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Windows 95 Turns 15
An anonymous reader writes "15 years ago on this day, Microsoft's then new Windows 95 was released. Among other things it moved users away from the archaic file manager and program manager to Windows explorer and the start menu. Compared to today's 'social desktop,' I'd much rather have the simpler and more sparse (pre-Internet Explorer integrated) Windows Explorer, though I do not like the (lack of) stability that Windows 95 offers. Of course if you were alive then, you've probably seen the commercials." I fondly recall downloading build after build and installing them. But within months of the official release, I switched to Linux.
I had a buddy back in 94/95 who was constantly throwing OS/2 in my face. Hey, look at all the Windows I can have open, look at my clean interface, look at how much faster and more stable this runs that your Win 3.11, look at all these DOS sessions open simultaneously!
Windows 95 finally gave me the ability to rub his arrogant face right in my ass. And, for that, I say "Thank you, Bill Gates."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
One of my favorites was WinNuke on IRC. Good times, good times.
Are we specifically referring to dos, or just the concept of cli file manager? Because frankly, to this day I run most of my linux boxes without a gui.
I'm not quite sure Archaic is the right word for something as useful as the cli.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I remember getting caught up in the hype and putting it on a 486 DX2 66 with 4 MB. Damn but that was slower than molasses running uphill in January. Suffered with that computer for nearly 2 years before I saved up enough for a replacement (poor college student at the time).
We can subtract! 2010 minus 1995 equals FIFTEEN!!!
Let's skip to the third grade!
I think one of my favorite things about Windows 95 was the music video for Weezer's Buddy Holly on the install disc.
This sig is in another castle.
I liked using Windows 95 over 98 because it rebooted much faster after bluescreening.
This space for rent.
Wow. I'm used to article summaries that have opinion or conjecture thrown in, but the only "information" in the summary here is the friggin title! Cmdr Taco I am disappointed.
Windows 95 was my first version of windows, and was a remarkably bland and inoffensive experience.
For me personally, 98 with active desktop was the start of the blue screens and instability which became a meme till the present day.
I don't know who Roberto Sparese is, but I'm sure he'll get a few more hits to his Facebook account as other readers also wonder whether that was actually a little-known word and not just a typo.
P.S. Cute kitty, Roberto!
Still funny: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjDSY8LczFw
While I could imagine using this sort of anthropomorphisation for a product that was still active, I think Windows 95 is dead.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
And today -- 15 years later -- it's still "almost ready" for the desktop.
Yes, more back-end shit runs Linux, but the sad fact is that Windows still owns desktops and Linux advocates have been too busy pissing in each other's teacups to bother taking advantage of the massive learning curve that Win7 requires, something so bad that switching to KDE or even Gnome is easier and more intuitive than "upgrading" from XP.
Sure "you make a grown man cry" but I doubt "you make a dead man cum".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Windows 95 was a trully innovative operating system. It allowed the convenience of use normally afforded only to those who had bought a Mac since 1986.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
...yes.. I remember the technical strategy behind Windows 95. Since Windows NT required more hardware let's create a mediocre Windows until hardware gets cheap enough to put NT on every machine. (finally it was accomplished with Windows XP)
Compared to Windows 3.11 it was the best thing ever created by a human. In that context, Windows 95 was pretty amazing. I always wondered why it took so long for a PC based OS to have a mouse cursor that was actually responsive. I guess my Amiga 1000 set a high standard for me a decade before Windows 95.
Better known as 318230.
me too
get win98 or win98se and run ROM or ROM2se on it (ROM = Revenge of Mozilla) it is basically a tool that strips out IE & OE and the win98 windows explorer and replaces it with a hacked/patched win95 windows explorer, and it is much more stable than win95 & more stable than a stock win98/win98se (i have to say it makes the best win9x possible but the only caveat is any application that requires internet explorer will not function. but anything else works great.
after doing a quick google search i think this app is nowhere to be found, i bet i can dig up a copy on an old CD-r that i kept with lots of ancient third party applications for win9x
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
and now Windows 95 is venturing into the angsty adolescent years. I don't even want to be around Vista when it begins high school....
