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The Long Reach of Windows 95
jfruh writes: I'm a Mac guy — have been ever since the '80s. When Windows 95 was released 20 years ago, I was among those who sneered that "Windows 95 is Macintosh 87." But now, as I type these words on a shiny new iMac, I can admit that my UI — and indeed the computing landscape in general — owes a lot to Windows 95, the most influential operating system that ever got no respect. ITWorld reports: "... even though many techies tend to dismiss UI innovation as eye candy, the fact is that the changes made in Windows 95 were incredibly successful in making the the system more accessible to users -- so successful, in fact, that a surprising number of them have endured and even spread to other operating systems. We still live in the world Windows 95 made. When I asked people on Twitter their thoughts about what aspects of Windows 95 have persisted, I think Aaron Webb said it best: 'All of it? Put a 15 year old in front of 3.1 and they would be lost. In front of Windows 95 they would be able to do any task quickly.'"
first install! woo hoo
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Everyone I know loved Win95 because it was that or our aging Ataris and Amigas. I'm pretty sure we appreciated what a big deal it was, actually.
was "Windows 95 sucks less."
Design for Use, not Construction!
I was 12 with Windows 3.1. In some ways I think it was the best version they ever made.
But this was also true if you put a 15 year old -- or a 10 year old -- in front of a 1987 Macintosh. The true revolution in mainstream computing was the Mac OS user interface, coupled with the Human Interface Guidelines which made all Mac software intuitive.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
Put a 15 year old in front of 3.1 and they would be lost. In front of Windows 95 they would be able to do any task quickly.
Windows 95 came without a web browser. What 15-year-old of today could do anything at all on it?
Any task quickly? Do you even remember how slow Windows 95 was? :P
owes a lot to Windows 95
Which owes a lot to Windows 3. Which owes a lot to the Mac SE and its kin. Which owes a lot to Xerox PARC. Which owes a lot to Doug Engelbart and SRI.
By the time Microsoft got to a UI, it was like the shopping cart that got passed around the hobo camp.
Have gnu, will travel.
Well would have been if I didn't have a fucking bastard BSOD. Twice.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Windows 95 copied system 7, and the Start Menu copied a system 7 extension called the Hierarchial menu which allowed you to put folders of apps, or just normal directory folders under the apple menu and navigate through them.
Yep Xerox got the UI right.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
BSODs since I dumped Windogs for Linux.
That was a sexy geek OS on top of Unix back in the day before it morphed into present day MacOSX when Steve Jobs brought it along to Apple.
It had right mouse button clicking and the menus and dockable icons and launchers (though were not on the buttom) but the concept was part of Windows 95 to its core with the start menu emulating much of it.
AfterStep which was Robs founder of slashdot favorite back in the day as well as WindowMaker were WM's which tried to clone part of the functionality into Linux at the turn of the century. WindowMaker was the most popular before Kde and then Gnome started to mature to what we have today.
http://saveie6.com/
How much has the basic UI changed since Windows 95? It hasn't, because 95 got it just about perfect for comfortable productive. There are minor variations in the size of component and placement, but almost every OS since has used the same basic concept: A 'launch programs' button, a task bar with a tab for each open window along one edge of the screen, and a notification area. Almost all major linux distros use that, Ubuntu with Unity being an exception. Microsoft tried to change to something new in Windows 8, but it was met with such hatred by the users that MS was forced to revert back to the classic layout in Windows 10. The only alternative to achieve any measure of success is OSX and the dock in place of the task bar. The most useful innovation MS has made to their UI after Windows 95 was taskbar item consolidation.
And it was true if you put a 10 year old in front of an Amiga in 1985 or 1986. As for the Apple HIG, a lot of it was counter-intuitive, what it did, however, was give consistency, and thus users were conditioned into doing things a certain way, but it also resulted in some applications being hampered etc
I would agree that Windows 95 is influential, but let's not go overboard. It's the first instance that I know of with the "taskbar" along the bottom including a main menu button on the lower-left, which has become a very common arrangement. However, it's largely become an arrangement common to desktop environments attempting to mimic Windows in order to be approachable to Windows users. It's not the arrangement of all operating systems.
Claiming that OSX is copying the task bar with its dock is a bit of an overstatement. Various environments had different permutations of a "dock" concept, including NeXTSTEP, the forerunner to OSX. I think BeOS and Amiga also had docks of sort, though I admit I haven't seen any of these operating systems in action and I don't remember exactly what they looked like back in 1995. Also, the way the Apple dock operates is significantly different from the Windows task bar, and arguably the Windows 10 taskbar takes some things from Apple's dock.
Part way through the article, there's a big quote that says, "Without Windows 95 there would be no Steam or XBox and we would still be playing Pong." That's just nonsense. I mean, it's true there might not be steam or XBox, in that Steam was originally developed for Windows and XBox is a Microsoft program. However, we wouldn't still by playing Pong. There were more advanced games than Pong before Windows 95, and it's not as though people wouldn't have continued to develop video consoles and video games. In the end, he wraps things up by arguing that Windows 95 was just so amazingly good that it pushed everyone out of the market, as though Microsoft's monopoly was a good thing that was achieved purely through the quality of the product.
Honestly, I don't know if this author is a bit dim or ignorant, or if the author is intentionally pushing a false narrative, but this article is pretty bad. Obviously Windows 95 had a big impact on the computing industry and the operating systems that came afterwards. I wouldn't argue against that. Still, let's not pretend that it was a wonderful product that took over the world by being the best thing ever, and let's not pretend that everything that came after is simply copying Windows 95. It was a relatively crappy operating system that became dominant because Microsoft was largely already dominant, and there wasn't really anything much better at the time. Microsoft had already squashed a lot of their competitors, and continued to do so with anti-competitive practices.
