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Windows 95 Turns 10
ColdGrits writes "It's hard to believe it, but 10 short years ago today saw the launch of Windows '95.
Here is an archive of the Washington Post's story on the day. As part of the launch, Microsoft paid $12,000,000 for the rights to use the Rolling Stones' song "Start Me Up" (containing the prophetic line 'You make a grown man cry'). "
From TFA:This passage is especially amusing, since I gained most of my knowledge of Windows 95 through needing to reinstall it repeatedly on various systems.
Another gem from TFA: Yes...I vaguely recall IBM's OS/2...but Apple? No....I'm drawing a blank. ^_^
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
How true... If those poor saps had only know what lie ahead.
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
"10 sort years ago "
Maybe i am new here, but what other kind of year is there other than sort years
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
That's a new one...
I wonder when we'll see Lindowsz....
The Slashdot Project was our last, best hope for unbiased news.
It failed.
But in the year of the Linux War, it became something greater: our last, best hope - for blinding stupidity.
Grow up Taco...Windowsz?
What's a sort year? And what's this Windowsz 95 thing?
You are not root, go away.
"You make a grown man cry."
Well, if it could make a "dead man come", that would be really special.
...and in further news, windows 2000 is now 5 years old.
While I'm sure many people here will make jokes about Windows 95, it was quite a leap in stability and usablility from windows 3.1. I don't think windows has had such an upgrade since then, nor do I think Vista will be that much of an improvment over XP/2000.
it rocksz. lolz!
Can't believe it's been 10 years since I attempted to do a seamless upgrade on my p90... Ah yes. I must truly thank M$ for releasing it though, because without w95 I would have never sought out linux.
Later,
Phil
Our top story: 1995 was ten years ago! Also, 2+2=4. Details at 11.
...WFW 3.11 was such a dog. Turns out we traded one dog for another.
Man, we were so stupid back then. Accepting vendor lies like it was gospel. Wait a minute......
from coldplay's X&Y album: FIX YOU ;)
you weren't tough enough to handle Slackware's 50-floppy installation.
Just goes to show that Microsoft excels in marketing more than it does in the creation of operating systems.
Oh, to be a time traveller and go back 10 years before the Windows 95 release....
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Don't forget... "You make a dead man come".
(Not a G-rated comment, but neither was the song.)
I can't believe it'sz been that long
Oh how right he was...
"I think the hype has been excessive," said Philip Kotler, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. "If there are bugs in this program, or if the extra performance doesn't deliver substantial benefits, this could be a disaster."
Actually, that quote should read...
Microsoft is delivering the same features they developed for us seven years ago.
Who do you think WROTE OS/2?!?
Besides, NT was already out and gaining popularity during this timeframe.
I was running Windows 95 Beta (And Alpha's) for a year and half before its release, and running them EXCLUSIVLEY.
I have one of the Alpha disks around ( one that was distributed within MS that I am 90% sure dates to 93, and I have one that dates to 1/1/94, I always will remeber that one because I thought shit these guys are working on NEW YEARS ????
14 1.44 floppy's (for the upgrade if I remeber right (maybe 13). The sad part was the last RC I got was SUBSTANTIALLY more stable than the Initial release was
I actually reverted to it until it expired
It was explaine to me by a buddy at MS (the one who got me the Alpha's and the Beta's , it was driver issues, that I wouldnt doubt, but it sure beat the HELL out of Windows 3.1
Back when that dinosaur OS was the current thing, I used to see want ads in the information systems section of newspapers demanding ten years of experience in Windows 95. Back then, they had not dont their math, but now, there are a few people who can actually answer that ad!
How ya like dat?
...lost productivity from Solitaire and Minesweeper. Yeah, it was in earlier versions, but Windows 95 made it even easier...
Government's view of the economy: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving,regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it.
The IE dev teams blogs (nay, boasts!) about tabbed browsing in IE7 -- saying nothing of the fact that tabs are years old.
MS brags and boasts about Monad, which is still vaporware, but it sure will be the best shell ever -- saying nothing of the fact that this has been available forever in *nix.
I'm sure we can come up with more. In the end, MS is very good at marketing. People just love their koolaid.
Rumour has it they've been tapped again for the Windows Vista launch. The new theme song?
"Under My Thumb".
*ba-dump-bump-ting!*
Wanted: One witty yet thought provoking
Windows Vista is going to be 1 soon! Happy Birthday Mac OSX Tiger!
Obviously talko is referring to the SRINGZ with 'sz': A purely Microsoft invention where an ASCII string is terminated with a null (0) bytes.
Microsoft was still using FAT16 at this time, which meant that the cluster size was 32kB if you had a "large" disk (600 MB) and nearly half your disk space was wasted if you had lots of small files. It wasn't until Windows 98 that Microsoft advertised the revolutionary new filesystem (FAT32) that would reclaim that space for you.
About a year later, I started using Linux primarily.
...just my 2 gil.
So, if you consider that Microsoft shipped 100 million copies of Windows 95 in its first three years, that works out to $0.12 per copy for the song rights. Of course you could argue that the 12 cents could have been better-directed towards bug fixes, but it's not a lot of cash in the whole scheme of things.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
...Windows 95, despite all it's many flaws, was a lot of fun. It was stupidity to use it in a situation requiring stability, but as a gaming platform and all around PC OS, it was great to have at the time. Especially with the freeware that became rapidly available, it was a big laboratory for computer users. Remember, MS didn't have an app for everything back then, so if you needed one, you bought it or sought it out on the freeware sites. Though I'd used Unix in school, my first exposure to IRC was on Win 95, and I relied on the freeware IRC clients to learn. Same with the utilities and such.
I'd never owned an Apple, so I can't speak to what it was like to use one back then (were they using, what, system 6 at the time? I don't remember...), but while XP is more reliable, and I get a tremedous sense of "do it yourself" satisfaction with Linux (my primary laptop OS), I don't think I'll ever have as much pure fun as I did playing around with Win 95 when it first came out, warts and all.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Linux turns 14
whoah!
can't believe linux is that aged
(http://www.li.org/linuxhistory.php)
Mots comments from /.ers I've read so far sound like:
If they HAD known, but 3.1 was worse, it was a pain in the ass
That made me eat my heart out: I'm still administrating several 95er machines of people who didn't make it to a machine which could run win2k or XP. I'm gathering win98 licences to stock those up. But for me at last, the 95 era isn't over.
(The first thing I've made after buying myself a new PC however was installing Debian. I wouldn't stand one more installation without internet access, German keyboard config and so. Ah and I couldn't stand windows98.)
so- this is not the past, it's not a nightmare. IT'S HELL ON EARTH.
---
eat my heart out
At that time I was a DOS-head and I hated, nay, LOATHED Windows 3.11. I only got into it to use Ami Pro but would quick exit out of Windows when I was done. I bought the Windows 95 upgrade at Sears after I got a chance to play with it on the display machines. Wedged it onto my Packard Bell that had a 200 MB or so hard drive and 4 MB of RAM (which I upgraded to 8 a few months later when SIMMs went on sale for $200).
I never did. My 486 computer (with 8MB RAM) came with Win3.11 and DOS6.2, and most of the time I had Windows turned off. It was just distasteful how much resources it wasted to make the thing "pretty".
When Win95 was launched it heralded an age of "user-friendliness", which to me sounded too much like "dumb-downness". And besides, the system boasted features that were useless to me (Autoplay? Who cares! I know how to run things in my CDROM).
I boycotted Windows95. I never ran it. Of course I had to give in at one point, when most software required the new Win32. But that was in 2000, when I started using...Win98. And Linux. And finding that I spend more time in Linux day by day.
Now I use Linux as my primary OS, with a Win98 partition which I still keep around for games (works well enough for that - I think of it as a massive shared library required for games). But then again, I don't even play games that much any more.
This is same as today. Windows 95 came, all the features that were there were all available in Apple's OS. Today, Vista will be released soon, Vista's features are already available in Apple's OS. But who do you think will make the money?
How I long for the days when a premiere operating system cost just $90... thank goodness for Linux. As more distributions of Linux appear and competition against Microsoft from the "free" camp grows, you would think they would cut the prices on their own software to compete. Unfortunately, as with most things, Microsoft is being backwards with their pricing scheme too.
I think that the move from the 9X code base to the NT code base was at least as big of a leap as from the 3.x codebase to the 9x codebase. Granted, the leap seems more evolutionary because of the NT 3.1 -> 4.0 -> 2000 chain, but for most people, the transition was from 95 or 98 -> 2000. This leap was tremendous, even if the UI seemed to stay largely the same.
That said, I do agree that XP is not that large of a change from 2000. Nor does it look like Vista will be that large of a change from XP. At one point, it may have been. But they've taken quite a bit of the innovative features out of Vista. Of course, I don't necessarily know that this is a bad thing. There is something to be said for marginal improvements. My only complaint with Vista is the relative speed at which the marginal change is happening.
I just installed Windows 95 last weekend on my P233 w/ 128MB of memory. It runs great, I've got IE 5.5 and even VNC so I can connect to it from anywhere. I'm surprised I ever felt I needed an upgrade.
*Toots on kazoo*
(To the tune of Jingle Bells)
Oh Microsoft, Microsoft,
Bloatware all the way!
I've sat here installing word since breakfast yesterday,
Oh Microsoft, Microsoft,
Moderation please!
If you haven't noticed,
Four gig drives don't grow on treeeeeeeees!
Happy tenth Windoze!
It's hard to believe also, at least to me, the price of the win95 upgrade never seemed to decrease! Even 3-4 years after its release, I was still seeing the upgrade priced at about $90.
I remember there were stories about people buying Win 95 who didn't even have a computer. Unbelievable. How can people not have a computer?
-- Cheers!
standing in line at the local egghead software at midnight to get my copy. Ended up getting Office, Plus, and an ergo keyboard too. Marketing people love guys like me. lol.
i cried most for OS/2 warp...
OS/2 ruled during that time I think, so we should now blame Rolling Stones' maybe?
2008: 10 year anniversary of Windows 98
....
2010: 10 year anniversary of Windows Me
2011: 10 year anniversary of Windows XP
1015: 20 year anniversary of Windows 95
2020: 20 year anniversary of Windows Me
Windowsz 95? Is that the localized Polish edition of Windows 95?
I have that damn CD!! Of course, I was only 5 at the time...... :D
Anyone remember that music video that came on the Windows 95 CD? I always wondered who they were, and what that cute woman's name was...
Of my beloved Packard Bell P75 running 3.11 for Workgroups with hardly ever crashing..... to upgrading to Win 95 and being introduced to the Blue Screen of Death and even worse happenings of Plug and Pray! I think I still spent most of my time in Dos with Dark Forces and Duke3d.
Hilarious
More
If you start me up
If you start me up I'll never stop
If you start me up
If you start me up I'll never stop
I've been running hot
You got me ticking gonna blow my top
If you start me up
If you start me up I'll never stop
You make a grown man cry
Spread out the oil, the gasoline
I walk smooth, ride in a mean, mean machine
Start it up
If you start it up
Kick on the starter give it all you got, you got,
you got I can't compete with the riders in the other heats If you rough it up
If you like it you can slide it up, slide it up
Don't make a grown man cry
My eyes dilate, my lips go green
My hands are greasy
She's a mean, mean machine
Start it up
If start me up
Give it all you got
You got to never, never, never stop
Never, never
Slide it up
You make a grown man cry
Ride like the wind at double speed
I'll take you places that you've never, never seen
Start it up
Love the day when we will never stop, never stop
Never stop, never stop
Tough me up
Never stop, never stop, never stop
You, you, you make a grown man cry
You, you make a dead man come
You, you make a dead man come
Can anyone figure out what the hell Microsoft Marketing was thinking when they selected this song?
I was in college at the time and Windows 95 had just come out. I was debating between using OS/2 Warp or Windows 95. I tried to go with OS/2 at first but I quickly ran into the realization that most of the apps I wanted to use were Windows apps.
Particularly problematic were Internet applications. OS/2 had some support for Windows binaries, but when it came down to running Navigator, etc, it just wasn't up to the task. So I ended up installing Windows 95. The rest is history.
Incidentally about two years after that, we received like 50 copies of OS/2 warp for free. We tried handing them out to people but nobody wanted it.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
When I bought it up brought Windows home and tried to boot it up. But when I load it up, it says my memory is not enough. I'll be runnin' out I need some extra RAM to fix it up I have to cough it up Open my wallet up - it never stops never stops ...
This is Windows 95
It's sucking up my drive
It makes a Pentium fly
But my PC is obsolete
I'll have to buy myself a brand new machine
Stick me up
You suck me in and then you got me hooked
There is so much stuff to buy
I need a new hard drive
It's gonna suck me dry
My 386
don't have the speed
It takes an hour just to bring it up the screen
Oh, no, I'm making software buys
It's making B*ll G*tes come
Yo, you make a rich man come...
I don't know about anyone else, but my take on win95 was one thing...the interface. Plumbing aside, it was *new* and *different* and made it seem like the first real step to LCARS and all the space age stuff that we always imagined would be common place by the year 2001.