I still say that Apple should have come up with a counter-commercial, showing Win95 crashes, driver annoyances, and other problems, all to the tune of "I Can't Get No Satisfaction."
I was using Norton Desktop on my Windows 3.1 box before Windows 95 came out. Nice clean interface and I didn't have to have a bunch of windows open. When 95 came out, it removed the need for Norton as it incorporated many of the features into the Windows shell.
I do know that Windows 95 killed my desire to muck with the system. With Windows 3.1 I was researching performance techniques and improving my config. I had a friend with a faster system however my Windows install was faster than his (he ranted a bit about it :) ).
But Windows 3.1 killed my desire to program until I got into Unix. I spent a lot of time reading the Petzold books and I understood how to write code for Windows but it was more complicated than I wanted to deal with for the hobby stuff I was doing.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
After so many years of Windows giving me an assfucking, now it's finally legal to... oh wait, one more year. Mustn't make that mistake again!
I'm really not trying to flame/troll/etc, but these "X turns N years old" stories are among the stupidest, most worthless non-story, non-news items ever posted on Slashdot.
I mean, really, WHO CARES??? No, seriously, I'm not just trolling. I really want to know, who among you actually thinks this story is newsworthy and/or prescient, and more importantly, why?
"And today -- 15 years later -- it's still "almost ready" for the desktop."
..
Lubuntu runs faster than Windows off a USB device, on the same hardware, browsing, word Processing, multimedia etc
lubuntu | light Ubuntu for faster computing
This layout of Windows has been in the market for 15 years, and I still have to do tech support for people who don't know what the fucking Start Button or task bar are.
"What web browser do you use?"
"Umm, I don't know? Foxfire?" "The E?"
...notice the speed? That's how responsive an OS should be today. And no bullshit layers of indirection excuses. The hardware is capable, and the software just needs to be made efficient.
Networking was the big leap forward from my perpective. I never had mouse responsiveness issues with Win 3, but when it came to plugging in to the ethernet or a modem, it was a train wreck of competing and incompatible networking layers. Depending on which application you needed to use, you might have to reboot into a completely different configuration.
If you wanted to create a dialup Internet-access service, you had to distribute a whole networking bundle to your prospective customers. What a mess!
Win95 ended that chaos.
It was pretty, too. Installing it was a nightmare -- 18 floppy disks, as I recall -- and it was prone to locking up while trying to detect hardware. But if you got it working you thought you'd gone to heaven.
Then the viruses came, and the bluescreens, and joy turned to sorrow.
I've used 98lite back then. The full version can also remove other unwanted stuff.
I guess Microsoft didn't make enough money from it yet, because it will still have copyright protection for some 60 years.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
http://www.cracked.com/blog/using-windows-7-may-lead-to-murder/
Of course marketing wisely removed the "You make a grown man cry...." lines from "Start Me Up"
If Microsoft had to re-imburse businesses for all the hours lost and wasted dealing with the steaming pile of crap (aka Windows 95) they would have been bankrupted years ago.
I used to use 98lite for this, which does still seem to be available. Worked very well back in the day.
Now, can anyone honestly say that there is any valid reason why the complete source code to Windows 95 should not be in the Public Domain already?
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Ah... I remember the Win95 launch. I was still living at home at the time
I know what you mean... A bridge is not quite the same thing.
And yay for still selling games that ran under it. Alas no Populous III
Of course if you were alive then, you've probably seen the commercials.
You don't honestly think that slashdot is in any way relevant to kids 15 and under, do you? If we even said "old enough to remember seeing the commercials" and graciously said that someone 5 years old at the time might remember them, that would mean you expect slashdot to have relevance to the 20-and-under set.
Although I honestly don't remember the commercials, and Windows 95 was the first OS I bought (or pirated? I don't remember now) on CD. I do recall that 95 was the first windows release that actually required you to enter a registration key at installation; 3.1 would graciously let you "enter it later".
