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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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
/)
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.
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.
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.
Well, yeah. It sucked enough less.
Not sucking too much is the Microsoft quality standard.