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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).
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.
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?
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)
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
Windows 95's upbeat but non-hipster marketing marked the start of a high point for Microsoft. They were essentially saying "here's something we think is good enough to do lots of things with, and we're going to help you do that" - and they were right. It wasn't anywhere near interesting technically, but it was accessible, cheap, familiar and MS encouraged it to become well-supported on a variety of hardware.
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!
Well, seen in the context of Microsoft's other commercials and marketing campaigns, this is arguably the least terrible. Its almost actually kind of good. I didn't vividly remember how terribly Win95 was, I might actually be kind of inclined to want to buy it. Its much less lame than the Win7 commercials, and its 88 windows better!
A year? I don't recall mine going that long without needing a reinstall. I'm sure it was possible, I just didn't feel like putting in the work it took to make happen. Back during the days when DOS was the thing, it wasn't so bad, even with Win 3.1 bolted on top of it, but somehow Win 95 marked the more or less beginning of the end of any effort at keeping up the appearance that the customer is the person that purchases the copy.
It's not so much teacup pissing as herding cats.. It's hard to build a top-down integrated solution without people on (the same) payroll. The only thing that saved it for the back end is the fact that everyone generally agreed to do things the *nix way.
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?"
Oh noes, we're not taking over the world, our evil plan is foiled!
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.
I can subtract too, 2010 minus 2011 equals minus one. Autodesk Maya 2011 must have come out negative one years ago ;)
Sorry, I call bullshit. A known issue, fixed only in 1999, would prevent Windows 95 and 98 from going over 49.7 days of uptime (2^32 milliseconds). Much hilarity ensued back in the day since "how could anyone have noticed / run into this" :-)
Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
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.
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 like them... Reminds me how far we have come.
Need an ISP in South Africa?
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.
Well, Apple's OS at the time wasn't exactly the pinnacle of stability (or anything else for that matter), so it would have made them look a bit silly. Even Mac OS 9, released in 1999, made Windows 95 look remarkably modern.
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.
Replace Windows 95 with Windows 2000 and I agree. Windows 2000 was the apex of the Microsoft Operating systems. If it weren't for the ubiquity of wireless (and the non-support of Windows 2000 of it), I think I could still use it productively today. Windows XP brought two things that were worthwhile: Fast User Switching and Wireless support out of the box... which many wireless chipset manufacturers don't seem to understand given the unneeded crap they bundle. A third, but mostly for corporate use, would be Remote Desktop... but my memory might be hazy and W2k might have had it.
Okay, but was Windows 95 really such an important milestone? And why is 15 years so significant? Next year it will be 16 years old. Are we going to have another Slashdot story about it then?
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!
Beware the powers of nostalgia my friend. Just reading through this tread has brought back a wash of memories from my Windows 95 days. Playing Hover, the Buddy Holly video on the install disc, the blue screens...
Can anyone tell me why 99% of
Sometime around 2000 or 2001, I inherited a Windows 98 machine with massive installed cruft. It ran slowly, and did a lot of weird things. Finally, one morning, it finally collapsed. After trying resuscitation to no avail, I grabbed the handiest Windows CD -- which happened to be the initial release of Windows 95. I installed it and was amazed at how quick and responsive the PC (a Pentium of some sort) had become. So I downloaded and installed about two dozen patches. Not only fast, but a lot more stable than I remembered Windows 95 being.
Finally, after a few weeks, I decided to try using fully patched Windows 95 on a minimal machine. So I installed it on my experimental CPU fanless 5x86 (a 133MHz 486 with a heatsink about the size of a beer can) with 16mb of memory. It ran beautifully. It usually went a couple of weeks between reboots -- which is about what my current Linux system can manage before the memory leaks get it. I used it for a number of years until application bloat, application dependence on IE libraries and lack of Windows 9 USB support made continued use impractical. And I liked it. I liked it better than much heftier machines with Windows 98. Lots better than Windows 2K (which I, stupidly in retrospect, tried to configure with a separate admin user -- something which pretty much did not work with the applications then available although no one admitted it at the time). Better than Windows XP. I never tried Vista and don't much care for Windows 7 although I think the latter is at least fairly well crafted, and I have to give Microsoft credit for getting hardware configuration working pretty much right after only 13 or 14 years of trying.
