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After watching some very interesting videos about the "History of Windows" last night, I got a little curious and installed a copy of Windows 3.00a onto one of my virtual machines. Back in 1993, my first PC already came preinstalled with a modern Windows 3.1, so this is something new to me.
On the one hand, the system does look familiar, but on the other hand... everything looks a bit "off". Mostly the colours. But, so far, everything seems to be working just fine. At this time, Windows still lacked any kind of multimedia software, so there's no Sound Recorder or Media Player yet. But, as a nice bonus, they still included the "MS-DOS Executive", so you can make it look and feel very close to Windows 2.x.
Unfortunately, unlike WIndows 3.1 or 3.11, there has never been a Y2K patch for Windows 3.0, so its usefulness, even within an emulator, is a bit limited.
@dfx I have to admit I never used any Windows prior to 3.1. My family kind of stuck with DOS until 3.1 came out. Perhaps I should mess around with 3.0 sometime just to see its differences. I wonder how many of those older era Windows games I have would run on 3.0 and not require 3.1.
Might some third party have rigged up a "y2k patch"? I feel like a simple solution might just be to overwrite the hardcoded 19 prefix to a 20. (That may interfere with stuff actually dated 19xx, but I'm not sure if that would actually break anything.)
@nazokiyoubinbou Mmmmh... yes, there might be some kind of "community patch" for Windows 3.0 or even 2.x out there, but my guess is that nobody really cared much about it in 1999.
@dfx I'll admit when Windows 95 came out I hardly ever looked back again.
I do remember messing with a few things that backported some Windows 9x features. (I forget what it was called? Win32s or something?) I remember it made dialogs look more 3D and provided compatibility for some other software I couldn't get to run. But as soon as I had a CPU good enough to handle 95 running the stuff I used 3.1 for I abandoned it.
@dfx That’s twice this week I’ve seen someone installing Windows 3.x. And I did too, on a RiSC PC 486 card, so there’s at least three of us 
@jamesholden Awesome! 
@dfx Reversi... one of the really underrated desktop OS games. Was a shame they dropped it with Win3.1, though you could start the exe in later versions too.
@404compliant Here you can find the latest version from the Windows 3.1 Driver Library:
