Bill Gates: Windows 95 Was 'A High Point'

BobJacobsen writes "CBSnews.com has an article about Bill Gates and Steve Balmer answering questions at the 'All Things Digital' conference. When asked about 'high points' in his time at Microsoft, Gates replied 'Windows 95 was a nice milestone.' The article continues 'He also spoke highly of Microsoft SharePoint Server software, but didn't mention Vista.' Was there really nothing else that Gates considered a high point?"

Comments

A crack-high moment.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Seriously tho' - take a look at the photo of Bill & Steve answering questions - have you ever seen such defensive body language? I almost felt sorry for them - but then I remembered they were responsible for Windows 95.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[pilgrim23]

Bill didn't mention getting his picture taken in Albuquerque? http://www.latimes.com/media/photo/2007-12/34454506.jpg

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Brian Gordon]

It was way better than 3.1..

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Opportunist]

I know trojans that are better than 3.1.

Hell, I wrote software the bugs of which were better than 3.1.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[StreetStealth]

To be honest, MacOS was just starting to get kind of iffy right around then.

Its glorious early lead as not only a GUI-based OS but one with a smart design team behind it was beginning to fade as the technology in and around it began to grow too complex for its architecture while Copland became something of a Longhorn (to anachro-neologize) and Gil Amelio didn't seem to know what exactly to do.

In 1995, Windows 95 was really something of a breath of fresh air -- it brought into one place a number of UI conventions that turned out to be quite enduring, had some pretty decent design behind it (compare a screenshot of 95's visual simplicity with Vista's ostentatious baroqueness some time), and was more up-to-date technologically than MacOS 7.1.

It's funny; 12 years later, despite only mildly changed marketshares, Leopard and Vista kind of reversed those roles, didn't they?

Re:A crack-high moment.

[iminplaya]

And if you don't believe me just tell me one MS innovation that doesn't have roots in other programs.

Find me any "innovation" that is entirely original.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[dedazo]

We can go through the entire Debian package repository and make the same point about just about anything in there.

There's precious little revolutionary innovation nowadays, in any field. The vast majority of it is evolutionary.

Search engines, semantic algorithms, large distributed systems and web crawlers existed before Google, after all. But I don't see anyone arguing that Google has not innovated, because they have. Curiously the goal posts seem to move every time the topic is Microsoft.

In any case, that doesn't seem to stop people from trotting out the "LOLOL MS has never done anything worthwhile!!!", which besides being ridiculous it usually means you have an agenda in your shoulder and a chip in your bag - or you're a twitter sockpuppet. I hope it's the former.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[roystgnr]

The advantages (pentium support, better 32 bit support) were outweighed by its stability problems.

Are you insane? Windows 95 may have crashed every week or so on average, and it certainly crashed every 49.7 days if you were ever lucky enough to make it that far, but we're comparing it to Windows 3.1 here! Even if you disregard the bugs in Windows 3.1 code itself, the thing used cooperative multitasking and unprotected memory, so your computer crashed every time the buggiest program you ran had a particularly bad flaw. It would freeze up multiple times a day, under any kind of heavy use.

I think it's clear that if your criterion is "improvement over best previously available version", Windows 95 really was the high point of Microsoft development. Stability doesn't outweigh that conclusion, stability is one of the reasons for it.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Locutus]

but Windows 95 was just plain BAD on the Pentium Pro which was fully optimized for 32 bit. Remember that 150MHz was the top end back in those days and IIRC, UNIX rocked on the PPro. And OS/2 ran most apps at close to 2x faster on the 150MHz PPro compared to 150MHz Pentium. Windows95 ran much SLOWER on that 150MHz PPro compared to the P150. That's right, Windows ran slower on the new 32bit CPU and Intel was pissed at Microsoft for this. It set Intel back about 2 years and helped AMD grow. They had to hack 16bit optimizations into a new chip and to make it interesting, added new DSP-like registers(SSE) so they could sell it as a new CPU. Otherwise it was just the old stuff dumbed down to run 16bit code better.

Bill Gates says that Windows 95 was a high point for him because he beat IBM in the marketing wars and solidified their monopoly once and for all. They had a huge party when word was sent throughout Microsoft that IBM signed the license deal for Windows 95. It was on the day it was released IIRC. So a technical flop but a marketing marvel is what Bill calls his high point. Yup, I remember seeing the video of a bunch of Microsoft employees in a hallway with a bowling ball and at the other end were 10 software competitor's products lined up like bowling pins. OS/2 was at pin position #1.

I guess NT was supposed to take all of the server market but reliability kept UNIX going and by the time people figured out how to make a whole bunch of Windows PCs replace UNIX, Linux came in and really messed up Bill and Steve's plan for world domination. Where's Bill's tech leadership legacy? Windows 95?

Back to the thread; So there was so much 16 bit code in the "new" 32bit Windows 95 that a new CPU optimized for 32bit code ran the software way slower than the old 16bit optimized Pentium CPU. Exactly what you'd expect from a company where marketing is job #1. IMO.

LoB

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Hal_Porter]

They had to hack 16bit optimizations into a new chip and to make it interesting, added new DSP-like registers(SSE) so they could sell it as a new CPU. Otherwise it was just the old stuff dumbed down to run 16bit code better. 16 bit code does a lot of segement register loads. Loading a segment register with a descriptor in protected mode is slow because the CPU must do protection checks. In the Pentium they added a cache. If you tried to load from a descriptor that was in the cache, the Pentium would skip the checks.

http://www.x86.org/ddj/aug98/aug98.htm
With the Pentium, Intel introduced a 94-entry, two-way set associative cache of segment-descriptor cache entries. Therefore, the phrase "segment-descriptor cache" is now ambiguous, with two possible meanings. Making matters worse, the new segment-descriptor cache was removed from the Pentium Pro design, but reintroduced in the Pentium II. (The lack of the new segment-descriptor cache in the Pentium Pro largely accounted for its poor 16-bit performance.)

When designing the PPro Intel thought that Windows NT would take over from 16 bit Windows. Windows NT doesn't do many segment loads. Threads use FS for thread local data so that is presumably loaded every time the scheduler switch threads, every 10 to 100ms. But that is a very small percentage of instructions. All code and data use the same values for CS and DS - base address 0 and limit 4GB. So Intel removed the segment descriptor cache. But since 16 bit OSs were still popular and those OSs load the CS and DS segment registers much more frequently. In fact they have to, since they were designed to work on the 286 back when 64K was the maximum possible limit. Since datasets and code sizes were way bigger than 64K, the segment registers are loaded very frequently. So in the Pentium 2 Intel reintroduced the cache. It's not a hack, just bad crystal ball gazing.

Actually most of Intel's mistakes are like that. They predict the future badly because of a strange mix of wishful thinking, a desire to get rid of legacy stuff and outright hubris.

Re:A crack-high moment.

[FreonTrip]

Well, let's be fair: Windows 95 was supposed to be able to scale down to 386 CPUs, which were capable of 32-bit code but thrived on 16-bit code. How well it did this is a matter of some debate, and generally you didn't want to do anything "serious" with the OS on less than a 486, but at the time there were a lot more potential customers using a 386 than there were using 686 CPUs, and the codebase indicates as much. :)

Re:A crack-high moment.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one ironic thing I find about Microsoft. Their client operating systems sometimes cause hair pulling, while they do quite well with their server stuff.

This actually underlines the fact that Windows crashes are almost never caused by the Windows OS itself, and almost always by buggy third-party drivers, and even buggy hardware, especially for things like video, which evolve rapidly.

Servers tend to be stable because there's no need to run the latest drivers for things like video and audio, and even if they are installed, they aren't exercised very heavily. Clients tend to crash because buggy drivers and/or hardware from firms like NVidia, ATI/AMD and Intel actually get exercised heavily, which exposes the bugs.

There's actually a slight argument for some form of open source here, since if NVidia, ATI, Intel, et al were willing to give the source code for their drivers to Microsoft, to include in the Windows OS builds, it would almost certainly lead to much higher reliability, since Microsoft would be able to spot a lot of these bugs through review of the code and stress testing (in contrast to the "many eyes" nonsense, Microsoft developers actually would be able to spot and fix bugs). However, these drivers are generally viewed as secret (eg NVidia don't want ATI to see their driver code and vice-versa, so neither will give sources to Microsoft), so Microsoft can't fix the bugs, but still get the blame when things go pear-shaped.

