Bill Gates: Windows 95 Was 'A High Point' 769
BobJacobsen writes "CBSnews.com has an article about Bill Gates and Steve Balmer answering questions at the 'All Things Digital' conference. When asked about 'high points' in his time at Microsoft, Gates replied 'Windows 95 was a nice milestone.' The article continues 'He also spoke highly of Microsoft SharePoint Server software, but didn't mention Vista.' Was there really nothing else that Gates considered a high point?"
Re:Not a fan boi... (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, I believe the quote would have been it was easier for Apple to make UNIX user friendly, because OS X is mostly BSD with a nice GUI and although Linux is very similar to BSD (and other UNIX variants) OS X doesn't run Linux it runs BSD.
Re:It WAS a high point (Score:4, Informative)
Re:95 wasn't so bad.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:High Point? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:95 wasn't so bad.... (Score:5, Informative)
Only by Mocrosoft standards.
At the time 95 was launched, SGI was putting 64-bit IRIX [wikipedia.org] machines [wikipedia.org] on people's desktops.
OS/2 3.0 ("Warp") [wikipedia.org] released in 1994 was better then Win95.
Then there was NeXTSTEP [slashdot.org], Apple Mac, etc. - all better then Microsoft.
Microsoft "won" because they ran on cheaper hardware. In no way was their software superior.
Re:win 95 (Score:4, Informative)
I did that on my comptuer when I was younger. You flick the switch it loads into windows, just like magic! My family loved it, as they were having trouble managing the mouse (double clicking can be a bitch), let alone the OS.
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:5, Informative)
Are you insane? Windows 95 may have crashed every week or so on average, and it certainly crashed every 49.7 days [microsoft.com] if you were ever lucky enough to make it that far, but we're comparing it to Windows 3.1 here! Even if you disregard the bugs in Windows 3.1 code itself, the thing used cooperative multitasking and unprotected memory, so your computer crashed every time the buggiest program you ran had a particularly bad flaw. It would freeze up multiple times a day, under any kind of heavy use.
I think it's clear that if your criterion is "improvement over best previously available version", Windows 95 really was the high point of Microsoft development. Stability doesn't outweigh that conclusion, stability is one of the reasons for it.
Re:Not a fan boi... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:3, Informative)
The problem? It's ridiculously slow, direct access to the Indexer is impossible to find, and the normal find-files dialog is so poorly designed that you can't get the best possible use out of the index that was built!
It's all a little silly, but yes, it was in the OS.
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:3, Informative)
but Windows 95 was just plain BAD on the Pentium Pro which was fully optimized for 32 bit. Remember that 150MHz was the top end back in those days and IIRC, UNIX rocked on the PPro. And OS/2 ran most apps at close to 2x faster on the 150MHz PPro compared to 150MHz Pentium.
Benchmarks ? There was still 16 bit code in OS/2 back then (most notably, the HPFS driver). Even discounting that, I sincerely doubt there was anything within a bull's roar of a 2x speed difference outside of a handful of corner cases.
I'd be happy to lay down $100 betting that once you loaded a Windows 95 system with up-to-date drivers and applications, the performance difference would be nearly nil. In that scenario, there was basically zero 16 bit code being used.
Windows95 ran much SLOWER on that 150MHz PPro compared to the P150. That's right, Windows ran slower on the new 32bit CPU and Intel was pissed at Microsoft for this. It set Intel back about 2 years and helped AMD grow.
Say what ? The PPro was a (very expensive) high-end workstation chip. The overlap between "users who want PPros" and "users who want Windows 95" was miniscule.
They had to hack 16bit optimizations into a new chip and to make it interesting, added new DSP-like registers(SSE) so they could sell it as a new CPU. Otherwise it was just the old stuff dumbed down to run 16bit code better.
That is to say, deliver what customers were asking for.
I guess NT was supposed to take all of the server market but reliability kept UNIX going and by the time people figured out how to make a whole bunch of Windows PCs replace UNIX, Linux came in and really messed up Bill and Steve's plan for world domination. Where's Bill's tech leadership legacy? Windows 95?
NT in early-mid 90s was still aimed squarely at workstations and workgroup-level servers (ie: Netware). Markets, it's worth noting, that it went on to dominate.
Back to the thread; So there was so much 16 bit code in the "new" 32bit Windows 95 that a new CPU optimized for 32bit code ran the software way slower than the old 16bit optimized Pentium CPU. Exactly what you'd expect from a company where marketing is job #1. IMO.
The limiations of Windows 95 were 100% the result of software engineering constraints, not marketing. Given what it achieved, it was amazing Windows 95 worked at all, let alone as well as it did.
Re:It was amazing to a twelve year old (Score:3, Informative)
Win 95 sucked but it sucked less than win 3.1 and dos.
Win 98 sucked but is sucked less than Win 95.
Win Me sucked... It just plain sucked.
Win2k sucked but it sucked a lot less than Windows 98,
XP was W2k with a Fisher Price look and feel but people wrote games that worked on it so it sucked less than W2K for games.
