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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.
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!
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?
Are we specifically referring to dos, or just the concept of cli file manager?
No. File Manager was a GUI program included with Windows 3.x (and still included as EXE only up to Windows Me).
R.Mo
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
Xplorer2 is great, somehow I think it was a mistake of MS to not include a dual pane option, as it's a real pain in the ass at times to copy things around the file tree using explorer. But given either Xplorer2 or Teracopy and it works out a lot more effectively.
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!
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.
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.
I've used 98lite back then. The full version can also remove other unwanted stuff.
God, 4MB of RAM for Windows '95??? That must have been brutal.
In '92 or '93 my girlfriend bought a similar machine with 4MB of RAM, and that was only Windows 3.11. On the second day she had it we watched Word thrash the machine within an inch of its life with a single document open. On day 3 she had me install Linux, which could actually work better with 4MB of RAM.
Machines of that era are what taught me to put as much physical memory into a machine as you can afford -- Windows or Linux, the machine will last longer and not become bogged down in it's VM. Heck, my Vista machine with 8GB of RAM has been a joy since it's had all the resources it ever needed. I credit throwing that much memory at it with actually having found Vista to be a pretty good OS.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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/
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.
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.
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
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 might be time to look into running a virtual machine for that legacy tool. You also can get modern motherboards with serial ports, or even USB to serial port adapters.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
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.
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.
When XP came out it was common for low-end OEM machines to have 128MB of RAM, which was only enough to boot it, not to run applications well.
It's just that XP was the premier OS for longer, so those old computers died off or got upgraded.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
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.
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.
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.
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 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)
Microsoft Windows 95 was released on August 24th, 1995.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/173161-48-windows-release-date
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/longterm/microsoft/stories/1995/debut082495.htm
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/08/dayintech_0824
So, either all of those places (and a good chunk more) have been "fixed", or you're the one trying to change reality.
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.