As a Mac user at the time, the love for Windows 3.11 left me scratching my head something fierce. By comparison to System 7.1+, Windows 3.11 was awwwwful.
Of course, around that time you could also run an Irix desktop, complete with Photoshop and SoftPC and even (later on) IE, but that was sadly beyond the reach of most consumers.
Not sure why you would say this. My first job was running phone lines through the lowered ceiling to hook up localtalk for the Macs. It worked wonderfully. Even back then Apple was very auto-configure-y which made finding printers and file servers very easy. Just go into Chooser and there they all were.
IP over localtalk was not difficult either. After a couple years it moved to ethernet (coax, yay!) and that worked fine too. Networking Macs has always been extremely easy.
I agree. The Mac was great at networking in 1993. Sure, MacTCP and MacPPP may have had strange configuration UI but localtalk and ethertalk Just Worked, and getting MacTCP and MacPPP working wasn't too hard.
My memories of AppleTalk wasn't so fond - though I can't for the life of me remember why as it seems so long ago now and I've filled my brain full of a few decades more technojunk since. But I do remember being joyful when it came time to port the various Mac LANs over to TCP/IP.
Both Mac and Windows may lagged behind the various unixes at the time in terms of WAN technologies (such as TCP/IP), but the Mac had fantastic LAN capabilities in the form of AppleTalk. Auto-discoverability and auto-setup was a dream. Just give your Mac a name, enable sharing, and you were off and running! Anyone on the network could find your stuff and share with you. All done with human-readable names and very simple GUI tools.
There was even good cross-subnet capabilities in the form of AppleTalk "zones", although you had to have routers which could speak AppleTalk in order for it to work. But when it did work, man was it nice! Far ahead of Windows at the time, and still superior in many ways when it came to ease of use vs. the zeroconf stuff of today.
IIRC, almost everything Windows 3.11 had out of the box was already present on Macs for ages. Shared printers, p2p file servers, instant messaging (that was an add-on) and more. And better - it all just worked.
I remember that, at the time, the e-mail client/server that came with 3.11 was nice and I don't remember anything like that on Macs, but, with that exception, System 7 was orders of magnitude better than 3.11.
My memory might be fuzzy, but I remember support in those days being very limited for 7.1. Win 3.11 would run on stuff made in the 80s (any 386 or 486 with enough RAM) - OS7 required a fairly new Mac.
3.1 and 3.11 were far different than the 0.01 would suggest.
* "Standard mode" was dropped, so 3.11 required a 386 or above
* Significant networking improvements (hence the "for workgroups" in the name) including IIRC built-in TCP/IP support (prior to that most people used Trumpet Windsock)
* I/O subsystem improvements too
I've heard it said that WfW3.11 was essentially a huge gamma-test for the network and I/O subsystems intended for what became Windows 95.
There was a non WfW 3.11 though that I think didn't include VSHARE.386; by the time 3.11 was around I think I had my 386/40
Also, WfW did not initially ship with built in winsock implementation, WfW did ship all the networking apparatuses other than that, just needing a drop-in winsock.
Of course, around that time you could also run an Irix desktop, complete with Photoshop and SoftPC and even (later on) IE, but that was sadly beyond the reach of most consumers.