Microsoft's business model of supporting a huge range of disparate parts that can be combined into innumerable configurations has a lot of strengths, which is why it killed off most of the proprietary systems, but it does have weaknesses too. The reliance on drivers written by hardware vendors is probably the single biggest technical challenge Microsoft face, and also the single biggest issue that tarnishes the reputation of their software (arguably unfairly, except to the extent that they could make it easier to write device drivers).

2k?

[sunami]

How about Windows 2000? I still use it and have no real issues with it, unlike when I've used XP.

It WAS a high point

[Trenchbroom]

As much as it pains me to admit it, Windows 95 was a big moment in PC history. The death (slowly) of DOS, plug and play, functional networking, Direct X, gateway to 32-bit computing--all were huge at the time. Yes, OS/2 was as good or better, yes, Mac OS was still better in 1995, and yes, BeOS was soon to show everyone up. But for the needs of the many (and the needs of a world who would soon crave the Internet and 3D gaming) Windows 95 was huge: warts, blue screens and all.

Re:It WAS a high point

[phantomfive]

Yes, and it represents Microsoft at its high point. All the world (figuratively speaking) was happy to get windows 95, it was such a clear advance over windows 3.11. It was a job (relatively) well done. Investors were happy. Customers were happy. It was the product that would push them into the clear winner position in the PC market (and by PC in this case I include Mac, since they drastically lost market share afterwards).

Then anti-trust investigations started up. Windows 98 was an incremental update that had to be dumped for windows NT. Security issues started to matter. This open source stuff became a threat. Now everyone is trying to knock them off the mountain. And may very well succeed.

leaps and bounds...

[Alonzo Meatman]

Anybody who doubts the veracity of this claim obviously isn't old enough to remember Windows 3.1.

Re:That explains it.

[metlin]

You mean, like the Ballmer peak?

Considering what came before it...

[kungfoolery]

...ya gotta admit, Windows95 was a huge improvemnt. WFW was really nothing more than a crappy shell plastered on top of a not so great OS. With Win95, it seems MS really came up with something much more modern and different (please note, I'm comparing Windows to earlier iterations of itself, not Mac, Unix, or anything else). It finally implemented a TCP/IP stack, Explorer (for better or worse), 32-bit filesystem, and a workable interface. The stupid start button was still eons behind what Apple had (and still has), but it was a huge leap from WFW.

More accurate high point == buying DOS?

[Sparky9292]

I'd figure the major high point would be Bill Gates buying Tim Patterson's 86-DOS for $50,000 and selling it to IBM and the clones for bazillions.

Maximum point of dominance

[alexhmit01]

Before Win95, Apple has a small but real Market, IBM made noise with OS/2, someone was pushing GEOS (came with my multimedia upgrade kit at some point), and most computers booted to DOS and ran Wordperfect 5.1/DOS and or LOTUS 1-2-3 and connected to the Netware box. Even if most OEMs shipped with Windows 3.11, computers didn't always boot it. The real data was a 3270 terminal away. Microsoft's high-end OSes NT Workstation was a novelty, NT Server was an also ran.

With Windows 95, they took over the desktop... DOS was hidden, OS/2 defeated, and with Office 95 shipping WELL before Wordperfect ported to Win32... With Win95 they grabbed a desktop monopoly, Office monopoly, and pushed NT Server as highly competitive with Netware and inevitably overtaking them.

It'd be another 2 years before Netscape made Microsoft wet-itself, panic, and get itself into anti-trust trouble... the SAME anti-trust trouble that caused IBM to use a third-party OS and off-the-shelf processor when creating the PC.

Microsoft's profits might grow, Win2K might have gotten NT capable of replacing the DOS/Windows combo (XP with XP Home edition finally banished it), but the high water mark was hit. When Win95 launched, everyone was excited, the cheap PC Platform got a lot of expensive Mac/Amiga capabilities. The next few years, Microsoft spent floundering around for expansion (most of which didn't pan out), focused on suffocating competitors like Netscape, and Bill Gates spent time being deposed for court cases...