Vista.....
Well Vista like ME just doesn't seem to suck less than XP....
All operating systems suck. The goal is that each version should suck less.
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.x86.org/ddj/aug98/aug98.htm [x86.org]
With the Pentium, Intel introduced a 94-entry, two-way set associative cache of segment-descriptor cache entries. Therefore, the phrase "segment-descriptor cache" is now ambiguous, with two possible meanings. Making matters worse, the new segment-descriptor cache was removed from the Pentium Pro design, but reintroduced in the Pentium II. (The lack of the new segment-descriptor cache in the Pentium Pro largely accounted for its poor 16-bit performance.)
When designing the PPro Intel thought that Windows NT would take over from 16 bit Windows. Windows NT doesn't do many segment loads. Threads use FS for thread local data so that is presumably loaded every time the scheduler switch threads, every 10 to 100ms. But that is a very small percentage of instructions. All code and data use the same values for CS and DS - base address 0 and limit 4GB. So Intel removed the segment descriptor cache. But since 16 bit OSs were still popular and those OSs load the CS and DS segment registers much more frequently. In fact they have to, since they were designed to work on the 286 back when 64K was the maximum possible limit. Since datasets and code sizes were way bigger than 64K, the segment registers are loaded very frequently. So in the Pentium 2 Intel reintroduced the cache. It's not a hack, just bad crystal ball gazing.
Actually most of Intel's mistakes are like that. They predict the future badly because of a strange mix of wishful thinking, a desire to get rid of legacy stuff and outright hubris.
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:5, Informative)
At the time, Intel decided to market the Pentium Pro as a server chip, so it was not meant to run Windows '95. It was meant for NT and OS/2 exclusively. The Pentium Pro was supposed to compete with the big iron servers running Unix, and Intel gambled that 32-bit software would replace 16-bit software in time. They were right: But they were ahead of their time. The market was not ready to get rid of the cheap desktop OSs and the vast quantities of 16-bit software.
So Windows '95 was indeed a high point for Microsoft. They were the first to deliver a stable 32-bit-ish graphical OS to Intel PCs. And it was the first OS to integrate well enough with DOS to replace it. Windows 3.1 was more of a graphical shell than an operating system. Windows '95 is why we use the term "wintel" and it is why IBM and OS/2 did not win the operating system wars.
Re:Very defensive about Vista. (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know why you named those four people; at least three of those four have been or are currently being compensated for their most famous "free" projects.
A common thread among those people is that they all started their major projects during college or grad school and found financial backing as they were leaving academia. Or in Larry Wall's case, he had a day job at JPL while working on Perl. I think you'll admit that college/grad student life can't realistically go on forever. Eventually your parents will stop giving you money and/or the university will stop paying your room and board, and you'll have to find a "real job" to support yourself and your family. I think lots of people in the open-source community are employed by the likes of IBM, Red Hat, Oracle, OSDL, etc. for their work. No, I don't feel like finding more references.
The message might be that we need to fund more people in grad school to work on pet projects, or that Microsoft needs to fund them, but in general I agree with Mr. Gates - development on large-scale projects can't continue indefinitely without some sort of compensation.
Re:Very defensive about Vista. (Score:3, Informative)
Linus was in school until 1996, during which time he was working on the first incarnations of Linux which you downloaded. Oh, and it turned into his Master's thesis too. Did you even both to read the part of the post where I said "started their major projects during college or grad school" ? And then as soon as he finished school, he got a job at Transmeta.
You have completely missed *my* point - that people can work on their hobby projects in school, or while holding a day job, but development can't continue like that forever. I guess I've been trolled by an AC. Oh well.
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:2, Informative)
Usable today:
1. Windows Server 2003
2. Windows 2000
3. Windows XP SP2
Usable in their day:
4. Windows NT 4.0
5. Windows NT 3.51
6. MS-DOS 3.3 or 5 and above
7. Windows 98 SE
Barely usable if you are a bit of a masochist:
8. Windows XP pre-SP2
9. Windows for Workgroups 3.11
10. Windows 98
Barely usable if you are on Prozac:
11. Windows 3.1
12. Windows Vista
13. Windows 3.0
Unusable even with a Prozac + Xanax drip-feed:
14. MS-DOS 4
15. Windows 95
16. Windows ME
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:4, Informative)
Desqview was nicer for stability, but had no GUI. It also didn't let me run a few applications I needed at the time.
Windows 95 kicked total butt in comparison to 3.1. The GUI was much cleaner and applications only tended to crash one at a time instead of blowing out the filesystem when a software bug rears it's head.
Hell, in 96, I recall Linux + X not being a very stable desktop by today's standards either.
Windows ME seems to be the last OS I really had much trouble with. But what do I know. I've only got experience with OS7-X, Windows 3.1-Vista, Debian, Slackware, FreeBSD, NetBSD, DOS, and various mutants in the TRS80 line.
