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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?
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.
.... 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 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
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.
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 :)