So yeah, it was the pinnacle of their success financially, and the peak for him before he went from geek hero to generally appreciated business hero, before his downfall as tech villain... It was the end of his being able to focus on technology and products, and the beginning of managing legal problems.

Re:Ah, I remember Windows XP

[Darkness404]

Ah, I remember way back when Windows XP was released, all the Lunix zealots tried to paint that as a failure, too.

Compared to Windows 2K XP was a failure from the user's standpoint. Though, the upgrade path was from ME to XP for the home users making XP much, much, much better. But for those of use on Windows 2K, XP was just extra bloat. XP also suffered from major security holes, I can't remember how much spyware I remember taking off of people's computers before Service Pack 2 introduced the concept of basic security. Windows 2K also didn't suffer from WGA or other DRM nonsense.

I predict that when the next desktop version of Windows is released, all the Lunix Zealots will be whinging about how terrible it is compared to Vista, and how Vista was the Greatest OS EVAR.

Actually, I don't think that will be the case. I think that MS has learned the lesson that DRM-laden OSes will not sell and remove the DRM and bloat from Windows 7, if it goes according to their plans (which I honestly doubt it will....) it may be a decent OS. But if it is inferior to free products (such as Linux) of course those using it are going to complain.

I wonder if it bothers him?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

TFA quotes Gates as saying "We got to dream about a software industry and the greatest tool of empowerment ever - the personal computer - and be part of creating that in terms of the platform and the applications,"

I wonder if the fact that MS is now decisively on the wrong side of the computer-as-tool-of-empowerment bothers him? I don't mean as a CEO or shareholder, obviously MS' strategy has made him giant piles of money; but personally. It can be argued that MS had a considerable hand in making cheap and common x86 gear a reality, back in the bad old days of fragmented consumer gear and hyperexpensive IBM suitware; but it has been a while now. Perhaps more than ever, MS is working against empowerment(and no, I'm not just fudding about Vista DRM-OMG!, I'm talking about things like Rights Management Services, and mandatory driver signing.) Even when they feel charitable, their notion of empowerment is "like corporate; but cheaper".

I wonder, does that bother Bill? What does he feel, privately, about the fact that MS has become the tyrant it overthrew, and has basically settled down to make money by offering software for enforcing corporate control? Does he like that or would he, off the record, admit a certain desire to be on the other side?

Re:Ah, I remember Windows XP

[dedazo]

Compared to Windows 2K XP was a failure from the user's standpoint.

And compared to NT4, Windows 2K was a failure from the user's standpoint.

Lather, rinse, repeat. The collective long term memory of the internets is so ephemeral that it doesn't surprise me we have these conversations every time Microsoft releases a new OS, but it does tend to get old.

Re:How about..

[Lehk228]

maybe most people on slashdot. if you start talking about breezy badges, gutsy gibbons, and hard herons in the average convenience store most people will just think you are some kind of pervert

Re:Ah, I remember Windows XP

[Mr2001]

Compared to Windows 2K XP was a failure from the user's standpoint. I disagree. Recall that before Windows XP was released, there were two different branches of Windows: an NT-based "professional" branch (NT 3.x -> 4.x -> Win2K) on the one hand, and a DOS-based "consumer" branch (95 -> 98 -> ME) on the other.

Well-written apps should have worked equally well on both branches, by sticking to the common subset of Win32 that was available on both, but in reality they didn't; there was common software that would run on 9x but not 2K, and vice versa. Windows XP's major achievement was to unify those branches into a single NT-based OS that was both shiny enough and compatible enough to serve as a 98/ME replacement for average consumers.

Maybe the eye candy was "extra bloat", but I do think it helped attract customers who would've stuck with ME otherwise. And that's a good enough goal in itself: the DOS branch was fundamentally less reliable and less secure than the NT branch. If a little bloat is what it took to get people off of the weaker branch, giving them a more solid OS and making developers' lives easier, then so be it.

Re:95 wasn't so bad....