So, my feeling is that Windows peaked somewhere around Windows 95-OSR2 and their single user OS pretty much has been downhill from there. I wonder if Microsoft had decided to continue develop and support an MSDOS core OS separate from their server/workstation OS, and had abandoned failed experiments like the Registry and IE integration as soon as their flaws were recognized, if they might not have an OS today that was competitive on todays low powered, performance limited, personal devices.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
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
Especially the "news" part. How can predictable events be news? Stop the presses, 15 years from now, Win95 will turn 30 years old!
I'm guessing that you're not Justin Bieber, teen singing sensation?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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.
And today -- 15 years later -- it's still "almost ready" for the desktop.
In all fairness that is because the finish line keeps moving. Just because they're still behind does not imply that they haven't been close in the past. Personally, my first real experience was around 2000. At the time, the OS presented to consumers was Windows ME and Windows 2000 was overpriced and poorly supported by non-business applications. At the time I really thought Linux had a bright future, I'd say they were way past ME. Then in 2001 Windows XP came and was a lackluster for those of us used to win2k, but compared to win98/ME it was a dream. It fixed pretty much all the fundamental problems of the win95/98/ME line, games started supporting both 2k and xp so I stayed on 2k but it was xp that made it usable. My thoughts about switching to Linux faded away.
Fast forward about six years, to 2007. The current Microsoft offering is Windows Vista, and the early impressions of that were definitively not good. In fact, so bad that I figured it's time to look around again and see what was happening. I'd had a linux server going most of the time but never seriously considered it as a desktop. I was looking at a quite mature KDE 3.x desktop which I felt was pretty much on par with Vista and after a while of going back and forth I switched. I suppose you can argue back and forth how "ready" it was, but I found it worked well for me.
For a while there, the gap widened again with KDE 4.0, Microsoft fixing the most issues with Vista and released Win7, which is actually a very nice OS as far as I've used it. I don't know why you'd think now would be good timing, compared to the XP-Vista gap or Vista period it'd probably be the worst timing of the decade. I'm hoping Microsoft will stumble a little again and KDE4/Gnome3 go well enough to take another swing in 2-3 years, which by my counting would be the third close encounter. Consider it more of a marathon, just because we're behind doesn't mean we're not running or that we might eventually catch up as those in front tire.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
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
Did you ever use Windows 3.11? Because that whole "time-slice" multi-tasking made for a dog-slow machine. An idle app still got it's "fair share" of the CPU time for no good reason. It also couldn't manage memory to save its life and needed add-on software to access more physical memory. Oh, and I think '95 was the first time Windows came with a viable networking stack and could do TCP/IP out of the box.
As much as I wasn't a fan on Windows '95, and had been using Linux for several years before that, it did bring better multi-tasking and the like.
Windows '95 was the beginnings of Microsoft actually having an operating system that did what 'real' operating systems of the day did, everything else was just basically cheap hacks on top of DOS -- and, in some ways, Windows '95 still had some cheap hacks, but it was a step in the right direction.
Heck, they might have another one tomorrow, just for the fun of it. You know how dupes go around here. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
So Windows 95 was your dad's idea?
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.
Sorry, I call bullshit. A known issue, fixed only in 1999, would prevent Windows 95 and 98 from going over 49.7 days of uptime (2^32 milliseconds). Much hilarity ensued back in the day since "how could anyone have noticed / run into this" :-)
Thing is, I know of at least one other installation that was reputed to have stayed up for a long time - much like the GP asserts.
My guess is the machine(s) in question were somehow or other rebooting themselves in the middle of the night long before 49.7 days was up.
I think it is worthwhile and why is very easy to answer:
Because I, along with many others in this thread, was THERE when it happened. The endless re-installs, blue screens, and tweaking. Moving from 3.11 to 95, and then 95 to 98. Now that I am a network engineer, I don't see as many things that really make me go WOW. After muddling around in DOS for so many years it was kinda cool to see the evolution to 3.11, 95 etc. I know that performance wise that early Windows was crap...but in a way it still felt like coming out of a cave into the light of day.
And it would appear from the comments that I am not alone in enjoying the nostalgia. If you have no interest in nostalgia, that's fine. Go find something you enjoy reading about. Surely these types of stories interspersed with the others is not too great a burden to bear.