I remember that I had a box at the university that ran a version of Linux, and its interface was basically the same as win3.1 as everything else was at the time...Motif. Win95 seemed like such a radical change (at first), plus the growing realization about the internet, computers in general, and it felt like a good time to be in the tech industry. Thus I've always used this day, 10 years ago, as the beginning of the tech bubble, ending with the conviction of microsoft in 2000.
The sad thing is, when I saw NextStep, I was *really* looking at the future, and didn't realize it. I'm shocked at how much ooh'ing and ahh'ing I did over NextStep, which I actually didn't do with Win95, and didn't think that the world should be moving this way. Eh, maybe it was the black and white screen. Oh well.
"But Microsoft is unlikely to suffer a similar fate because it took precautions, such as delaying its launch date and sending out a few hundred thousand copies to testers across the country."
These are called precautions? I'm going to tell my client that next time we're delayed on a release. And as far as testing, was that something that was new in software at the time?
The proper spelling is Windoze, not Windowsz. Leave it to a potshoting
Is it really correct to keep counting age after it's dead? When was the last time Windows 95 was available to buy? When was the last one someone actually used it(I'mnot counting museums here)?
I'd rather be flying
Windowsz 95 Turns 10
Hmm, is that the Polish spelling? Or is 10 the the reading level of the editors today?
rooooar
MS is still trying to match the functionality of having a system that is composed of small scriptable programs that interoperate using human readable text interfaces, connected by pipes and redirected IO.
Their solution is to have the shell make a huge tree of objects that call each other. The objects aren't text, you can't load them in notepad, and you can't pipe them like you can with UNIX. Instead you've got a pile of goddamn API's. Plus, these fucking things are objects, so you can call them and they execute code. The good guys will use them to dig out information that they want. The bad guys will examine them for buffer overflows.
What do Microsoft developers drive? Easy - a Pontiac Aztek. They love ugly cars just as much as they love ugly operating systems. "But you can go camping in it!" is their reply when you criticise their ride. I agree. All the bugs make you feel like you're stuck in the fucking woods without any toilet paper.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I remember this. I was dubious whether to upgrade or not.
I used to start the upgrade process from within Win 3.1, and each day I advanced one more page of the wizard...
I remember reading somewhere "Life starts at 95"...
Windows 95 still had a crappy FAT filesystem (even though Microsoft had developed HPFS years before) and it was still a pile of 32-bit DLLs (or VxDs) running on top of DOS instead of a compartmentalized 32-bit OS with a classic kernel/shell design.
Microsoft's older version of OS/2 was a 16-bit solution that wasn't all that competitive, but at least it had a real filesystem and an architecture that made a little bit of sense to someone with a comp sci background.
Besides, by the time Windows 95 was released, OS/2 had been an IBM product for over three years (OS/2 2.0, 2.1, and Warp 3.0 had already been released), and it had been almost completely rewritten by IBM during that time (new 32-bit kernel, new WPS desktop, new VDM subsystem, new WinOS2 subsystem, and new network stack).
NT was around then, as you say, and it had a good native 32-bit core, but it still used the Windows 3.1 desktop and had such poor support for DOS apps that many people couldn't use it effectively (at least for a few more years).
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Wow, so I guess it's been about 10.5 yrs since I started running FreeBSD. A couple of years later.. perhaps 96,97, I started running Linux. I think I only ran '95 for a few months in total - it didn't run so hot on my 386DX40 with 4MB RAM and 86MB HD.
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.
" As part of the launch, Microsoft paid $12,000,000 for the rights to use the Rolling Stones' song "Start Me Up""
Thus starting the long traditin of the Rolling Stones selling themselves out to any shady business for the right price (coughAmeriquestcough). Being the Rolling Stones and all, it's not like they need the money...
Well I bought it up
...
...
.... (ring it up)
.... you got me, you got me
...
... I 'm making software buys. ... It's making Bill Gates come... ... your making a rich man come....
Brought Windows home and tried to boot it up
But when I load it up
It says my memory is not enough
I've been running out
I need Some Extra RAM to fix me up
I have to cough it up
Open my wallet up, it never stops, never stops, never stops, never stops
Its Windows 95
It's sucking up my drive
It makes a Pentium fly
But my PC is obsolete
I'll have to buy myself a brand new machine
Just stick me up
You suck me in then you got me hooked
There's so much stuff to buy
I need a new hard drive
I'ts gonna suck me dry
My 386, Don't have the speed
It takes an hour just to bring up the screen
Oh no
Woow
Yo Yo
Technoli
Moving from 3.1 to NT4 was a huge upgrade. New interface, 32-bit kernel, protected memory, pre-emptive multitasking. Upgrading from NT4 to NT5 was an incremental upgrade. It added DirectX (NT4 had a sort of kludged-on DirectX) and a much nicer interface for system management. NT5.1? Remote desktop was nice, not sure if it added anything else worthwhile.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Apple's "Aliases" were easier to deal with in 1995, and they've gone several steps further since then. (Move something, the alias will find it. Use them to move down complete drive trees from your toolbar. Smoothly worked into the UI and API, conversant with drag and drop in ways that work everywhere, and so on.)
Mostly the Windows shortcut is just a booby trap when I'm trying to figure out how some fool developer crammed features into my right click. The only place I see people use them, for the most part, is as static links to applications from their desktops -- because apparently people don't want to wade into their Start menus to find apps.
And ever it shall be so.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
How is the line "you make a grown man cry" prophetic? What prophecy did it fulfill? Scratch that I just got it. Damn I feel stupid. Can't say Windows 95 ever made me cry... feel pretty darn frustrated, but not cry.
I didn't notice. In August of 1995 I was on my third happy year with a true object-oriented desktop, preemptive multitasking that worked, a real file system, decent script language, and no DOS underneath!
I ran OS/2 from 1992 to 1998. Never once had Windows 3.x or 95/98 installed on my PC. Even if IBM ultimately botched OS/2, at least by the late 1990s Linux was available and with NT 4.0, MS had a usable (not great, but usable) product.
I will always be grateful to Big Blue for giving me an alternative to DOS-based Windows!!!
Thanks MSFT for the house and car I bought.
Windows 95 OSR2.1 and OSR2.5 both included support for USB well before Windows 98's release.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
The Weezer video to the Buddy Holly song.
"Linux® is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries."
When they mention Linux®.
Deleted
sp?
I've got a question for Ask Slashdot: why does the market suffer fools like these? Mr. Chuck Stegman let fly a pretty haughty supposition as to the quality of Microsoft's products, and was completely and unequivically wrong on that call. Does Mr. Stegman probably still have a job in the technology analyst biz? Probably. Does Laura DiDio (with a much more abysmal record) have still have one? Sure. Why do companies still exist that have loudmouth figureheads that fanatically predict outcomes which never come to fruition on a regular basis? Is there a huge market for incorrect, biased research? Maybe I should get in on this, while there's still room.
--- What
...an upgrade for DOS users was US$99, and an upgrade for Windows users was US$49.
It wasn't always expensive -- only for latecomers, and one of the reasons so many hobbyists jumped at the OS/2 platform in 1992/1993 was the low cost.
The price for OS/2 rose later on, but by then the war for the desktop was effectively over.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Billy's Windowzberg Address:
;)
1/2 Score and 10 billion crashes ago, our programmers brought forth on this server a "new" program, conceived in PARC and dedidcated to the proposition that all software can be ripped off.
I'm too lazy to complete the joke and I think you get it by now anyway.
... I can't believe this name wasn't already taken!!!
' "If there are bugs in this program, or if the extra performance doesn't deliver substantial benefits, this could be a disaster." '
made me laugh. also made me feel old as i remember when it came out in highscool. i ran 3.11 till i found some essential program (probably a game) didnt run on it. then i baught a 133 had tried putting 3.11 on that. 3.11 started to feel old (maybe 1996 ish) so i put 95 on it. oh those were the days. remember to back up your registry files every day! or else one crash during a key shutdown time and *BLAMO*
nothing taught me the importance of backups and really how to fix computers more than windows 95. this is because of its constant need of repair.
wow i just re read that and its so pointless i kind of feel bad for not starting a beelog and putting it on that..
It has been removed! Hopefully they can start spell checking ASAP!
- what is the definition of simultanagnosia?! I've been meaning to look it up!
2^32 = 4294967296 ms between guaranteed crashes due to an integer overflow bug.
10yrs * 365.25days / 4294967296 / 1000ms / 60s / 60m / 24hr = 73 reboots
Of course the reality is much worse!
For those of us who were using OS/2 or the Mac years before, the Windows 95 desktop was a disappointment.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Hell, my win98 box is pretty much open to any script kiddie out there because MS refuses to issue patches. "It's seven years old, Grandpa. Get with the times!"
My Chevy is a 1988 and, like my copy of Win 98, runs fine. I had to have the fuel pump replaced last year and I still have to change the oil, etc, but it gets me where I want to go.
Now, if a large defect became apparent (say, it exploded on impact like a Pinto or a Crown Vic), Chevy would recall it, even though it's 22 years old. If they didn't, the government would force them to.
Yet the government won't force Microsoft to patch security holes in win 98, let alone 95.
What's wrong with this picture?
You seem to have pretty rose coloured glasses for Win95. You talk about it like you used it in 1999, not 1995. Let me refresh your memory!
:)
:-D
Win95 was terrible for games. None of my games worked with it. None! Not until DirectX 5 and 6 could DirectX be said to have matured enough for general use. Nothing really good came out until then, either. Quake was still something you'd "Exit into DOS mode" for.
As for the Freeware, most of it was dreesed up Win32s apps or NT apps now able to be run (thanks to Win95 implementing full Win32). The MS Plus pack was a good example of the sillyness of the era: IE 1.0 came with it. That thing sucked. People were desperate for uninstallers that wouldn't hose the system (cleansweep, etc, came out around then). And the memory managers for DOS still sucked -- keeping QEMM 7 around was much better than using DOS 7's emm386/himem.sys!
If you had 16mb of RAM, Win95 was noticably bitchy compared to Win3.1. You needed at least 32mb of RAM, and at least a Pentium 120 to really have it go decently. That was a top-of-the-line computer until fall 1996.
Thankfully, Netscape 1.x was available and 32-bit then. Plus you could run it just as easily on an Indy or DECStation or Linux
The best thing about Win95 was that it included its own 32-bit Winsock implementation.
PS: System 7 came out in 1990! By the time Win95 was out, it'd been updated to 7.5ish (7.5.1 came out in March, 1995; 7.5.2 in August, 1995). This was a pretty decent OS for not having real guts to it -- Quicktime, Applescript, PowerPC support (for the "new" PowerPC CPUs), Powertalk, and easy to add/remove TTFs. Windows just barely got the TTF part with Win95. Windows Media Player in Win95 didn't come close to Quicktime!
Mock mock mock mock mock mock mock
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
lol what?
Hey they chanbged the title form "windowsz" to "windows" ! Unglaublich !, why the don't change all the other mistakes in titles/posts that normally plage slashdot ?!
:-(
How deep we sunk
It was "Where do you want to go today?" to "What spyware did you have to remove today?"
I think WinME was probably the worst of the bunch - or at least the worst since Windows 2.0 ;-)
I still remember some guy selling tapes for Colorado JUMBO drives that had SLS on them so folks didn't have to download all the ZIP files.
Those were the days...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
...are either truly inexperienced with OS/2 or they are demented or both. I supported OS/2 2.1 and Warp 3 on a Token Ring LAN and there was nothing more excrutiating in my desktop/software support years than that. The ONLY things it excelled at were inflicting mental distress and running multiple DOS sessions without crashing. Whoopie-frigging-do. If I wasn't being paid to jump in the line of fire, you'd not have been able to force me at gunpoint to do it.
Windows 95 for all its issues was not as bad as people have made it out to be. First, MS did warn people that a fresh install rather than upgrade over Win3.x was advised. Second, the vendors like IBM did their level best to act like it was still the days of DOS/Win3.x or has it been forgotten that their Craptivas tended to use every freaking IRQ there was knowing that IRQ sharing was not remotely ready in that first release? Compaq, et al, had their own dufus-level driver and build issues.
Major corporations actually using it daily and not being able to take major efficiency disruptions did yeoman work bughunting and suggesting workarounds and fixes to Microsoft and some actually paid serious cash to Redmond for code access to work their own builds of it. Meanwhile people threw stones at those big corporations heedless of how much of their Windows headache was steadily being addressed by those corporations. To this day people still don't get it and still have a "tail wags the dog" mindset that the home and school are the real influence.
Nope. Business, where we all work, is where the PC market is guided along more than at home and the NT/2K touches in XP Home bear that out. I don't use a glitzy ego booster for Jobs at work, I use an OS that all things taken into account, is the best choice for my work. It offers things that our proprietary app writers find get their job done better than any other platform.
So in addition to hoisting a cold one to MS for a job well done in the end and congratulating them on ten years out from Windows 95, I also salute the corporations that adopted it in droves so long ago and all the work they and my fellow techs and coders did to fix things up. I was not and am still not happy about their basically selling beta code as finished product rushing it to market, but it did set the stage for a much easier desktop experience that only encouraged rapid personal computer adoption after years of doldrums and facilitated widespread Internet usage adoption to boot. If Apple or IBM had their way, never mind the Unix geeks, we'd have had personal computers that remained as inaccessible to the average user as what went before and not seen the renaisance that we did.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Windows 95 was the third Windows I used, but the first I remember selling to a customer. In the Summer of 1995, or possibly 1996, me and my Dad put together about 6 new Pentium 100MHz computers with Windows 95, and we haven't stopped building machines for people since.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I think that I could sell out for that amount.
