The Long Reach of Windows 95 354
jfruh writes: I'm a Mac guy — have been ever since the '80s. When Windows 95 was released 20 years ago, I was among those who sneered that "Windows 95 is Macintosh 87." But now, as I type these words on a shiny new iMac, I can admit that my UI — and indeed the computing landscape in general — owes a lot to Windows 95, the most influential operating system that ever got no respect. ITWorld reports: "... even though many techies tend to dismiss UI innovation as eye candy, the fact is that the changes made in Windows 95 were incredibly successful in making the the system more accessible to users -- so successful, in fact, that a surprising number of them have endured and even spread to other operating systems. We still live in the world Windows 95 made. When I asked people on Twitter their thoughts about what aspects of Windows 95 have persisted, I think Aaron Webb said it best: 'All of it? Put a 15 year old in front of 3.1 and they would be lost. In front of Windows 95 they would be able to do any task quickly.'"
00000-00000-00000-00000-00000 heh (Score:4, Funny)
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I don't think 00000-00000-00000-00000-00000 would have been valid. I think 95 keys were in the format of 000-0000000 or 00000-OEM-0000000-00000 for OEM keys.
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Of course, that was back before every OS phoned-home or required registration, so it didn't matter if everyone on the planet used the same key. I suspect that Microsoft didn't make it hard because while piracy hurt their short-term bottom-lines it fostered a culture used to using Windows even though there were, at the time, several other choices, so those kids using Windows 95
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Yeah, I seem to recall figuring out a key that worked after less than an hour of trying different things.
I believe it was 12345-67890-09876-54321 that worked for me.
Re:00000-00000-00000-00000-00000 heh (Score:5, Informative)
Yep. 111-11111111 or something like that actually worked. There were other variants that were easy to remember at-the-time too.
Close! The format of those old Microsoft product keys was actually 000-0000000.
The trick to making up a valid product key was that the 7-digit field must add up to a multiple of seven. The easiest code to remember was 111-1111111 -- seven ones add up to seven -- which turns out is a multiple of a seven :)
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Actually, the common saying... (Score:4, Insightful)
was "Windows 95 sucks less."
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For me, Windows 95 solved a huge issue I was having at the time.
The problem was plug and play and under DOS. Each manufacturer had their own proprietary PnP configuration utility and they were often mutually exclusive.
I seem to recall that I had a shiny new graphics card (Diamond Stealth II I think) and a sound card (SB16) that I COULD NOT get to work together in the same system under DOS.
Windows 95 was a godsend at the time that worked its PnP magic to get both working at the same time.
Re:Actually, the common saying... (Score:5, Informative)
The *real* fun under later versions of DOS was playing the equivalent of Tetris trying to get as much crap in the UMA/HMA as you could so you had enough conventional memory left to do something useful.
Re:Actually, the common saying... (Score:4, Insightful)
Nah, PnP may have been -possible- in the era of Win95, but realistically, you'd expect any number of incompatabilities well into the 98 era. Only once you had 2000/XP days did MS really shove mandatory driver compatability down manufacturer's throats. That said, the ability to throw together a set of pieces and have them work was largely the work of MS flexing its muscles. Love em, or hate em, PC's may have taken a very different route if there wasn't someone to keep people shooting for compat.
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My experience was quite the opposite.
Before plug and play you had to adjust the dip switches on the cards. Then they worked extreamly well. After plug and play we needed more complex drivers that caused bugs and random failures over time.
What made it worse were all the hardware companies who bent backwards to make win-hardware where they took such functionality away and relied on windows to do all the work.
After windows was released I needed to switch to an external modem just to have it work reliability.
What you want to believe doesn't make it true. (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, the common saying... was "Windows 95 sucks less."
No it wasn't.
The geek is only deluding himself when he claims that Win 95 wasn't one of the most successful and significant product launches in tech.
Re:What you want to believe doesn't make it true. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, yeah. It sucked enough less.
Not sucking too much is the Microsoft quality standard.
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Successful? Yes. Significant for microsoft? Yes. A diabolically twisted ingenious kludge between real mode and v86 mode? Hell yes. It's amazing it worked at all.