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 don't know about that. Although I could have done the math, I didn't put 95 and 15 together to make 110. I realize that windows 95 is ancient, but it came out about the same time I started noticing computers. In the back of my head, its somehow always cutting edge, I think of windows 95 and my first thought was that commercial on youtube, and there's a flash of "THE FUTURE IS NOW!"
It's kind of like how when you first started noticing girls, you had your first real crush, and maybe you look back now and don't know what you possibly thought was attractive in her at the time, and on her facebook page now she mentions she's a creationist and you see that she's 50 pounds overweight... but whenever you hear her first name you sometimes think "Oh that's that bodacious babe in algebra... wait, no..."
Anyway, nerd nostalgia is at type of news for nerds. I care.
In our household it was.
Don't think I'll ever forgive him for that one.
C:\NGRTLNS.W95
I agree totally. Windows 95 turning 15 affects no one's life at all, so this should be "idle" at best
"...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.
I've got nothing against windows, I've been earning good money from it for 20yrs. However I'm old enough to remeber when "start me up" was in the charts, so the first thing that came into my head when I heard the ad was the lyrics; "You make a grown man cry. 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.
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 ;-)
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.
Evil tounges would say the proof is in the pudding and that the lack of people using it proves it's not good quality compared to the alternatives, no matter how brilliant the few who us it think it is. Outside of server apps like Apache none of the OSS poster childs like Firefox, OpenOffice, GIMP etc. are dominant in their area. It's certainly not because of the price. It's not because of the obnoxious EULA and use restrictions. It's not because of the forced upgrades and lock-in. I suppose you can tell yourself that it's all because of the marketing and dirty tricks Microsoft and Adobe pull, but I strongly doubt that's the only explaination. In some areas OSS has a very long way to go before they can deliver anything called quality software, I use it daily and it ranges from extremely good to extremely crappy. And unlike in the Windows world often that crappy project is the best and possibly only there is, while on Windows you can usually pay your way to quality...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
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.
I remember people saying at the time they wouldn't "downgrade" from Windows 3.11 to '95. This was one of my first experiences with zealots, though I have no idea why they'd pick Win 3.11 to be zealous about. Most of them probably couldn't "downgrade" because their computers weren't fast enough, but some of them I think truly believed Win 3.11 was better than 95. (I realize Win 95 had plenty of its own problems, but to call it worse than Windows 3.11 was insane - the people saying that definitely hadn't used both.)
I always turned the computer off when I was done with it, back then. That's what we were trained to do with the old 8-bit micros I had as a kid, since there wasn't much point to leaving them on & idle.
My uptimes in Win 95 were always limited to several hours at most, on purpose.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
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.
But within months of the official release, I switched to Linux.
Windows 95 drove me to try Linux too, but much faster than months. It only took about a week. Never went back. Win 95 really sucked. Thank you, M$!
The video isn't accurate for my state (Utah). It says the age of consent is 16, but that's only true if you're less then 10 years older. The true age of consent in Utah is 18. I suspect lots of states have similar caveats.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
PCs had color before Mac.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
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.
Only certain hardware would hang...
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
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
Firefox overtook IE in Germany at least. It has a huge market share the world over, and this despite IE shipping with windows.
But I'm sure you'll just say that that's only one example and your point holds. Whatever. For me, I see better quality and in the FOSS world and it allows me (as a highly skilled technical user) to do more of the stuff I want to do.
As long as a critical mass of interest holds (and we're way, way above that right now) then I really don't care if you feel it's ready for grandma or not.
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!
The look the little girl gives the camera at the end of the commercial always made me giggle a bit. It seemed to say "What? This is it? Seriously?"
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Let me submit news that before anyone does.
My work Win 95 machine, in the 300MHz days, was coaxed into running for about 30 days without a reboot. By then it was unusable though, I remember icons on the screen all being corrupted, you could barely start any applications due to lack of resources. I can't remember if I purposefully rebooted it in the end, or if it crashed.
9x did not do stability, but it did mean that when sat in front of a 9x machine you wouldn't get stuck at the office late. 2 minutes before home time, a quick double ctrl-alt-del and it would be a case of "fucking Windows has crashed again. Oh well, might as well go home, 'cause I can do anything without the computer working". You can't get away with that any more, every day. Maybe once a month. The PHBs have wised-up to the fact that most computers don't appear to be as shit as they used to be. Windows is of course as shit as it used to be, just in different ways.