It it twelve million for a fucking song.
Twelve million for a fucking song!!!
For a minute CmdrTaco changed the title to "Windowsz 95 Turns 10" at 11:41 eastern. Anyone else noticed?
My first system - a refurbished Pentium Thinkpad - came with about 11-12 floppies for installing Windows. But Office 4 took like 40 or so - and what good was Windows without that. Lord help you if one of them was corrupt and you found out about 44 minutes into installation. Then there were the 7 floppies to install dial-up networking and Netscape for the college. Guh.
"windows[n.]
A thirty-two bit extension to a GUI shell to a sixteen-bit patch to an eight bit OS originally coded for a four-bit microprocessor and sold by a two-bit company that can't stand one-bit of competition"
So what's changed?
When it comes to the relation of how much disk space it needed and what functionality it provided with a default installation then it's one of the best Windows versions ever.
I liked it very much back then. It responded very direct and fast. All other Windows version I used since felt kind of slow, no matter what kind of hardware configuration they ran on.
Regards,
Dennis B. Schramm
Sigs suck!
It goes on from there...
Windows 95, 10 years of Linux evangelism and counting.
or
Windows 95, 10 years of making more money for semantic.
or
Windows 95, Unix without the useful stuff.
or
Windows 95, Adware with style.
The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum. - O'Toole's Corollary
Was it intentional, or a typo ?
Windowsz 95 Turns 10
Theoretically, yeah, with the right motherboard and a full moon. In practice, reliable USB support only came in with 98SE.
-- "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" -- Juvenal
I was sort of excited about Monad until I realized much of what you posted. This isn't going to be a shell so much as an interactive Windows Scripting Host session. The real "aha" moment in realizing that this was true was when I decided to just use ZSH for my windows shell. Great until you realize that you can't do things like md(mkdir), dir (directory listing) among many other things. MS took the stand alone programs out and stuffed them into cmd.exe =/ More to come I'm sure where all of the functionality you need is tucked away in some program that's a pain in the ass to access instead of a collection of single purpose programs you can piece together.
And MS can call me when they get a logging fascility that doesn't suck. =P
The OS I still write code on for a living (OS2200) was first born as EXEC 8 on the UNIVAC 1108 and was first announced in 1966.
:-)
It ain't pretty, but at least it's old!
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I though they wrote 32-bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16-bit patch to an 8-bit operating system originally coded for a 4-bit microprocessor written by a 2-bit company that can't stand 1-bit of competition
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
1995.. there's something special about that year. A lot of good things happened in 1995. That was also the turningpoint for regular people - regular people started to use PCs and the internet in 1995. Prior to that only university guys were using internet and only geeks had computers at home.
..Oh, memories.
..and then there was Lion King that was released in 1995. And I got my first girlfriend in november, 1995.
I have a software firewall, antivirus and spyware removal tools, Mozilla and Thunderbird, all the Windows development tools I can stand and Cygwin for real work.
Never had a virus or worm other than one a coworker brought in on a floppy.
Thank you for Windows 95. It's BSOD feature motivated me to learn all about Linux in 1996. Since then my machine has been running without crashing or being infected by viruses.
Mount Vesuvius's famous eruption in 79 AD. Insert your own "buried in..." jokes here. ;)
"Nature bats last..."
MultiFinder first appeared in System 5. It was made non-optional in System 7.0 in 1991. This was also the first virtual memory implementation included with the OS. Connectix made a product called Virtual which implemented virtual memory on System 6.
-mkb
Ironically enough, 47 users in my office (out of ~230) have received the "Blue Screen of Death" today... and it's not even lunch time yet. No lie.
Who cares what OS/2 cost in 1992? I was talking 1995.
And if my memory serves me correctly it was expensive in 1995.
o/~ Join us now and share the software
MS brags and boasts about Monad, which is still vaporware, but it sure will be the best shell ever -- saying nothing of the fact that this has been available forever in *nix.
.NET objects on which you can execute methods, examine properties, and pass them to other applications for further processing.
Oh really? Perhaps you should go get a clue about Monad. If you have trouble reading, you can even watch a pretty moving picture.
Monad turns the command line into an object oriented environment where instead of having to do error prone parsing through text piped though app after app, you treat the output from one app as one or more
This is, in fact, far ahead of anything currently available on Unix or Windows. In fact, it's so far ahead of what is currently available it will take quite a long time to get all parts of the OS and the apps that run on top of it to fully support the concepts Monad introduces. It's pretty damn innovative, if you ask me.
Oh, and it runs quite well for vaporware. I've been running it for a couple of months now (in beta form) and it's pretty damn cool.
I'm sure we can come up with more. In the end, MS is very good at marketing. People just love their koolaid.
Ya, when you're making shit up you can pump it out like a champ.
Masochism
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
Why? Because I can. :-)
It actually works well as an old-time gaming OS on PPro/Voodoo2/AWE64 hardware, and it's a fun platform to run things like Tribes 1, UT, AOEII, Homeworld, NFS3/4, or Total Annihilation on. Cheap gaming LAN!
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Windows95 OSR2.1 was the actual "first stable Windows, ever." Its USB support sucked, but it was the first with FAT32 and its multitasking was a bit more robust.
However, Windows95 *did* come on a set of floppies, the last Windows version small enough to be installed that way. This proved to be quite useful with my first ThinkPad, a 365x, which didn't have an optical drive.
It could be argued that OSR2.5 was a step backward, because IE was a mandatory install and couldn't be removed. You could specify *not* installing IE with the expert mode of the OSR 2.1 install. And you could remove it any time you wanted. Too bad Netscape at that point was a crashy program that crashed a lot, but Opera proved to be a lovely addition to a 95OSR2.1 system.
95OSR2.1 was not topped until Windows 2000 Pro, which I think marks the high-water mark for MS operating systems. XP is 2K with tons of unnecessary crap ladled on. Feh.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
- 640kb Memory troubles - WTF shouldnt I have 8 MB ???
- Multimedia confusion, The PC was a multimedia PC because it had a sound card and CDROM !!! , I had those for years on my Amiga and we didnt hype about it.
- Windows 3.11 - WTF is this, give me my Workbench with features that were years ahead of its time, and that windows 95 inovated by copiying them...
finally i made enough money in the PC business to buy my self my DREAM AMIGA 4000T
Not wanting to start a flame war, but i must say that the Amiga and several others were doing the things that windows is now innovating several years ago...
Jorge Canelhas http://www.retroreview.com/ -The retrocomputing magazine.
Oh come one. Sure, there are lots and lots of problems with Windows, but scripting objects is not one of them.
Ever try to work with filenames containing spaces? Ever need to manipulate data that represents a graph or tree (other than a directory tree)? Ever need to manipulate a bunch of spreadsheets (including layout)?
I've done each of those in bash and in WSH and I infinitely prefer the latter.
Using plaintext when possible is a great idea that I support 100%, but for some things it just plain sucks. And as soon as piping objects is made easy (as MS claims to be doing with Monad), objects will become more desirable still.
Honestly, the *nix world is rediculously smug when it comes to these things. For ages scripting was way better under *nix, but in the past years it seems that MS is where all the progress is being made. They're still not entirely there, but they're gaining ground fast.
It should have been "Satisfaction" instead of "Start me up":
I can't get no satisfaction,
...
I can't get no satisfaction.
'cause I try and I try and I try and I try.
I can't get no, I can't get no.
Guvf vf abg n EBG zrffntr
I drive an Aztek you insensitive clod!
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
MS originally wanted to license REM's "Its the end of the world as we know it" but REM refused or something and it never went through.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Some here do not seem to understand the Windows OS bloodline. Win95 was one of the Windows 1.0 - 3.11/Win95/Win98/ME line. These were based on 16 bit DOS and can be regarded as "Windows-for-DOS". They increasingly took on 32 bit memory, 32 bit file system and protected memory, but by kludges.
About 1992, MS and IBM were jointly developing OS/2 as the modern all-32 bit replacement for DOS, but MS broke off to go it alone - for which they recruited Dave Cutler from DEC. The result was NT3.0, inspired by VMS and OS/2. This was the start of a separate bloodline : NT3.0/3.1/4.0/XP, and the 2000 and 2003 server variations. While the NT GUI looked like Windows-for-DOS it was radically different underneath and vastly superior, despite early bugs with NT3.
NT3 was thus the greatest ever leap for MS. However not many saw it because it was for developers and servers, and so priced. But NT in some lite form was meant to replace Windows-for-DOS about '97. This did not happen because of rivalry between the different MS development teams (and lack of direction) and also because games had problems on NT. NT would not allow games to access hardware direcly, as they usually did at the time. So Windows-for-DOS stayed on life support (98/ME) long after it should have died.
I went Win3.1, OS/2, NT4, Linux. I have however tried/installed/repaired Win95/98 on other PC's and it was cr@p. It is astonishing that people put up with such rubbish in the late 90's and that MS had the nerve to ask money for it. It will be well remembered in the history of marketing.
You can get some relief by installing cygwin. You can then have whatever shell you want, and it will also launch windoze programs. Or, do what I finally did when I am forced to use windows. VMWare on a linux host :)
I remember using the first versions of linux, especially slackware on floppy in and around these dates...
isnt linux due for an anniversary some day soon?
or did I miss it?
where is the anniversary of the very first linux kernel?
The good guys will use them to dig out information that they want. The bad guys will examine them for buffer overflows.
.NET objects... in other words, they're managed. There are no buffer overflows... unless you can find one in the CLR, which hasn't happened since .NET was released despite many, many people looking for one.
Ya, except for the fact that they're all
Hey, don't knock the Aztek. Sure it's a bit on the ugly side but what other vehicle lends itself to being modified into a battle cruiser than that beast?
Who lined up the midnight madness to get Windows 95? Also, Plus! Pack! I got it the next day at CompUSA. I I was a teenager. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
"Yesterday, August 23, 1995 -- a date which will live in infamy -- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by software and hardware forces of the Empire of Microsoft."
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Quicken 95 turned ten too. ...
So did Norton systemworks 95 and antivirus 95 and
...you were already late for the party, since 1992 was the introduction of the 32-bit version and the time when heavy user movement from Windows to OS/2 actually occurred. That was the point in history when its price was a key factor.
FWIW, the full price for OS/2 Warp 3 was US$129 in the fall of 1994, and Warp 3 with WinOS2 in the spring of 1995 was US$199 if you didn't already have a copy of Windows 3.1 somewhere.
Warp Connect (the client with NIC support that was released in late 1995) was US$229/299 for the red spine and blue spine versions (without and with WinOS2 respectively), but that was intended for business users. Most home users only need dial-up TCP/IP support (SLIP or PPP) at that point in time...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
My memories of Windows 95 are hardly fond. My worst one involves getting Windows 95 OS/R2 installed and configured on some VP's IBM ThinkPad 600. Not even IBM could get it to work properly! Eventually, I got it to work, but only after having spent over a month, including two all-nighters at the office, installing the damned thing over and over and over again. There were so many devices crammed into that laptop, each one wanting its own interrupt, that Windows 95 could hardly handle it.
Eventually, I got it to work, although I'm not sure how, so I made an image backup just in case. The VP received his laptop, but then complained bitterly that it would crash on him every few hours. Yeah, well duh: it's Windows! What did he expect? Join the club. Ungrateful bastard.
To top it all off, some other VP, having heard of my success with the ThinkPad 600, came by later to have me fix his. Great. Well, at least I had that image backup, right? Wrong. It didn't work, even though his laptop was exactly the same model and revision number. I still have no explanation for this. I'd start it up after copying the image to it and it would have exactly the same device and registry problems that I had before getting it right. This kind of thing was never a problem on the Compaq and Toshiba laptops -- just on the IBM ThinkPad 600. I swore never to use an IBM ThinkPad again.
Fast forward to the present. Guess what kind of a laptop I have now? An IBM ThinkPad A21m. And I'm actually happy with it. So, what changed my mind? Simple:
Linux.
last week to use a legacy program on it and was surprised at how quickly it booted up. I also noted with some interest that the 1 Gig HD was only half used, even with some applications installed. As I navigated around the HD with Windows Explorer and moved some files, I further noticed that it didn't really feel any different than using XP. Then I loaded Firefox and connected to the Internet via the Linksys Pcmcia ethernet card and found that browsing didn't feel much different either. Somebody want to explain again how far we've come in the past 10 years with Windows? Sure there are some conveniences and minor improvements, but at what cost in bloat and memory requirements?
I just checked the stats on my relatively busy web site and saw that of the 16,640 Windows machines that visited last week 94 of them were using Win95. Just below that was NT with 42 visits and WIN32s with 10 visits. Oh, I even saw one single OS/2 visit..
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
According to wikipedia:
On Aug 24 in the year 79:
Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying the cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae with volcanic ash.