The Registry is the most prominent Windows feature... and it's a POS.
Intuitive? Are you kidding? Working on OSX is like being in your garage under your car, working, only, you have an obsessive compulsive wife, and every time you set a tool on the concrete in arms reach, she immediately puts it on the shelf because everything must look pretty, at all times.
I have never hated working with an operating system the way I hate OSX. It has literally brought me within inches of quitting my job in frustration on numerous occassions. It is beyond "bad", it is downright hostile.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Yep Xerox got the UI right.
Yep, click on the icon of a file, a window pops up, you type a UNIX command to manipulate the file. They totally had the whole GUI thing figured out and Apple did nothing but copy--oh, and add direct manipulation pervasively ;-)
Except the Xerox PARC UI lacked folders and pull-down menus, just to name a few key innovations made by the original Mac team.
A menu that pops on the bottom right on clicking 'START' can hardly be called UI innovation. If you turned it upside-down and enabled it by depressing the esc key, It would be similar to any number of such menuing UI around at the time. See this image from 1991, where if you click on the apple icon or click on the 'apple' key, you get the main menu.
My favorite dig at windows 95 was that it came with the crash key.....push the windows button on the keyboard while doing anything serious, and it would bring the whole system down.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I think the most prominent innovation was the "Start" button. It (along with some heavy weight marketing) finally pushed the mild-mannered consumer to a primarily GUI environment on the PC-side which IBM (with OS/2) and others never quite accomplished. Of course, it "borrowed" plenty of ideas from other platforms, but it wasn't done without improvements (Explorer basically is a reorganized version of Finder in my opinion).
The First time I saw windows 8 I did not like it for some reason, at first I thought it was because how "Square" everything was.
Later I came to the conclusion that the reason I did not like it was because in a way it was a regression to the pre '95 icon based system.
@Anonymous Coward: "95 was the first Windows that was an operating system. 3.1 was still a DOS application."
Windows 95 was designed to make Windows apps not run on DR_DOS and not run on Novell Netware.
Windows 95 sucked at first, Microsoft was largely responsible for the notion of waiting for the first Service Pack. By the time the first service pack came out most people either bought a new computer (hello Internet craze) or had upgraded their existing computers and no longer had as many grips about performance they may have had at first. Windows 98SE was the best Operating System Microsoft ever released, by Service Pack 3, although SP2 was decent. Faster, more feature rich, and you could still uninstall Internet Explorer if you wanted to. Nobody gave a shit about Apple and Macintosh system 7 or 8 or whatever the hell ancient garbage they were on. Linux was only known to the hardcore nerds and not even close to being ready for the desktop. BSD even less so.
Thank God; just saying. :)
What does OSX have to do with an 87 Macintosh?
And personally I'm using both a Windows 7 and a Mac with OSX and I find I like both for different reasons. I use my OSX box at work (MacBook Pro) and I can manage Unix systems with no issues.
Carl
Shit better not happen!
Eject a disk by moving it from my desktop to the trash with all the files I want to delete? Makes sense.
Switching tiled applications makes the one menu bar change? Sure. It's not like moving the cursor half the screen for each click is a waste of time.
The virtual reality interface in Minority Report, it's Microsoft Bob i tell you. If you rent the movie and freeze frame, you can see that dog pop up every once in a while. And Clippy talks to Tom Cruise in Comic sans thought bubbles.
They had the sidebar which I think showed active apps, and most "innovations" of Windows 95. ... IIRC ... I don't remember Win95 as being particularly innovative when I saw it, since we had NeXTs in our computer lab at college.
No, the most influential OS that got no respect is VAX VMS. Once Digital died, it's like it never existed. Microsoft even hired Cuttler away from DEC, and they *still to this day* haven't made a decent virtual memory manager or process scheduler. And VMS was 64 bit decades before Microsoft or Apple could manage it.
VMS was amazingly slick. Lightning fast, and I had VMS servers up continuously for nearly two years (took them down to upgrade the OS and some mission critical applications). Microsoft, and for that matter Apple, have never figured out the joys of AutoGen. Every OS no matter what it's on should have some version of AutoGen to tailor OS parameters to the user and applications (s)he uses. It's just common sense. And this stuff is well off patent. No excuse not to do it.
I surely wish HP would give it up and release VMS to the public domain. Maybe then some of it's features would find their way into these "modern" OSes. If they can just cut and paste. Oh, wait, that was snarky. Bad (old) programmer, bad!
I use my OSX box at work (MacBook Pro) and I can manage Unix systems with no issues
Assuming the OS works well enough connect to the network and open an SSH terminal session you'd have no issues managing Unix systems.
It would take a pretty catastrophically bad OS to fail as a dumb SSH terminal. Even DOS was pretty passable at it.
I think he means actually managing and fixing screwed up OSX systems from OSX. That's where OSX really gets in the way.
Just sayin'....
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
by bits and pieces, MS moved junk around, hid useful fields, then controls, then where files were saved.
and after all those inconveniences, they effed up the whole IT infrastructure with Windows 8. IBM must have cheered, it's Presentation Manager V3, and Microsoft did it.
barstards.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Though the "dragging disk to trash" makes zero sense now, it at least made half sense back with the first Macs which had a single floppy drive. Half sense may be a bit much; Quarter sense? can I make up stupid terms like that?
Anyways, the first macs were single floppy only affairs, with the OS on a floppy, and presumably you have a user floppy. And you'd have to eject the system floppy to get your user disk in. And then swap back and forth. The OS would need to keep track of the volumes, even if ejected, so they know what disk to ask for. so you got these grayed out icons for known-but-ejected-disks. But, now, you have this grayed out "i know about you but you're gone" icon and you want to get rid of it. well, we have a trash can! get rid of the *placeholder* by trashing it.
Of course, even that's stupid. and it makes no sense at all for a disk that's inserted. But they stretched that metaphor out, and that's how to eject an inserted disk. so when macs started getting dual floppies, or even hard drives, "you want me to put my disk in the trash!!??"
I worked at a mac lab in the System 6 System 7 days, and this always always freaked out new users. I had to go through a big explanation.
you are off by an astronomical unit if you believe it was the GUI that made the success of Windows 95. Its success is mainly due to the inclusion of the TCP/IP stack which standardized how PC owners can connect to the internet in an easy manner since then. Done with Trumpet IP and the likes trying to make things working. What drove people at this time was already the desire to access the internet, the real new thing. Most Joe users had to ask a relative if they were lucky enough to have one in the computer science field to setup their PC with Windows 3.1. Windows 95 made this easy.
Achille Talon
Hop!
More like Macintosh 91. Jeez, get it right kid
actually... newshell.exe as it was known was written by the NT team, when Windows NT 3.1 was new and NT 3.51 was in beta. the windows 95 team - who were universally absolutely hated by the NT team - legitimately "stole" newshell.exe from the [internally and legitimately accessible] source repository of the NT team at the time, and release it as the default shell of windows 95 *before* the NT team were able to release it. it wasn't until NT 4 beta that the NT team was able to catch up.
unnnfortunately, the NT team were being pressurised to do some pretty stupid things, because windows 95, being a PROGRAM-RUNNER *NOT* repeat *NOT* repeat *NOT* an "Operating System" (windows 95 didn't even have proper virtual memory management for god's sake: programs were either fully-swapped-out or fully-resident: absolutely nothing in between) - windows 95 was unfortunately *faster* than the flagship operating system (NT).
so they were forced to remove the user-space GDI implementation and associated API (which buggered up citrix and other screen virtualisation technology completely: it had to be re-added back in many years later and was called "RDP"... it was actually another company's screen virtualisation technology... bought and re-badged... but we're talking windows 2000 by then...). removal of the GDI implementation meant two things: firstly, lots more speed, and secondly, if you moved a window off-screen it caused a BSOD in NT 4.0 betas because of course there was no range-checking any more and this was all kernel-space!
many people loved the fact that NT 3.51's user-space screen driver could actually crash, leaving you with no screen... but the mouse, keyboard and the rest of the OS was working perfectly. many sysadmins didn't bother with a reboot when that happened because they could just use keyboard short-cuts, remote logins, or just pure mouse-guesswork!
the NT team did at one point also try to move printer drivers (including 3rd party ones) into kernelspace (to again avoid a userspace-kernelspace context switch... or 100). for obvious reasons that initiative didn't last long....
yeahhhh we don't hear about the history of pain that windows 95 caused within microsoft. and now, many of the people who knew what was going on have retired as millionaires on the stock options from so far back...
You don't know what you're talking about. Xerox didn't have overlapping windows, or many of the other interface paradigms of current GUIs.
See for me the OS that was great and got zero respect from the masses - and even existed alongside Windows 95 at the time - was OS/2. For me it had a great "coolness" factor, really beat the pants off Windows NT and 95 from a performance and feature perspective not to mention legandary stability for an x86 OS seconded only by *nix variants and Novell NetWare at the time (although I'll admit to having less than perfect uptime on my hardware). It was truly pushing the envelope at the time. Unfortunately IBM didn't care as they were really still in a recovery mode from losing a ton of cash and couldn't understand why no one was buying mainframes anymore. Microsoft leaving OS/2 and IBM to push Windows may have started the decline, but IBM was really to blame for that failure.
...like allowing spaces in file names. Incredibly bad idea. I used both NT3.5 and NT4 at the same time, and Win95 certainly made NT3.5 look antiquated. That speaks more to the poor design of Windows before 95 than it does to the good design of 95.
For the 2-3 years that Win95 was VAPORWARE, OS/2 2.x and later OS/2 Warp had many of the features (and often with better implementations) that Microsoft ultimately delivered. The real success story of Win95 was Microsoft's marketing engine and FUD tactics, not their software...
OS X is a completely different thing than System 1-7 or OS 8 and 9.
The main thing OS X offered that many a Mac person just hated Apple for not having... was true, preemptive multitasking. Before that, if an application or a desktop accessory didn't use WaitNextEvent(), the entire system ground to a halt, requiring a hardware reset. In fact, because OS 9 and earlier behaved like a chain of primitive Christmas tree lights (one bulb goes out, the entire chain does too), one wound up having to reboot every so often, just for safety. Some applications crashes could be recovered from... others, it was full down. To boot, there wasn't any real multi-user capability, other than what was grafted on via AppleShare servers or security programs like FileGuard or others.
Is OS X perfect? Nope. It desperately needs a new primary filesystem as HFS Plus is getting long in the tooth (it really is at best, competition for ext3) [1]. However, as an OS, it does its job well.
[1]: With all the cash Apple is sitting on, they could either license ZFS from Oracle, or if they don't want to deal with the licensing issues, hit up Symantec, license Veritas for VxFS, and extend that. One can use OSXFuse, but having a native filesystem on par with ZFS or btrfs would be nice.
Before Windows 95, PCs had a vibrant marketplace of GUI shells, file managers, e-mail applications and web browsers. Netscape introduced Java applets and Javascript, updated frequently and was free with honor system payments. UNIX-based system had a wide choice of free and commercial Windows managers with features like virtual desktops that Microsoft only added in Windows 10.
What Microsoft taught users is to be lazy and not look beyond built in software with mediocre feature set. They have ultimately hurt themselves as mainstream applications became so dumbed down that you can just run the same thing on 4 inch phone and not miss much. Have they cultivated a healthy 3rd party ecosystem, people might be still interested in more powerful desktop/laptop experience in addition to phones and tablets.
Black and White screen? Fuck you.
Sorry, Amiga
God, Windows 95 vs Amiga 85...
Yep.. because 10 year olds "intuitively" would know to manually adjust the memory heaps for their programs.. or to use a rom manager to enable 32-bit addressing instead of 24-bit at boot.. yep.. or not spend 20 minutes looking for the damn on button that seemed to be moved to a creatively new and harder to find location with each new Mac.. and command-key click is sooo much more intuitive than right-clicking on menu items!
Before that, if an application or a desktop accessory didn't use WaitNextEvent(), the entire system ground to a halt, requiring a hardware reset.
Win 3.x was pretty much the same way - it used cooperative multitasking just like the Mac, and if you took too long processing a given message you could lock your system right up. Two of the biggest things that Win95 brought to the table (that NT already had) were true preemptive multitasking and a per-process message queue, so if you still managed to be sloppy with your message handling, it just locked up that process instead of the whole machine.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
This may (also) have been stolen from some other OS, but Win95 was this Great Leap Forward in usability for one innovation alone, the right-click menu. I think it was the first time that "object-oriented" really showed up at the user level. Whatever object you clicked on - file, device, folder, data-object inside an application - you got the list of methods associated with the object, what you could do with the thing. Instead of applications having menus for their various functions, *data* objects had a menu appropriate to that data-item.
If Microsoft invented that, they have to be given some props. Certainly all the larger Linux distros paid them the homage of stealing the idea.
Oh, and minor point by comparison, but still, props: I remember everybody giving rave reviews to their workaround for storing long filenames while remaining backwards compatible with 8.3 names. Not exactly a leap forward, but it countered the Great Leap Backward that 8.3 was and made the transition away from them almost painless.
Though at the time, I was a long time user of Commodore Amiga. Most PCs at the time were extraordinarily difficult to configure and keep running. I remember the multi-tasking in Windows 95 being really bad-- explorer.exe getting blocked. Other things that stick out to me were over use of modal dialogs and that lower-right notification tray filling up with animated distracting icons.
Don't get me started on clippy, or DOS, or file system naming conventions. Sure, compared to Windows 3.1 it was bliss-- but other computing platforms were years ahead.
That's not what I meant.
Sorry, it took another decade for your Mac to catch up to 32-bit Windows (and Windows NT). Now it's just another OS. At least Apple has realized that. The platform is no longer the thing.
Agreed. Xerox PARC did amazing work... too bad they were designing a paperless office for a paper-centered company. :-)
Koans and fables for the software engineer
I certainly never had to do any of those things during years of using Macs. No, I'm talking about software like MacPaint, MacWrite, etc. If you put a 10-year-old in front of those, they would figure out the menus and toolbars pretty much immediately. There was nothing nearly as good in PC land at the time.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
Eject a disk by moving it from my desktop to the trash with all the files I want to delete? Makes sense.
Well, to understand this, you have to recall that early Macs had to be able to run off of a single floppy drive. Users might buy a hard drive or a second floppy drive (or if they had a dual-floppy SE, a third floppy drive for some reason) but it couldn't be relied on. Yet they still had to be able to tolerate having the OS disc ejected at times.
So there was a distinction between physically ejecting a disc while keeping it mounted (which was represented onscreen by a greyed out disc icon) so that you could copy to it, and both physically ejecting _and_ dismounting a disc.
The formal way that you were supposed to do this was by using menu commands. The Eject command was for eject-but-keep-mounted while the generally ignored Put Away command was for eject-and-dismount. It was also possible to use Put Away on an already greyed out, ejected-but-mounted disc icon.
User testing showed that this was inconvenient, and one of the OS developers eventually created a shortcut for the Put Away command, which was to drag a disc icon to the trash. It wound up being so popular that it shipped.
Apparently there had been some thought at the time about changing the Trash icon into some sort of Eject icon in the case of ejecting a disc, but apparently this was felt to be confusing or too difficult, so it wasn't done. In OS X the idea was revisited, and now the Trash icon does turn into a standard Eject icon when you're dragging a disc.
In any case, in real life, whatever confusion dragging disc icons to the trash might have caused, everyone got over it basically immediately.
Switching tiled applications makes the one menu bar change? Sure. It's not like moving the cursor half the screen for each click is a waste of time.
It's not; since there's nothing above the menubar, you can just slam the mouse up. It turns out to be faster and easier than having multiple menu bars. The Mac and Lisa groups did consider per-window menubars, but having tested the idea, it was rejected. For example, here's some polaroids of a screen from 1980 showing a Lisa with a menu attached to the bottom of a window: http://www.folklore.org/images... Later that year, the menu had moved to the top of the windows: http://www.folklore.org/images... And early the next year, it finally settled at the top of the screen: http://www.folklore.org/images...
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
But this was also true if you put a 15 year old -- or a 10 year old -- in front of a 1987 Macintosh.
Given the unlikely chance that his family could afford one ---
In October 1984, Apple introduced the Macintosh 512K, with quadruple the memory of the original, at a price of US $3,195.
$7,338, adjusted for inflation.
Apple released the Macintosh Plus on January 10, 1986, for a price of US$ 2,600.
$5,661, adjusted for inflation.
It offered one megabyte of RAM, easily expandable to four megabytes by the use of socketed RAM boards. It also featured a SCSI parallel interface, allowing up to seven peripherals---such as hard drives and scanners---to be attached to the machine. Its floppy drive was increased to an 800 kB capacity. The Mac Plus was an immediate success and remained in production, unchanged, until October 15, 1990; on sale for just over four years and ten months, it was the longest-lived Macintosh in Apple's history.
In September 1986, Apple introduced the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop, or MPW, an application that allowed software developers to create software for Macintosh on Macintosh, rather than cross compiling from a Lisa.
This is another way of saying that the barriers to entry for an MS-DOS developer were low.
In August 1987, Apple unveiled HyperCard and MultiFinder, which added cooperative multitasking to the Macintosh. Apple began bundling both with every Macintosh.
Updated Motorola CPUs made a faster machine possible, and in 1987 Apple took advantage of the new Motorola technology and introduced the Macintosh II at $5500, powered by a 16 MHz Motorola 68020 processor.
$11,554. adjusted for inflation.
The primary improvement in the Macintosh II was Color QuickDraw in ROM, a color version of the graphics language which was the heart of the machine.
Macintosh. CPI Inflation Calculator
To understand the significance of Windows 95, you only have to sense the emotions inspired by the rediscovery of the videos which shipped with Win 95. Edie Brickell - Good Times
This was not Charlie Chaplin. This was not "1984."
But, for hundreds of millions of quite ordinary people, this was their introduction to multimedia, the PC and the Internet.
Actually, the common saying... was "Windows 95 sucks less."
No it wasn't.
The geek is only deluding himself when he claims that Win 95 wasn't one of the most successful and significant product launches in tech.
... a Mac wannabe.
I remember OS2, for crying out loud, and immediately thought, "Mac copy."
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Smells like a troll and does not know anything about history. Apple had visual interfaces far longer than Microsoft.
Actually it's not even that. It's just bullshit. Saying this (the world owes so much to Windows 95) is like saying "the world owes so much to the Model T Ford for innovations such as steering wheels, the degree to which turning the steering wheel causes the vehicle to deflect when moving, and the respective positions of the gas, brake and clutch pedals. It wasn't some great thing, it was just that it was EARLIER, and later models and even other manufacturers followed suit because it's what the customers were expecting and there wasn't enough reason to change it.
Honestly, they're really pretty stupid designs when you think about it. Handlbars make MUCH more sense, especially with a pair of brake-pulls or levers, one on either side, so that you can brake more rapidly, (the time it takes to squeeze with your hand is probably shorter than the time it takes to yank your foot off the accelerator, move it over to the brake pedal, and push, especially if the thing is designed so your hand can comfortably cover the brake lever while normally driving. But that's what came out first, so we're mostly STUCK with it.
The same goes for Windows 95 and all its so-called innovations.
... made a lot of people become dumber.
I'm typing this on a keyboard with two keys with the Windows logo. That's the kind of "quality" heritage we got from W95.
All depends on how you define OS and Windows.
Possible answers:
Windows 1.0 (It loads apps and provides APIs)
Windows/386 2.x (Manages protected-mode VMMs)
Windows 3.0 Enhanced 386 mode ( "" )
OS/2 2.0 (has genuine Windows built-in)
Windows 3.1 with 32-bit Disk Access enabled with 32-bit disk controller drivers
Windows NT 3.1
Windows for Workgroups 3.11 with 32-bit disk access enabled AND 32-bit file access enabled
Windows 95 (and if this is your answer, why not one of the previous?)
Windows ME (stripped out parts of MS-DOS, so that MS-DOS Mode no longer worked)
Windows XP (because it was MS' replacement for all previous DOS-based versions)
Which they stole from Xerox, who bought it from MIT's computer lab, but did nothing with it, really. Let's not forget ALL our history. The big players in tech, as corporations, have actually innovated very little on either side; most of what is TODAY modern computing, started at AT&T's Bell Laboratories, and the computer research departments of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Berkeley, and likely a great many others, plus of course, the Department of Defense.
What the companies DID was to embrace the ideas, polish them, (esp. in Apple's case,) and incorporate them into commercial products.
I'm guessing they're Not a mac user, and are just saying that to get some credibility.
Apple mainly succeeded in the legal realm. They sued all the GUI OS companies out of business. The GEM desktop is gone, for one example. Geos was driven out of the market.
In actuality, what Apples legal muscle succeeded in doing was run all of Microsoft's competitors on the PC Clone platform out of business. Then Microsoft had the resources to defeat Apple's 'Look and Feel' lawsuit (which everybody involved in Free Software, in particular people like RMS actively campaigned against) and Windows owned the desktop.
Microsoft has a lot to thank Apple for. Apple plowed their field for them.
Also, Mac users have never wanted their OS to be the dominant platform. Why should the rabble get to use their cool 'elite' stuff?
i was using geos 16bit before windows 95 was released,
as i recall windows 95 totally ripped it off, stole most aspects from it, menus, windows controls etc.
the credit should be given to geos.
I always wanted to drag the hard drive icon to the trash and have it make the hard disk version of that stupid noise the floppy eject motor made, and spit the hard drive out.
(If you've never run MacOS on floppy diskettes, esp. on a one drive Mac, you've not had the opportunity to grow really really sick of that eject sound)
Its sad when someone new to computing and unexperienced with the real world switches to a mac and then says 'but it looks like windows'. M$ had to spend a lot of cash to make sure they didnt end up in prison for anti-competitive practices only 15 years ago. When did critical thinking leave /. ?
Except you're forgetting Windows Paint and Windows Write.
But I had In-A-Vision and later Micrografx Designer. I ran In-A-Vision (which came with a Windows 1 runtime installer) on my 8088 machine with Windows 2. It made Mac Paint look like a turd.
Stopped reading right there.
Posting coward because I modded. If you haven't seen this you will have found your new favorite video.
History will tell you that Apple was in decline when Windows 95 came out. This was the period of the Centris and the Performa lines, plasticky John Sculley potato-chip models (just take the same ingredients and re-package 'em), followed by the rocky PowerPC transition that never delivered the holy-shit-fast performance that it promised, even while "Jean-Louis Gassée... steadfastly refused to lower the profit margins on Mac computers" and helped solidify Apple's reputation as being overpriced for what you get (you wanna cd-rom with that?), particularly as Intel forged steadily forward with the Pentium.
So even if Apple was first, in the mid-90's the desktop computer market was ripe for the taking. All Microsoft had to do was re-invent Windows without the Program Manager and make it work on any and all those crappy 386's still out there, with their shitty 14-inch color monitors, and fuck knows what peripherals. But they did it. It might run slow as shit on a 386, but on a Pentium with some RAM and a decent graphics card (S3 anyone? Matrox? Number-9?), you could drive a 19-inch monitor at full resolution. and the sound card worked! and this kind of rig was affordable! Remember computer shopper? Fully loaded PC's were getting CHEAP! and with Windows 95, they could launch and run Doom and Duke 3D (and, oh yeah, Lotus 123)!
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Windows was a pathetic imitation of NeXTstep. Here is a NeXTstep video from 1992. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gveTy4EmNyk
The only natural human interface is the nipple, everything else is learned.
There is nothing intuitive about the Mac interface and there are things that were (and still are) counter intuitive. It did offer a quick ramp up time for those with limited computer exposure. For some, such as those used to the Unix command line, the Mac was a frustrating experience. Many of the metaphors used on the desktop don't make sense today.
My first Macintosh was the Mac 512Ke. I think it came with System 3 and there is no way I could use it today without consulting a manual. Certainly not in this era of key combos and gestures, all plugged into my muscle memory. Also, I only use a mouse when doing diagrams. The computing landscape has changed dramatically and a 10 year old has vast experience with computers these days. I don't believe people could do any task quickly on the Mac UI from the 1980s.
Windows 95 on hardware from 1995. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzPqSoxRCa8
I was putting a Calmira taskbar on Windows 3.1 in 2000 so people could use it easily.
http://toastytech.com/guis/cal.html
Windows 95 is the first Microsoft OS that really had to deal with multitasking. People didn't run multiple applications very successfully on windows 3.1 machines. The Windows 95 GUI presented multiple applications "good enough". It's not some genius UI. It's the one people know, and until something is *much* better, it's not a good value proposition to force people to something new.
-Dave
Windows 95, if I remember correctly, solved the modem-to-internet problem. Up until then, I remember getting a modem to dial out meant starting some specialized dialer app or other (like AOL), and this might make it possible for other internet programs like FTP or telnet or Gopher or Navigator to work. Windows 95 had all this plumbing built-in. You set up your dial-up number (or two) and account information in a control panel applet, and then whenever an IP-aware program or app tapped for an address that wasn't available locally, the modem would automagically wake up and dial your ISP while your program patiently waited for the handshaking to complete.
This was pretty damned cool. You could have a LAN card and a modem on the same system, do all sorts of LAN-based stuff and the modem would stay asleep until you pinged a host outside the LAN. It. Just. Worked. With Windows 95, people could ditch AOL, and just subscribe to something cheap and simple like Earthlink. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Macs got this functionality until the iMac in 1998. For Windows 95 users, this made the Internet a LOT easier to use, and meant any internet app like Navigator would just plain work.
This magic carried on into Windows 2000. I once carried a mid-size office LAN over a single dial-up bridged by a Windows 2000 box and a modem. Windows reliably squeezed every packet through, and re-dialed automatically whenever the connection went down. Slow, but it worked! Why do something like this? Because Verizon couldn't deliver our T1 on time!
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
First, stealing requires depriving the property's owner of their rightful use of the property. You cannot steal intellectual property.
Second, Apple and Xerox had a contract in place where Xerox got Apple stock in exchange for the use of the GUI elements Xerox developed.
Third, you are ignorant and have no place lecturing others.
the most impressive thing about windows 95 was the sheer number and variety of existing machines that it not only ran on, but ran on with support. (Yes, trolls, not 100%)
System 7? Not so much.
...and bullshit...
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2010/06/102660634-05-04-acc.pdf
Win95 inherited most of it's features from the UNIX world. The author is very young...
It makes a grown man cry.
I guess you're right there.. I was partially remembering the earlier *Microsoft* GUIs.
But this is one account that also recounts what I said:
http://www.theoligarch.com/mic...
It is referring to the Star 8010 though.
Windows 95 = Macintosh 89
Circumcision is child abuse.
Oh no! This slight difference clearly means that the entire paradigm didn't work from the start, and Apple had to come up with an entirely new design all on their own!
> Xerox didn't have overlapping windows
Xerox Alto or Star running Smalltalk did have overlapping windows. This is what Steve Jobs saw when he visted.
http://toastytech.com/guis/altost2.jpg
You're missing the elephant in the room. A wide-spread computer in the mid 80s (at least here in Germany) was the AMIGA, and with it AMIGA OS. I was able to somewhat "use" it being less than 10 years old.
