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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.'"
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
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
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.
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.
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