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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 $12,000,000 for the rights to use the Rolling Stones' song "Start Me Up" (containing the prophetic line 'You make a grown man cry'). "
From TFA:This passage is especially amusing, since I gained most of my knowledge of Windows 95 through needing to reinstall it repeatedly on various systems.
Another gem from TFA: Yes...I vaguely recall IBM's OS/2...but Apple? No....I'm drawing a blank. ^_^
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
How true... If those poor saps had only know what lie ahead.
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
"You make a grown man cry."
Well, if it could make a "dead man come", that would be really special.
...and in further news, windows 2000 is now 5 years old.
Can't believe it's been 10 years since I attempted to do a seamless upgrade on my p90... Ah yes. I must truly thank M$ 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.
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?
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
Actually, for me windows 3.1 was pretty stable and usable. Win95 was unstable and I pretty much had to fix it as much as use it. However, WinXP actually works well most of the time, doesn't easily break, and I can do pretty much all of the same things on it as I can on any other modern OS.
...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
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?
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!
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
Didn't the lead singer for Coldplay die once he realized he was just an even wussier version of Radiohead's Thom Yorke?
Here's every Coldplay song, ever:
I HOPE SOME GIRL WILL LOVE ME, BECAUSE I'M A HUGE PANSY
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?
"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?
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!
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.
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
Seriously, check out nLite, and also at the nLite forum, especially this FAQ. This is a free Win2k and XP customisable installer. You can use this to get a seriously stripped down install that should run on your old dogs. Worth checking out other parts of this site if you've got to admin Windows.
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...
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.
...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)
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.
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.
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
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
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 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-
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.
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