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'). "

Comments

But they didn't deliver; they provided a stop-gap.

[Richard Steiner]

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).

Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a

[ThinkFr33ly]

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.

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 .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. 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.

Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a

[ThinkFr33ly]

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.

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 .NET object affords me the flexibility.

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.