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

Mock it if you will, but...

[DesScorp]

...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.

I'll mock away.

[Inoshiro]

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!

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 :-D

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

[Gorath99]

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.

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

[picklepuss]

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

Re:Windows 95.

[Thomas Miconi]

I never saw versions of windows less than 3.0 to be able to comment.

I saw freakin' Windows 2.0 and I'm still aching. Imagine twm on a 4-colour CGA screen. But with bugs.

Man, the real revolution was the 2.0->3.0 transition.

The appearance of Windows 3.0 (of which 3.1 was a minor modification) essentially changed the very meaning of home computing. It was the first usable GUI system widely available for DOS-based PC. It was still significantly inferior to the Mac, but it looked quite pretty - especially compared to the indescriptible ugliness of 2.0. So people flocked from DOS, and discovered all that GUI goodness. Graphical applications ! Icons ! Multitasking ! Word and Excel for Windows ! Hell, WYSIWYG editors !

People (myself included) like to diss out Microsoft, but I do have some respect for what Windows 3.0 represents : Gates had the balls to bet the whole damn company on Windows, even though DOS and text-based apps were doing pretty well. It worked, but it could have failed miserably, and early versions of Windows were no encouragement.

Of course, as an added bonus to The Bilg, it killed off Geoworks Ensemble and similar projects.

Thomas-