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/09/ 08/54817.aspx
And I happen to know that Cringe A) got the info from a vaguely anonymous email; B) published it with no confirmation; and C) received the email below:
>To: bob@cringely.com
>Date: 5 Jul 95 09:28:27 -0700
>From: yusufm
>X-Exchange-Message-Id: C=US;A=
>;P=MICROSOFT;l=RED-10-MSG950705092827FIX00A501
>Subject: 7/3 Notes From Field
>
>The dongle thingamajig you wrote up is of course not correct. No such
> thing required or in the box to use Windows 95. One of your more
>whacky rumours...did you really believe it?
>
>Yusuf Mehdi
>Product Manager, Windows 95
>Microsoft
How do I know this? ;-) I still have the original emails filed away from 10 years ago.
The AIDS epidemic is still going strong after more than a decade.
Sounds a bit overcomplicated to me, really. At least with the error prone parsing through text piped through app after app, I'm at any point able to thow a tee in the script and send the output somewhere that I can visibly read it and interpret it. I can also take that output and modify it slightly and send it manually back through the next step in the chain to do some additional testing. I'm not sure that simply examining the properties of the .NET object affords me the flexibility.
I'd also point out that I personally disagree with a lot of this obsession over object oriented code in everything these days. In a short script with a defined start and end, there's no need for the obfuscation of object orientation. I hate it when I see a huge generic class included by default on every page of a web application, even though some pages may only use 1 (or even NONE) of the functions within that class. At that point it's just a bunch of uneccessary overhead. It begins to seem like developers get use to that style of $this->crap and they can't get out of it
I've been forced to use Cygwin for some stuff, and while for most shell scripts, it's works fine, I find it rather slow and bloated. At the end of the day I just took those scripts I needed off the Windows box and on to a Linux box.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Microsoft distributed "Windows 95 - It sucks less" T-shirts to Macintosh developers during the run-up to Windows 95.
I used the windows 3.11 with the Norton desktop and when /I/ switched the UI was the same but hopelessly uglier.
At least then I could just type 'win' to restart when the damn thing crashed - '95 wasn't very amusing to me.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Sure, there were a few. But for the most part the 3.x (desktop PCs) and NT (workstations) were entirely separate market segments.
2000's big improvements weren't so much architectural, but in improvements on existing architecture. For example, DCOM got slightly reworked and the unified driver model was put in place. 2000 is also light years ahead of 4.0 in terms of stability.
The biggest change, however, was to provide a single code base for both workstation class machines and desktop class machines so that there was no longer an NT line and a 9x line.
Do the math... Billyboy's first child was born roughly 9 months from this day. Coincedence?
of course you could.
ie installation was *after* the windows install. i always just killed the ie installer and had win95c without ie.
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
Oh Windows, you made a happy man very old.
:o(
"Persistence is annoying success." - ghee22 11:28:1999 - 10:53:PM
That joke was funny THE FIRST TIME!
... and that's when I threw away my Stones CDs, and started boycotting them.
I was never much of an REM fan, but to their credit, REM turned down Microsoft cold when they tried to get the rights to "It's the End of the World as We Know It".
"Ya, when you're making shit up you can pump it out like a champ."
Are any other comments needed?
Story checks out.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
Haha, you're so right it hurts. They'd finally achieved something that people with a strange sense of humour could've called "stability" in 98SE, and they promptly threw it away by including all that glued-on eye candy in ME (which also found its way into XP). No wonder they also introduced "system restore" (not that it would've worked, mind you). Everyone knew that the NT codebase was the way to go, so I guess ME was just something that was necessary for the consumer OEM market desiring a "new" version of Windows. Or perhaps it was just to prevent new hardware from running 9x-based Windows too well, thus persuading people into accepting 2000 as a superior solution... Conspiracy theory: Maybe WinME was an abbrev of "Windows Must Evolve"?
Windows 2000 was, and still is, a very good OS. Still, I use XP (tweaked to look like 2000) because I've been spoiled by ClearType.
I've been using Macs since 1993, Linux since 1992, OS/2 since 1992, and Windows since 1988, as well as a plethora of other OSes with GUIs and without, and I've seen good and bad things in all of them.
:-)
The fact that some of us have actually had a very positive experience with OS/2 over the years (hey, it's hasn't been my main-but-not-exclusive desktop OS at home for 13+ years because it doesn't work) is not a reflection at all on your experience -- it simply means I was a lot luckier, perhaps, or did better research when buying my PC hardware, or maybe I just appreciated things like HPFS, MVDM, and the WPS a lot more than you did.
Different strokes and all that.
The fact that I've been a voluntary hobbyist user of OS/2 and not in a forced corporate support role might have a lot to do with our respective attitudes, too.
For what it's worth, I question your objectivity, and I think your mapping your tokenring-centric corporate experience to all possible users (and then insulting those who disagree) is a bit on the childish side. IMO, of course.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
For the average user, at home or business, 90% of a computer's use is going to be two things: internet applications, and word processing. (I just made up the 90% figure, but I am sure most readers will agree it sounds reasonable).
Notice that over the past 10 years, processor speed has gone from c 200 MHz to 2 GHz. Installed RAM has gone from 16 or 32 MB to 256 or 512 MB. So with a ten fold increase in these things (bus, harddrive, video RAM, etc, have all gone up similiarly), how much has the basic internet and word processing experience changed from the mid 90s? Not a whole lot. Word Processors have even more features, and web browsers have lots of multimedia, but the basic functions have hardly changed in ten years.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
So the first commercial computer we bought was an NEC and it came loaded with BOB.
Seriously, BOB was cool. So imaginative and fun. So was Sierra's OnLine service, which I forget what it was called. Oh man the days when the bubble just formed kicked ass. I think im ready to go back to playing Doom 2 on BBS's and starting notepad by clicking on the picture of the pad on my table in my BOB house.
Each related OS has its own various problems or benefits:
:-)
3.1 : No network stack, cluttered, ran on top of DOS, but for non-power-users better than shell commands
95 : TCP/IP and IPX/SPX support. Had various hardware issues (hated the K6-2) and suffered from conflicts in "DLL hell" 98 : Better driver support, some fun/useful addons. Activedesktop (love it or hate it), and more DLL hell. Could use win95 drivers but sometimes didn't like them.
NT: Slower/less-compatible for media apps, but generally more stable
2000: In general more stable, less crashing. NO MORE DLL HELL. RPC vulnerabilities
XP: More RPC vulnerabilities. Incompatabilities with earlier software. Poor 64-bit support in more recent years.
You forgot about Windows ME, as well... but then again I'm sure Microsoft would like to forget it ever existed, as well. It was something like if two family members 98 and 2000 mated and had a bastard inbred child....
``Token Ring LAN''
...'' Those calls were a piece of cake.
Heh, I remember when some idiot at the brokerage firm I worked at tried to install Windows 95 on the Broken Ring network the weak after 95's release. It took down the whole network. He got escorted out on the spot. Long story short: Broken Ring was a nightmare to support regardless of the OS on the clients.
Later, when I worked at a Help Desk, I loved our clients that ran OS/2. For the most part, they never called. When they did call, the problem was almost always a training issue, ``Yeah, it works that way in Windows, but in OS/2, you have to
Supporting Windows 95 was a mixed bad. For the first two years after release, supporting the OEM version was a nightmare. To this day, I'm convinced that the original OEM version of Windows 95 was nothing more than an expanded beta test. The retail version, however, wasn't bad to work with at all. At least not at the time of release.
Of course, a couple of years down the road with OEM SR2, the OEM version of Windows 95 became vastly superior to the retail version. At that time, OEM SR2 was the best, easiest to support, Microsoft operating system ever. IMO, its reign as the King of the MS operating systems lasted until 98SE. NT 3.x and 4 were fiendishly difficult to support, mostly because of hardware incompatibility.
A bit?? A bit??? No, the Pontiac Miz-tek deserves all the scorn it gets, and then some.
Pontiac - We build excrement.
what's that, at least 4 people repling with "You Forgot:"
hehehe, cool
My system had GP faults through the roof. Of course I was 16 at the time and didn't realize it was from dll corruption?? Or was it?
When an app crashed the whole system froze under Windows3.1.
It really really sucked. So much that I used dos when using compuserve and AOL 2.0 for dos. I used windows to browse the early internet with mosiac but shutdown windows and used dos for everything else.
At least a broken app would not bring Windows95 down and on my system Windows95 was alot more stable and reliable than Windows3.1. Sad but true
It amazes me how ms won at all back in those days. It was sooo bad it was not even funny and it perplexes me how the IT departments standardized on this garbage.
http://saveie6.com/
Redpack (it would only run Windows 3.x programs if you already had Windows installed) cost me $89 after the rebate.
Bluepack (it had Windows 3.x compiled with Wacomm's much envied 16 bit compiler included) could be found for $129.
I fired Microsoft from my desktop and made the move to Linux. I never noticed before but Microsoft picked the same day that is the anniversarys of Pompeii buried by Vesuvius, St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, and the Burning of The U.S. White House by the British. I wonder what this means?
The aging process of Windows 95. How often to re-install it, just because of age?
Vaporware has to do with releases, not beta's. Technically Duke Nukem Forever had a few beta's. GP Poster is more likely referring to the fact that Microsoft removed this feature from the release of Win XP SP3 (Aka Windows Vista).
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
Yes... the one where you provide an example to show how I'm wrong.
Um let's see here
Any product by Jeep except the New commando.
Hummer,
F150, F250, F350.
I would take any of those over the Aztec for going off-road.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
At least with the error prone parsing through text piped through app after app, I'm at any point able to thow a tee in the script and send the output somewhere that I can visibly read it and interpret it.
.NET object affords me the flexibility.
You can do this with Monad as well. I can simply send the output of any monad command directly to the console window, just like you would if it were text, and it will output it using a default text output mode.
I can also take that output and modify it slightly and send it manually back through the next step in the chain to do some additional testing
You can do the same with Monad. You can easily serialize the output from a Monad command, do with it as you will, and feed it back in... but usually it's not necessary.
I'm not sure that simply examining the properties of the
As far as I can tell, anything you can do with a text-based command line app can just as easily be done with Monad. Monad supports all the ideas behind text based interaction, but adds the ability to work with the output as objects as well.
I'd also point out that I personally disagree with a lot of this obsession over object oriented code in everything these days. In a short script with a defined start and end, there's no need for the obfuscation of object orientation.
I agree, and with Monad you don't *have* to take advantage of the object-based interactions. If you want just text, you've got it.
I used Windows 95 for 5 years without reinstalling it. At one point I even moved the drive to a new computer and after I did a CPU upgrade, all without ever reinstalling it.
...
I did a lot of fixing it during that time but I awlways managed to make it run without a reinstall.
People who kept reinstalling Windows 95 where just to lazy or did not want to take the time to fix it; some fixes took me longer to do that a reinstall, but I learned a lot doing them.
But even then with all the fixes, tweaks and patches I had to reboot least every 2 days because it ran out of memory (if i did not crash before), I think there was a lot of memory leaks in Windows 95.
I was so happy when I found about Linux
Oh by the way it was Windows 95 OSR2 maybe that helped a bit in preventing the need for reinstall.
In celebration of the 10th anniversary of the launch of Windows 95, a Microsoft spokesperson had the following to say, "In another 10 years we hope to have all of the bugs and security holes from Windows 95 patched, then we will move onto Windows 98."
Well, one question I asked myself while struggling with Win95 in 1995 was "Will I feel the same nostalgia for this in ten years that I feel for homecomputers from the 1980s?"
I can finally say: "Not a single bit! I am glad it's dead. And I am looking forward for it's brothers to die too."
Not to take anything away from Monad, but you've been able to script objects interactively with Python for well over a decade. There are other languages like that as well (Ruby is, I believe). I don't think Monad is really far ahead of what is already available on Unix and Windows.
Its suckin' up my driiive... err, I was signing 'You make a grown man cryyy', right?
So you are saying that MS released something that works, and does not have exploitable bugs? Please tell me this is not true. It will leave hundreds, nay thousands of ./ readers sitting in front of their monitors stupified at what to say in response.
Their rendition for MS is "Paint it Blue."
Chicago! Nobody mentioned it yet....
Yeah, but don't forget that MS probably already applied for a patent on tabbed browsing, which it will receive because the USPTO has no idea what Firefox is, so that in a few years MS will be known as the inventor of tabbed browsing.
I've often wondered if MS corporate/legal fully reviewed and vetted the use of "Start Me Up," as in addition to 'You make a grown man cry,' it also includes the phrase 'You make a dead man cum.'
And you, madam, are very ugly. In the morning, I shall be sober.
...isn't this called AppleScript?
And yes it is innovative, just don't mistake it for a Microsoft innovation. (should also probably give props to BeOS messages as well...)
Try this simple task using Python:
Get the list of processes on the current machine and a remote machine. Compare the two and find out if the versions of the processes on each machine are different.
Once you're done with that, stop the services which have older version numbers, update them, and restart them.
Can this be done with Python? Sure. Is it "easy"? Um... hell no. It's about 30 lines of script code in Monad.
And it's not just about the number of lines of code, obviously. It's also about how easy it is to maintain and add features to your script.