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I think Windows 95 is greatly under-appreciated. I remember one of the biggest jokes was "Oh, its more Mac Like!". People who made that claim seem to not remember the horrors that was MacOS 7, 8 or 9. I did not become familer with Linux until 1997, so I cannot compare, but, as far as I can remember, the only thing even in the same league with Windows '95 OS/2, which Microsoft wrote a good deal of the code for, if I remember right. It pretty much standardized Plug N Play on the PC platform (granted, it was buggy, still had to manually reassign the IRQs on my Awe32 because Windows kept wanting to assign it the same IRQ as my video card), and it really started pushing the demand for faster processors (before that, people were like, my 286 can run Windows and I can run Word Perfect, why do I need a new computer). Windows '95 included Winsock intergrated into the OS, as well as dialers, so this made connecting to an ISP much easier than it had ever been. I was amazed with the concept that I could download multiple files at once! It made people want to upgrade to 256-color and high-color displays. The introduction of APIs ment that software manufactorors no longer had to write their software for each individual piece of hardware out there, you just had to have it complient to the API, and hope the sound card / video card / printer supported Windows specifications.
While it may have been insecure, prone to crashes, and the butt of many jokes, Windows '95 really did kind of revolutionize computing. I think credit is due.
A legacy bit of device programming kit I have only runs on Windows and needs a serial port, and I have an old Toshiba satellite laptop with not enough memory to boot XP .. Win95 works fine. I bought the world's oldest PCMCIA (non-32 bit) network adapter off a certain Internet Auction Site; I just drop Intel Hex files into a shared folder and off it goes. AND it doesn't insist on my downloading multiple updates for Windows security fixes every time I boot it. I did have to take the hard disk out, put a DOS boot image and all of the Win95 diskette images on to it to bootstrap the install, cuz I couldn't find enough 3.5 inch diskettes ..
...is the Win95's ease of copying and piracy really established their dominance in the PC market.
OS2 was a better system, but iirc much harder to pirate.
The fact that sneaker-net distribution meant EVERYONE grew up with a system running Win95 ended up making Gates a bajillionaire.
-Styopa
after doing a quick google search i think this app is nowhere to be found
After doing my own quick google search I found a mirror of it on the first page of results here.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Pedant...
It's weird, though. I moved out of the parents' place almost 15 years ago and despite only having been back for short stints since (a couple of university holidays when I couldn't find anything better and a period of about 2-3 months between finishing up my studies and finding a proper job - yeah, the market for new graduates was much kinder back then) I still call it "home" when I talk about it. This is despite having a mortgage on my own place and whatnot. I suspect if they ever moved house, I would never call their new place "home". There's just something about the place you grew up...
The commercials were the best.
If you start me up! ... If you start me up I'll never st...
An exception 08 has occurred at 0323:C23776D in VxD DiskTSD(03) * 00002848.
This was called from 0323:C2378D7 in VxD voltrack(04) * 00000000. It may be
possible to continue normally.
* Press any key to attempt to continue.
* Press CTRL+ALT+RESET to restart your computer
Windows is a 32 bit extension of a 16 bit shell for a 8 bit operating system written for a 4 bit processor by a 2 bit company that can't stand one bit of competition!
Ah, yes, I always got a kick out of how they cut off Mick Jagger right before he goes "you make a grown man cry!".
Win 95 was disgusting. I hated that OS and Win 98 was awful as well. The only thing those OSs ever did was get me to use Linux!
yup, thats the one!
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Seriously, dude. Know Your Ages of Consent.
We went from Windows For Workgroups to NT 3 in the IT dept where I was at and I never went back to consumer-grade MS OS. Three years ago I switched to Mac, and am quite happy. Sadly I keep an XP Pro VM around, will probably have to upgrade it to 7 so I can remote support my dad.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
Windows 95 is EOL, i.e. dead. It doesn't turn 15, just like King William I of the Netherlands doesn't turn 238. He would have turned 238 today, if he were still alive. Windows 95 would have turned 15 if it were not EOL.
