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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.'"
95 was the first Windows that was an operating system. 3.1 was still a DOS application.
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/
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 ;-)
Wrong if you edited the text file msdos.sys you could still boot into the DOS version running under windows 95. I even found ways of exiting windows 95 to DOS. Windows-NT/XP etc where the actual windowed osses microsoft made.
In the beginning you could even add win32 libraries to windows 3.11 and run some windows 95 applications by tweaking their ini files.
Not really a DOS application. DOS was an advanced bootloader (in modern terms) for Windows 95. W95 has it's own memory manager, cpu scheduler, device drivers and even DOS API emulation. You could not "close Windows" and go back to DOS without a reboot. In W3.11 it was pretty much possible.
Yep. 111-11111111 or something like that actually worked. There were other variants that were easy to remember at-the-time too.
Close! The format of those old Microsoft product keys was actually 000-0000000.
The trick to making up a valid product key was that the 7-digit field must add up to a multiple of seven. The easiest code to remember was 111-1111111 -- seven ones add up to seven -- which turns out is a multiple of a seven :)
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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The problem was plug and play and under DOS. Each manufacturer had their own proprietary PnP configuration utility and they were often mutually exclusive.
The *real* fun under later versions of DOS was playing the equivalent of Tetris trying to get as much crap in the UMA/HMA as you could so you had enough conventional memory left to do something useful.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
The key difference is that Windows 95 did not use DOS to access the hard drive. It had its own 32 bit disk manager. DOS's file access provisions went dormant once the system booted as long as an appropriate driver was available. If no driver was available, you'd have an exclamation point in control panel, and very bad performance. Fraxinus is spot on - DOS was still there, but was relegated to being a bootloader and recovery console.
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
anyone remember NSCA Mosaic?
Yup, and I also remember having to have Trumpet Winsock to get connected at all. Fun times playing with the configuration to get it to handshake with the terminal adapter and get a SLIP/PPP session started.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Sorry. OS/2 had this before win95. Everything was an object. The desktop was basically an object that was a folder. Subfolders had their own individual properties (including backgrounds, permissions etc) being objects themselves.
...and bullshit...
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2010/06/102660634-05-04-acc.pdf