Windows had one feature that was only lamely copied by its competitors: the "random downtime" feature. This has helped me many times. One I remember was being at a conference around 1998, and the talk I most wanted to hear was about to start. But I had a bad case of the runs, and really had to go right away! I ran out to the bathroom, and came back 15 minutes later, disappointed I had missed most of the talk. But the speaker was still trying to reboot his Win95 laptop that had his slides!
I was working at CompUSA when Windows 95 came out. One of the Mac guys gave me a button, that I still have. I still find it to be accurate.
That's surprising from a company that nowadays seems to have the least knowledgeable employees on the planet (well Fry's is close too). Last time I went to a CompUSA, I was out of town fixing a friends comp who needed a processor fan.
When I entered the store, a clerk approached me and asked if he could help. I said, "Sure. I need a processor fan." To which he replied, "No problem. Is that hardware or software?"
I shoulda asked to see the software fan.
-Valiss
Here I read that everybody liked it and how fast it runs and boots, etc, etc. I bet you were the same guys that talked how bad it was, about 10 or 9 years ago.
what other vehicle lends itself to being modified into a battle cruiser than that beast?
A Herkimer Battle Jitney...I bet they get pretty much the same gas mileage too.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
To properly parse that sentence I think a comma should appear after "4-bit microprocessor" since otherwise it would kinda read as applying to Inte....
oh, wait, never mind...
(with apologies to Apple)
I installed Win 95 on a 386 that I was currently running 3.1 on and was amazed at how slow it performed and how it took up 90% of the hard drive space.
It took about 20 minutes before I uninstalled it and went back to 3.1.
It was not until Windows 2000 that I finally found a decent OS come out of Microsoft (I have no experience with NT).
I'm still using my 120 MHz Win95 as my main machine. I works fine with Firefox and Office 95.
You forgot the International XT family. :P
X TFamily/index.asp
http://www.internationaldelivers.com/site_layout/
Bill Goldberg will be test driving one on the History Channel today at 2pm Eastern.
http://www.historychannel.com/automaniac/
Spiritus ex Machina
"The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we CAN imagine."
nope not an aztek. they drive a scion
at first it looks really cool, then you realize it's nothing more than a box that is exactly like the old box with different rims and nameplate.
an Aztek actually has some technology to it and is a n origional design. the scion is a direct ripoff of honda with a better marketing devision.
nothing microsoft ever made is origional.
Hmmph. I can never understand how Linux zealots are so enamoured with cryptic command-line tools. Man pages are pretty-much opaque, and require a Man page themselves to understand. GUI materials are self-documenting - you can see what you can do with them just by looking at them. Other platforms have perfectly intelligent methods for scripting GUI objects - it's nothing inherently flawed in the paradigm.
Plus, once again, buffer overruns are a function of a particular bad implementation of programming, not OOP in general.
Personally, I think the platform I can do the best scripting in is Python. Easy, sensible help system, good tools, nice syntax, etc. But also consider things like LabView, that can make a perfectly functional programming language and GUI-and-program system just by wiring diagrams together. Apple apparently has some goregeous innovations coming in the world of user-scripting.
But meanwhile most Unix nuts are still convinced that Bash is the be-all and end-all, despite having utterly bizarre gotchas (like the recent story where someone described how having a file called -r can result in rm * having the very unexpected sideeffect of deleting recursively).
Learning to do a new task in a pure-text environment is like trying to learn how to spell a word with a dictionary - you can't look it up until you know how to spell it. Likewise, you have no idea what tool you use for a task until you already know what that tool does, and then you have to read confusing documentation of how to use it. Meanwhile, a nice GUI lets you figure it all out just from checking out the widgets.
Unfortunately, just because _one_ company decides to leave it's GUIs without any coherent standard for scripted GUI access, all most other guis make this same omission.
All I know is that the win2k "find" screen makes 10x more sense than the grep command.
except you try and get karma
"except that you try to get".
It's really called "WinBLOWS"!
The CB App. What's your 20?
Well, maybe. The Start menu is just "syntactic sugar," so to speak. It's just a pretty face on top of part of the same filesystem Explorer shows. The "duality" it presents isn't even skin-deep; you can stick documents in the Start menu and you can launch applications from the Explorer. If you were so inclined, you could make today the last day you ever touch the Start menu, yet give up zero functionality and only a debateable amount of convenience.
.PIF files, and the Progman was the only part of the system that could associate an icon with a .PIF and ultimately with an .EXE. Meanwhile even the smallest file-manipulation task (like renaming or deleting a single file) required the Fileman. There was no way to use the PC as a desktop computer without being familiar with and using both, and frequently one ended up switching back and forth over and over again.
The old Progman/Fileman duality couldn't do stuff like that. Its duality reflected the underlying reality of how Win3.x worked - it wasn't just a UI design choice. Many applications needed
Sure, but it really needs the 64 bit patch now.
I just had a flashback to 'Star Blazers' except that instead of the Battleship Yamato, they modified a 2003 Aztek into a spaceship to get the cure for the Gamelon radiation.
I'd say we're fucked. But we could go CAMPING! Yay!
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
doing for ten years what the MacOS has for twenty.
Go buy yourself a real computer.
and we still can't get away from the fucking start menu.
'You make a grown man cry' Yeah, I wonder why they didn't make this some golden script on MS's every Windows capmaign flag. Win9x in special.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I was busy installing RedHat GNU/Linux over top of the Win95 installation that screwed my previously Win 3.1 (blech) box. I never looked back. I was a former Mac guy at that point.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
at first i thought they had the launch date worng, then i realized that it was win98 and later that had launch dates after the naming convention would have you believe (windows 2000 in 2001, 98 in 99, etc..)
These songs by Sting would serve as well:
King of Pain
Every Breath you Take (I'll be Watching You)
Fragile
Driven to Tears
I can never understand how Linux zealots are so enamoured with cryptic command-line tools.
.NET that did things like statistical analysis of characters in large text files, because the input was minimal and it took less time than making a GUI. For the analysis of the actual encrypted text though, I wanted a GUI because it let me make changes in the decryption options and see the changes update across the screen, rather than comparing two text files of output from a command line tool.
The *ix command line is what I miss most when I use Windows systems (which is most of the time, currently).
It takes a little getting used to, but it lets you do all the things you *think* you should be able to.
For example, using tr I can replace characters or strings in a file or text stream as part of a batch process. On Windows I'd have to write a script or a program to do that.
Another *huge* benefit is that you can do massive batch processes without depending on a GUI app supporting it. If I have a command line tool that converts TIFF -> PNG or whatever, I can do tiff2png *.tiff *.png and be done with it. Some GUI apps like Photoshop might be able to do the same thing, but it would take more time to set up, and I may not have an app with that capability.
Man pages are pretty-much opaque, and require a Man page themselves to understand.
That I'll agree with you on. I've never been fond of man pages, even though I can usually dig out what I'm after eventually.
There are a lot of situations where a GUI is preferable, but a powerful command line is a great tool to have at your disposal.
Another example: For a personal hobby project, I needed to make some tools to help me figure out how some text was encoded. I wrote some command-line tools using
I ended up doing a quick and dirty solution in Excel (quick and dirty being relative since I had to implement binary XOR in VBA =P), but if this were something I'd be using frequently I'd make a proper GUI app out of it.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Whenever you use the objective case of the first person singular personal pronoun in a spot in the sentence that should be occupied by the subjective case.. you should precede it with a slash.
/ME was 35 years old".
For instance in my case since I'm thirty-five, I would say, "But I thought
It doesn't seem so bad if you used the wmi module:
h tml
http://tgolden.sc.sabren.com/python/wmi_cookbook.
My point wasn't to say that Monad wasn't good, simply that the idea of an interactive object oriented shell is nothing new.
I also agree with your statement about ease of maintaining and adding features to a script. I think Python does alright in that department.
Man, I feel your pain. I can't get anyone to buy mine either.
Although I had been running betas of Chicago dual booting with OS/2 for a while before launch, most of my geek friends stuck with DOS/WFWG311. I remember a lot of people who had put off upgrading until Blizzard's Diablo hit the scene and required Windows 95 to run.
That game more than any other program was the biggest reason that I saw for most people to upgrade.
"What the hell is this sludge on my screen?"
"Oh, that's just the GUI..."
You should read up on D-BUS.
It's pretty early but it's already in quite heavy use.
Thanks for that example.
That's a pretty lucid illustration of Monad's capabilities for someone like myself, who hasn't actually tried it out yet.
GUI materials are self-documenting - you can see what you can do with them just by looking at them.
That's why there's no market for the For Dummies series. Something having a GUI frontend does not automatically make it easy to use.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
All the memories.... and also all the headaches of setting up all the DOS mode packet drivers for network cards, sound cards, etc, and all the IRQ, DMA and IO port conflicts to go along with it... makes me long for a net game of ROTT.
I've still got a 5'x3' vinyl poster stating "Welcome To The World Of Windows 95" that retailers hung in stores to promote it.
A nice peice of geeky nostalgia. From before I was jaded and cynical when it came to Microsoft.
I've never been able to find one for sale on ebay or anything, anybody else got one?
How can a process have a version number?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
And y'all thought Macs were virus free? Hah.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
Monad turns the command line into an object oriented environment where instead of having to do error prone parsing through text piped though app after app, you treat the output from one app as one or more .NET objects on which you can execute methods, examine properties, and pass them to other applications for further processing.
This is, in fact, far ahead of anything currently available on Unix or Windows.
You mean like Perl? People treating a OO language like the second-coming of Christ. Geesh, shit worked without being totally OO. Perl is great language and it has been doing what you just described since 1987 which is far earlier than .NET
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
wake me when the headline reads "Windows 95 dead at last".
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
And to have good TTF support in Win3.x you had a few options. Adobe's ATM (Adobe Type Manager) was really popular. Win3.1 and 3.11 added some rudimentary TTF support to Windows itself without needing ATM, but it was rough. System 7.5 already had a nice, easy Drag'n'Drop TTF font management system by the time Win95 got a TTF folder in the control panel.
I'll also note that the TTF folder in the control panel doesn't really act much like the rest of the folders on the system, breaking the metaphor considerably!
Check it out: Wikipedia reference on win3.1
- Inoshiro.
You mean those are cars????
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
Monad 'aint that good...according to this guy MSH beta tester
I can never understand how Linux zealots are so enamoured with cryptic command-line tools.
Because once you're used to them they're _really_ fast to do stuff with, and they usually come with good, concise man pages explaining how to use them (much better then your usual Windows online help).
Man pages are pretty-much opaque, and require a Man page themselves to understand.
Uh, I dunno what man pages you've been reading but most of the ones I've ever read are very concise and tell you what you need to know assuming you have the slightest clue what the tool you're looking at the man for _does_.
GUI materials are self-documenting - you can see what you can do with them just by looking at them.
Mmm.. yes.. right... Having used Unix exclusively for about 5 years I have been pushed back to using windows as a workstation (but thankfully not for my actual work - that gets done through an ssh and X session into boxes running a proper OS) and I can tell you that most of the GUIs are written by people who clearly think they're self documenting... and they're wrong (unless you count opening every single menu and dialogue box to find an option that they've stuck in some non-obvious place as "self documenting").
Going from being purely commandline based to having to use a GUI for stuff I can tell you that using a GUI feels sooooo slow - I was 5 times as productive doing stuff at the commandline as doing stuff in a GUI with all that pointing and clicking.
But meanwhile most Unix nuts are still convinced that Bash is the be-all and end-all, despite having utterly bizarre gotchas.
No, I certainly don't consider Bash to be the be-all and end-all of scripting - there are far better languages about. But for hacking up a quick script to do something relatively simple, it's very fast to develop in and you can pretty much guarantee it's going to be on almost all systems. I think the thing I find most powerful in bash is the ability to knock up quick scripts to do things on the commandline - the number of times I need to do an operation to a number of files and hack up a quick for-loop at the prompt.
Also, pipes have got to be one of the most useful inventions for doing some reasonably complex stuff in a hurry.
Learning to do a new task in a pure-text environment is like trying to learn how to spell a word with a dictionary - you can't look it up until you know how to spell it.
Yes - there you're right. If you've never before done anything like what you're currently trying to do then there is some effort involved. However, if you're used to the environment then a lot of concepts are transferrable - you can see similarities between tasks and reuse the knowledge you gained the last time. And more to the point, once you _know_ how to do something then it's just so much faster to do it at the CLI than in a GUI.
Maybe a CLI isn't for everyone but for me I couldn't use an OS which didn't have a powerful CLI - even in Windows I fire up Bash very frequently to do stuff because it's just easier and faster.
Meanwhile, a nice GUI lets you figure it all out just from checking out the widgets.
Again, I agree - a GUI lets you figure it out by opening every menu and dialogue box and probably reading the help on obscure widgets... as opposed to a 2 minute flick through a man page to find what you're after - I'll take the man page every time since I just don't have the time and patience to click through a GUI.
All I know is that the win2k "find" screen makes 10x more sense than the grep command.
Yes, and it's about a billion times less useful. Turns out that if you remove almost all the useful features in a program it's easier for people to understand... and almost completely useless to everyone too.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
No shit !
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Some people let their genitalia control them, and some people use their brains..
God, you are so funny. Did you know that Chris Martin and the rest of Coldplay all met at university, at University College London, one of the best universities in Britain, on par with Ivy League institutions? They're all very smart with good degrees to their names.
So, to recap, they're all intelligent as well as rich and popular. That kind of destroys your pathetic "some people use their brains" argument, doesn't it? Now how are you going to run them down?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I thought that was the song that went with Win95? I remember the video clip of that on the disc, it was a bunch of people sitting on a couch watching this beater car roll and it went "Good Times Bad Times Give me some of that."
Then there was that sad bumper car game... oie.
Check out Andrew Schulman's "Inside Windows 95" some time. But the "on top" makes it sound like DOS was still in charge under the covers, which it wasn't - it's pretty much a pile of dead code and thunks by the time vmm32.vxd got its tentacles inside.
They did a pretty good job of making it backwards-compatible enough so folks could still most of the DOS and Win16 apps they wanted.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
Why python? That problem would be a simple sh script.
But... processes don't have version numbers. We assume that you mean the files containing the executables. We assume that you are running linux, and the gnu utilities.
ls -l -L --full-time $(which $(ps --noheader -c | cut -c 35-)) | cut -c 44-
Of course, you are going to want to restart the commands, so "ps -c" would not be appropriate, but I will leave that to you.
Also, to run this on a remote machine, add "ssh user@remote" to the front of the command.
30 lines? 2 lines, followed by a diff, and uniq, followed by 2 lines of scp. I am not sure what a "service" is (vs. a process) in your context. I don't think that you meant "process".
But its really only 10ish lines of sh script (I would say "service", list the running "services", and use rpm to extract the versions, and scp the rpm to the partner machine, install it, and restart the service. Since the rpm doesn't back-date without forcing, ALL running services could be so updated. Of course, installing the "service" restarts the service anyway).
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Thanks for the new sig. I blew milk out my nose!
Doh! too long! Back to my old sig :(
tell application "monad"
activate
set creator to the creatorCode
if the name of the creator is "Microsoft" then
display dialog "Fuck off" with Buttons {"bite me"}
endif
end tell
applescript has been around since before OSX. Not only does it communicate with any application like an object, it can discover any applications properties, methods, and UI. And if that application is written in Cocoa, then all of those properties and methods are discovered by introspection and exported automatically for you when you build the application. Thus the scipt can call deep subroutines in your application.
Moreover it's event driven not just procedural which means it can have a GUI and repsond to clicks, drags and whatnot.
It also plays well at the shell and command line level, with perl often being a handy tool to use from within apple script. And it comes with a
The only HUGE problem with apple script besides its limitations as a full blown programming language is the english syntax. While seemingly an advantage it's not. English syntax is easy to read by anyone (good!!) but nearly impossible to write, since in english there are many nearly equivalent ways to say the same thing (but only one is acceptable applescript syntax).
That and the O'reily book on applescipt truly is the worst O'reily book ever minted.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
the right music should be "Satisfaction"
But you never know. Working with Win 95 at launch is what convinced me to turn my IT career to Unix from 97 through 03. I'm just now coming back to the Windows world and I have to admit that two things surprised me. The first is how much Windows has grown up. The second is how much it still pisses me off.
so it's really REALLY hard for non-programmers to use? I'll agree with that.
Why python? That problem would be a simple sh script.
That's correct, if you are running a Unix system. I am under the assumption that the problem was referring to Windows systems and not Unix.
A service on Windows is similar to a daemon on Unix.
It is still a process, but a distinct type of process.
i was using windows 95 but i recently changed to xp.i found this article about a defect http://associatedcontent.com/content.cfm?content_t ype=article&content_type_id=8704
is this true? should i change my windows software?
10 years and still in beta.
Mommy. What's a karma whore?
I happened into a TON of A/UX stuff a couple of years ago.
:D
Official long-sleeved t-shirt (tan) with A/UX printed on the sleeves (red). Developer documentation (some of it still shrinkwrapped, most of it in binder format). A WGS95 with a fully functional install of (iirc) 3.1 on a 230 meg hdd.
The userland is an obvious precursour to modern OS X, except the System 7 environment actually ran Mac apps natively, rather than in an emulation wrapper.
I wonder if there's a modern version of Commando?
WOW SUCH A NEW AND INVENTIVE ORIGINAL JOKE! I've never heard that one before! Certainly not about 30,000 times a goddamned year between 1995 and 2005. And yet Slashdot moderators, obviously on crack, moderate it up regardless... maybe Slashdot does something to people to just suck their sense of humor out and replace it with hatred of RFID tags.
Comment of the year
Amiga and several others were doing the things that windows is now innovating several years ago...
except for memory protection
There's just as many examples where I'd prefer bash over WSH. Then again I'd prefer almost anything to WSH. The UNIX equivalent of the scripting object you're reffering to is called CPAN.
Perl + CPAN is UNIX's answer to WSH. (Or should that be the other way round.)
WSH should be compared to Perl/Python/Ruby.
cmd.exe should be compared to bash.
.. bad month, very bad month. In a lesser scale, also in this month happened the Hiroshima bombing so the use of atomic bombs in wars, and with a bit of luck, was also the month when happened the dinosaur extintion. Not sure of what of those events were worse for the planet, but Windows 95 have all my bets.
Well, what better time than this to appreciate Winsongs 95, by Apple employees.
Including the hits 'You can't use this' and 'Killing me softly with Windows'!
( Somebody please mirror/seed it before host explodes? )
J
Perl + CPAN/Python/Ruby available on UNIX (and Windows) now.
Speaking of age of abstract objects, AppleScript is about to turn twelve!
There's no 'on' position on the Slacker switch!
I can't believe it's been 10 years. Believe it or not, I still have Win95 on one of my older pcs at home. My mom still uses Win98. Ahhhh, nothing like celebrating years of never-ending Window crashes and viruses (weep, weep).
I have to work providing remote support over very slow links. A good CLI, with history and editing facilities (like bash with the vi option) is the only way to work sometimes.....
PENAROL: Seras eterno como el tiempo y floreceras en cada primavera.
Unfortunately yes. For a time I was a field tech and that was the company car given to me. They actually do drive quite nicely and are comfortable to ride in as long as you don't need a center rear-view mirror. The dumb, little spoiler goes right across it taking about 50-60% of your field off vision away.
The *ix command line is what I miss most when I use Windows systems (which is most of the time, currently).
Don't complain, then - install one! There is no reason whatsoever why using Windows has to be an exercise in command-line deprivation, since complete and usable Unix-like command-line environments have been available for years now.
Personally I use Cygwin, because it's a very complete Linux-style environment with all the GNU tools and other goodies I'm used to from Linux. But even if your PHBs won't allow that nasty open-source stuff on company computers, I don't see what they could possibly have against Microsoft(r) Windows(r) Services for UNIX(r), which is an official and fully supported Microsoft product. And also free.
I started using Linux exclusively about 10 years ago.
I think Microsoft pays people to read slashdot and defend its crappy products. Also, Monad is a misspelling of what the os really is Gonad
first of all: Man pages can be easily found for what you'd wish to do, by using apropos
second: man pages are reference pages, mostly. Read a tutorial and you will understand, consult a man page an you will recall.
(bashing): consider posting on slashdot would be object-oriented. write three class inheritances that would eventually instantiate in three post lines. write a wrapper class that handles the concatenation and outsource the type of concatenation to an interface that the reader is left to choose...(/bashing)
gtkaml.org
That's another discussion altogether. I was comparing plaintext vs objects, not one implementation vs another. I just happen to be more familiar with WSH than CPAN.
(By the way, WSH is just the scripting host, not a language. You can use a number of different languages with WSH, including perl.)
My main problem is that *nix apps in general still only want to communicate through plaintext, even when this really isn't the optimal solution. Nowadays, I can communicate using objects with nearly any useful application under WSH. Maybe CPAN makes up for this, I don't know. But even if it does, what if I don't want to program in perl? With WSH, I can use any language that has a frontend.
In short: I don't care about languages, I just want *nix applications to start communicating through objects where appropriate.
It's a joke. Get over it and yourself. You need not take such offense and then be so offensive over it. I suspect it's a waste of time unles you WROTE Win95, which I doubt you did.
As for your signature... I, for one, might be redundant but is used for emphasis. If it's annoying then, well, too bad. Ever heard "He himself was going to do it". Same kind of thing. I'm sure you've said it.
I did this same thing in python some time back...
.NET in list processing pretty much any day of the week.
Assuming that each machine has it's MSI files in a know place or that you keep a fileserver with your MSI files (which even w/ Monad this is necessary):
You can do this in *less* lines with python. And no, they aren't complicated lines. Here's a breakdown.
3 lines for importing win libraries
2 lines to get the local and remote service lists with names, versions, etc.(list comprehensions sure are great)
5 lines to loop through each remote service with a newer version in the local list
(body lines)
- 1 line: shut down remote service with wmi cmd.
- 1 line: wait
- 1 line: copy new MSI to remote machine
- 1 line: remote execute MSI with silent switch
5 lines to loop through each local service with a newer version in the remote list
(body lines)
- 1 line: shut it down
- 1 line: wait
- 1 line: copy new MSI from remote machine
- 1 line: remote execute MSI with silent switch
15 lines.
1/2 of your approximate 30.
At any rate, the problem with your argument is that you tried to win by arguing monad's superior (you though) libraries for accessing windows specific functions.
At the bottom, the functions needed are all available through the windows api and WMI through COM...and python provides a very simple layer to access both.
with that aside, it's just list processing. And python kicks the shit out of
That was really 10 years ago? Time flies, and all my middle school's computers had Windows 95. XD
Oooh Monad boy shot down.
Also, sad to see how people just refuse to believe that new functionality in windows isn't already incredibly old news everywhere else, more sophisticated, and more easily done. Its great windows has finally caught up (again) in one more tiny little thing thats already just an expected part of any *NIX environment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_protection_fa ult
Yeah, our store was OK. I worked in the Tech Shop -- building, upgrading, and fixing PCs. It was pretty good experience, and it helped me get into the IT business; I've moved on to much bigger things since then.
We had some good store-branded hardware to work with when I started, then we started selling some real junk. If you ever want to know what to buy, ask the hard-core techs in the back what they own.
The sales guys at the time were OK. Some were fairly good, and some were your typical sales person who doesn't care what it is he's selling. The Mac guys were generally pretty good. I doubt that they even have anyone specializing in Macs these days. It's gone down-hill so much, I rarely go there. (I'm actually partial to Best Buy, since there aren't any Fry's within 1000 miles. It helps that I pretty much know what I'm looking for/at.) And the store I worked at is no longer in operation.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
,i>second: man pages are reference pages, mostly. Read a tutorial and you will understand, consult a man page an you will recall.
Not exactly, reading man pages is a learned skill. Once you know what to expect, reading a well formed man page is relatively easy.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I thought Windows 95 was released in 1997?
I hate it when I see a huge generic class included by default on every page of a web application, even though some pages may only use 1 (or even NONE) of the functions within that class.
That's bad programming (and bad OO!), not a fault of OO. You can write a crap, badly architected mess no matter what technology or design paradigm you choose to employ. If OO is at fault in that, it's only because some people see it as a silver bullet, and take the opportunity to stop thinking.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Win95 was terrible for games. None of my games worked with it. None! Not until DirectX 5 and 6 could DirectX be said to have matured enough for general use. Nothing really good came out until then, either. Quake was still something you'd "Exit into DOS mode" for.
Windows 95 was the platform I first saw GLQuake running under the 3dfx Voodoo - I can still remember my remarks cleary "holy shit this is awsome!" Sure the very first direct 3d game (monster truck madness - which ran in directx 3) was kinda crappy, but a lot of that was targeted for video cards like the S3 Virge.
I did have a mac then - System 7.5.x could multitask as well as Windows 3.1 - which was poor at best. 95 was much better at multi-tasking in every way. Remember System 7 (os 8 and os 9 for that matter) still had the "allocate memory" kludge that Windows never had to deal with. Anyone who has done support for System 7, 8 and 9 knows what a pain that little feature was.
Exactly! I wasn't knocking OO... it definitely has it's place(s). It's just what I perceive as an over-abundance of people using OO anywhere and everywhere regardless of what they are trying to do.
The difference between GUI and CLI is the difference between visual and auditory thinking. I would rather "talk" to my computer than manipulate it as an object. I seldom have to visually search for things in a CLI. I just have to remember what it's called. Faster than a menu and IMO easier.
All I know is that the win2k "find" screen makes 10x more sense than the grep command.
It's also 1/10th as useful. Regexps are very useful, the amount of documentation needed reflects their power. It's like what they say about sendmail: "Sendmail is complex because the world is complex." It's the same thing with CLI tools.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
From the webpage: You need at least .NET Framework 1.1 in order to run it.
:P
Yes, very Lite indeed
Thanks, you really made my day. Good stuff. Best laff all week.
That'd be 54 times a day for the assumed 16 hours you're awake. That's once every 20 minutes of your waking life for 5 years. Man, that's gotta hurt.
IIRC, MS edit was pretty damn WYSIWYG on the dot-matrix printers of the day.