I know someone who took a drink everytime W95 blue-screened. He died of liver damage in 97.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Consider that Windows 95 was a commercial success, but it set the wrong direction for Microsoft's software for a decade. Windows 95 was considered "easy and intuitive" and that users didn't really need to understand what they were doing. They only needed to ask themselves "where do you want to go today." This has led us to where we are today- a mess with literally one half million known computer viruses- all designed for the Windows platform. I blame Windows 95. As long as you make a lot of money, then all is forgiven. People chose the supposed "easy" and new look of Windows 95 over Windows NT 3.51. It's ironic that '95 was based on DOS guts; whereas, NT was actually the new architecture. It wasn't as "pretty" because it was based on the older Windows 3.1 interface. People chose cuteness over stability. It took until NT4 for it to get the same "look and feel." In the meantime, Microsoft didn't really know what to do with NT given '95's runaway commercial success. They chose to market it as "for business only." This vision continues at Microsoft to the present day.
Along the way, some of us got tired of their abuse and gouging and jumped off their sinking ship.
It was shoddy product and ridiculously unreliable.
What it did contribute, though, was that it showed the Apple Menu to the whole world. Mac OS has now moved away from that, but pretty much everyone else is now using some sort of logo, in the upper or lower left corner of the screen, to access a menu of applications and/or OS settings. And I think Windows 95 (not MacOS) really gets the credit for that. If they hadn't used the idea, I really just can't help but wonder if anyone would be doing it anymore. Maybe, maybe not.
Of course, Windows95 managed to get it wrong by labeling it "start," leading to maximum user-astonishment when people wanted to shutdown or reboot, but I assume that was just a joke. The idea behind it, wasn't.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
So Windows 95 was your dad's idea?
I remember a great cartoon in the paper around the time of Win95's release. It was a picture of a computer surrounded by confetti with "Windows '95" on the screen. And next to it was a Mac that said "Windows '84, '85, '86..."
Way to be 11 years later to the party, there Microsoft.
Surely the End of Life of Windows 95 precludes it from being 15... I mean... it's dead. Dead things don't age.
In other news, Yasser Arafat turns 81.
I explicitly release the above into the public domain.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjDSY8LczFw
In our household it was.
Don't think I'll ever forgive him for that one.
C:\NGRTLNS.W95
"...But within months of the official release, I switched to Linux..."
I know some kinky people, but not many who would go through the self flagellation that was the user experience of Linux in the mid-90's. If you tell me it was slackware I'll bow to the king.
It sucks less
Some time before Win95 came out I had already switched to OS/2, which I kept using far beyond 2000 upto the moment that I switched to Linux. When Apple OSX was released I switched to that fairly quick.
Neither OS/2 nor Linux was ideal, but it made me so happy not to have to use Win95 (and up).
For my work I mainly used the command line, and my servers ran OS/2 and Linux as well (DB/2 and Java), so that turned out pretty good.
People tended to laugh at me for being so recalcitrant with my OS choice. Yet I managed to reach financial independence in doing so. And I tend to believe that choosing my OS had unimportant role in that because we depended on speed and uptime for our business.
Therefore I want to thank Microsoft in retrospect for showing me how bad they sucked at OS development and innovation during my use of Windows 3.0 and 3.1 making me stay away from their products from then on.
Fond memories indeed...
if you look at a graph of the stock price of silicon graphics (i just tried to get this at google finance, but the historical information was unavailable) you see it peaks right about the time windows 95 was released. up until then, anyone trying to do serious (be sure to screw your face into a grimace when you say that) computing turned to unix and shunned dos and win 3.1. but with the release of windows 95 people got more ambitious about what they thought could be accomplished with commodity hardware and windows. if only they realized that 15 years later they would be almost on par with *nix ;-)
It's what most machines were shipping with in 1996 and 97, anyway. FAT32 support, no integrated MSIE crap, and a bit more stable than the original Win95 release.
I still have a pair of PPro gaming boxes running Win95 OSR2 (as well as various other OSes from the time period including BeOS 5 and versions of both Mandrake and Red Hat Linux.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
"you make a grown man cry"
Way back when I was in university, I did a placement year as IT technician at a school.