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:1, Informative)
REDMOND, Wash., Dec. 13, 2004 -- Microsoft Corp. today introduced a beta version of its new MSN® Toolbar Suite, with breakthrough desktop search functionality that helps consumers quickly find virtually any type of document, media file or e-mail message on their Windows® based personal computer.
Now whether it was a "breakthrough" technology is another matter, but they did have desktop search software before Live Search, which changed from "MSN" to "Live" back in 2006.
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Stallman has a lucrative speaking career (Score:1, Informative)
Microsoft High Points: (Score:4, Informative)
2) Windows 98 se
3) Windows XP sp1
4) Getting that contract with IBM
5) Strong arming governments through bribes
6) Bundled monopolism (Internet Explorer 5)
7) Copying Apple
8) Not being brown like Ubuntu
Other than that, I don't really see many MS high points, and I've kind of been watching them the whole time. I kind of liked Qbasic for a minute. It was handy, but I think they bought that from somebody when it was mostly feature complete, then fucked it up later. I can't remember now.... Oh the weary and toil of years of tech support have ravaged me, Microsoft, you bloated, retarded, retarding, evil, slow, relentless monopoly. Would somebody please make a Linux distro to put you to rest indefinitely.
Re:Very defensive about Vista. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sharepoint (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry, but I don't know where your comment comes from - the site layout is identical in both IE and FF (FF 3 RC 1), document libraries work identically, lists work identically, even adding and removing webparts works fine (apart from dragging them around to the position you want).
From what I have just seen, I would have no trouble using the SharePoint site with FireFox as my main internal browser.
Stallman says software free, speeches protected (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Free_Software_and_Beyond:_Human_Rights_in_the_Use_of_Software [wikisource.org]
Way down in that document, he divides IP into 3 segments, and says how he would deal with them.
1) Useful IP: Programs, recipes, instructions on how to do things, must be free.
2) Works that state the views of certain parties: Stallman's speeches fall here, as well as op-eds, etc.
Let me quote directly: "Now here my answer is different, I don't think modified versions of these works contribute to society, all they do is misrepresent the authors. So I propose a compromised copyright system which says that everybody is free non-commercially to redistribute exact copies. But modifications require permission and commercial use require permission."
So there you have it, Stallman is free to remix, derive from, and commercially exploit the fruits of my labor (whether I like it or not), but I am not allowed to modify, derive from, or commercially exploit the fruits of his labor (unless he lets me). That sure sounds fair.
Not relevent to the discussion, but for completeness' sake:
3) Arts and entertainment: movies, paintings, & etc. 10 year exclusive rights to modification and commercial use.
Re:Ah, I remember Windows XP (Score:2, Informative)
This is true on all OSes, not just Windows. "I'm safe because I know my business" is just BS. No one is safe.
At least I can see the difference in performance between my machine which is probably malware free and my parents' or brother's girlfriend machines which I'm sure or not. Most of the malwate I've seen is not at all subtle - it just wants to get off the machine into as many machines as possible as quickly as possible.
And come to think of it, if I can't see the malware, is it really that bad that I have it? It's reminds me of that puzzle about "if a tree falls but there is no one to hear it, does it still make a noise?"
Re:I'm actually with Bill on this one (Score:3, Informative)
The USB 1.0 specification came out in 1996. You couldn't find USB devices on the market until 1997ish.
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:3, Informative)
The system requirements for Windows 3.1 are at:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q32905 [microsoft.com]
"- IBM compatible 80286 or higher (386 recommended)".
Re:A crack-high moment. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Windows vs. Linux in the 90s. (Score:4, Informative)
Loading a CD burning application and any other intensive software was beyond any system from that era's abilities. If the writer didn't get data at a certain speed, it would screw up the burn.
Also, what's the difference in losing an hour's work due to Windows crashing while working on a paper and X crashing while working on a paper? Not much, the whole system might as well have tanked in both cases. I also consider word processing and office applications from the mid 90s superior to Linux applications under X from the same era. It's only been since the early 2000s one could scrape by in a Windows house without a Windows box.
System stability from the mid 90s in both Linux and Windows is what prompted me to go entirely BSD until a couple of years ago.
KDE was also unusable garbage in 96. It took a few years before it matured into anything remotely like you see today. WindowMaker, in my opinion, was the best thing going at that time.
Re:Ah, I remember Windows XP (Score:3, Informative)
Plus, you can turn off most of the "eye candy" in XP. Right-click on the taskbar->Choose Properties->Click on the Start Menu tab->Choose Classic Start Menu. Combine that with the Windows Classic theme in Display Properties and you have an OS that looks like more like Win2K did. It's the first thing I do with any Windows XP installation.
Of course, I don't exactly keep my XP system in "Classic Mode." I've installed LClock [neowin.net] and Free Launch Bar [freelaunchbar.com]. The former changes the look of the system clock and lets me change the Start Menu button to another image (a Windows logo that I mocked up). The latter changes my QuickLaunch bar to allow for submenus and other visual improvements.
Re:95 wasn't so bad.... (Score:3, Informative)