I quit!
Any Patents on it would still have 7-10 years left.
I think Software patents would be OK, if they only lasted 3-5 years, things just move too fast in the software world, and it's holding back progress instead of encouraging it.
Where *specificially* is plaintext not optimal? Keeping in mind all of the advantages of plaintext and all of the downsides of binary only "objects". Not just speed.
Now granted I'm a plaintext snob so if you can convince me you can convince anybody. But in the year 2005 you better bring a *lot* more than speed to the table.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
That's right, my parents are still running a 95 box. They use it almost everyday for email, web browsing, and the occasional word file. I've offered them an upgrade or even new computer (they are using an old dell... 133 processer 32 ram!), but they always refuse.
This used to bother the crap out of me, until I realized this was the safest thing for them. No one bothers to write viruses, spyware, or any other crap.
And, it's fun to tell my tech friends who never seem to believe me.
Raymend Chen has an entry about it on his blog:/ 24/455558.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/08
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
AC says: "except for memory protection"
True. As I recall, later versions of the Amiga did come out with the memory management hardware. On the other hand, I didn't have the memory issues with my A1000 that I did with Windows 95. And I ran a lot of junk on that old beast.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
I was at a friend's house yesterday looking at an old Dell desktop, trying to figure out how old it was. The "Built for Windows 95" sticker should have been a dead giveaway. She doesn't know anything about computers, except that that particular one is dead as Dillinger.
This sig is false.
there is always a prediction that didn't come true.
"You make a grown man cry". Fair enough.
"If you start me up I never stop..."!!!
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
...is the fact the basic interface design pioneered by that OS has not really changed dramatically even with the release of Windows XP. After all, Windows XP's Luna interface has the majority of the look and feel of Windows 95, especially the Taskbar with its Start button on the left side, a tray area showing all active programs, and a right side area showing a list of running accillary programs.
This is why everyone will be very interested in seeing how Windows Vista runs, because I think Microsoft will come up with a totally new look and feel for Windows XP's successor.
Yes yes yes - all that is sort of true and at the same time completely and utterly irrelevant.
Most games DID work - quake and doom I recall playing for hours, irc, Alphaworld, powwow chat, loads of stuff.
Quality was down the pan for sure in the absolute engineering standards sense but not in the Zen sense that Win95 expanded many peoples horizons and enabled the expasnion of the web in the way that it happened.
Sure, Linux was there too but just invsible to most people and their flapping around with 14k modems, dodgy drivers, booting to dos occasionally.
Rose tinted? Yes if the grandparent meant engineering but not if he meant that Win95 DROVE the expansion of mainstream client internet use including the rise of PC enthusiasts and the whole build your own marketplace.
No, no, calm down. It doesn't have that specific bug. Even microsoft can't fit every single bug into their software (why do you think longhorn is taking so long?), I'm sure it's got plenty of other bugs.
That's because it _had_ to be to meet it's primary design criteria of backwards compatibility.
Not to mention those "32-bit DLLs (or VxDs)" replaced just about every aspect of DOS. In just about evrey way, DOS was little more than a bootloader.
Microsoft's older version of OS/2 was a 16-bit solution that wasn't all that competitive, but at least it had a real filesystem and an architecture that made a little bit of sense to someone with a comp sci background.
Microsoft had an OS for that crowd as well - NT.
NT was around then, as you say, and it had a good native 32-bit core, but it still used the Windows 3.1 desktop and had such poor support for DOS apps that many people couldn't use it effectively (at least for a few more years).
Which is why we had Windows 9x. NT's DOS support hasn't really changed much - what has is how many DOS apps (and, more importantly, hardware with only DOS drivers) are being used.
As I always say - considering all the crazy shit Windows 95 did, it's impressive it worked at all, let alone as well as it did.
Oh yeah? Here's what my shell looks like:
h ome/myusername/bar"
:-)
CL-USER> (rename-file "foo" "bar")
#P"bar"
#P"/home/myusername/foo"
#P"/
CL-USER> (type-of *)
PATHNAME
Dynamically typed interaction environments *are* available. They just don't go around calling themselves "sh"
Speed be damned. If I wanted speed, I sure wouldn't be using WSH. I'm using it because it makes my life easier.
Here's an example. I can easily do pretty much anything Word, PowerPoint and (especially) Excel are capable of from WSH. That's really nice when I want to analyse and generate reports on a metric ton of scientific data in CSV format.
This way I can treat the data in a natural way. If I want a row, I just ask the object representing Excel to give me that row. If I want the text in the row to be boldfaced, I set the Font.Bold property of that row to True. If I want the row to be displayed in PowerPoint, I just pass the object. Easy.
Now, I could certainly do all this analysis and report generation by piping the plaintext CSV data using bash, sed, grep, wc, gnuplot, latex, etc. but to say it's bloody tedious is an understatement. I know this because I've done it.
Another example is graphs. If I want to get the collection of great-grandparents of a node, I don't want to have to first parse a bloody list of nodes, values, arcs, etc. Why do I want to do that when my utilities have already done that work? Just let me access their internal representations through some API. It'd make my life a lot easier. Would probably result in better code as well.
Besides, objects and plaintext need not be mutually exclusive. For instance, in Java every object has a toString() method. Just expose the object to those utilties that want 'em and produce the String representation for those that don't. Everybody'll be happy.
Is this like when the Linux crowd was boasting about their fancy new O(1) scheduler when Windows NT had one since its first release ?
MS brags and boasts about Monad, which is still vaporware, but it sure will be the best shell ever -- saying nothing of the fact that this has been available forever in *nix.
No unix shell I've ever used does what Monad does.
Because the format and methods of manipulating that plain text are not consistent.
Check out Andrew Schulman's "Inside Windows 95" some time.
I am all about how things work and learning about new and interesting things but would that book be of any value 10 years after the fact considering that OS and anything like it is already dead? I don't think you'd get much out of it that you could really apply or use in the future considering this was a very specific OS with very specific things that were required to get it to work the way it did.
I guess you could put that on your resume if you are strugling for something technical... "I am very familiar with the insides and design of Windows 95 and how they integrated the OS with DOS."
When all you've got is a hammer, I guess everything looks like a nail...
The shells "forever" ago weren't quite as nice. In fact, I think in it's day, AmigaDOS and OS/2's shells were more capable than the Unix shells of 1985. (but then, I could be wrong.. I didn't pick up Unix until about 1988 or so.. but things felt a lot less advanced in Unix at the time.. but then, I knew C so rather than shell scripting I just did whatever in C)
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
sounds a bit like "OpenDoc" but for programming interfaces. I could be wrong, but I don't think I quite understood the post. But that's what it sounds like.
:(
OpenDoc would've been so cool. I miss oS/2
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Monad isn't vaporware; I'm running it on the machine I'm typing this on.
And Mondad does have some really cool features that have never been available from the standard *nix shells.
I'm not talking about wizards and paper-clips. I'm a command-line junkie who has always installed the cygwin tools on any Windows box I work on, and I'm telling you Monad is way cool.
Monad commands (which are, like *nix shell commads, little programs) pipe in and out objects, not just text. These objects have text representations and you are welcome to parse them that way, but using their object-ness often makes life much easier.
Here is a trivial example: Suppose you want the day of the week corresponding to the timestamp of the file test. In unix, you could invoke ls -l or some other command than can extract the timestamp, then parse the text output to extract the day number part, then invoke some other logic to convert that to a day of the week. In Monday, you just do (get-item test).LastWriteTime.DayOfWeek. (get-item test) returned a file object and you extracted its LastWriteTime property, which was a date-time object, then extracted the DayOfWeek property of that date-time object. These same file and date-time objects, with the same properties, are returned and accepted by all the Monad commands.
Anyone who has ever tried to write a shell script that processes the output of unix's ps command with cry with joy at Monad. (By the way, get-process is the Monad equivilent of ps.)
You did not just compare that little doggie to grep did you?
bwahahaha!!
It was crap then. It's old crap now. Let's here it for the Windows Registry and LONGPA~1.AMEs!
"But those customers expecting Windows 95 to be a great technological leap forward may be disappointed. International Business Machines Corp. and Apple Computer Inc. already have operating systems on the market that sport the features - greater memory management, the ability to perform several tasks at once and enhanced user-friendliness - now being hailed in Windows 95."
MacOS had no preemptive multitasking, no memory management, and no memory protection at the time. Whomever wrote the above has no idea what he's talking about. Win95 was a huge leap above MacOS at the time.
Vote for Pedro
I didn't see that one, but you'll LOVE this, M$ applied for a patent on "property" pages...
US Patent Application 20030007011
Funny - I have never, ever heard a 'nix geek mention Apropos (have read about it before in a lengthy guide to linux). The fact that you need an obscure tool to figure out the documentation of stuff that really should be self-documenting is a bad, bad sign.
"I was working at CompUSA when Windows 95 came out. One of the Mac guys gave me a button, that I still have. I still find it to be accurate.
Windows 95 = MacIntosh 88"
MacOS in 95 had no preemptive multitasking, no memory management, and no memory protection. Win95 was far superior to MacOS until MacOS X. The sad thing is that:
MacIntosh 88 == MacIntosh 98
No significant improvements in a decade.
Vote for Pedro
OK, perhaps the person to whom you're responding should have said
I.e., he was responding to somebody who make an incorrect statement about the way W95 worked, and suggested a book that more accurately described how it worked, as a reference to support his statements about how it worked. It wasn't, as far as I know, a broad suggestion that everybody reading his posting go out and get the book.
Try Windows Services for Unix.
cmd.exe should be compared to bash.
Hold on a second... There is NO comparing the two, except they are both text command line interfaces. This is like saying OS/X is like Windows 3.0 because they are both graphical interfaces.
To keep this short: cmd.exe can't background a job or support multiple programs in the same shell. bash lets you do this with a simple "&" after the command. I can run dozens of programs at the same time in bash, or one with cmd.exe
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
the BSOD!
what about making a dead man cum?
That's close to the truth. Going by the wikipedia description, OpenDoc was going to be the successor to OLE, which is the predecessor to ActiveX that Microsoft uses for all of this.
I only use it for scripting (I'm primarily a Java programmer), but it's pretty nifty.
I had to reinstall it so many times on my At&T brand computer (yes, AT&T used to make PCs), I ended up learning the product inside and out. I started providing support to the lawyers I worked with, got into the betas for subsequent releases, got certs, and have now been consulting for 10 years. I love MS. They create products that puts money in my pocket.
Remember... ZG9uJ3QgZm9yZ2V0IHRvIGRyaW5rIHlvdXIgb3ZhbHRpbmU=
I'd say your argument about passing objects instead of plaintext is valid for some cases, but one thing I still love plaintext for is data rows. It may be a matter of taste, but I'd much rather be using sed and awk for that. Plus, I don't lose transparency and portability that way. It seems to me that one of the chief problems with Microsoft's approach is that they actively work to eliminate transparency everywhere possible instead of only where absolutely necessary.
So how much do you get an hour to pimp out Microsoft "products" here?
what... crash repeatedly for no reason? :]
Stop Computers/Cars Analogies on S
"d also point out that I personally disagree with a lot of this obsession over object oriented code in everything these days. In a short script with a defined start and end, there's no need for the obfuscation of object orientation. I hate it when I see a huge generic class included by default on every page of a web application, even though some pages may only use 1 (or even NONE) of the functions within that class. At that point it's just a bunch of uneccessary overhead. It begins to seem like developers get use to that style of $this->crap and they can't get out of it"
.. use the right tool for the job. In my opinion, business software if MUCH more maintainable with the GUI - LOGIC - PERSISTENCE separation, as was always taught, but those tenants are generally more difficult to decouple, the deeper you object hierarchy.
I have to completly agree with you. I have recently come to the realization that old fashioned records and functions are more than adequate, easier to maintain, and far more portable than object oriented code. OO does have its uses...GUI widgets being one of them, but often the object hierarchy makes the system a mess. Interfaces remove some of this headache, but if you are then reimplementing interface methods in the class hierarchy, I don't see any advantage over generic functions with typed parameters.
OO, Functional, Procedural
I'd rather take my 1970 Chevy C-10 off-road.
Because I only paid $400 for it, so I can have fun and not worry at all that I'll scratch the paint job.
resigned
Cygwin is an ugly kludge. Just another layer of DLLs that rides on top of the Win32 subsystem.
Interix, now castrated and called Services for UNIX, is a whole POSIX subsystem that runs in parallel with the Win32 subsystem and runs directly on the NT Kernel. It's a far better choice, from a functional point-of-view, though not 'open source' (but Softway Systems, producers of Interix asked the Open Source Community if they wanted it open-sourced before Microsoft swooped in and bought the company instead.)
resigned
class MyResponse : public GenericResponse
{
public:
MyResponse() {};
virtual ~MyResponse() {};
virtual inline void DisplayResponse() {
cout "I agree" EOL;
};
};
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
I don't get why people knock the Aztec so much. Sure, it's damn ugly. But it's not really any uglier than half of the other cars on the road. But that's just me.
There's no denying, though, that the man pages for many Linux 'distros' is spotty and uneven.
