Windows 95 Turns 15 461
An anonymous reader writes "15 years ago on this day, Microsoft's then new Windows 95 was released. Among other things it moved users away from the archaic file manager and program manager to Windows explorer and the start menu. Compared to today's 'social desktop,' I'd much rather have the simpler and more sparse (pre-Internet Explorer integrated) Windows Explorer, though I do not like the (lack of) stability that Windows 95 offers. Of course if you were alive then, you've probably seen the commercials." I fondly recall downloading build after build and installing them. But within months of the official release, I switched to Linux.
I remember putting it on a 486 (Score:2, Interesting)
I remember that good old days... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Archaic file manager? (Score:1, Interesting)
I never really liked the Windows Explorer as a file manager. Hundreds of different windows, folder settings now following you around but different folders showing differently, slow and just not powerful enough. Pre-Vista era I always liked Turbo Navigator [softpedia.com] a lot more, similar to how I use xplorer2 [wikipedia.org] now. The recent Windows versions came with even more simpler and stupid file managers. I guess they're fine for a casual user, but a file manager really needs to have tabs and two panels.
RE:"pre Internet Explorer integrated) Windows Exp" (Score:5, Interesting)
get win98 or win98se and run ROM or ROM2se on it (ROM = Revenge of Mozilla) it is basically a tool that strips out IE & OE and the win98 windows explorer and replaces it with a hacked/patched win95 windows explorer, and it is much more stable than win95 & more stable than a stock win98/win98se (i have to say it makes the best win9x possible but the only caveat is any application that requires internet explorer will not function. but anything else works great.
after doing a quick google search i think this app is nowhere to be found, i bet i can dig up a copy on an old CD-r that i kept with lots of ancient third party applications for win9x
Re:Archaic file manager? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I look just like Buddy Holly (Score:4, Interesting)
We got a kick out of the networked "Microsoft Hover" game: http://www.johnlamansky.com/blog/the-legend-of-microsoft-hover/
Re:I remember putting it on a 486 (Score:3, Interesting)
God, 4MB of RAM for Windows '95??? That must have been brutal.
In '92 or '93 my girlfriend bought a similar machine with 4MB of RAM, and that was only Windows 3.11. On the second day she had it we watched Word thrash the machine within an inch of its life with a single document open. On day 3 she had me install Linux, which could actually work better with 4MB of RAM.
Machines of that era are what taught me to put as much physical memory into a machine as you can afford -- Windows or Linux, the machine will last longer and not become bogged down in it's VM. Heck, my Vista machine with 8GB of RAM has been a joy since it's had all the resources it ever needed. I credit throwing that much memory at it with actually having found Vista to be a pretty good OS.
Overly optimistic there... (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course if you were alive then, you've probably seen the commercials.
You don't honestly think that slashdot is in any way relevant to kids 15 and under, do you? If we even said "old enough to remember seeing the commercials" and graciously said that someone 5 years old at the time might remember them, that would mean you expect slashdot to have relevance to the 20-and-under set.
Although I honestly don't remember the commercials, and Windows 95 was the first OS I bought (or pirated? I don't remember now) on CD. I do recall that 95 was the first windows release that actually required you to enter a registration key at installation; 3.1 would graciously let you "enter it later".
Re:Bland and inoffensive (Score:3, Interesting)
Sometime around 2000 or 2001, I inherited a Windows 98 machine with massive installed cruft. It ran slowly, and did a lot of weird things. Finally, one morning, it finally collapsed. After trying resuscitation to no avail, I grabbed the handiest Windows CD -- which happened to be the initial release of Windows 95. I installed it and was amazed at how quick and responsive the PC (a Pentium of some sort) had become. So I downloaded and installed about two dozen patches. Not only fast, but a lot more stable than I remembered Windows 95 being.
Finally, after a few weeks, I decided to try using fully patched Windows 95 on a minimal machine. So I installed it on my experimental CPU fanless 5x86 (a 133MHz 486 with a heatsink about the size of a beer can) with 16mb of memory. It ran beautifully. It usually went a couple of weeks between reboots -- which is about what my current Linux system can manage before the memory leaks get it. I used it for a number of years until application bloat, application dependence on IE libraries and lack of Windows 9 USB support made continued use impractical. And I liked it. I liked it better than much heftier machines with Windows 98. Lots better than Windows 2K (which I, stupidly in retrospect, tried to configure with a separate admin user -- something which pretty much did not work with the applications then available although no one admitted it at the time). Better than Windows XP. I never tried Vista and don't much care for Windows 7 although I think the latter is at least fairly well crafted, and I have to give Microsoft credit for getting hardware configuration working pretty much right after only 13 or 14 years of trying.
So, my feeling is that Windows peaked somewhere around Windows 95-OSR2 and their single user OS pretty much has been downhill from there. I wonder if Microsoft had decided to continue develop and support an MSDOS core OS separate from their server/workstation OS, and had abandoned failed experiments like the Registry and IE integration as soon as their flaws were recognized, if they might not have an OS today that was competitive on todays low powered, performance limited, personal devices.
Re:Bland and inoffensive (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry, I call bullshit. A known issue [microsoft.com], fixed only in 1999, would prevent Windows 95 and 98 from going over 49.7 days of uptime (2^32 milliseconds). Much hilarity ensued back in the day since "how could anyone have noticed / run into this" :-)
Thing is, I know of at least one other installation that was reputed to have stayed up for a long time - much like the GP asserts.