Just remembered another 95 PC in the same office, connected up to a client's network for support, that went really strange one day, the clock started going too quickly. I think it was going about 4 times faster than it should, and seeing the clock spinning too fast was utterly hilarious. The machine seemed to be working fine otherwise though. A reboot cleared it, and I never saw Windows do that again... that was the kind of craziness you got with 9x!.
Car analogies break down.
Well, they did this.
Circumcision is child abuse.
OSR2 was pretty nice, as the 9x versions of Windows went. FAT32, USB, pretty stable. It still sucked to high heaven but I kept an OSR2 machine around to play Win95/DOS games on once I switched to 2000 for daily use.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
Massive learning curve? Compared to switching to Linux? No I don't think there was an opportunity there.
Where there was a clear opportunity was netbooks. Linux had a clean year on a platform that played to all their strengths. You want an example that one stinks.
As for "almost ready". Its been ready for 10 years. It just hasn't been better than the 2 main competitors. The GNU project was successful in creating a free OS usable for anything. It was no successful in creating the best OS on the market. OTOH the original goal was a free Unix and then the best Unix on the market. I'd say in terms of traditional Unix desktops they were successful. People in 1998 would be shocked that a dozen years later Solaris, AIX, Digital Unix, IRIX have all been essentially passed by Linux.
It was an important milestone in a commercial sense: it was not innovative, it was not even particularly good, but it sold INSANELY well.
Circumcision is child abuse.
OSS poster children:
typesetting: Document Sciences products haven't advanced. I'd say TeX likely has it here.
scripting languages: Perl, Python and Ruby are the big ones. Where is REXX? Where is AutoLisp? Except for Microsoft Batch File Language (which no one claims is any good), are there any commercial ones even in the top 10?
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.
I agree with you. For Linux to succeed it either needs to find new markets (like embedded) or Microsoft needs to trip badly. Both are possible. There was a real opening with the Netbooks.
Anyway you sound like someone who would like OSX.
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 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
My dissatisfaction with Microsoft didn't begin until my first XP installation, and the third party firewall I always installed (Kerio), which clued me into the evilness of Microsoft's empire. Basically, I ran a file search on my local hard drive. I forget now what I was looking for, but Kerio popped up an alert for outgoing traffic the second I clicked the search button. Seems that Explorer.exe wanted to contact Microsoft servers every time I performed a search, even though the search was limited to the local drive. I permanently blocked that action, but it left a really bad taste in my mouth. MS has no need nor right to be contacted when I am looking for personal files stored on the local drive.
When the abortion that was Windows Vista came out, I switched to Ubuntu, and haven't looked back since. I keep a copy of Windows XP on a small virtual machine with no outside access for the occasional task that requires a Windows OS. Other than that, I have been free of the Microsoft teat for almost four years now. That's not to say that Linux and FOSS don't have their own problems and frustrations, but I'd rather search for a solution on the Ubuntu forums than the Microsoft Knowledge Base any day of the week.
Over the past four years, I have switched all of our corporate servers over to Linux, and am slowly switching workstations over to Linux or Mac, utilizing Windows on locked down VMs wherever it's necessary.
I wish I would have had the foresight to make the switch sooner; I would be just that more experienced with it.
Yeap, 2000 was the pinnacle of MS products. Since then they have been focusing even more on attracting new users to computers, and as a consequence the amount of shiny-shiny and hand holding has sky rocketed.
2000 pro never had remote desktop, but the server versions did. I used to use 2000 server as my desktop OS for a good while, because it was essentially the same as 2000 pro, but with the useful feature of terminal services. I used to connect to the TS from work so that I could surf, IRC, usenet, etc. from work, without incriminating applications or data on my work PC.
Car analogies break down.
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 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.
The correlation is that Linux users won't tolerate the Blue Balls of Death you get when Windows crashes.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
>>My guess is the machine(s) in question were somehow or other rebooting themselves in the middle of the night long before 49.7 days was up.
I had Cygwin installed, so I actually could run uptime and see.
I took a screenshot of it, I'll see if I can dig it up.
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)
Replace Windows 95 with Windows 2000 and I agree. Windows 2000 was the apex of the Microsoft Operating systems. If it weren't for the ubiquity of wireless (and the non-support of Windows 2000 of it), I think I could still use it productively today. Windows XP brought two things that were worthwhile: Fast User Switching and Wireless support out of the box... which many wireless chipset manufacturers don't seem to understand given the unneeded crap they bundle. A third, but mostly for corporate use, would be Remote Desktop... but my memory might be hazy and W2k might have had it.
Until not that long ago I steered non-technical computer users to Windows 98. It was stable enough that you could live with it, did what people needed to do, didn't require ridiculous amounts of CPU or memory, and had USB that worked. Some people claim there is USB support in Windows 95, but after careful study I have come to the conclusion that they are mistaken.
Now, of course, I suggest they buy a Mac Mini. When my Mom saw mine she flipped over it and promptly bought herself one. The killer app for her was Garage Band, since she's a musician.
...laura
Windows 95 (or Win2k, for that matter) are both pretty fax on a 200MHz PPro. I still have a few of those lying around, and at times they're more responsive than my XP desktop.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Yes, and Windows 3.0 before that. And yes, when Windows 95 came out, I (eventually) upgraded. However, pre-emptive multitasking or not, Windows 95 hardly qualifies as an important computing milestone in my book. More to the point, even if it was an important milestone, it would still be, IMO, completely pointless and vapid to have a news story about it turning 15.
Taking over the world? No. But you can't have it both ways. Either Linux's adoption in servers, mobile devices, etc. is meaningless, or its lack of adoption on the desktop is meaningful.
Granted, there is a technical distinction between the desktop environment and the Linux kernel, but that distinction is irrelevant to the average user, and as long as it continues to be used as an excuse, it will prevent growth, both qualitative and quantitative.
Finally, as to producing "quality free software" nearly all of it is command-line oriented; GUIs are either tacked on, or left out entirely. I realize *why* apps follow this pattern of design, necessitated by the distinction between kernel and desktop environment, but modularity all too often comes at the expense of tight and seamless integration from the user's perspective, exacerbated by the lack of standardization in controls and widgets.
As the GP stated, the lack of coherence on the desktop is attributable to the "herding cats" nature of development. Nonetheless, it's still a problem that hasn't been adequately addressed, and lack of uptake is, I believe, evidence that "quality free software" is *not* being produced, at least not when the definition of quality includes transparent integration within in a larger environment.
To be fair, the tools and standards for such integration have come a long way in both Gnome and KDE, but unfortunately there is far less than universal adoption of such standards, even within the environments themselves. Worse, there is necessarily a competition of human interface standards between Gnome, KDE, and even the unnecessary tweaks to each made by a given distro. When standards compete, especially on this sort of scale and timeline, everyone loses.
There are plausible methods to unify on a singular vision and prevent forks from creating a rift, but as with the kernel, it does require a final arbiter of some sort, along with his or her popular support. Unfortunately, people with the skill, vision, and benevolence of Linus Torvalds are hard to find. Pick any two, as they say. Not that Linus is god-like by any means, or that he hasn't made bad decisions in the past, but overall he's clearly done a very good job of managing the official kernel, willingly integrating opposing ideas when, if not before, it becomes clear they're superior to his own. He's neither become overly corrupted by his authority, nor leveraged it unduly for personal gain; something quite unlike the Ellisons or Shuttleworths of the world. Naturally people disagree with some, or perhaps many, of Linus' decisions, but it's hard to argue with success. Which brings us full circle to the lack of success of "Linux" (for lack of a more over-arching term) on the desktop.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
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.
What is the correlation between a particular OS and the porn viewing habits of its Linux, Apple or Unix users.
Windows XP - underage porn, 200lb breasts, been drinkin motorcycle ladies
Linux - erotic sexual fantaxy stories with multiple participants and unknown outcomes
MacOS - regular, healthy porn can sometimes stimulate sex in marriage
iphone OS - no time for porn - just sex, sex, and more sex. no marriages. yet. no flashing.
SunOS - Advanced age porn
FreeBSD - lights out, can't see porn, scan logs, see porn of other users, send report to management
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
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.
Yeah, but CGA... Come on. :-D
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.
Yep, when comparing two tick counts, you better check for that rollover condition.
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).
I got Windows 95 up to 49.7 days once too. Once I realized that the computer was close to the limit I actually calculated when it would hit, and made sure I was there when it happened. Nothing actually happened when the computer hit the limiit until until I tried moving the mouse then it bluescreened.
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!