be displayed. Windows versions prior to 95 were the worst. Windows 95, onwards used the fixed colours for inactive windows, so it didn't look as bad.

Speed is by no means an issue. This is one of the fastest bog standard 486 you can get. At 120mhz, it can almost run Quake (In fact if you do some finagling with the settings, it's playable)

For the hell of it, I installed WinCiv onto my Windows 3.1 installation (Which is pointless because I have the DOS one installed too).

Before I go onto how it went, I want to say my graphics card is pretty fast. It's a VLB card and can handle rapid changes of frames.

The resolution is set to 1152x864 which is the highest resolution that outputs at 60hz. For no good reason 1024x768 won't work at 60hz, even though it's a supported mode all the way up to 75hz. The card can do 1280x1024, but I do not have a CRT to test that with since the refresh rate is so weird.

I do want to say for applications that DO support 256 colours on screen, Windows 3.1 works FINE. The 486 has no problem pushing basic OS functions.

My Trio32 only supports 800x600 with 64k colours on screen, not the 16.7m of an 8bpp colour mode. However, Civilization now works fine on this mode with 0 slowdown. The colours are nice, and the audio works.

So, 800x600x(idk is it 17?) works fine. 0 slowdown for 2D applications. SimTower works fine on these modes, it only slows down on higher resolutions because of the massive sprite and animation count.

I don't know what 486 you were using, maybe an SX-25, but this is a more powerful 486.

This reminds me of when in the late 90s, I upgraded my crapping 386 SX to a 486 66MHz, with a video card with 1MB of RAM. I already has a Pentium 200 MMX machine by then, but I did it for the hell of it. The video card supported 24-bpp but only up to 640x480 and was slow at that colour depth. 16-bit 800x600 was the perfect compromise between speed and quality. 8-bit colour was very crappy and could sometimes be slower, with all the palette changes.

[Ampera]

My only idea as to why the palette issues suck so much are because it's an early Windows game. The thing itself doesn't seem to be programmed with any real care in the world.

I'm running the DOS version now, which uses mode 13H.

[timb]

I think you guys need to revise your timelines a tiny bit, your memory is a bit hazy, I reckon -- by 1994, 640x480@8 bit was not unusual at the low end, and the very high end was actually SXGA (1280x1024).  Remember, Windows 3.0 (released in 1990) was most commonly used with 640x480@4-bit, but 8-bit was common during its lifespan. By 1995, when Windows 95 came out, 800x600@8-bit was the recommended configuration, and 1024x768 was not unusual on beefier systems.

Looking at the ads in the Sept. 1994 issue of BYTE, I see that even ordinary laptops had 640x480 and 800x600 displays at 8-bit. The high end for Windows PCs (not even counting high-end workstations like Intergraph and Sun) was 24-bit color at SXGA, 3D acceleration was just beginning to hit the scene. It looks like the mainstream was unaccelerated 1MB SVGA, which allowed for 800x600@16-bit, with the CPU being the real bottleneck in that mode.

(For reference on the Mac side, the 1987 Mac II was the first to support external displays, and it supported 640x480 at 4-bit by default, 8-bit with VRAM upgrade. By 1991, high end Macs, namely the Quadra line, supported 1152x870@4-bit, and 8-bit with a VRAM upgrade. By late 1993, even some consumer Macs like the Performa 475 supported 1152x870@4-bit out of the box and 8-bit with added VRAM. Of course, such a display cost many times more than the consumer computer itself!)

What was cutting edge and what was common are two entirely different things. You have to remember, in the early 90's PCs were still not quite affordable for everyone. If you were a regular user on a budget you basically had two options: Buy a used name brand PC from someone upgrading (usually through classified ads) *or* buy a new mid-range no-name system from a local shop or computer show.

Anyway, in early 1994 the most common configuration by far (that the majority of people would have been capable running) would have been 640x480. I saw some statistics on this recently (common screen resolution from 1982 to 2016) but can't find it at the moment. One interesting thing about it was how VGA was by far the most popular resolution from shortly after its introduction up until just after Windows 95 came out; since, as you said, it recommended at least SVGA resolution. (It was that plus RAM prices falling that finally pushed people to upgrade I think.)

I mean, with the way Windows 3.1 ran programs there was little need for large screen resolutions for most home users.

[VK3DRB]

I don't disagree. I think I am gonna swap back in my PC-DOS drive. OS/2 is a neat experiment for me, but one with no decent outcome. I like to experiment with older operating systems with my machines. I am in the early days of my retro PC collecting. I have years to go an a lot more things to add, but it has become a really enjoyable hobby.

Try DRDOS, which was Digital Research DOS. Some dingbat hobbyists and workers in the clone computer stores called it "Doctor DOS". I used it for a few years and it was very good. IBM DOS was somewhat better than MSDOS due to the addons like the E3 editor. Plus the IBM DOS included a much better hard disk data compression tool called Superstor, than Microsoft's crappy Doublespace if I recall.

[Ampera]

I don't disagree. I think I am gonna swap back in my PC-DOS drive. OS/2 is a neat experiment for me, but one with no decent outcome. I like to experiment with older operating systems with my machines. I am in the early days of my retro PC collecting. I have years to go an a lot more things to add, but it has become a really enjoyable hobby.

Try DRDOS, which was Digital Research DOS. Some dingbat hobbyists and workers in the clone computer stores called it "Doctor DOS". I used it for a few years and it was very good. IBM DOS was somewhat better than MSDOS due to the addons like the E3 editor. Plus the IBM DOS included a much better hard disk data compression tool called Superstor, than Microsoft's crappy Doublespace if I recall.

I know about DR-DOS. One neat thing about the later versions (Caldera and Novell) is that they have FAT-32 support, which is almost entirely useless for most DOS applications, as anything that needs more hard drive space would be either using Linux or Windows (NT or 9x), this is not mentioning the numerous issues with it.

I use PC-DOS because it's just the dos with the highest cool factor. It may seem strange to base an operating system off that, but in the retro computing sector, it's part of the reason we build the machines.

[helius]

Yep, with the caveat that most graphics-intensive PC games of the time (think 1993's Doom) ran on straight DOS for performance reasons, usually in EGA and other low-res color modes.

This is not quite right: EGA was going obsolete by 1990. The color palettes are also much less flexible than VGA.
The predecessor to Wolfenstein 3D, called Catacomb 3D, used EGA and the visual difference is very noticeable.
Wolf3D and DOOM used an undocumented VGA mode called "Mode X" that was faster and looked better than any of the standard modes.

[tooki]

I think you guys need to revise your timelines a tiny bit, your memory is a bit hazy, I reckon -- by 1994, 640x480@8 bit was not unusual at the low end, and the very high end was actually SXGA (1280x1024).  Remember, Windows 3.0 (released in 1990) was most commonly used with 640x480@4-bit, but 8-bit was common during its lifespan. By 1995, when Windows 95 came out, 800x600@8-bit was the recommended configuration, and 1024x768 was not unusual on beefier systems.

Looking at the ads in the Sept. 1994 issue of BYTE, I see that even ordinary laptops had 640x480 and 800x600 displays at 8-bit. The high end for Windows PCs (not even counting high-end workstations like Intergraph and Sun) was 24-bit color at SXGA, 3D acceleration was just beginning to hit the scene. It looks like the mainstream was unaccelerated 1MB SVGA, which allowed for 800x600@16-bit, with the CPU being the real bottleneck in that mode.

(For reference on the Mac side, the 1987 Mac II was the first to support external displays, and it supported 640x480 at 4-bit by default, 8-bit with VRAM upgrade. By 1991, high end Macs, namely the Quadra line, supported 1152x870@4-bit, and 8-bit with a VRAM upgrade. By late 1993, even some consumer Macs like the Performa 475 supported 1152x870@4-bit out of the box and 8-bit with added VRAM. Of course, such a display cost many times more than the consumer computer itself!)

What was cutting edge and what was common are two entirely different things. You have to remember, in the early 90's PCs were still not quite affordable for everyone. If you were a regular user on a budget you basically had two options: Buy a used name brand PC from someone upgrading (usually through classified ads) *or* buy a new mid-range no-name system from a local shop or computer show.

Anyway, in early 1994 the most common configuration by far (that the majority of people would have been capable running) would have been 640x480. I saw some statistics on this recently (common screen resolution from 1982 to 2016) but can't find it at the moment. One interesting thing about it was how VGA was by far the most popular resolution from shortly after its introduction up until just after Windows 95 came out; since, as you said, it recommended at least SVGA resolution. (It was that plus RAM prices falling that finally pushed people to upgrade I think.)

I mean, with the way Windows 3.1 ran programs there was little need for large screen resolutions for most home users.

I addressed what was cutting edge in my comment. The whole point was that hero999 originally said 640x480@8bit was a "quite high" resolution for 1994, which is utter nonsense: it was the entry level by then.