[Joce640k]

>"it was a decently advanced OS for the time."

Only by Mocrosoft standards.

At the time 95 was launched, SGI was putting 64-bit IRIX machines on people's desktops.

OS/2 3.0 ("Warp") released in 1994 was better then Win95.

Then there was NeXTSTEP, Apple Mac, etc. - all better then Microsoft.

Microsoft "won" because they ran on cheaper hardware. In no way was their software superior.

Re:Very defensive about Vista.

[setagllib]

For a business relying on critical software, being able to legally and practically hire a contractor to fix a problem in open source software is a huge advantage over having to track down a developer legally and technically able to fix a problem.

Even if 99% of people can't fix the problem, having that 1% is enough to save a business. If it's 99.9999% of people who can't fix it, leaving a mere handfull of developers who can (for legal or technical reasons), you're pretty much sunk and have to take the disaster recovery or migration cost head-on.

Open source is a guarantee that things can be fixed legally and practically. You may not need it, but if you do, it can save your business. A lot of companies learn that the hard way, and that's why open source and open standards are growing and growing.

Re:Very defensive about Vista.

[Rary]

I agree with Gates, Win95 was as good as Windows got.

Actually, he didn't say that Windows 95 was as good as Windows got. He said that Windows 95 was a nice milestone.

Windows 95 literally changed the world of personal computing. It was revolutionary in a way that little else in the world of software has ever been. Few companies get the opportunity to produce even one product that has the kind of impact that Windows 95 had, yet people point to the fact that Microsoft hasn't had another like it as an indication of failure.

Microsoft has not put out another product that did to the computing world what Windows 95 did, and Bill knows that. But it doesn't mean that he thinks subsequent Windows versions were crap. In fact, I'm betting he doesn't use Windows 95 on his home PC.

Re:Very defensive about Vista.

[AcidPenguin9873]

I don't know why you named those four people; at least three of those four have been or are currently being compensated for their most famous "free" projects.

• Linus went to Transmeta in 1996 shortly after his Master's degree, and Transmeta paid him to work on Linux.
• Ian Murdock founded Debian during college, then was a part time student and staff programmer at the University of Arizona before founding Progeny (and presumably getting VC funding for it). One thing Progeny did was produce a commercially-saleable derivative of Debian. Then after that he went to Sun.
• Larry Wall was at JPL after grad school, and I'm sure he's made plenty of money off the Perl books he publishes through O'Reilly.
• I don't know about Stallman; he's some sort of communo-socio-anarchist and may survive on ramen handouts from the local organic food store, so you might have me there.

A common thread among those people is that they all started their major projects during college or grad school and found financial backing as they were leaving academia. Or in Larry Wall's case, he had a day job at JPL while working on Perl. I think you'll admit that college/grad student life can't realistically go on forever. Eventually your parents will stop giving you money and/or the university will stop paying your room and board, and you'll have to find a "real job" to support yourself and your family. I think lots of people in the open-source community are employed by the likes of IBM, Red Hat, Oracle, OSDL, etc. for their work. No, I don't feel like finding more references.

The message might be that we need to fund more people in grad school to work on pet projects, or that Microsoft needs to fund them, but in general I agree with Mr. Gates - development on large-scale projects can't continue indefinitely without some sort of compensation.

past few years?

[mkcmkc]

This involvement has allowed the end to end quality of FLOSS to skyrocket in the past few years I'm not sure what you mean by end to end here. Obviously FLOSS has moved into different domains at different times--some areas decades ago, while other areas may never see FLOSS.

One pattern does seem clear: once FLOSS gets a start in an area, it appears to attain supremacy within about five to ten years. And once FLOSS takes a niche, proprietary software never takes it back.

There will probably always be proprietary software, but days of Microsoft's primary niches are numbered.

I'm actually with Bill on this one

[Mr Z]

Windows 95, with all its warts and issues, was something of a high point. And, honestly, I do consider this from the vantage point of hardware built for Windows 95, running Windows 95 OSR2, or its closely related followon, Windows 98SE.

