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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!
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
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.
95 was the first Windows that was an operating system. 3.1 was still a DOS application.
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/
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.
I would say xp (with luna turned off) was the pinnacle of underlying tech and UI layout for microsoft.
I think I was 13, and I can say unequivocally that breaking Windows 3.1 and having to fix shit before my parents got home taught me more about computers than the 4 years of college that came later.
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 ;-)
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.
Also, let's not forget OS/2 Warp, which came out in 1994. It had something very similar to a start button and task bar, only it was located at the top by default.
sig: sauer
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 remember it was very fast - to BSOD.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
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!
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.
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.
A menu that pops on the bottom right on clicking 'START' can hardly be called UI innovation.
Which is why MS put it on the bottom left.
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.
That was the second OS/2 Warp (OS/2 4) actually. OS/2 3.0 Warp used the launchpad still - kind of CDE like in retrospect. Among us OS/2 users at the time few of us liked the addition of the top bar in Warp 4.
Besides what the AC said (which I 100% agree with) XP's real feature over windows 2000 was probably the license model change. Before XP the licenses weren't tied to the hardware, and weren't verified by MS. I've always though that the main reason for the change. The UI color style (which could be revered to 2000's look) was to make people thing they were getting something over 2000.
The fact that it was such a small update over 2k is probably most of what made it successful. All the major issues were worked by the users of 2k. That is basically what happened with windows7 too. Vista users dealt with all the bugs, and when it was finally a reasonable product MS just released it with the appropriate service packs as a new product.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Well, on a 386 or better processor, Windows 3.1 would run in protected mode or '386 enhanced mode' and provide virtual DOS environments to run many MS-DOS programs, and also use 32-bit system calls to access the hard drive. So it was in a sense a 'shell' that ran on top of MS-DOS but also enhanced the performance of DOS programs run with it. I ran Windows 3 for years before I could afford a 386 though. A good old 8088 machine with a Hercules graphic card, and later an IBM EGA card in mono-graphics mode (there was a way to plug a 'digital' monochrome display into a real IBM EGA card that was jumpered correctly and get a pretty nice Windows display- much better than Hercules.)
You certainly could boot DOS, but then you were using DOS, not Win95. Win95 was not "running on top of DOS" in the same way that 3.1 was.
As others have said, it had its own memory manager and disk access, which is pretty much what DOS did (in a crappier way). So, if you booted DOS, you weren't booting the lower levels of Win95, you were booting DOS 7.0: another operating system entirely which Win95 just happened to be very backward compatible with, boot-loaded from and was used for 16-bit driver access.
Some details:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnew...
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...
...and bullshit...
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2010/06/102660634-05-04-acc.pdf
It makes a grown man cry.
Win95 "ran on" DOS the same way that your Linux machine runs on JavaScript. Just because you have a VM spun up running a compatibility layer for legacy programs doesn't mean your OS is based on what that VM emulates.
Put yourself on the right side of ignorance: read this
Oh, you mean Windows 2000?
Bye!
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.