Is there a modern browser that runs on Windows 3.1?

Why does no one want to actually _answer his question_? It's one of my major gripes with tech forums these days: Someone asks a question about "How can I do X?" and instead of providing an answer, everyone piles up to say "HAHAH X is so stupid, you should be doing Y".<p>I actually preface some of my questions these days with "I realise X might sound silly, but I'd like to do it so please answer the question instead of telling my why I shouldn't be doing it"<p>Stop it already. Or at least ANSWER THE QUESTION and then politely suggest why you think it might be a bad idea.

I find it a little hard to believe that anyone would try to build a band-saw controller on a Windows box in the way suggested by the post and assumed by so many of the comments.<p>It seems likely that the Windows PC is just a job manager and GUI for a simpler embedded controller that actually controls the band-saw. A standard PC doesn't have, as standard equipment, any I/O capabilities suitable for machine control, after all. When I did software for industrial controls, most of the controls that had PC interfaces were built that way; an embedded controller in the machine, running a real-time OS, actually actuated all the relays and optos and was responsible for all the safety interlocks. The PC would talk to that controller through a serial port and put a pretty face on the front of things. If the PC crashed, the operator wouldn't be able to run the machine, but the machine wouldn't go berserk.<p>I understand why someone would say that running a browser on the Win 3.1 machine is a bad idea, but it may not really be that bad.

Yikes!<p>Reminds me of my last programming job.<p>I was working on a commercial printing company. It did a lot of products for the banking industry. The print machines were pretty old, and made by Xerox. So old, in fact, that most of the wiring/sensors were one-off replacements done by the technician in charge.<p>It was (still is) a mess. A computer running Windows 98 (this on 2011) talked to a Linux box. The Linux box then sent the job to the board on the machine. It was all done in Java, except the low level stuff that ran C.<p>The machines broke constantly, and they required some Oracle certified dev to come down and "fix it" (which cost thousands of dollars).<p>One day, I asked my boss "Why don't they just buy new machines? It costs more to keep these running than to buy a new ones."<p>His answer opened up my eyes to the corporate/bureocratric culture of mediocrity:<p>"This works."<p>And to to top it all off, the production manager wanted me to write him a "little" program for the Windows 98 machine. The program would be used to keep track of prodcution for the whole department.<p>Unbelievable.

Oh crap. Why on earth all this should be on the same computer?<p>I would not trust running timeclock software on a bandsaw controller even if it would be latest core-i7/xeon/whatever and QNX or VxWorks.

Total hypothesizing and speculation here but...<p>I work with audio and music software (in which timing accuracy is a major component). Timing accuracy 20 years ago was generally far, far better than a modern PC. The Atari ST is still the gold standard -- with regard to timing it makes Ableton Live 8 running on OSX look/sound like garbage. Without multitasking, whatever program you were using could prioritize timing over the GUI and other components in a way that a modern name brand OS won't allow<p>Again, pure speculation here but this may be the case at least to some degree for Win 3.1 because there aren't as many network services and other bells and whistles running in the background. It may even be the case that Win 3.1 doesn't have real multitasking. Maybe someone can chime in on that

1) Buy a more modern computer with Windows 7, etc.<p>2) Set up a virtual machine with Windows 3.1 on it to run the bandsaw controller.<p>3) Now you can get any modern browser, still have the bandsaw software running, and not have to deal with multiple computers.

I love the top ranked comment on that site: This is a <i>bandsaw</i>...you're using dos with a gui...this is a <i>bandsaw</i>...

VNC client and VNC server on another PC.

Sounds like the bandsaw industry, from sharpening to operating, could use some disruption.<p>I'm only half kidding. There are tons of niche commercial/industrial processes that can use 21st century solutions. They're just hard to see unless you're in them, which is why non-technical people sometimes have brilliant ideas.

Oh, how I'd love to have DOS/Win3.1 or OS/2 programmer job these days... :)

Hmm. If the server-side app requires CSS/HTML4 and the client has to run on Win3.1, how about writing a proxy? The proxy would present a simplified HTML3.2 interface, and handle interpreting Javascript events and managing cookies to support a session talking to the server?<p>(It's a horrible kludge, but if it saves $150,000 ...)

<a href="http://www.fdisk.com/doslynx/lynxport.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.fdisk.com/doslynx/lynxport.htm</a>

Perhaps they could reverse-engineer the Windows 3.1 software and get it to run on XP?<p>Can't tell from the details why the software won't do Windows XP.

This is kind of pointless. NComputing already does this over ethernet.

It's just sad to be required to run Windows 3.1 in 2012.