The launch version of Win95 was awful and nobody was really prepared for it and it caused plenty of problems. It didn't understand USB at all, etc. etc. etc. But, it eventually matured, and it really represented a fundamental mental shift for everyone: DOS is well and truly going away. You could manage things from a GUI. You don't have to set jumpers to install a card.

This was the first Windows that didn't boot into an obvious DOS first. It was the first Windows that started to feel more like a lot more than a graphical version of DOSSHELL.EXE. It was the first version you could credibly manage almost entirely by GUI, rather than editing obscure .INI files to comment out incompatible VXDs.

In terms of bringing the state of PC computing forward, Win95 was definitely one of the larger, more successful steps forward. If I had to rate the more successful steps on Microsoft's part, they'd be, in roughly chronological order:

• MS-DOS/PC-DOS 2.1x: First widely deployed and long-lived DOS iteration. Adds subdirectories, device drivers and the EXE format, IIRC. Powered the generation of IBM PCs, PCjrs and the first wave of compatibles that really began to put the PC on the map.
• MS-DOS 3.3: Probably the highlight of the DOS networking era. As I recall, this is the peak of the early LanManager attempts at networking PCs. Also brought many ideas from XENIX back into DOS.
• MS-DOS 6.2 + Win 3.1x: DOS reaches its pinnacle, with proper online help, a decent compiled BASIC and highmem support. Windows finally begins to become something worth putting at the end of AUTOEXEC.BAT for many people. Some of this started happening with MS-DOS 5, but it didn't really reach maturity until MS-DOS 6.2x.
• Win9x: Win95 was a much needed upgrade in interaction with the PC. Established a new UI that'd hold with minimal changes through XP (though it got a graphical refresh for the default XP theme, classic was still available). It finally made it reasonable for most people to dump DOS. It made managing the system entirely from the GUI credible. Though flawed, it brought us the first instance of Plug-and-Play and the end of the jumper. This alone was a pretty huge step. Combine it with USB, and you have a rather noticeable shift in ease of use at the hardware level. Granted, much of this didn't stabilize until around Win98SE, but in many ways Win98SE was really more of a Win95 SP4.
• Win2000: This put the NT kernel on the map for most people, and many still run it. This set the stage for the successful release of WinXP.
• WinXP: For all practical purposes, killed DOS dead for good by bringing the NT kernel to the masses.

I'm not sure whether Win2K and WinXP both belong on the list as separate bullets, or if they really kinda form a single bullet point. Their biggest contribution together was to kill DOS and force everyone to finally program with at least some hardware abstraction. <soupnazi>No direct hardware access for YOU!</soupnazi>

At any rate, if I were to name the highlights of the Microsoft path in terms of actually advancing the state of PC computing for most people, those would be the points I pick.

I'm not a Microsoft fanboi. I was something of a fan, if a bit timid about it, back in the early 90s. I quickly became disillusioned when I got to college and was exposed to UNIX. Here I was with a 386 all to myself that I could barely use without crashing, and I was logging into a timeshare AT&T SVR4 UNIX box with dual 486s, sharing it with 100 other people. In late 1993 I installed Linux and dual booted for a few years, but eventually I was running Linux only. So I'm no Microsoft apologist.

That said, you'd be

Windows vs. Linux in the 90s.

[DrYak]

Hell, in 96, I recall Linux + X not being a very stable desktop by today's standards either. Compared to modern linux distribution, it wasn't very stable.
Compared to the Microsoft software du jour, that's an entirely different story.

Usually, buggy software caused *some* application to stop abruptly. In worst-case scenario the whole K Desktop Environment would crash, bringing down you whole GUI and throwing you back to the shell. Nonetheless, everything running in the background kept running, completely unaffected by whatever problem you had with the GUI : The Samba shares, the Squid Proxy set up to share the modem connection, telnet & ssh, etc...

On Windows 9x/ME, whenever it crashed, you got a bluescreen and *absolutely everything* was down with it. In addition you could really do a lot of things with it. It was supposed to be multi-tasking, but you couldn't load more than a couple of apps at the same time anyway. Loading a CD Burning application and an Office Suite and a web browser was beyond its capabilities.

Windows 95 was the reason I switched to Linux.