Windows 95 Turns 10

ColdGrits writes "It's hard to believe it, but 10 short years ago today saw the launch of Windows '95. Here is an archive of the Washington Post's story on the day. As part of the launch, Microsoft paid $12,000,000 for the rights to use the Rolling Stones' song "Start Me Up" (containing the prophetic line 'You make a grown man cry'). "

Spell Check

[r0d3nt]

What's a sort year? And what's this Windowsz 95 thing?

Re:Windows 95.

[hal9000(jr)]

Windows 95, it was quite a leap in stability and usablility from windows 3.1. I don't think windows has had such an upgrade since then

Huh? *cough* Windows 2000 *cough*

Much more stable that Win 95, far fewer requirements to reinstall, use of ring 0, ring 3 seperation , better memory management, NTFS and encrypted file system. (yeah, I know, many of these features started in NT, but NT isn't comparable to a desktop OS like Win 95, not even NT Workstation)

Re:Windows 95.

[Paleomacus]

Actually, for me windows 3.1 was pretty stable and usable. Win95 was unstable and I pretty much had to fix it as much as use it. However, WinXP actually works well most of the time, doesn't easily break, and I can do pretty much all of the same things on it as I can on any other modern OS.

Re:Ahh, nostalgia...

[ArielMT]

No. NeXT was a venture of Steve Jobs after he left Apple the first time. After he returned to Apple, with NeXT a technological breakthrough but a commercial failure, it was Apple under Jobs' stewardship who bought out NeXT.

Re:Mock it if you will, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

System 6 predates Window 95 by seven years (released in 1988).
In 1995, the latest Mac OS was System 7.5.

Re:Oh, for the days of a $90 OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Try Mac OS X ;)

When you consider inflation, it can't be too far off $90 in 1995.

But they didn't deliver; they provided a stop-gap.

[Richard Steiner]

Windows 95 still had a crappy FAT filesystem (even though Microsoft had developed HPFS years before) and it was still a pile of 32-bit DLLs (or VxDs) running on top of DOS instead of a compartmentalized 32-bit OS with a classic kernel/shell design.

Microsoft's older version of OS/2 was a 16-bit solution that wasn't all that competitive, but at least it had a real filesystem and an architecture that made a little bit of sense to someone with a comp sci background.

Besides, by the time Windows 95 was released, OS/2 had been an IBM product for over three years (OS/2 2.0, 2.1, and Warp 3.0 had already been released), and it had been almost completely rewritten by IBM during that time (new 32-bit kernel, new WPS desktop, new VDM subsystem, new WinOS2 subsystem, and new network stack).

NT was around then, as you say, and it had a good native 32-bit core, but it still used the Windows 3.1 desktop and had such poor support for DOS apps that many people couldn't use it effectively (at least for a few more years).

Re:Ahh, nostalgia...

[justforaday]

...it was Apple under Jobs' stewardship who bought out NeXT.

Actually, it was Apple under Amelio who bought NeXT. Along with the purchase came a certain Steve Jobs who served Amelio in an advisory role. Amelio stepped down from CEO in spring of 97 and Jobs stepped into the Interim CEO position (iCEO). After a bit of that he signed on full time.

Re:Win 95

[mccalli]

Windows 95 came, all the features that were there were all available in Apple's OS.

No, this isn't true. I was a Mac user at the time, running System 7.5 on a LC, and whilst a lot of the UI was better on the Mac some of the internals weren't.

Examples? Well, two major ones spring to mind.

• Pre-emptive multitasking. The Mac used co-operative multitasking, ie. relying on the frontmost app to nicely make calls to yield().
• Application memory management. On System 7.5, you had to manually set how much memory an application was supposed to get. If you guessed wrong, tough - the app would die with an 'out of memory error', regardless of how much physical or even virtual RAM was still available.

I actually switched away from System 7.5 to a PC running Win95. I refused to go earlier, because Win3.11 was so utterly poor. It's fair to say I missed things from my Mac's UI. It's equally fair to say I think my Windows bax at that time was a better computer.

I'm a Mac user again now, having re-taken the plunge at OS X 10.2 (Jaguar). Now the tables are turned, and the Mac is a drastically better box than the Windows machines I have to use. But had Apple continued down the MacOS route, I would never have gone back to them.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:it's not dead.. it's a pity

[1u3hr]

I'm still administrating several 95er machines of people who didn't make it to a machine which could run win2k or XP.

Seriously, check out nLite [nliteos.com], and also at the nLite forum, especially [msfn.org] this FAQ [msfn.org]. This is a free Win2k and XP customisable installer. You can use this to get a seriously stripped down install that should run on your old dogs. Worth checking out other parts of this site if you've got to admin Windows.

Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a

[ThinkFr33ly]

MS brags and boasts about Monad, which is still vaporware, but it sure will be the best shell ever -- saying nothing of the fact that this has been available forever in *nix.

Oh really? Perhaps you should go get a clue about Monad [wikipedia.org]. If you have trouble reading, you can even watch a pretty moving picture [msdn.com].

Monad turns the command line into an object oriented environment where instead of having to do error prone parsing through text piped though app after app, you treat the output from one app as one or more .NET objects on which you can execute methods, examine properties, and pass them to other applications for further processing.

This is, in fact, far ahead of anything currently available on Unix or Windows. In fact, it's so far ahead of what is currently available it will take quite a long time to get all parts of the OS and the apps that run on top of it to fully support the concepts Monad introduces. It's pretty damn innovative, if you ask me.

Oh, and it runs quite well for vaporware. I've been running it for a couple of months now (in beta form) and it's pretty damn cool.

I'm sure we can come up with more. In the end, MS is very good at marketing. People just love their koolaid.

Ya, when you're making shit up you can pump it out like a champ.

I just booted an old Pentium 100 laptop with 95..

[the_rajah]

last week to use a legacy program on it and was surprised at how quickly it booted up. I also noted with some interest that the 1 Gig HD was only half used, even with some applications installed. As I navigated around the HD with Windows Explorer and moved some files, I further noticed that it didn't really feel any different than using XP. Then I loaded Firefox and connected to the Internet via the Linksys Pcmcia ethernet card and found that browsing didn't feel much different either. Somebody want to explain again how far we've come in the past 10 years with Windows? Sure there are some conveniences and minor improvements, but at what cost in bloat and memory requirements?

I just checked the stats on my relatively busy web site and saw that of the 16,640 Windows machines that visited last week 94 of them were using Win95. Just below that was NT with 42 visits and WIN32s with 10 visits. Oh, I even saw one single OS/2 visit..

Re:Win 95

[metamatic]

You're right about memory management, but Windows 95 wasn't fully pre-emptive either. An errant program could still lock up the entire system.

Re:Ahh, nostalgia...

[FenwayFrank]

Actually it was 49.7 days [com.com]. Which lead to a lot of people wondering: how on earth did someone manage to keep a Windows system up that long?

Re:Mock it if you will, but...

[crankyspice]

I'd never owned an Apple, so I can't speak to what it was like to use one back then (were they using, what, system 6 at the time? I don't remember...)

Apple at the time was on System 7.5, and TFA has it wrong [byte.com]... True preemptive multitasking, protected memory, etc., didn't really arrive until OS X in the late '90s. (Anyone remember the failed promises for Copland [byte.com], of which only the interface facelift survived into the eventually released System 8?)

Byte Magazine, writing on the release of System 7 in 1990, chided Apple for not releasing an OS with protected memory and preemptive multitasking. (That article doesn't seem to be online; I have it at home, though home is 2000 miles away...)

I was a Mac user at the time, on 68040 and eventually PowerPC 603 machines. But Apple lost their step there in the mid-90s, and were turning out crap computers (exploding and cracking PowerBook 5300s anyone?) and couldn't get out a next-gen O/S to save their life -- literally! I was hoping for BeOS, but what became OS X was enough to grab me back from dual-booting Windows 95/98/2000 and Linux on VAIO laptops and hand-built grey-box PIIIs... Haven't looked back since!

Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a

[ThinkFr33ly]

At least with the error prone parsing through text piped through app after app, I'm at any point able to thow a tee in the script and send the output somewhere that I can visibly read it and interpret it.

You can do this with Monad as well. I can simply send the output of any monad command directly to the console window, just like you would if it were text, and it will output it using a default text output mode.

I can also take that output and modify it slightly and send it manually back through the next step in the chain to do some additional testing

You can do the same with Monad. You can easily serialize the output from a Monad command, do with it as you will, and feed it back in... but usually it's not necessary.

I'm not sure that simply examining the properties of the .NET object affords me the flexibility.

As far as I can tell, anything you can do with a text-based command line app can just as easily be done with Monad. Monad supports all the ideas behind text based interaction, but adds the ability to work with the output as objects as well.

I'd also point out that I personally disagree with a lot of this obsession over object oriented code in everything these days. In a short script with a defined start and end, there's no need for the obfuscation of object orientation.

I agree, and with Monad you don't *have* to take advantage of the object-based interactions. If you want just text, you've got it.

Re:hmmm

[dmnic]

you mean before, not after.

win 98 came out in 97
win 2000 came out in 99
win me came out in 2000
xp same out in 2001

Re:But they didn't deliver; they provided a stop-g

[Sax Maniac]

The VxDs actually replaced nearly all of the DOS and BIOS calls with virtualized device drivers -- that's why you could run a bunch of separate DOS windows. IIRC, vmm32.vxd was the 32-bit kernel, and went in and patched up the interrupt table and redirected it to its own code. Otherwise there's no way it would work since the DOS code talked to the hardware directly and had no support for multitasking.

Check out Andrew Schulman's "Inside Windows 95" some time. But the "on top" makes it sound like DOS was still in charge under the covers, which it wasn't - it's pretty much a pile of dead code and thunks by the time vmm32.vxd got its tentacles inside.

They did a pretty good job of making it backwards-compatible enough so folks could still most of the DOS and Win16 apps they wanted.

Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a

[ratboy666]

Why python? That problem would be a simple sh script.

But... processes don't have version numbers. We assume that you mean the files containing the executables. We assume that you are running linux, and the gnu utilities.

ls -l -L --full-time $(which $(ps --noheader -c | cut -c 35-)) | cut -c 44-

Of course, you are going to want to restart the commands, so "ps -c" would not be appropriate, but I will leave that to you.

Also, to run this on a remote machine, add "ssh user@remote" to the front of the command.

30 lines? 2 lines, followed by a diff, and uniq, followed by 2 lines of scp. I am not sure what a "service" is (vs. a process) in your context. I don't think that you meant "process".

But its really only 10ish lines of sh script (I would say "service", list the running "services", and use rpm to extract the versions, and scp the rpm to the partner machine, install it, and restart the service. Since the rpm doesn't back-date without forcing, ALL running services could be so updated. Of course, installing the "service" restarts the service anyway).

Ratboy.

Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a

[obdulio]

I have to work providing remote support over very slow links. A good CLI, with history and editing facilities (like bash with the vi option) is the only way to work sometimes.....

Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a

[b100dian]

first of all: Man pages can be easily found for what you'd wish to do, by using apropos

second: man pages are reference pages, mostly. Read a tutorial and you will understand, consult a man page an you will recall.

(bashing): consider posting on slashdot would be object-oriented. write three class inheritances that would eventually instantiate in three post lines. write a wrapper class that handles the concatenation and outsource the type of concatenation to an interface that the reader is left to choose...(/bashing)

let me refresh your memory

[Skuld-Chan]

Win95 was terrible for games. None of my games worked with it. None! Not until DirectX 5 and 6 could DirectX be said to have matured enough for general use. Nothing really good came out until then, either. Quake was still something you'd "Exit into DOS mode" for.

Windows 95 was the platform I first saw GLQuake running under the 3dfx Voodoo - I can still remember my remarks cleary "holy shit this is awsome!" Sure the very first direct 3d game (monster truck madness - which ran in directx 3) was kinda crappy, but a lot of that was targeted for video cards like the S3 Virge.

I did have a mac then - System 7.5.x could multitask as well as Windows 3.1 - which was poor at best. 95 was much better at multi-tasking in every way. Remember System 7 (os 8 and os 9 for that matter) still had the "allocate memory" kludge that Windows never had to deal with. Anyone who has done support for System 7, 8 and 9 knows what a pain that little feature was.

Re:Ahh, nostalgia...

[Creepy]

Macs had Virtual Memory before Windows, as well as no 640k HIMEM/LOMEM boundary, though they did have 16k page alignment issues that were a pain in the ass until they were rolled into the compiler (or maybe it was just the Symantec compiler didn't handle them automatically, but Codewarrior did - that stuff was a long time ago).

    What I think they're probably referring to is memory handles, however. MacOS's memory manager used a pointer-to-a-pointer memory allocation structure called a Handle that registered the memory allocation with the memory manager. The memory manager would then periodically move the pointers, but since the Handle never changed, the user would not lose the memory.

example (Pointer tells us the address where the memory is allocated, and Handle is a pointer to that pointer):
Handle-->Pointer-->[heap memory]
0xbc00 0x4000 1 2 3 4 5

memory manager finds an empty space lower in the heap and decides to move the memory there. It then updates the pointer with the new location of the memory:
Handle-->Pointer-->[heap memory]
0xbc00 0x3000 1 2 3 4 5

since the handle doesn't move, the user can always be sure that dereferencing the handle always gives them their data, even if the data moves.

Prior to having a memory manager, heap fragmentation was handled (or not) by the programmer, which sometimes resulted in programs slowing down the longer they were run.

Re:I'll mock away.

[drsmithy]

If you had 16mb of RAM, Win95 was noticably bitchy compared to Win3.1. You needed at least 32mb of RAM, and at least a Pentium 120 to really have it go decently. That was a top-of-the-line computer until fall 1996.

Oh, bullshit. Windows 95 + Office was usable on 386s and 486s with 8MB of RAM (a fairly common machine in 1995).

Pentium 120s with 32MB ? That's a comfortable *NT4* machine - Windows 95 would be blazingly fast on such hardware.