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Windows 95 Turns 20
Etherwalk writes: Windows 95 turns 20 tomorrow, August 24, 2015. Users looking to upgrade from Windows 3.1 should be warned that some reviewers on the Amazon purchase page have been receiving 3.5" high-density floppy disk versions instead of a modern 150 kbps CD-ROM disk. Do you remember first seeing or installing Windows 95? Do you have any systems still running it?
.... the Briefcase!
I just can't remember what it was for.
Win95 was such a huge upgrade. We forget now, but it packed an astonishing amount of stuff into just 4mb of RAM (8mb recommended). If someone produced it today in some kind of hackathon it'd be praised as a wonder of tightly written code. They even optimised it by making sure the dots in the clock didn't blink, as the animation would have increased the memory usage of the OS!
It's surprising how little Windows has changed over the years, in some ways. Not because MS didn't want to change it but because the Win95 UI design was basically very effective and people still like it, even today.
I purchased a Toshiba Satellite laptop with WFW 3.11 in early '95 that I upgraded to Win 95 in September of that year. I pulled it out of the closet three years ago and it still boots up with the clean install I put on it when I moved on to newer hardware.
Ah, the bad old days of .dll conflicts, memory managers, point drivers for PCMCIA cards, and coax. I don't miss any of it.
Win95 was MILES ahead of Win3.1. I was super excited about Windows 95.. it revolutionized home computing for millions.
I've seen it running in a VM because of software that big money was paid for that was still perfectly satisfactory for it's intended purpose. Why buy new software when there is no need? The old computer died and the new modern Win 8 box wont run the software? Virtual environment to the rescue!
I can't do that as much as I would like to. All the old PC"s (DOS/Win 3.11/Win9x) at work are control PC's which speak to
lab equipment over (proprietary) serial/parallel dialects or use old ISA acquisition boards.
It really sucks when you're locked ancient software and hardware.
Yeah, but that instability was not entirely Win95's fault.
Back then computers had almost no resources. NT had a "proper", academically correct OS design with a microkernel architecture (until NT4). It paid for it dearly: resource consumption was nearly double that of Chicago. Additionally, app and hardware compatibility was crap. Many, many apps, devices and especially games would not run on Windows NT. Microsoft spent the next 6-7 years trying to make NT acceptable to the consumer market and only achieved it starting with Windows XP.
So Win95 was hobbled by the need for DOS and Win3.1 compatibility, but that is why it was such a huge commercial success.
Making things worse, tools for writing reliable software were crap back then. Most software was written in C or C++ except often without any kind of STL. Static analysis was piss poor to non-existent. If you wanted garbage collection, Visual Basic was all you had (actually it used reference counting). Unit testing existed as a concept but was barely known: it was extremely common for programs to have no unit tests at all, and testing frameworks like JUnit also didn't exist. Drivers were routinely written by hardware engineers who only had a basic grasp of software engineering, so they were frequently very buggy. Hardware itself was often quite unreliable. Computers didn't have the same kinds of reliability technologies they have today.
Most importantly nobody had the internet, so apps couldn't report crash dumps back to the developers, so most developers never heard about their app crashes and had no way to fix them except by doing exhaustive, human based testing. Basically that's what distinguished stable software from unstable software: how much money you paid to professional software testers.
Everyone who used computers back then remembers the "save every few minutes" advice being drilled into people's heads. And it was needed, but that wasn't entirely Microsoft's fault. It was just that computing sucked back then, even more than it does today :)
I started computing with Dos5/Win 3.0. Loved Dos 6.2 + WFW 3.11. Then M$ threw out their solid, stable, bought, code base and defecated out Win 95, and the world changed.
My memories of win95 were equally warm and fuzzy, until the the BSODs began.
Oh the horror of working on a CS project for hours, with a upcoming deadline, and watching a good chunk of code and hours of work vanish upon File -> Save -> BSOD -> "NOOOOOOOOYYOOOUUUUFUUCCC..."
M$-Anything is the only product brand that made me want to throw my computer out the window and go back to pencil and paper for tasks, where applicable
As soon as I found Redhat 9, and it was what M$ should have been, I jumped ship from the M$ line of crapware entirely.
Today it's FreeBSD all the way
Fast, rock solid stable, bleeding edge software, safe and secure. This is what computing SHOULD be all about. Not the flashy, squirrely, dumbed down, garbage the marketing depts think people want today.
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain