Slashdot Mirror
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?
"if we are too rude in base then oems may either stick with win3.1/msdos or defect to os/2. the way to shut out novell in the base is to either ship a full client or make it so there is no network connectivity." ref
If you take 2x Windows 95, you'll end up with Solaris 10.
I still have a VM with it installed and running.
I Think I also have an original OEM box with the full 13 Floppy disk installation.
I also still have and original box set of Dos 6.22 and Windows 3.11 Somewhere too.
IIRC, Gates paid the Rolling Stones $12M for the rights to use their song "Start me up" which to this day I don't understand why he'd pick a song with the lyrics "You make a grown man cry!" in the chorus.
Trying to install Win95 on a Win 3.11 machine of the day certainly lent itself to tears. I don't think I was ever able to successfully do it (I reverted the 3.11 system back and then just went with Win NT and then then Win 2k) - I never used a Win95 or Win98 PC at work or at home.
A step in the right direction but definitely not an OS that was ready for prime time (sorry for the mixed metaphors).
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I got my first PC in high school about a month before windows 95 came out. I got a free upgrade on that Packard Bell. It had an impressive 8MB of RAM, 1MB video card and a Pentium 100mhz. Those were the days.
I ended up installing Windows 95 a total of 52 times on that computer. I started experimenting with modifying the registry and often deleting things from it. For example, all those stupid "tips" messages you got at startup were stored in the registry. You could knock off a significant amount of data. That combined with a registry compression tool and you had extra RAM and more speed. I had pages of tweaks to do to windows 95. When 98 came out, I was disappointed. Went through an OS/2 warp phase and an NT4 phase before I got into Linux, Solaris and finally *BSD.
Without windows being such a piece of shit, I never would have gotten into operating systems.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Same here. Being able to download at 28k from a BBS while playing Wolfenstein was years beyond windows.
Yes, OS/2 was a great DOS multitasking environment, I also used it to run a Fidonet BBS back in the '90s, but IBM had an obsession with trying to make the 286 useful, which crippled it from the start. Back in the day, I thought 64K segments were the height of stupidity, which is why I've been primarily a Mac user since '85. Also, this would be the second time that IBM let Microsoft use it to further their (MS) own goals.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I just remembered something else.. Windows 95 used about 50 MB of hard drive space back when our hard drive was 170 MB. It seemed like a HUGE pig compared to Windows 3.1 + DOS which was somewhere between 10 MB and 20 MB. That inspired a Weird Al style parody song about Windows 95: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwb74UQPK3s
Windows 95 came with a very early version of Internet Explorer. At one point I remember realizing that it was way better than Mosaiic. For example, it could display background images, play background music, and generally better positioning of elements on the screen. I think Microsoft hosted a haloween website that really showcased IE and impressed me.
I also remember when Microsoft was pushing developers to build ActiveX controls for web pages. They were competing with the mind blowing "Hot Java" which could render animations in a web page and do neat things.
Do you remember first seeing or installing Windows 95?
I do.
95 was really slick looking. Its splash screens and on-screen fonts seemed beautiful, after years of having run DOS programs, earlier Windows (2.1 and 3.0) and Desqview.
I also remember that 95 was awful to use for work -- it would crash, hang, and/or start acting erratically, requiring reboots several times during each work day. I also remember having to manually save my work every few minutes, unless I was using a program that could be configured to autosave every few minutes. (I think we were still using WordPerfect in a DOS box back then and WP was one of the few programs that could actually autosave.)
95 was so unstable that, when you purchased a Microsoft language (C, Pascal, etc), Microsoft actually include a copy of NT 4.0 for free. (At my college bookstore, buying a Microsoft language with a NT 4.0 CD in the box actually cost less than buying just NT 4.0 by itself.)
Sure! I have a laptop with 95 on it. Works great. I use it to run my milling machine.
20 years ago I was a teenager. My family wasn't rich growing up. By that point I'd owned a second hand Commodore 64 I bought for $75 through the classified ads, an IBM PC XT I bought from a consignment shop, and a 386 I built from pieces I bought second hand from a friend who was upgrading to a Pentium system. Around this time 20 years ago I was finishing up an internship I had in between my junior and senior years of high school that I had because I spent some time on BBSes and the guy thought I would enjoy learning to develop software with them. During the summer I used a 486 DX2 system with Windows 3.1. That was my fist real exposure to Windows.
There was a local trade mag for computers that they gave away free every month at news stands. I always enjoyed reading them and there were a lot of articles on Win 95. No one I knew had it or got it over the next year.
The following year when I was getting ready for college, one of the thing we had to buy was a modern computer to meet the requirements for my engineering program. It was built by a local shop and they offered DOS 6.22 / Win 3.1 or Windows 95. I remember being hesitant about 95, but decided to go for it since it was newer and I knew newer aoftware was designed for it.
That design really opened up computing to a lot of people. Having a single place to go to Start any program was a great idea. Before you had to know what directory to look in or where in Program Manager an icon was. All my non technical friends in college had no problem with it. With Windows 3.1 they would struggle and if they had to drop to DOS they were mostly lost. If you want to know what's running, it's right there on the task bar.
I've used various versions of Windows and Linux over the years, but I think the biggest legacy is the start button and task bar. They pretty much define how most people interact with the desktop. The Windows 8 UI debacle and the shift back to a start menu / having Modern apps on the task bar shows that it's how users have come to expect to interact with a desktop system.
I had Chicago Beta 1 Build 112, from May of 1994 and went through several builds prior to release. Ran it on a Cyrix-based 486DLC at 40MHz with 8MB RAM with a 400MB hard disk drive. A couple of the betas were really messed up, but my young teenage self was more than happy to work around the problems. There was one build where msgsrv32 had to be manually killed and quickly so that the shell would load properly at initial bootup.
What initially appealed to me was the ability to use Windows NT applications that were 32 bit and more robust and reliable. Amusingly, Winzip was my first 32-bit application. It also was better for network gaming as it was easier to make the network stack work in Windows than it was with the Microsoft Network Client for DOS, though depending on the game over the years that was a useful option too.
I didn't really start to dislike Microsoft until they started forcing Internet Explorer. Windows 95 OSR2 would attempt for force its install when the OS was installed as a separate component but that could be manually killed before it did anything. With Windows 98 I found a program called 98Lite that would extract the shell from the Windows 95 source files and put it on the Windows 98 installation; there were a few bugs for GUI features that were created for 98 but otherwise it worked fairly well.
In some ways Microsoft's hamhanded IE integration helped push me towards Linux. Slackware jokingly released their version with the 2.0.0 kernel as "Slackware 96", started out with that and moved into the fold quite seriously.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I remember the Weezer video that came on the CD. It was amazing to me that my PC could finally play video in a window like on Knight Rider. Now it's just part of every day life.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The 'Buddy Holly' music video that was included on the Win95 CD made me a fan of Weezer, which I still am to this day. I must have watched that video hundreds of times as a kid.