Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
was "Windows 95 sucks less."
Design for Use, not Construction!
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
Yep Xerox got the UI right.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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
9x was still a DOS application, it just booted on startup automagically.
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
I think they mean a current 15 year-old of today (i.e. someone who did not grow up with Windows 95) would still be able to use Windows 95 because it shares so much with the UI of today's Windows.
As far as games go, Microsoft (smartly) killed gaming on the Mac.
There was an awesome game called Marathon on the Mac, from a new firm called Bungiesoft. It was a quantum leap past what most Mac games were (and PC for that matter), and could have made PowerPC the gamer's choice (anyone remember the Pipin? im sure you don't). But Microsoft and Gates smartly bought out Bungiesoft, and their next Mac game Halo got quickly made into a PC/XBox only affair. Imagine a world where Halo was a Mac game, a Halo halo effect as it were, and the home computing world is much different.
In MacOS6, all control panels were in a DeskAccessory called Control Panel. There was a selector on the left, and a general area to fill with content on the right. Why did the author pick windows 95 for this "all in one control panel" instead of the Mac's own legacy from 5 years previous to Win95 I don't know.
Also, the 3 buttons in the window, that's as much to do with XWindows as Microsoft. Remember MacOSX has roots in NeXT which has roots in UNIX. It's odd to attribute to Windows when there's a direct line to XWindows.
I had TCP/IP on my personal Mac in 92 or 93, with MacTCP and either MacSLIP or MacPPP (as my back end improved). I don't know how you go from "Apple bundled previously separate Mac Specific freeware" to "it was Win95 that did it sir!". Everything going to TCP/IP was obvious back then.
There are several stretches in the article to attribute things to Win95 when it's easy to see sources elsewhere. Not that Win95 didn't have influence. But no need to say the world changed ONLY because of Win95 when there were several things moving in the same direction.
I remember thinking that Windows 95 was just a bad copy of OS/2 with some Macisms sprinkled around for good measure. I don't think it would be too far off the mark to say that Windows 95's main claim to fame was that it copied the right combination of features from other systems which were already around. That's not necessarily a bad thing; it's frequently how big successes happen in computing and elsewhere. However, to say those features themselves were Win95 innovations would be stretching things more than a bit.
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!
Heh. How many times did I hand-edit win.ini?
That's why /etc in unix and linux made sense to me later. Configuration controls are meant to be human-readable and human editable.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
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.
Absolutely. Doom predated Windows 95, which was in turn predated by wolfenstein 3D which was arguably the most influential game of all time. How many FPS games owe their look and feel to those two games?
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.
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
That's exactly what I don't miss. Regular people aren't power users. They just want things to work. If the included feature set is so deficient that they have to rely on third party software, it's more stuff they have to learn, and more work for those who help them to support.
In the DOS days I used to use Norton Commander. I felt blind without it. I'd go to work and my boss would ask to look at something on his machine, and he was an XTreeProGold guy. OK, it's a great program too, but it's like we spoke different languages. To use someone else's machine, there was always some learning curve to figure out THEIR "bag of tricks". These days I can get most everything done with the tools included with Windows. I don't want to have to rely on some "vibrant marketplace", everything I really need is consistently included on any Windows machine I touch.
Power users are a different breed. Linux seems to offer exactly that "vibrant", choice-filled competitive atmosphere you're looking for. Seems like an OS that would fit you better.
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.