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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'). "
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."
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
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
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?
Hmm yes, 1995 was also my year of conversion to Linux. Never assumed it was anything to do with the release of Windows 95, more like all the tools I needed to work on my PhD were UNIX based, and I wanted practice.
;) Those were the days where I knew the figures for my hard drive geometry off the top of my head, now I couldn't even tell you which manufacturer made them. The difference 10 years makes!
As I recall Linux wasn't *particularly* easy to install at the time
I don't read your sig, why do you read mine?
All I can say is thank you again OS/2! If Microsoft had not felt a real threat from OS/2 which at the time was starting to show some signs of life, if not on its own merits but its ability to run Windows apps more stably, Windows 95 would not have come out as it did. I don't know if a less rushed Windows 95 would have been better or not, but it is funny looking back to think that only now with Windows 2K and XP are there Windows desktop solutions that rival the ancient OS/2 in stability and features. Though I still miss the Workplace Shell.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
I agree, I remember installing those win32s extensions to Win 3.11 to be able to use Get right and other programs in order to continue using it. I really didn't like Win 95, as the requirements where terrible for what I thought was only the application that was meant to launch other applications...
Something I have found really interesting since the win 3.1 to win 9x migration is that it seems everyone loved and loves the innovative Win9x menu set-up, and I REALLY hate it, having to click in the start and then programs and then Accessories and then and then and then... until I get to the program I want to run... and of course there are those users that after installing the 5124nth application, it takes like 2 minutes to display the programs in the start menu...
Personally I liked more the Program Manager approach. Nowadays I have my main tool bar with 6 folders (Office, Unix, Internet, Utilities, Viewers, Programming) with drop down capabilities, and also in the "quick start" menu I have the programs I use a lot (web browser, Latex editor, notepad, calc, winamp, etc).
And, of course I also HATE the people that let their desktop be crowded by tons of icons... you really can not find anything there so it is counter intuitive...
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Speaking as someone who started reading in the Chips & Dips days, I'm vexed by the continued presence of naive posters that imagine that objectivity was ever a property, or intended property, of slashdot content. WTF color is the sky in your world, AC? I started reading this site because back then it was hard to find a tech news source that wasn't Just Another Bill Gates Pole Smoker, and was very upfront about it. I was refreshing then. I'll grant that it's not refreshing now, but please respect its history.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
...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)
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!
How about the fact that there was a bug that made it impossible to exceed 30 days uptime that wasn't discovered until three years later?
(Can't find a link, but I very clearly remember this bug.)
-Peter
While that is true, the jump (features/security/etc) from Win 2000 to WinXP wasn't as big as the jump from Win95 to Win 2000.
- 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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
How can a process have a version number?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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
...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.