Now, if you've ever been a humble IT technician you'll know that the average technician frequently does not have the authority to do anything particularly interesting. This place was particularly bad because my own manager at the time was actively opposed to more-or-less anything that could make life easier. He wasn't hugely keen on scripting the boring work away, and suggesting that we license Ghost nearly gave him fits.
And he'd acquired a network of about 80-100 PCs running Windows '95 and '98 authenticating against an NT 4 domain. "Nightmare of Brobdingnagian Proportions" more or less covers it.
Isn't there a point at which it's spooky to be celebrating the birthday of dead things? Like, when it dies?
This is too Norman Batesy for me.
"I threw my Linux box .. behind a rack and .. Used it every day .. to process my porn images"
What is the correlation between a particular OS and the porn viewing habits of its Linux, Apple or Unix users.
I was at Boeing back then. Everyone in engineering had Macs but the fix was in with Microsoft. W3.1 was judged unsuitable for use, so only a few poor suckers were stuck with that. We had a number of PCs running DOS. Great for lab use, as numerous ISA cards were avaiilable, or easily cobbled up by our technicians.
One day, the IT folks showed up and dropped a Dell 166 on my desk (between my Mac and X terminal). It only had a DOS command prompt, but the hardware guys assured me that the Windows guys would follow shortly with their install disks.
About 3 months later, this pig was still sitting there with nothing but a DOS command prompt staring back at me. The story was that initial W95 installs were proving to be a disaster and IT was in the process of staffing up to levels needed to support the platform. I went to my boss and told him, "While I'm waiting, there's this other system available now that I can load and try out. Its called Linux."
He said, "OK" and I've never looked back. Thank you Mr. Gates.
Have gnu, will travel.
I'm gonna get flamed for this, but even though I mostly used Netscape, I actually liked IE3--the page rendering seemed to be smoother but it seems like neither browser was all that stable.
Sent from my iPhone
Yeah... It would be 15 years old today if it were still alive.
(Coincidentally, 15 years is roughly 95 in IT years.)
Ask me about my sig!
Let me submit news that before anyone does.
Yeah, i tried to watch that with my Amiga 1200... MC68030 just wasn't enough without framedropping :)
you mean the ping of death? god was that fun (back in the day when icq also showed the ip of the other party)
CRT monitors. When I've seen them I've literally thought "what are those THINGS?!" I would use Windows 95 on a TFT rather than any OS on a CRT.
Slashdot can add.... Good Job....
At the time may career as a NetWare sysadmin was just taking off, so it was another six years before I made the switch to Linux, but for me Win95 marked the beginning of the end of my belief in proprietary software.
Windows 95 is commonly regarded as the most dangerous computer virus known. Once installed, it will crash the victim's computer in only matter of minutes.
Reference: 08:25 at Star Wreck V: Lost Contact
Apple doesn't want the corporate market IBM couldn't even get it together with OS/2 but they didn't want the home market Linux doesn't want the computer incompetent
Hits the nail on the head
"Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion." ~General Norman Schwarzkopf
I can remember Win 95! I actually found a machine last year that ran it and it looked so primitive, but I remember just how much I loved it when it first came out. Now I'm XP through and through. But I'm feeling all nostalgic now.... dubli time?
I NEVER liked windows, coming from an Amiga background (I had the 500 + 1200).
When My Amiga died in 1996 I got a Windows PC that cost 4 times the amount had 16 times the RAM and was about 50 times time faster in CPU speed (in Mhz) but was about 1000 X slower in doing anything, it was so unstable, everything cost lots more but did not have the capabilities of software on the Amiga (untill about 1/2 decade later) and our entire OS actually crashed (all the time) - with the Amiga crashes (guru mediations) nearly always occurred only ever in games.
So for me I view Microsoft as a company that make computing progress go backwards.
As well as being technically inept MS use their monopoly to prevent progress and innovation.
Microsoft use FUD and threats about made up patents relating to Linux and open-source software to use a Mafia style technique of bullying money out of companies - with 'patent deals' - Tomtom and Amazon are recent victims. All the details are off record (if the details were ever publicised Microsoft could no longer use FUD as a weapon...) (I prey someone leaks the info to wikileaks)
The result of Microsoft tactics have both helped to prevent innovation in the industry (Apple are being just as bad recently) and end up costing governments around the world huge bills with windows licenses that could be avoided and spent to improve society - alternatives exist but MS have always done their most to ensure that competition cannot exist
years TOO old.
Yours In Moscow,
Kilgore Trout
It's nice that Microsoft and its trolled have "fixed" written history.
Windows 95 was not released to the consumer market until 1996.
You can edit WiKipedia, but you can't change reality.
E
I remember the commercials with the Rolling Stones singing "Start Me Up". I also remember the other applicable line from that song, "You make a grown man cry."
I hate Windows explorer. I really wish they would add back Winfile.exe, just add long-filename support. I always had two-panes, side by side in a single window.
Since they haven't, the first thing I do is install PowerDesk. It costs about $29, but it is worth it. I setup my two-pane view in a single window, with drive icons and other shortcuts on the powerbar above.
PLEASE don't tell me how you can open up two explorer windows and place them side by side. That's a nightmare when you have many windows open.
Total Commander is also good.
Most of the time I run Ubuntu, so this doesn't come up much anymore. But I'm also in school, which apparently is sponsored by Microsoft, so I keep a Windows box around for that - and a few games!
Some settling may occur during posting.
Surely, you don't really think that's what it's all about, do you? Who cares if Windows has more market share? The purpose of free software projects is to produce quality free software, and as long as we continue to do that we could care less whether more people are using it than the proprietary alternative.
Market share is a measure of quality.
If your app is still widely regarded as second rate, and not worth the price even when distributed free-as-in-beer, you have a problem that needs fixing.
Sure, Win95 looks bad today - it certainly crashed a lot, for one thing. But there's no denying that it improved the lot of most ordinary computer users by leaps and bounds. It really was a tremendous advance over Win 3.x. Linux might have been better still, but the fact is that almost no one had even heard of Linux at the time, and in any case, Linux wasn't really in any kind of shape for the average user to handle in 1995.
The transition that really blew me away, though, was DOS - Windows 3.x. I was in grad school, and I was taking this Matlab-based course. At the time, you programmed Matlab by editing a script file with a text editor... which meant "edit.exe". I was going crazy - I kept having to start edit, amend my script, shut down edit, run Matlab, shut down Matlab, write up results in WordPerfect 5.1. Shut down WP, start edit, save, shut down edit, start Matlab... rinse, repeat. Then I read about this thing called Windows (3.1 had just rolled out)... you mean I can run all this stuff... at THE SAME TIME??? I ran to the bookstore.
Sure, Windows 3.x was sucky. But at the time, it was a godsend. The thing to remember is that things in retrospect look different than they did at the time.
I was working as a computer programmer in the late 70s and early 80s. I remember the big fuss around the first 16 bit micro-processors, Intel 8086, Zilog Z8000, and Motorola 68000. I particularly remember when the hardware guys at my company got their hands on a sample 68000. We looked at that 64 pin chip like it was a precious jewel. The general consensus there and in the computer mags was that the 68000 was the best of the lot. So what happened? IBM came out with the PC using the 8086 and 'the masses', the non-cognoscenti, all rushed out and bought that. My thought at the time was that they were just mesmerized by the 3 letters IBM on the machine, and it ran MS-DOS. So my perception is that that's how Microsoft first cornered their market. To paraphrase Mae West, "Goodness had nothing to do with it." Fast forward about 10 years. I'm working at a place that sells software on a lot of platforms, I ported the product to various Unix clones but they also had guys doing MS-DOS and IBM stuff. OK, I get assigned to do a port to OS/2 version 1.0. I did it and thought the OS was pretty cool. It was my first use of threading, except for some crude stuff using unix fork. Then the next version of OS/2 came out. It's been awhile, but I think it was supposed to have been done by a British group that had a totally different philosophy. Everything I'd written broke, and I struggled to get it working till my boss said forget it. He never had anything to do with OS/2 after that.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
Anybody serious about software engineering or 32-bit development using Microsoft products was using David Cutler's Windows NT series (3.51 May 1995 and doing alpha/beta development on 4.0 which would be released those outside Microsoft and the first-tier partners the following year).
