Opera 8.53 works fine on Windows 95 OSR2. I assume it would also work on Windows 98, but I've not personally moved to such a modern platform at home.:-)
Not really. OS/2 Warp 3 came out with dial-up networking out of the box in 1994, and it had a fairly large chunk of the hobbyist market in 1994/1995. I would guess 10% at least (and I've seen higher guestimates).
OS/2 is safe, mainly (as you say) because it's relatively obscure, but also partially because it uses a TCP/IP stack derived from BSD and partially because it doesn't have any stupid infection vectors like ActiveX.:-)
FWIW, OS/2 from 2.0 isn't all that similar to Windows. Different kernel design, different filesystems, different scripting language (REXX), etc. The PM (Presentation Manager) API is similar to Windows in some respects, but the WPS desktop is based on SOM which is very different from anything Microsoft.
Probably quite a few. As I noted a few days ago in another discussion here, I even use Win95 OSR2 on a fairly regular basis.
Why? It's legal, it works, and I've locked it down to the point where it's stable. Oh yeah, and I have it living behind a firewall so it doesn't accidentally get burned.:-)
If you do something with your own hands, the lessons tend to stick. I'd grab copies of a few Linux distros, FreeBSD, and maybe Solaris or something and try to install them at home. You can pick up a decent PC on eBay for less than $100 to use as an experimental box.
I got my initial UNIX experience (1) installing and playing with Linux and (2) taking a UNIX admin course at a local college, both in the early 1990's. The two different types of learning complimented each other well, at least in my case.
I *do* have a ReplyTV 5040, but I don't save stuff off to a PC. Even its little 40GB drive has been enough for us at this point.
I have a 250GB Buffalo LinkStation on the LAN that I might choose to use for some archival purpose, but I doubt it'll be video -- I have a couple thousand CDs, literally, between my rock and classical collections that I want to rip and make available to the LAN at a decent bitrate, but even 128k VBR files suck up a lot of space fairly quickly once they start to accumulate. I'm already burning almost 40GB, and I'm barely getting started.:-( Individually those are little files.
Because they take up space, make noise, and suck electricity.
I'll bet that the 4-5 boxes I tend to keep running with a single monitor (and which spend most of the time turned off) use less power than many single newer boxes do all by themselves. I don't have power-hungry CPUs or video cards to feed.
See, this is the kind detail that irks me. Any current linux distribution would work just fine with 64MB in the capacity of a file server without using significantely more RAM. And yet you choose an obsolete distribution. Baffling.
Then I will educate you.
Do a Google Groups search for "Proliant" and "memory hole". Now, realize that I've done an additional modification to the box (I added a Compaq-branded Matrox Millenium), making the normal kernel boot directives to bypass the memory hole on certain Proliant systems ("mem=exactmap mem=640@0m mem=63m@1m") not work anymore.
This box is EXTREMELY picky. I've not gotten a single Knoppix-based distro to install on it yet, newer versions of Mandriva will not install, newer Fedora versions will not install, and newer SuSE versions will not install. All they see is either 15MB or 16MB (it has 64MB installed).
However, Mandrake 8.2 boot just fine with a single very simple directive: mem=64MB. That directive does not work with newer kernels. It fails. But Mandrake is old enough that it doesn't seem to have the same sort of issues with this box that newer distros seem to.
I'm choosing to use the only distro that I've managed to successfully boot on the box. So shoot me. If you have a better idea, I'm all ears. DSL used to work, but it now fails. INSERT used to work, but it also now fails. Puppy has always failed. Slackware and Slax both fail. I've tried a lot of distros on the Proliant, and frankly I'm sick of spinning my wheels on it, so I went back to the old standby.
Dare I verbalize my thoughts on what you can do with your misguided assumptions...?:-)
So, what accounts for the other party? Near as I can tell, they're both sucking pretty hard these days.
Guess why I voted for Governor Jesse when I lived up in Minnesota? The guy wasn't as effective as he could have been, but he was interesting, you knew precisely where he stood on issues, and his behavior was a refreshing blast of fresh air compared to the pile of career politician types out there who don't seem to care about much else beyond re-election. The best thing: he promised he'd only serve one term in office, and he stuck to that.
Neither one of the major parties appeals to me, either. Too many extremists in each one...
I'm sorry. I use XP Pro, Solaris 9, and OS2200 at work. And I only have one PC at work. Is that better?:-)
"Secondary" desktops?? WTF are you talking about? Do you ever leave teh house?
As an OS/2 user who likes a certain amount of gaming, I need at least two boxes to keep me happy, and I hate dual-booting a lot. I've also found time to play with things like Solaris, BeOS, FreeBSD, and a number of Linux variants on occasion, mainly which makes having multiple desktop boxes useful. Welcome to the world of the PC hobbyist.:-) Old boxes are cheap, so why not collect a few?
Oh come on. Win95 as a server? On A Proliant 2500?
To be fair, it also runs Win2k, but I had an additional legal license for Win95 OSR2 and decided to see if it would run. It does. I'm in the process of replacing both with Mandrake 8.2 (which is old but fitting for a 64MB file server), though, so it'll soon be a moot point.
I suspect you might have some serious mental health issues. But if it works for you, more power to you.
It used to be worse. I've actually used a Mac in a corporate environment, and I'm not a graphics artist or anything. How's that for sicko?:-):-)
I could do the same, but the Proliant and its hard drives were freebies. Hard to beat that.:-)
Yeah, I do tend to collect a lot of crap, but I manage to put most of it to actual use. And it's a lot more fun (I think) to do comparisons between operating systems side-by-side via KVM than to try to dual-boot between them. The price of some of the other boxes was fairly negligible, also, something which was important back when I was looking for work and didn't have a lot of money to toss around...
Didn't mean to be a jerk, but I know VERY few people who would care about files of that size outside of a few folks who do video work for a living. It just struck me as an odd question.
Some of us run older top-of-the-line workstation-class boxes at home (with older operating systems) simply because we can, and it's fun to see how much raw functionality can be extracted from such hardware and software.
Often the end result is quite impressive.
I personally don't blame the FireFox developers for dropping Win9x from their main support tree, since that was a foreone conclusion at some point. That doesn't make it any less disappointing, though.
Maybe *your* PC was single-threaded in 1998. Mine was *heavily* multithreaded even as far back as 1992, but I wasn't running Windows on my 486DX/33 back then either.:-)
What on earth would I use files that large for? How would I generate them? I don't do video editing, and nothing I've seen that I have any use for approaches that size.
My Micron tower at home is almost 10 years old now (built November 1996), but it has a 686-class CPU (a 200MHz Pentium Pro) with a second CPU socket if I want one, it has three 7200RPM SCSI drives in it which are probably as fast as many modern IDE drives, its video runs at 1600x1200@85hz which is decent even by today's standards, and it connects to the net via cablemodem with a 100Mbit ethernet card.
Not that different from most boxes sold today. And it's nine years old.
The main differences are (1) video subsystems are much faster today, (2) my old box only reads/writes CD-R/CD-RW media and not DVDs, and (3) it runs older operating systems specifically optimized for its era.
I've even found at times that my little 192MB PPro outperforms my 512MB P4 box. Why? Because Warp 4 kicks XP Pro's ass under load, for one, and because I tend to run a lot of smaller lighter applications instead of the modern bloatware I'm saddled with at work.
It's funny how viewpoints change from platform to platform.
On my main work platform here, for example (a Unisys Clearpath Dorado server), I have a lot of software in my local UTILITIES directory that was last compiled in the 1980's and even one utility last compiled in January 1978, and yet the OS release we're running here (Unisys ClearPath OS2200 10.1, EXEC 47R5B) isn't all that old (August 2005).
In any case, you obviously missed my point. Microsoft could have done it far better with a little thought and an intelligent approach to legacy support. IBM knew how, and did so with OS/2. It simply wasn't in Microsoft's plans (they made a lot more money pushing crap like Win9x).
The problem isn't forced upgrades (which don't exist), but rather the lack of browser fixes that will probably result from Win9x support being dropped from the mainstream FireFox tree.
Unlike most applications, a web browser actually interfaces with things on the internet, so it is far more likely to be compromised than my old copy of Visio or Comptons Encyclopedia.:-)
Precisely. I realized right away (from witnessing a friend's experience with that update) that the IE-based desktop in Win95 was far slower than the original Win95 UI, and since I also used Netscape and then Mozilla on those boxes for browsing I didn't really see a need to install that update. It was a downgrade in almost every way imaginable.
Amusingly, your "old" box is twice as fast as anything in my house except my wife's box. I have one Micron PPro/200 box as my main desktop, two Compaq Deskpro PPro/200s (one with an Intel OverDrive so it's a screamer at 333MHz), two IBM IntelliStations (Model 6899, so they're also PPro/200 boxes), and one Compaq Proliant 2500 (PPro/200).
For everything but modern gaming and video processing, those boxes are just fine. I still think that games like NFS3, TA, and UT are loads of fun, and since I'm mainly playing solo it doesn't matter what others think.:-)
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Opera 8.53 works fine on Windows 95 OSR2. I assume it would also work on Windows 98, but I've not personally moved to such a modern platform at home. :-)
Sorry to nitpick, but OSR2.0 added FAT32 support, not USB. That didn't arrive until OSR2.1.
:-)
You're absolutely right that OSR2.5 was crap, tho...
Not really. OS/2 Warp 3 came out with dial-up networking out of the box in 1994, and it had a fairly large chunk of the hobbyist market in 1994/1995. I would guess 10% at least (and I've seen higher guestimates).
OS/2 is safe, mainly (as you say) because it's relatively obscure, but also partially because it uses a TCP/IP stack derived from BSD and partially because it doesn't have any stupid infection vectors like ActiveX. :-)
FWIW, OS/2 from 2.0 isn't all that similar to Windows. Different kernel design, different filesystems, different scripting language (REXX), etc. The PM (Presentation Manager) API is similar to Windows in some respects, but the WPS desktop is based on SOM which is very different from anything Microsoft.
Probably quite a few. As I noted a few days ago in another discussion here, I even use Win95 OSR2 on a fairly regular basis.
:-)
Why? It's legal, it works, and I've locked it down to the point where it's stable. Oh yeah, and I have it living behind a firewall so it doesn't accidentally get burned.
If you do something with your own hands, the lessons tend to stick. I'd grab copies of a few Linux distros, FreeBSD, and maybe Solaris or something and try to install them at home. You can pick up a decent PC on eBay for less than $100 to use as an experimental box.
I got my initial UNIX experience (1) installing and playing with Linux and (2) taking a UNIX admin course at a local college, both in the early 1990's. The two different types of learning complimented each other well, at least in my case.
I thought it was Tim...er...Tom Benzedr...er...Bombadil who did the smoking...?
I *do* have a ReplyTV 5040, but I don't save stuff off to a PC. Even its little 40GB drive has been enough for us at this point.
:-( Individually those are little files.
I have a 250GB Buffalo LinkStation on the LAN that I might choose to use for some archival purpose, but I doubt it'll be video -- I have a couple thousand CDs, literally, between my rock and classical collections that I want to rip and make available to the LAN at a decent bitrate, but even 128k VBR files suck up a lot of space fairly quickly once they start to accumulate. I'm already burning almost 40GB, and I'm barely getting started.
I'll bet that the 4-5 boxes I tend to keep running with a single monitor (and which spend most of the time turned off) use less power than many single newer boxes do all by themselves. I don't have power-hungry CPUs or video cards to feed.
Then I will educate you.
Do a Google Groups search for "Proliant" and "memory hole". Now, realize that I've done an additional modification to the box (I added a Compaq-branded Matrox Millenium), making the normal kernel boot directives to bypass the memory hole on certain Proliant systems ("mem=exactmap mem=640@0m mem=63m@1m") not work anymore.
This box is EXTREMELY picky. I've not gotten a single Knoppix-based distro to install on it yet, newer versions of Mandriva will not install, newer Fedora versions will not install, and newer SuSE versions will not install. All they see is either 15MB or 16MB (it has 64MB installed).
However, Mandrake 8.2 boot just fine with a single very simple directive: mem=64MB. That directive does not work with newer kernels. It fails. But Mandrake is old enough that it doesn't seem to have the same sort of issues with this box that newer distros seem to.
I'm choosing to use the only distro that I've managed to successfully boot on the box. So shoot me. If you have a better idea, I'm all ears. DSL used to work, but it now fails. INSERT used to work, but it also now fails. Puppy has always failed. Slackware and Slax both fail. I've tried a lot of distros on the Proliant, and frankly I'm sick of spinning my wheels on it, so I went back to the old standby.
Dare I verbalize my thoughts on what you can do with your misguided assumptions...? :-)
The latest one I've run on Win95 OSR2 is Opera 8.53, which I think is pretty current. A version off, perhaps.
Guess why I voted for Governor Jesse when I lived up in Minnesota? The guy wasn't as effective as he could have been, but he was interesting, you knew precisely where he stood on issues, and his behavior was a refreshing blast of fresh air compared to the pile of career politician types out there who don't seem to care about much else beyond re-election. The best thing: he promised he'd only serve one term in office, and he stuck to that.
Neither one of the major parties appeals to me, either. Too many extremists in each one...
I could do the same, but the Proliant and its hard drives were freebies. Hard to beat that. :-)
Yeah, I do tend to collect a lot of crap, but I manage to put most of it to actual use. And it's a lot more fun (I think) to do comparisons between operating systems side-by-side via KVM than to try to dual-boot between them. The price of some of the other boxes was fairly negligible, also, something which was important back when I was looking for work and didn't have a lot of money to toss around...
Didn't mean to be a jerk, but I know VERY few people who would care about files of that size outside of a few folks who do video work for a living. It just struck me as an odd question.
:-(
Sorry for sounding like a jerk.
DOS users already have Arachne. :-)
Some of us run older top-of-the-line workstation-class boxes at home (with older operating systems) simply because we can, and it's fun to see how much raw functionality can be extracted from such hardware and software.
Often the end result is quite impressive.
I personally don't blame the FireFox developers for dropping Win9x from their main support tree, since that was a foreone conclusion at some point. That doesn't make it any less disappointing, though.
Maybe *your* PC was single-threaded in 1998. Mine was *heavily* multithreaded even as far back as 1992, but I wasn't running Windows on my 486DX/33 back then either. :-)
What on earth would I use files that large for? How would I generate them? I don't do video editing, and nothing I've seen that I have any use for approaches that size.
What a silly question...
My Micron tower at home is almost 10 years old now (built November 1996), but it has a 686-class CPU (a 200MHz Pentium Pro) with a second CPU socket if I want one, it has three 7200RPM SCSI drives in it which are probably as fast as many modern IDE drives, its video runs at 1600x1200@85hz which is decent even by today's standards, and it connects to the net via cablemodem with a 100Mbit ethernet card.
Not that different from most boxes sold today. And it's nine years old.
The main differences are (1) video subsystems are much faster today, (2) my old box only reads/writes CD-R/CD-RW media and not DVDs, and (3) it runs older operating systems specifically optimized for its era.
I've even found at times that my little 192MB PPro outperforms my 512MB P4 box. Why? Because Warp 4 kicks XP Pro's ass under load, for one, and because I tend to run a lot of smaller lighter applications instead of the modern bloatware I'm saddled with at work.
So I ask again: Are computers really evolving?
It's funny how viewpoints change from platform to platform.
On my main work platform here, for example (a Unisys Clearpath Dorado server), I have a lot of software in my local UTILITIES directory that was last compiled in the 1980's and even one utility last compiled in January 1978, and yet the OS release we're running here (Unisys ClearPath OS2200 10.1, EXEC 47R5B) isn't all that old (August 2005).
In any case, you obviously missed my point. Microsoft could have done it far better with a little thought and an intelligent approach to legacy support. IBM knew how, and did so with OS/2. It simply wasn't in Microsoft's plans (they made a lot more money pushing crap like Win9x).
The great American explodomobile! :-)
The problem isn't forced upgrades (which don't exist), but rather the lack of browser fixes that will probably result from Win9x support being dropped from the mainstream FireFox tree.
:-)
Unlike most applications, a web browser actually interfaces with things on the internet, so it is far more likely to be compromised than my old copy of Visio or Comptons Encyclopedia.
Precisely. I realized right away (from witnessing a friend's experience with that update) that the IE-based desktop in Win95 was far slower than the original Win95 UI, and since I also used Netscape and then Mozilla on those boxes for browsing I didn't really see a need to install that update. It was a downgrade in almost every way imaginable.
Amusingly, your "old" box is twice as fast as anything in my house except my wife's box. I have one Micron PPro/200 box as my main desktop, two Compaq Deskpro PPro/200s (one with an Intel OverDrive so it's a screamer at 333MHz), two IBM IntelliStations (Model 6899, so they're also PPro/200 boxes), and one Compaq Proliant 2500 (PPro/200).
:-)
For everything but modern gaming and video processing, those boxes are just fine. I still think that games like NFS3, TA, and UT are loads of fun, and since I'm mainly playing solo it doesn't matter what others think.
Actually, the latest version of Opera should run just fine under Windows 95, 98, etc. I use at home sometimes on my OSR2 setup.