15? (Score:2)
I was 12 with Windows 3.1. In some ways I think it was the best version they ever made.
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95 was the first Windows that was an operating system. 3.1 was still a DOS application.
The first Windows that was an operating system? (Score:2)
Windows 95 was designed to make Windows apps not run on DR_DOS [edge-op.org] and not run on Novell [edge-op.org] Netware [edge-op.org].
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Re:15? (Score:5, Informative)
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Nice little hack but if you wanted to go back to DOS, there is the option to do just that in the shutdown menu. Duh.
Re: 15? (Score:5, Informative)
The key difference is that Windows 95 did not use DOS to access the hard drive. It had its own 32 bit disk manager. DOS's file access provisions went dormant once the system booted as long as an appropriate driver was available. If no driver was available, you'd have an exclamation point in control panel, and very bad performance. Fraxinus is spot on - DOS was still there, but was relegated to being a bootloader and recovery console.
Re: 15? (Score:4, Interesting)
Win95 "ran on" DOS the same way that your Linux machine runs on JavaScript. Just because you have a VM spun up running a compatibility layer for legacy programs doesn't mean your OS is based on what that VM emulates.
Put yourself on the right side of ignorance: read this [msdn.com]
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You certainly could boot DOS, but then you were using DOS, not Win95. Win95 was not "running on top of DOS" in the same way that 3.1 was.
As others have said, it had its own memory manager and disk access, which is pretty much what DOS did (in a crappier way). So, if you booted DOS, you weren't booting the lower levels of Win95, you were booting DOS 7.0: another operating system entirely which Win95 just happened to be very backward compatible with, boot-loaded from and was used for 16-bit driver access.
So
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Re:15? (Score:5, Insightful)
Heh. How many times did I hand-edit win.ini?
That's why /etc in unix and linux made sense to me later. Configuration controls are meant to be human-readable and human editable.
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Re:15? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I would say xp (with luna turned off) was the pinnacle of underlying tech and UI layout for microsoft.
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2003 was the same, with an updated kernel that seemed to have a bit better swapping performance.
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Oh, you mean Windows 2000?
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Re:15? (Score:4, Interesting)
Besides what the AC said (which I 100% agree with) XP's real feature over windows 2000 was probably the license model change. Before XP the licenses weren't tied to the hardware, and weren't verified by MS. I've always though that the main reason for the change. The UI color style (which could be revered to 2000's look) was to make people thing they were getting something over 2000.
The fact that it was such a small update over 2k is probably most of what made it successful. All the major issues were worked by the users of 2k. That is basically what happened with windows7 too. Vista users dealt with all the bugs, and when it was finally a reasonable product MS just released it with the appropriate service packs as a new product.
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Sorry, but Apple still deserves most of the credit (Score:5, Insightful)
But this was also true if you put a 15 year old -- or a 10 year old -- in front of a 1987 Macintosh. The true revolution in mainstream computing was the Mac OS user interface, coupled with the Human Interface Guidelines which made all Mac software intuitive.
Re:Sorry, but Apple still deserves most of the cre (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep Xerox got the UI right.
Re:Sorry, but Apple still deserves most of the cre (Score:4, Informative)
Yep Xerox got the UI right.
Yep, click on the icon of a file, a window pops up, you type a UNIX command to manipulate the file. They totally had the whole GUI thing figured out and Apple did nothing but copy--oh, and add direct manipulation pervasively ;-)
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You don't know what you're talking about. Xerox didn't have overlapping windows, or many of the other interface paradigms of current GUIs.
Re:Sorry, but Apple still deserves most of the cre (Score:4, Informative)
...and bullshit...
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2010/06/102660634-05-04-acc.pdf
Re:Sorry, but Apple still deserves most of the cre (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed. Xerox PARC did amazing work... too bad they were designing a paperless office for a paper-centered company. :-)
Re:Sorry, but Apple still deserves most of the cre (Score:5, Insightful)
And it was true if you put a 10 year old in front of an Amiga in 1985 or 1986. As for the Apple HIG, a lot of it was counter-intuitive, what it did, however, was give consistency, and thus users were conditioned into doing things a certain way, but it also resulted in some applications being hampered etc
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Though the "dragging disk to trash" makes zero sense now, it at least made half sense back with the first Macs which had a single floppy drive. Half sense may be a bit much; Quarter sense? can I make up stupid terms like that?