True...but did OS/2 have Hover?
There are few Linux distros that preinstall many games, or many of the simple apps people like, I don't quite get it.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Win95 was 32-bit "OS" bolted on DOS. OS/2 was 32-bit from the ground up.
Argh, not this again.
I guess death is to make sure history moves forward, otherwise society would keep repeating the same thing for eternity.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
It was available in retail stores Aug 1995.
Obviously you were not old enough to remember the release, so do some digging and check the archive sections in major newspapers. Some have the actual headline story from that day, as well as pics of the line ups that put today's Apple fanbois to shame, that is unless Microsoft and its trolled have "fixed" written history everywhere.
Put several programs and docs in a folder. Mark the folder as a Workgroup Folder by checking the little box.
From then on, every time you opened that folder, all of the programs and documents inside of that folder would start running and/or open up in their previous position. All at the same time. One double-click.
Close the folder, and all of them would fold themselves up and put themselves away. One double-click.
Instant workspaces.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
16-bit OS/2 software (both PM [GUI] and VIO [text mode]) ran just fine on OS/2 2.x and later (and IBM was absolutely ANAL about keeping backwards compatibility intact), so you must have been referring to something which happened midstream during OS/2 1.x's development? The 32-bit versions after 1992 were all written in the US.
Of course, I can't speak for any in-house software that you folks developed. All I know is that I ran a LOT of older utilities in the OS/2 2.0 and 2.1 days before better alternatives came along. It's possible some failed ... my software selection process filtered them out, so my memory could also be selective. :-)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
My opinion as well. What I think made the 68000 the top of the line is Motorola designed a 16-bit CPU with a 32-bit ISA and register set, and no memory segmentation with a 24-bit address bus. Neither the Z8000 nor the 8086 had these advantages (the Z8000 did have a non-segmented model, but only had 16-bit addressing, and the 80386 shoehorned its 32-bit architecture onto an ISA only designed to be 16-bit). Oh, how I wish the 8086 had simply been left to die instead of becoming ubiquitous with modern computing.
Haha, I was a PC newbie back then. I remember buying Windows 95 upgrade CD from a local CompUSA store. I didn't line up for the midnight madness. I almost bought that Pitfall game too. :D
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
> When elephants fight it is the grass under their feet that suffers the most.
When elephants make love the grass suffers too. => Elephants are bad for grass whatever they do.
1600 years ago today - 24 August 410: the date it all went wrong for Rome? ...Who exactly were the Visigoths, the barbarians from the North who marched unopposed into Rome?
Mr Von Rummel says the latest research reveals a very different picture from that held as recently as 50 years ago.
"Today we know the group consisted of different people, it was mainly an army with a successful leader. People joined this group inside the Roman Empire. They sacked a lot of towns but they acted in different ways, they also were a sometime partner of the Romans," he said.
"The moment the Roman emperor did not pay any more they changed sides and sacked the town just to tell the emperor: 'You should pay us'...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I remember all the hype about win95. You could actually buy it on floppies if you didn't have a CD drive or if it was not recognized. I never had too much of a problem installing it, but just about every computer had specific config.sys and autoexec.bat files. I do remember it being rather fragile and could be made to crash pretty easily. I was typically reinstalling win95 about every 6 months as that proved the only way to get consistent good operation from it.
-- After all is said and done, more is said than done.
but it's still very alive.
Go linux!
Actually OS/2 was cheap too. I still have a red-spine OS/2 Warp Version 3 from that era (the one which - if you wanted Win3.1 support - you had to have your own Win3.1 install disks) - the version which was out at the same time as Win95 (of course there was also the blue-spine - which came with Win3.1 support built in, and OS/2 Warp Connect (with networking) V3 red and blue spine). The price sticker on the base red-spine version was $49.95.
Win95 retailed for more then that as I recall.