However, you don't have to use Linux, there are other free Unix OSes that have well-integrated and complete manual sets.
resigned
I have never, ever heard a 'nix geek mention Apropos
Are you sure you're not hanging out with 'nux geeks instead of 'nix geeks??
(there's an old saying: Linux is for people who hate Microsoft. BSD is for people who love UNIX)
resigned
Another wonderful tool for this can be found at the djgpp site http://www.delorie.com/djgpp. Basically it let's you turn the dosbox (or whatever they call it now) into a semi-decent CLI. As a minimum, I'd suggest installing gcc and the bash shell.
Yes, Windows 95b and later technically had USB support. Actually finding someone who managed to get it working is another thing entirely.
OpenDoc was sort of like... say you have a data file that is part word processor document, part spreadsheet. The document would tell the system that it needs word processor software and spreadsheet software to work with that document. Then, the system would use whatever word processor and spreadsheet software you have (wether it be Word Perfect or Word or Excel or Lotus). Kinda neat.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Nah, I just went to Linux. Windows ain't no better, and the licensing differences means I can do it cheaper. I'll leave Windows to those addicted to a shitty decade-old GUI.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
When one considers that more than half the cars on the road today (Including SUV's) have the same bland look is it any wonder that any car that stands out is either beloved or deemed ugly?
Add to that the fact that there is mechanically no difference between say a Honda and an Acura. Even the styling is so close as to say "Ha! You paid $50K for basically the same car I paid $20K for and all you got was GPS."
Mass production is what it is all about. Economies or in General Motors case diseconomies of scale rule the world.
first 3.1 (yum.) then 3.11 (sushi-yum) then a mystery 3.2 (bananna-yum) then 95 (what? whats this 3->95 buisiness?) and so-forth.
Please help the McDonald's north of UTA: as I pulled up to purchase a hotfudge sundae at their drive through, I happened to see the BIOS out put as their system was rebooting... into Windows 95!
The guy at the payment window didn't find their use of Windows 95 as amusing as I did.
That simply isn't true. Acuras have had much better transmissions, shift linkages, suspensions, and the engines are typically tuned much more towards the performance end. Sure on paper they may look like the same car, but in a lot of ways they are much, much more refined. They aren't marketed in Japan as anything but Honda and they carry a higher price tag per model there as well. Sure they might use the same powerplant, but the Acura engine is usually guaranteed to be a much better tuned engine. The Honda prelude was one of the few Hondas to see some of this tech trickle down, but in the end, they still had cheaper shift linkages and such and were not nearly as smooth as the the Acura Integra, though they probably accelerated about the same. I don't even think that you can begin to compare the Accord and the RSX. Have you actually driven either a top end honda vs. an acura or are you just spewing forth your own excrement?
The S2000 is an amazing car and bears the Honda name. The NSX is also amazing and bears the Acura name. (and costs 4x as much) But really, these are apples and oranges.
I just read a review on the 2005 S2000 and was diappointed that they reduced the redline to 8200 RPM from 9000 RPM in an attempt to tame the beast a bit. I also read that they shifted the powerband much lower. The VTEC magic was really best produced at 8000-9000 rpm and it is kind of sad to see that they toned it down. I guess most people didn't realize that the car was meant to be driven near the redline all the time.
Still, truly an amazing car.
zosxavius photography
Do any of you remember the music video to Buddy Holly by Weezer on the Win95 cd? I remember playing that video on WFW 3.11 (since I refused to upgrade to 95 for over a year) - and I still like 3.x lol. Man did I hate 95... (I used OS/2 around that time quite a bit too). That video was probably the only thing I liked about the 95 cd.
I still can't believe how horrible 95/98 and ME were. Hopefully they'll be considered as having the worst operating system design in history (they used some sort of hybrid overlay kernel).
-eventhorizon
#Secret Windows Source Code, in MS C% - if (uptime >= "24 hours") then bsod() else print "Windows License Violation!"
I wonder if it's any coincidence that the Windows anniversary appeared on Slashdot so closely to the Hiroshima anniversary.
Another *huge* benefit is that you can do massive batch processes without depending on a GUI app supporting it. If I have a command line tool that converts TIFF -> PNG or whatever, I can do tiff2png *.tiff *.png and be done with it.
Or, you fire up Photoshop and run/build a script in it, changing the file types and names, and be done with it, without having to resort to some arcane outmoded notion of what constitutes a computing experience.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
And people scratch their heads and wonder why SCO is suing all of Microsoft's competitors? Leverage... what?
From Wikipedia.org "When Microsoft entered into an agreement with IBM to develop OS/2, it lost interest in promoting Xenix. In 1987 Microsoft transferred ownership of Xenix to SCO in an agreement that left Microsoft owning 25% of SCO."
Nix piping of text streams is ok, but ask yourself, would you really build a system entirely out of untyped strings?
Most developers innately prefer typed systems.
In unix if you want to write a script around "ls", you have to parse out all the columns and understand it by reading man pages. In monad you could get an editor to actually give you a strongly typed collection that you could easily iterate on and do what you need.
Face it, Monad is the writing on the wall. Unix needs an object oriented shell. Although, a relatational shell would probably be a lot more useful. Oh wait, Pick did that in 1985. So never mind.
This is my sig.
Microsoft paid $12,000,000 for the rights to use the Rolling Stones' song "Start Me Up" (containing the prophetic line 'You make a grown man cry').
1995 called.. they want their joke back.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
IE7 and tabbed browsing... I'm with you, but Monad functionality in Unix? What are you smoking? If Monad is released, it makes all the shell's in the Unix world look like DOS Shell.
Just because you don't like Microsoft, don't make yourself look stupid by clumping all of their technology into one bucket.
Like you, I have a lot of opinions, but if I don't have data to support what I am saying, then it is just an opinion. I might even be right, but just because I (or you in this case) like something a lot doesn't make it better or best.
SO!
Without supporting data other than our own opinions, we are making it up and dishing it out. What else can I say?
I'm all for nice shell features, and I agree that a powerful CLI is a great tool for computer people, but there's plenty of stuff cmd.exe can in fact do which many (including you, apparently) don't realize. For example:
Indeed. Try
for %1 in (*.tiff) do @tiff2png %1 %~n1.png
Is it what you're used to? No. Is it as simple? Arguably not. Does it do the job? Hell yeah.
Read up, and a lot of "what you *think* you should be able to" is indeed possible with cmd.exe. It's not always the nicest; not always prettiest. But it's often right there ready for you when you need/want it.
All the bugs make you feel like you're stuck in the fucking woods without any toilet paper.
... but at least in the woods you have the leaves
-- Segmentation fault. Core dumped
True. As I recall, later versions of the Amiga did come out with the memory management hardware.
That they had an MMU didn't mean they used it. AmigaOS never had memory protection.
Doesn't sound innovative at all to me. You can use dcop from any UNIX shell and get access to components. Big whoopie. We've had it for years.
it does make you conceited though. Hell I did my degree there and I'm not nearly as intelligent as most people think I am...
The nice thing about the way unix (etc) communicates using plaintext is that you don't need about 15,000 fucking APIs to enable all your processes to communicate with each other. The unix (etc) approach really is optimal in the real world. (Disclaimer: I've been doing this stuff prolly since before you were born.)
What a long, strange trip it's been.
If you're dealing with a lot of data (say, half a terabyte or so), Excel just isn't going to cope. You need a proper database and a proper programming language. This is one of the times when plaintext probably isn't optimal, but neither are objects. ISAM files with FORTRAN'd be OK. So would Oracle (eg) and C.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
That sounds like Python or even PERL to me. Maybe you should "get a clue" that Monad isn't particularly new in the sense that no one else has done it but rather new in the sense that Microsoft will finally be providing a decent interactive scripting language with a rich library of code (the .NET stuff).
I still don't understand why they call it a shell though. To me it seems more like just another scripting language that's somewhat better tuned for interactive use than other scripting languages but not quite as much as a real shell (like zsh or even bash).
Don't get me wrong though. I'm quite excited that a decent interactive scripting language will now be included with Windows. This was one of the biggest downfalls to Win32 IMO. At least on Unix you always have /bin/sh which isn't great but is workable. And most modern Unix have Python available which is even better. Fortunately, Python is available for Win32 and is easy to install. There is even a commercial product that provides a CLR version of Python that has access to all the .NET functionality.
Nah, not that bad. That would indeed not be something to be tackled through scripting. I'm talking about less than a gig of data.
But with WSH I don't need to use 15000 API's either. It's no worse (better even IMO) than having to learn to use the various posix tools.
No you wouldn't. This is stupid. This is exactly why perl and other scripting languages were created. The point of Unix philosophy is using the right tool for the right job. What you've described are definitely not the right tools, at least some of them are not.
I'm not disputing the benefits of OOP. OOP is very useful, even in scripting. I think what microsoft has done with COM is created a standard OO API for all the languages to use. This trend continues with .NET. This could never happen with Unix. Unix has millions APIs some OOP, some are not, some are C libraries, some are C++ class libraries and of course some are language specific APIs, like CPAN. This is the nature of Unix: you cannot have a single standard in Unix.
I remember getting a Cease and Desist Letter from some porn company back in 2003. One of their P2P file monitoring monkeys flagged a file I was sharing via Gnutella as a matching the name of one of their porn videos.
The file they claimed I was illegally sharing was a shareware version of a Jurassic Park game that was included on the Win95 CD. I thought it was totally hilarious that they put together a long legal threat that they sent to me in addition to contacting my ISP, who actually turned off my service for a day because of it.
I can't afford a sig!
I'll gladly admit that this would no doubt have been easier in perl. Unfortunately, I didn't know perl and didn't have the time to learn it. The thing had to be done and I knew how to do it with the standard *nix tools. Was an easy decision. (Though I admit that I cheated a bit and did some tricky parts in Java.)
Regardless, even with perl I doubt it would it would have been as easy as with WSH. That is not a knock against perl, but an acknowledgement that this problem is more naturally tackled in OO using tools that communicate in OO, which is what I can do extremely easily with WSH.
I don't see why such a thing would be impossible under *nix. I'm not asking for an overnight shift and I'm not asking for an abandonment of plaintext (far from it). Why would it be impossible for the gnu tools to be modified so that they're able to produce serialized objects in some common framework when the appropriate flag is set? That'd be a great start!
> Man, the real revolution was the 2.0->3.0 transition.
> Multitasking !
You are mistaken on THAT point . . but one home computer OS in that era with a multitaking GUI was that offered by CBM's Amiga, which first sold in 1985.
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(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
If memory serves I believe Win95 package came with 3.5" floppy disk. I also remember one of the disks contained a virus. Which in retrospective seemed appropriate. Microsoft's way of saying, "welcome to our insecure, bug-ridden, virus-prone OS."
Windows 95 still had a crappy FAT filesystem (even though Microsoft had developed HPFS years before) and it was still a pile of 32-bit DLLs (or VxDs) running on top of DOS instead of a compartmentalized 32-bit OS with a classic kernel/shell design.
:-)
That's because it _had_ to be to meet it's primary design criteria of backwards compatibility.
Neither the FAT filesystem nor the underlying DOS kernel bundled with Windows 95 was a hard requirement for backwards compatability.
(1) IBM proved three years earlier with OS/2 2.0 (and again with OS/2 2.1 and 3.0 before Win95's release) that DOS and Windows programs could work just fine from a more advanced filesystem like HPFS without missing a beat (or having a clue about the true nature of the underlying directory structures).
Yes, a few low-level utilities like Norton Utilities or PC Tools needed to adjust, and some older programs that used unapproved techniques to get at things directly, but that was the case with Windows 95 anyway.
(2) Guess how much DOS is in an OS/2 Virtual DOS Machine? If you guessed "none", you're right.
IBM even rewrote Windows 3.1 as a DPMI client and got their OS/2 product to run it just fine in a VDM (that's what WinOS2 is), and both OS/2 for Windows 2.1 and OS/2 Warp 3 red spine could take an existing WinOS2 installation and run *it* in a VDM.
If you needed specific compatibility, OS/2 could use a boot diskette image to run *any* version of DOS (PC-DOS, DR-DOS, or MS-DOS) in a VDM, and you could run all of them concurrently, all without needing a FAT filesystem except in the boot images.
Maybe it was a requirement for Microsoft, but after all they're more a marketing company than a technology company. IBM had the knowhow to do it differently, and IMO correctly.
Not to mention those "32-bit DLLs (or VxDs)" replaced just about every aspect of DOS. In just about evrey way, DOS was little more than a bootloader.
Unless you wanted to run a number of DOS games, in which case Windows 95 did the effective equivalent of an OS/2 "dual boot" and booted into an actual DOS, tossing all of the background processes out of the way in the process.
OS/2, on the other hand, handled many of those in a VDM without needing to boot to a real DOS, so that modem download in the background could keep on chugging along even when you were playing Warcraft or Descent or whatever.
I *do* agree with your last sentence, though.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
On a similar note, I remember when Windows 95 came out a PC fanatic friend of mine was bragging to the Amiga users about how it was now a 32 bit OS.
It was only some time later I realised that AmigaOS had been always 32 bit, since 1985 - again, we didn't brag about these things, or think about them as being anything special, so I didn't at first realise that the Amiga already had these things.