Arcview 1.0

After a recent article mentioning Arcview 1 from Direction's Magazine, and a popular response from James Fee, I too thought back to my days of using Arcview 1.

When ESRI released Arcview 2.0, they decided to let everyone freely download Arcview 1.0. AV1, as mentioned in the previous articles, was just a viewer for coverages and imagery. No editing was possible. I don't think shapefiles existed until AV2, so therefore AV1 didn't read them.

I did download it back then, along with a county soils coverage around 1994ish (I think it was using a 14.4k modem too). Well, I wouldn't call what I did was actually using it. It took about 30 minutes for the screen to refresh on my Packard Bell 486SX/20mHz, 2MB.

Nobody uses Arcview1 nowdays for the very blunt fact that it does not run under anything other than Windows 3.x. It will not run on Win95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP under any circumstances. In my opinion, ArcExplorer was basically a replacement of AV1 for Win95 era.

This weekend, I happened to come across a pile of Windows For Workgroups 3.11 floppies (8 in total). Thinking back to the recent posts, I thought it would be fun to fire up Arcview 1 and see how it performs. I was able to find the Arcview 1 install file - hint av1usa.exe. After an hour or so of swapping floppies, I got WFW3.11 up and running on a spare harddrive. (Side note - wow - Win3.x is so very dated with a poor user interface, even the command-line seems less archaic). I then installed AV1 which took about 30-45 seconds.

But after trying to start AV1, I got the 'Divide by Zero or Overflow Error'. This is the error you get when you try to run it under Win95 and above. Any ideas why this may be happening? I'm guessing that it doesn't like the newer (relatively) Athlon XP processor. I might just try it on an old Pentium Pro that I have, but perhaps someone remembers an old Win3.x .ini or config.sys setting that works wonders.

(yes it's just a picture of the screen, but I wasn't going to bother trying to find and install a Win3.x screen capture program)