My guess is the machine(s) in question were somehow or other rebooting themselves in the middle of the night long before 49.7 days was up.
Re:"turns 15"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, I kinda cringe anytime I get close to a machine like that and my official recommendation to both companies is to replace the machine (Or at least start putting some money into a fund to replace it ASAP). But really, do you expect that $15,000 replacement hardware to last 22 years like that Dos 3.x system has lasted? Or to last the 13 years that windows 95 machine has lasted? Once hardware gets that old you're certainly living on borrowed time, but I have seen way to many capacitor issues on newer hardware to even begin to assume a machine will last more than 5 years now =/.
OSR2 was a good compromiae for me. (Score:3, Interesting)
It's what most machines were shipping with in 1996 and 97, anyway. FAT32 support, no integrated MSIE crap, and a bit more stable than the original Win95 release.
I still have a pair of PPro gaming boxes running Win95 OSR2 (as well as various other OSes from the time period including BeOS 5 and versions of both Mandrake and Red Hat Linux.
Re:I remember putting it on a 486 (Score:3, Interesting)
When XP came out it was common for low-end OEM machines to have 128MB of RAM, which was only enough to boot it, not to run applications well.
It's just that XP was the premier OS for longer, so those old computers died off or got upgraded.
I remember Windows 95 (Score:5, Interesting)
I was at Boeing back then. Everyone in engineering had Macs but the fix was in with Microsoft. W3.1 was judged unsuitable for use, so only a few poor suckers were stuck with that. We had a number of PCs running DOS. Great for lab use, as numerous ISA cards were avaiilable, or easily cobbled up by our technicians.
One day, the IT folks showed up and dropped a Dell 166 on my desk (between my Mac and X terminal). It only had a DOS command prompt, but the hardware guys assured me that the Windows guys would follow shortly with their install disks.
About 3 months later, this pig was still sitting there with nothing but a DOS command prompt staring back at me. The story was that initial W95 installs were proving to be a disaster and IT was in the process of staffing up to levels needed to support the platform. I went to my boss and told him, "While I'm waiting, there's this other system available now that I can load and try out. Its called Linux."
He said, "OK" and I've never looked back. Thank you Mr. Gates.
Re:I look just like Buddy Holly (Score:3, Interesting)
WTF is Freudian?
Kids don't get taught about psychology, and industry and state doesn't talk about psychology, because psychology is the science that is abused to create PR, propaganda, and advertising. If the people knew about psychology (and even things like what a Freudian slip is, or who Freud was), then they would be much less effected by PR, propaganda, and advertising.
I think those crackpots Scientologists oppose psychology too because if people understood psychology, they would be able to spot the brainwashing.
Re:I finally could tell my friend to go to hell (Score:3, Interesting)
I assume you were IBM back then. Then come on. OS/2 wasn't even available preloaded on your own computers. I bought an Ambra and I couldn't get OS/2 preloaded nor OS/2 support for the sound card on the Ambra motherboard. Your IBM resellers didn't carry or push OS/2. I had a bear of a time getting OS/2 1.3 until you had the direct order program. Also you wouldn't distribute in normal channels.
IBM was talking out of both sides of their mouth the whole time they were pushing OS/2. Sun and Microsoft both stood behind their OSes 100%.
Re:Bland and inoffensive (Score:5, Interesting)
My work Win 95 machine, in the 300MHz days, was coaxed into running for about 30 days without a reboot. By then it was unusable though, I remember icons on the screen all being corrupted, you could barely start any applications due to lack of resources. I can't remember if I purposefully rebooted it in the end, or if it crashed.
9x did not do stability, but it did mean that when sat in front of a 9x machine you wouldn't get stuck at the office late. 2 minutes before home time, a quick double ctrl-alt-del and it would be a case of "fucking Windows has crashed again. Oh well, might as well go home, 'cause I can do anything without the computer working". You can't get away with that any more, every day. Maybe once a month. The PHBs have wised-up to the fact that most computers don't appear to be as shit as they used to be. Windows is of course as shit as it used to be, just in different ways.
Just remembered another 95 PC in the same office, connected up to a client's network for support, that went really strange one day, the clock started going too quickly. I think it was going about 4 times faster than it should, and seeing the clock spinning too fast was utterly hilarious. The machine seemed to be working fine otherwise though. A reboot cleared it, and I never saw Windows do that again... that was the kind of craziness you got with 9x!.
Revisionism (Score:1, Interesting)
It's nice that Microsoft and its trolled have "fixed" written history.
Windows 95 was not released to the consumer market until 1996.
You can edit WiKipedia, but you can't change reality.
E
Re:I remember Windows 95 (Score:3, Interesting)
I started with Linux in 1995, too. It was Yggdrasil, took twenty minutes to boot on a 386/33 MHz machine. To make it boot faster one had to configure it to look only for the available hardware, otherwise it would look for everything it had drivers for and wait for timeout.
Then I learned about Slackware and never looked back.
Re:Many OS's were better and died or got very vew (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Windows 95 vs. Windows 98 (Score:2, Interesting)
It reminds me of my first internship. I had the choice between running Win95 or NT4. I would crash Win95 at least 3 times a day versus maybe 1 for NT4. What did I choose? Win95. It was rebooting fairly quickly and it ran faster and the machine I had. Win95 was more productive for me despite of the multiple crashes a day. That's sad.
win95 memories (Score:2, Interesting)