Don't forget HP VDU of 1982 (a.k.a. CDE) which introduced the tray Win95 simply copied. Start menu not a big deal either, TWM's menu of 1987 was rather similar. But Win95 was the most influential, even if not innovative.
But she's smart and beautiful.
Huh. So Apple has always been a patent troll then.
I was that 15 year old in front of DOS and Windows 3.1. And when Windows 95 came, I decided it was exactly the same shit all over again and switched to Linux.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
Was there really anything with Wintendo 95 in terms of user experience that was any better than Amiga OS had already been for years?
"Put a 15 year old in front of 3.1 and they would be lost."
Why? Because the lack of a transparency and fancy colors?
3.1 would be easier for a 15yr old to use than WIndows 8.1/10 och OSX. How do I know this? I have two kids 14 and 15 and they have no problem using 3.1. Its mostly SAA and designed by people who know how people work not just what looks "cool". Todays ergonomics are horrid in both the OSs and applications. Inconsistent behavior and low signal values. Its pretty but the ergonomics and usability sucks!
OS X is the OS developed at NeXT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_OS_X
Yep Xerox got the UI right.
IIRC, they worked with kids (studied) to develop the UI. So yeah...Xerox got it right.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Intuitive? Are you kidding? Working on OSX...
OS X is not the MacOS of 1987, that would have been Mac OS 4 and Mac OS 5, both having releases in 1987 and were very different from the Mac OS you know as OS X today. OS X was a wholesale replacement for MacOS which brought in UNIX via NeXTStep OS and its lineage from FreeBSD after Apple both Steve Job's NeXT Inc.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
There's a lot of love for Amiga, but they never quite got a firm foothold. Sometimes good things don't make it, when other things already have public mindshare.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
Well, that escalated quickly. :-)
Koans and fables for the software engineer
Windows still bears the scars of having shared memory and message queues. Every WinMain contains a useless pointer to hPrevInstance so you could gracefully handle telling people not to run multiple instances of your app.
And WaitNextEvent() is an entirely different pile of pain. Every how-to book (and I have several) tells you to use 0x7fffffff as your wait time. That basically puts your program at the lowest priority. So the first thing every newbie programmer does is try out what happens if you use 0 instead. The answer: you lock up your Mac because you haven't progressed far enough to have made anything that breaks that while(true) event loop. Derp.
That was the new UI concepts introduced in Windows 95 again? The start button and the system tray are the only thing I come to think of. I never liked the start button concept. But I guess it was a remedy the complete mess some users ware able to make in the program manager (thanks to it's window in window MDI implementation). Perhaps it was kind of intuitive. But clinking "start" to turn of the computer... I don't know. The system tray on the other hand is simply just bad. It presents a bunch of random icons to the user. A few of the icons may be useful, a few of them understood by the user but most of them have no real purpose other than to expose some logo. (You can say the third party applications displaying the icons are to blame but I think the system tray still is responsible for proving an API that encourages it.)
Apart from that, Windows 95 tried to move from an application centric paradigm to a document centric. But it only felt like a poor atempt to mimic OS/2. Instead of replacing the load/save pattarn with the open/close pattern they ended up with just replacing the word "load" with the word "open", and (less conseqently) the word "quit" with the word "close". They basically replaced established UI terminolygy with a new anything-goes-policy. Not unlike iOS then you think about it. No application can be too strange to feel out of place. Perhaps that was the biggest achivement of the Windows 95 UI?
Actually, dragging to the trash made a lot of sense in the context of it's day.
You're on a single floppy drive machine - with no hard disk. You boot off the system disk and Eject it with CMD-E. The system caches the list of files on that disk and spits out the floppy, greys the icon a bit (but it is still clickable and even browsable without the disk in the drive - you just can't execute anything). Then you put in maybe your application disk for MS Word and fire that up, and after it's loaded you again eject with CMD-E. Again, the disk is cached and remains on the desktop.
Now you write up your homework in word and want to save the file. You insert a third disk. Your documents disk. You save the file, but you're done with that disk, so you use the Command "Put Away" CMD-Y to eject the disk and not have it cached to the desktop.
You then want to print your homework out for class, but this requires a read of the system disk, so the system prompts you to pop it back in.
All these disks appeared on your desktop and you could work between them because you had them cached virtually - all one a single floppy system. You only got rid of them when you were actually done with them. Whether or not they were physically in the machine had no bearing on whether or not you were still working with them. I mean, You wouldn't re-eject an already ejected disk would you just to clear the virtual disk off your desktop would you? To clean things up you'd just drag it to the trash - because you were trashing the ghost, not the actual disk. Or alternatively use CMD-Y to put away the ghost which had the same effect.
If you understood what was going on, it made sense in that context.
Yeah, except in Europe where they were really big. However I was mostly referring to the 'innovations' of windows '95 - multiple open programs, overlapping windows, multiple active screen resolutions. All done 10 years earlier on AmigaOS/Intuition...
Another aspect of Win 95, kinda lost now, was it was fun. The Plus! cd packed in all these themes that actually worked, changing fonts, icons, colors, wallpaper, screensaver, and (my favorite) system sounds to an aquarium, a haunted house, sports, and other cool time-wasting stuff. The aquarium screensaver was quite impressive. Sure it ate some CPU, but by the time Pentium 133's were common, who cared? Some of the system sounds from that era I still keep around and plug into Windows, 'cause some of them were just plain well done.
One of my ongoing beefs with Microsoft is how, with each release, they take more of this away. I didn't mind "Luna" on XP, at least not in principle, but they only released 3 possible colors (plus a black Zune theme if you could find it). Otherwise, Luna was locked down (although "classic" was still available).
It got worse from there. On a lot of systems, you have to go through a lot of settings to get Aero to start working even if you have adequate display hardware, and once it's working there's not much you can do with it. Moreover, these things they call "themes" in Windows 7-10 aren't themes at all - they're little more than a wallpaper (albeit a pretty one). Little else can be changed. You have to go skinning or buy Windows Blinds to do anything close to what Windows 95 offered with Plus!, and these methods involve messing with system files which Win 10's mandatory system updates may well wipe out on a regular basis.
Windows 95 was a product that Microsoft was determined to make people want to use on a PC at home. But the guys behind it have probably all retired with their stock options, and the new people figure you'll buy Windows 'cause you just have to. Fuck having fun, give us your ID, your browsing history and your shopping habits. Click on this live tile, watch this ad. Buy a tablet and a phone, so we can track where you're at. It's been 20 years since Windows 95 and we got TELEMETRY!
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
True, but the mac interface sucked. W95 was much nicer than any of the OS7/8/9 competitors. 2nd mover advantage, and all that. Not that it always works that way - nextstep was a nicer OS IMHO than OSX.
I think they had overlapping windows, but to draw in a window that wasn't the front window, it had to be brought to the front first, then pushed back down where it used to be. Quickdraw regions made this unnecessary on the Lisa and later the Mac.
And Windows still doesn't pre-erase window contents when they're exposed by something in front of them moving away.
FWIW, the original function of "Put Away" was when you put something in the trash, Put Away put it back where it used to be before it went into the trash. So the other way of getting rid of an off-line disk was really the equivalent of taking it out of the trash!
Actually that isn't the purpose of hPrevInstance at all. It was designed so that you could run multiple copies or instances of the same program and the copies could share data with each other.
A few programs simply used the parameter to display an error if another copy was already running but that was not it's intended purpose and doing so generally indicates the developer was too lazy to test cases that required running multiple copies of the application.
More information about hPrevInstance can be found at The Old New Thing
That picture is from 1983. Jobs visited Xerox in 1979
The most odious piece of legacy code that refuses to die is of course, NTFS. We still are stuck with 206 character path names, we can't use many characters or symbols in file names, and we STILL have three character file extensions.
Just look in your system folder at all of the legacy crapware and bits. Networking drivers, sound drivers, control panels, you name it - still all legacy code underneath the shiny exterior of Windows 10. Type in "mstsc.exe" and well, that old piece of junk still is there... ftp is as well, despite it being an insanely insecure way to transfer files these days. So is telnet.
Yes, Windows 95 has a long reach. Like a Zombie, it refuses to die.
...and in the end you still didn't throw them away. You saved them, you wrote them to disk, closed the file, you did any number of things but put it in the "trash"? I understood, I still understand, It's a shitty analogy. Nowhere in any real world setting, nowhere in any imagined setting has this EVER happened before. You don't throw away what you want to save. Who the fuck walked around a 1980s office and said, "Oh Marcy, get that important document out of the trash, I want to work on it again." It was a failure covered up to pretend it was a feature. Stop making excuses for them. "So let it be written, so let it be done!" It was too late to turn back after it was done. What I don't understand is why they are still doing it. Really I need to force hack my CD out of the drive because the OS won't give it back?!!! FU. Now I've voided my warranty???!!! FU. Just give me the f****** CD. Give me the f******* floppy(yes that's how long this has been going on). FU Apple. YOU DO NOT DICTATE WHEN I GET MY DATA BACK. I shouldn't have to "pick" my CD drive to get my CD back. What this means is Apple hasn't even learned to mount and unmount a drive yet. Did I say FU Apple? Yes I am fully capable of doing things myself. Oh that's right Apple is meant only for hipsters and fa***** who need to have something in their hand at all times, whether a coffee or someone else's d***. FU Apple. How about giving me access to an SD card. Oh that's right, FU I have to go the "Cloud" to transfer documents so you and every other agency around the world can read them. FU Apple. Don't even get me started on Microsoft.
Preemptive multitasking in Windows 95? Whaaat?
Actually, they'd probably have trouble launching applications. There's no dock so they would have to figure out to how to go to Apple menu, which they probably figure out after a minute or two unless perhaps they've also used Gnome. Windows 95 has the start button in the same place and it basically functions the same as it always has (well, except for that whole Windows 8 thing..). So a modern Windows user would know how to use it pretty much instantly.
I can also guarantee you that they'd end up with every program they launch being open because they wouldn't know how to actually close them. Well, until MacOS shits all over itself due to it's non-existent memory management and crashes.
Yes, it's true. It took Apple all the way to OSX to have what Microsoft had in 1995 with Windows 95, and in 1993 with NT. Apple spent the entire 1990's with an OS that wasn't any more advanced than Windows 3.1 in many ways.
It's kind of too bad that doesn't exist anymore. If you want to have it so the user double clicks on a file in Windows Explorer and have the file open in an already existing instance of your application, this can be somewhat tricky. Windows file associations work by launching your program with the file name as a command line argument, so it will just keep launching instances of your application. So to get around this, when your application starts, it must somehow figure if there is already an existing instance, and if one exists, pass the command line arguments to the first instance to open the file, then the duplicate instance can exit. This is actually non-trivial, and one of the common solutions is to use DDE, which is basically unchanged since Windows 3.1.
Yes, Win95 offered fully preemptive multitasking and a private address space per process for 32-bit programs. 16-bit software was multitasked cooperatively under 95, since all 16-bit programs shared a single address space and the 16-bit API code was not reentrant.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas