Windows 95 Turns 10 790
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'). "
Interesting Lines (Score:2, Interesting)
"I think the hype has been excessive," said Philip Kotler, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. "If there are bugs in this program, or if the extra performance doesn't deliver substantial benefits, this could be a disaster."
Its older than that (Score:5, Interesting)
I have one of the Alpha disks around ( one that was distributed within MS that I am 90% sure dates to 93, and I have one that dates to 1/1/94, I always will remeber that one because I thought shit these guys are working on NEW YEARS ????
14 1.44 floppy's (for the upgrade if I remeber right (maybe 13). The sad part was the last RC I got was SUBSTANTIALLY more stable than the Initial release was
I actually reverted to it until it expired
It was explaine to me by a buddy at MS (the one who got me the Alpha's and the Beta's , it was driver issues, that I wouldnt doubt, but it sure beat the HELL out of Windows 3.1
$0.12 a copy (Score:3, Interesting)
I never ran Windows 95 (Score:3, Interesting)
When Win95 was launched it heralded an age of "user-friendliness", which to me sounded too much like "dumb-downness". And besides, the system boasted features that were useless to me (Autoplay? Who cares! I know how to run things in my CDROM).
I boycotted Windows95. I never ran it. Of course I had to give in at one point, when most software required the new Win32. But that was in 2000, when I started using...Win98. And Linux. And finding that I spend more time in Linux day by day.
Now I use Linux as my primary OS, with a Win98 partition which I still keep around for games (works well enough for that - I think of it as a massive shared library required for games). But then again, I don't even play games that much any more.
Win 95 (Score:4, Interesting)
This is same as today. Windows 95 came, all the features that were there were all available in Apple's OS. Today, Vista will be released soon, Vista's features are already available in Apple's OS. But who do you think will make the money?
Re:the nightmares are coming back... (Score:4, Interesting)
As I recall Linux wasn't *particularly* easy to install at the time
Re:Ahh, nostalgia... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Windows 95. (Score:3, Interesting)
Something I have found really interesting since the win 3.1 to win 9x migration is that it seems everyone loved and loves the innovative Win9x menu set-up, and I REALLY hate it, having to click in the start and then programs and then Accessories and then and then and then... until I get to the program I want to run... and of course there are those users that after installing the 5124nth application, it takes like 2 minutes to display the programs in the start menu...
Personally I liked more the Program Manager approach. Nowadays I have my main tool bar with 6 folders (Office, Unix, Internet, Utilities, Viewers, Programming) with drop down capabilities, and also in the "quick start" menu I have the programs I use a lot (web browser, Latex editor, notepad, calc, winamp, etc).
And, of course I also HATE the people that let their desktop be crowded by tons of icons... you really can not find anything there so it is counter intuitive...
Re:yadda yadda (Score:5, Interesting)
Those mentioning OS/2 in a positive light... (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows 95 for all its issues was not as bad as people have made it out to be. First, MS did warn people that a fresh install rather than upgrade over Win3.x was advised. Second, the vendors like IBM did their level best to act like it was still the days of DOS/Win3.x or has it been forgotten that their Craptivas tended to use every freaking IRQ there was knowing that IRQ sharing was not remotely ready in that first release? Compaq, et al, had their own dufus-level driver and build issues.
Major corporations actually using it daily and not being able to take major efficiency disruptions did yeoman work bughunting and suggesting workarounds and fixes to Microsoft and some actually paid serious cash to Redmond for code access to work their own builds of it. Meanwhile people threw stones at those big corporations heedless of how much of their Windows headache was steadily being addressed by those corporations. To this day people still don't get it and still have a "tail wags the dog" mindset that the home and school are the real influence.
Nope. Business, where we all work, is where the PC market is guided along more than at home and the NT/2K touches in XP Home bear that out. I don't use a glitzy ego booster for Jobs at work, I use an OS that all things taken into account, is the best choice for my work. It offers things that our proprietary app writers find get their job done better than any other platform.
So in addition to hoisting a cold one to MS for a job well done in the end and congratulating them on ten years out from Windows 95, I also salute the corporations that adopted it in droves so long ago and all the work they and my fellow techs and coders did to fix things up. I was not and am still not happy about their basically selling beta code as finished product rushing it to market, but it did set the stage for a much easier desktop experience that only encouraged rapid personal computer adoption after years of doldrums and facilitated widespread Internet usage adoption to boot. If Apple or IBM had their way, never mind the Unix geeks, we'd have had personal computers that remained as inaccessible to the average user as what went before and not seen the renaisance that we did.
The better Windows (Score:2, Interesting)
I liked it very much back then. It responded very direct and fast. All other Windows version I used since felt kind of slow, no matter what kind of hardware configuration they ran on.
Regards,
Dennis B. Schramm
Re:Ahh, nostalgia... (Score:3, Interesting)
(Can't find a link, but I very clearly remember this bug.)
-Peter
Re:Its older than that (Score:2, Interesting)
Ah yes!
I think it was 92 or 93 when I was running beta releases of NT (I was not even a teenager, so the memory is a bit fuzzy) I got from my father. They were not so stable, but I was impressed with their performance over 3.11. I used to run OS/2 and some custom tools in 3.11 just to make it more user friendly (for the life of me I can't remember what it was called, but it added a sidebar, which was way different). But 95 actually ran better (as I remember) than those early releases of NT, which were really buggy. As much as I loathe MS, those were the upgrades that made Windows more usable (despite the fact that it would be years before plug and play worked). Of couse, I felt l337 to be using NT!
The earliest test copies of NT I had were towering stacks of floppies as well. I think I still have a stack somewhere. Thanks for the flashback!
Least we forget the days of 624k conventional memory or expanded and extended memory, using a boot disk to play Wing Commander, running DOSSHELL to save that precious conventional memory...
Re:Windows 95. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Win 95 - Amiga vs PC scenario .... (Score:2, Interesting)
- 640kb Memory troubles - WTF shouldnt I have 8 MB ???
- Multimedia confusion, The PC was a multimedia PC because it had a sound card and CDROM !!! , I had those for years on my Amiga and we didnt hype about it.
- Windows 3.11 - WTF is this, give me my Workbench with features that were years ahead of its time, and that windows 95 inovated by copiying them...
finally i made enough money in the PC business to buy my self my DREAM AMIGA 4000T
Not wanting to start a flame war, but i must say that the Amiga and several others were doing the things that windows is now innovating several years ago...
Jorge Canelhas http://www.retroreview.com/ [retroreview.com] -The retrocomputing magazine.
Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a (Score:3, Interesting)
You make a grown man cry (Score:3, Interesting)
Eventually, I got it to work, although I'm not sure how, so I made an image backup just in case. The VP received his laptop, but then complained bitterly that it would crash on him every few hours. Yeah, well duh: it's Windows! What did he expect? Join the club. Ungrateful bastard.
To top it all off, some other VP, having heard of my success with the ThinkPad 600, came by later to have me fix his. Great. Well, at least I had that image backup, right? Wrong. It didn't work, even though his laptop was exactly the same model and revision number. I still have no explanation for this. I'd start it up after copying the image to it and it would have exactly the same device and registry problems that I had before getting it right. This kind of thing was never a problem on the Compaq and Toshiba laptops -- just on the IBM ThinkPad 600. I swore never to use an IBM ThinkPad again.
Fast forward to the present. Guess what kind of a laptop I have now? An IBM ThinkPad A21m. And I'm actually happy with it. So, what changed my mind? Simple:
Linux.
Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a (Score:2, Interesting)
Get the list of processes on the current machine and a remote machine. Compare the two and find out if the versions of the processes on each machine are different.
Once you're done with that, stop the services which have older version numbers, update them, and restart them.
Can this be done with Python? Sure. Is it "easy"? Um... hell no. It's about 30 lines of script code in Monad.
And it's not just about the number of lines of code, obviously. It's also about how easy it is to maintain and add features to your script.
Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a (Score:2, Interesting)
http://tgolden.sc.sabren.com/python/wmi_cookbook.
My point wasn't to say that Monad wasn't good, simply that the idea of an interactive object oriented shell is nothing new.
I also agree with your statement about ease of maintaining and adding features to a script. I think Python does alright in that department.
Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a (Score:3, Interesting)
Because once you're used to them they're _really_ fast to do stuff with, and they usually come with good, concise man pages explaining how to use them (much better then your usual Windows online help).
Man pages are pretty-much opaque, and require a Man page themselves to understand.
Uh, I dunno what man pages you've been reading but most of the ones I've ever read are very concise and tell you what you need to know assuming you have the slightest clue what the tool you're looking at the man for _does_.
GUI materials are self-documenting - you can see what you can do with them just by looking at them.
Mmm.. yes.. right... Having used Unix exclusively for about 5 years I have been pushed back to using windows as a workstation (but thankfully not for my actual work - that gets done through an ssh and X session into boxes running a proper OS) and I can tell you that most of the GUIs are written by people who clearly think they're self documenting... and they're wrong (unless you count opening every single menu and dialogue box to find an option that they've stuck in some non-obvious place as "self documenting").
Going from being purely commandline based to having to use a GUI for stuff I can tell you that using a GUI feels sooooo slow - I was 5 times as productive doing stuff at the commandline as doing stuff in a GUI with all that pointing and clicking.
But meanwhile most Unix nuts are still convinced that Bash is the be-all and end-all, despite having utterly bizarre gotchas.
No, I certainly don't consider Bash to be the be-all and end-all of scripting - there are far better languages about. But for hacking up a quick script to do something relatively simple, it's very fast to develop in and you can pretty much guarantee it's going to be on almost all systems. I think the thing I find most powerful in bash is the ability to knock up quick scripts to do things on the commandline - the number of times I need to do an operation to a number of files and hack up a quick for-loop at the prompt.
Also, pipes have got to be one of the most useful inventions for doing some reasonably complex stuff in a hurry.
Learning to do a new task in a pure-text environment is like trying to learn how to spell a word with a dictionary - you can't look it up until you know how to spell it.
Yes - there you're right. If you've never before done anything like what you're currently trying to do then there is some effort involved. However, if you're used to the environment then a lot of concepts are transferrable - you can see similarities between tasks and reuse the knowledge you gained the last time. And more to the point, once you _know_ how to do something then it's just so much faster to do it at the CLI than in a GUI.
Maybe a CLI isn't for everyone but for me I couldn't use an OS which didn't have a powerful CLI - even in Windows I fire up Bash very frequently to do stuff because it's just easier and faster.
Meanwhile, a nice GUI lets you figure it all out just from checking out the widgets.
Again, I agree - a GUI lets you figure it out by opening every menu and dialogue box and probably reading the help on obscure widgets... as opposed to a 2 minute flick through a man page to find what you're after - I'll take the man page every time since I just don't have the time and patience to click through a GUI.
All I know is that the win2k "find" screen makes 10x more sense than the grep command.
Yes, and it's about a billion times less useful. Turns out that if you remove almost all the useful features in a program it's easier for people to understand... and almost completely useless to everyone too.
What I find interesting about Windows 95... (Score:3, Interesting)
This is why everyone will be very interested in seeing how Windows Vista runs, because I think Microsoft will come up with a totally new look and feel for Windows XP's successor.