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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
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.
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.
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 ;-)
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.
@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.
You had a Windows button on your keyboard? Fancy. Us common plebs had to make do with standard 102 if we were lucky.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
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.
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.
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.
I'm not a kernel engineer (just a sysadm from way back) but I seem to recall that Windows NT inherited quite a bit from VMS under the covers, both good and bad. (An example of bad, I was told, had to do with security issues with message passing. I can't remember anything more than that.)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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!
My favorite dig at Windows 95 was that it came on like 22 floppy disks.
Oh, I want to install TCP/IP networking.... Ok, insert floppy disk 3 followed by floppy disk 20.... oh, don't have either of those? no networking for you!
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Enh, as someone who had to struggle late into the night trying to resolve driver issues, PnP issues, master browser storms, and other idiotic issues, I'd say Windows 95 sucked its entire life, and Windows 98 did too. 98 SE was when they finally got it right. Or, at least, usable.
From a conceptual standpoint, Microsoft really had something with 95. But under the covers, it could get really ugly.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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...
The first time I installed Windows 95 it was a beta version on a CD-ROM that I'd been handed at a Microsoft Developer's event of some sort. (I promptly took it to work and installed it over my Windows for Workgroup and discovered via the 'Network Neighborhood' that there was tons of stuff out there on the Work servers that we were't supposed to be able to casually 'browse.')
I didn't encounter floppy versions of Win95 until significantly later, when I bought a laptop that didn't have a CD drive. You had to make an 'install set' with your own floppies back then, though Toshiba kindly provided nice professional looking stickers for each diskette. (When I produced my set [stupidly not buying new high quality media to use for that purpose] it had a defective disk #17 if I remember right. You just had to make sure not to install the optional components on #17 to get a clean install without it crashing.)
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...
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.
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.
IBM was really to blame for that failure.
Indeed. I remember reading about how OS/2 was far more sophisticated than Windows... then I saw IBM selling PCs loaded with Windows. Something was clearly wrong there: if they wouldn't put their weight behind their own system, who would?
Circumcision is child abuse.
...like allowing spaces in file names. Incredibly bad idea
...shared by every UN*X out there and by Windows NT. Not at all a problem from the GUI (nice, actually), and, from the command line, shells allow quoting and many UN*X shells will escape spaces when doing auto-completion. Yeah, you have to take a little more care when writing shell scripts, and use "-print0" with find and "-0" with xargs, but I've managed to live with that.
Huh. So Apple has always been a patent troll then.
I do know from what alternative land you are coming where Amiga users loved anything Microsoft. Amiga did things that took almost 20 something years for the PCs to catch up. Even multitasking under 95 was a shit.
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
Even multitasking under 95 was a shit.
No joke. The most visible parts of Windows 95 were - despite appearances - maintaining a lot of Windows 3.x compatibility underneath. The entire GUI app system was only capable of co-operative multi-tasking. It actually ran within a single virtual DOS box. The DOS boxes and virtual device drivers were pre-emptive multitasking between themselves, but not the GUI.
The Amiga, on the other hand, from Day 1 had full real-time capable pre-emptive multitasking. The Interrupt Services were themselves interruptible by higher-priority interrupts and the system timer did round-robin scheduling on the application tasks. Sadly, it was ahead of its time, so that while the lowest-common-denominator did include services like these, as well as hardware DMA, it didn't include hardware memory protection.
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
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.
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
Preemptive multitasking in Windows 95? Whaaat?
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