Anyways, the first macs were single floppy only affairs, with the OS on a floppy, and presumably you have a user floppy. And you'd have to eject the system floppy to get your user disk in. And then swap back and forth. The OS would need to keep track of the volumes, even if ejected
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Eject a disk by moving it from my desktop to the trash with all the files I want to delete? Makes sense.
Well, to understand this, you have to recall that early Macs had to be able to run off of a single floppy drive. Users might buy a hard drive or a second floppy drive (or if they had a dual-floppy SE, a third floppy drive for some reason) but it couldn't be relied on. Yet they still had to be able to tolerate having the OS disc ejected at times.
So there was a distinction between physically ejecting a disc while keeping it mounted (which was represented onscreen by a greyed out disc icon) so that you could c
Re: Sorry, but Apple still deserves most of the cr (Score:5, Insightful)
Intuitive? Are you kidding? Working on OSX is like being in your garage under your car, working, only, you have an obsessive compulsive wife, and every time you set a tool on the concrete in arms reach, she immediately puts it on the shelf because everything must look pretty, at all times.
I have never hated working with an operating system the way I hate OSX. It has literally brought me within inches of quitting my job in frustration on numerous occassions. It is beyond "bad", it is downright hostile.
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OS X is a completely different thing than System 1-7 or OS 8 and 9.
The main thing OS X offered that many a Mac person just hated Apple for not having... was true, preemptive multitasking. Before that, if an application or a desktop accessory didn't use WaitNextEvent(), the entire system ground to a halt, requiring a hardware reset. In fact, because OS 9 and earlier behaved like a chain of primitive Christmas tree lights (one bulb goes out, the entire chain does too), one wound up having to reboot every so
Re: Sorry, but Apple still deserves most of the cr (Score:4, Informative)
Win 3.x was pretty much the same way - it used cooperative multitasking just like the Mac, and if you took too long processing a given message you could lock your system right up. Two of the biggest things that Win95 brought to the table (that NT already had) were true preemptive multitasking and a per-process message queue, so if you still managed to be sloppy with your message handling, it just locked up that process instead of the whole machine.
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I use my OSX box at work (MacBook Pro) and I can manage Unix systems with no issues
Assuming the OS works well enough connect to the network and open an SSH terminal session you'd have no issues managing Unix systems.
It would take a pretty catastrophically bad OS to fail as a dumb SSH terminal. Even DOS was pretty passable at it.
I think he means actually managing and fixing screwed up OSX systems from OSX. That's where OSX really gets in the way.
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I certainly never had to do any of those things during years of using Macs. No, I'm talking about software like MacPaint, MacWrite, etc. If you put a 10-year-old in front of those, they would figure out the menus and toolbars pretty much immediately. There was nothing nearly as good in PC land at the time.
Barriers To Entry. (Score:2)
But this was also true if you put a 15 year old -- or a 10 year old -- in front of a 1987 Macintosh.
Given the unlikely chance that his family could afford one ---
In October 1984, Apple introduced the Macintosh 512K, with quadruple the memory of the original, at a price of US $3,195.
$7,338, adjusted for inflation.
Apple released the Macintosh Plus on January 10, 1986, for a price of US$ 2,600.
$5,661, adjusted for inflation.
It offered one megabyte of RAM, easily expandable to four megabytes by the use of socketed RAM boards. It also featured a SCSI parallel interface, allowing up to seven peripherals---such as hard drives and scanners---to be attached to the machine. Its floppy drive was increased to an 800 kB capacity. The Mac Plus was an immediate success and remained in production, unchanged, until October 15, 1990; on sale for just over four years and ten months, it was the longest-lived Macintosh in Apple's history.
In September 1986, Apple introduced the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop, or MPW, an application that allowed software developers to create software for Macintosh on Macintosh, rather than cross compiling from a Lisa.
This is another way of saying that the barriers to entry for an MS-DOS developer were low.
In August 1987, Apple unveiled HyperCard and MultiFinder, which added cooperative multitasking to the Macintosh. Apple began bundling both with every Macintosh.
Updated Motorola CPUs made a faster machine possible, and in 1987 Apple took advantage of the new Motorola technology and introduced the Macintosh II at $5500, powered by a 16 MHz Motorola 68020 processor.
$11,554. adjusted for inflation.
The primary improvement in the Macintosh II was Color QuickDraw in ROM, a color version of the graphics language which was the heart of the machine.
Macintosh [wikipedia.org]. CPI Inflation Calculator [bls.gov]
To understand the significance of Windows 95, you only have to sense the emotions inspired by the rediscovery of the videos which shipped with Win 95. Edie Brickell - Good Times [youtube.com]
This was not Charlie Chaplin. This was not "1984."
History. Leran some. (Score:5, Funny)
owes a lot to Windows 95
Which owes a lot to Windows 3. Which owes a lot to the Mac SE and its kin. Which owes a lot to Xerox PARC. Which owes a lot to Doug Engelbart and SRI.
By the time Microsoft got to a UI, it was like the shopping cart that got passed around the hobo camp.
Re:History. Leran some. (Score:5, Funny)
owes a lot to Windows 95
Which owes a lot to Windows 3. Which owes a lot to the Mac SE and its kin. Which owes a lot to Xerox PARC. Which owes a lot to Doug Engelbart and SRI.
By the time Microsoft got to a UI, it was like the shopping cart that got passed around the hobo camp.
And by the time linux got to the cart one of the wheels had a shimmy
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Yup, but they were good at selling shopping carts.
Both Apple and OS/2 were available before W95. Young me had OS/2 for months before 95 came out: it never crashed (YMMV), it did more, cleaner, but i couldn't recommend it to my friends because of driver support (thanks, IBM neighbor) and games...
Frosty Piss! (Score:2)
Well would have been if I didn't have a fucking bastard BSOD. Twice.
Eh ... (Score:2)
Windows 95 copied system 7, and the Start Menu copied a system 7 extension called the Hierarchial menu which allowed you to put folders of apps, or just normal directory folders under the apple menu and navigate through them.
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Windows 95 copied system 7, and the Start Menu copied a system 7 extension called the Hierarchial menu which allowed you to put folders of apps, or just normal directory folders under the apple menu and navigate through them.
Lets just ignore the fact that much of this was in development at Xerox Parc. All you need to do is look at the design elements (including hierarchical menus) from that time and you see the same in Windows and Mac OS. Both companies took the base model and innovated in their own ways. I'm also pretty sure that as their products evolved each influenced the other and both have borrowed from other 3rd party products...
It's like harping that Jeep has a blind spot warning system in their cars when Volvo had
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...and sometimes it passed back and forth a couple of times.
Apple added aliases to System 7 (essentially symbolic links, though a little more clever). Visually, the way you could tell an alias from the real file is that it's name was in italics. So the filename under the icon would say "Microsoft Word" instead of "Microsoft Word". It was a clever idea.
Unfortunately, it didn't work all that well with non-roman characters. There's no Italic in Japanese. So you couldn't tell them apart.
Microsoft implement
Try NextStep (Score:5, Informative)
That was a sexy geek OS on top of Unix back in the day before it morphed into present day MacOSX when Steve Jobs brought it along to Apple.
It had right mouse button clicking and the menus and dockable icons and launchers (though were not on the buttom) but the concept was part of Windows 95 to its core with the start menu emulating much of it.
AfterStep which was Robs founder of slashdot favorite back in the day as well as WindowMaker were WM's which tried to clone part of the functionality into Linux at the turn of the century. WindowMaker was the most popular before Kde and then Gnome started to mature to what we have today.
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I like the original idea behind AfterStep - to make an open source implementation of Obj-C and the Foundation, and Appkit frameworks to make porting OpenSTEP applications to Linux or other open source operating systems easier.
You're thinking of GNUstep (which by the way is not limited [etoileos.com] to OpenStep's original floating menus). :)
AfterStep started as a configuration file and some applets for fvwm, before forking.
Window Maker was written from scratch, and they wrote the WINGs toolkit for it. As the toolkit name says, WINGs Is Not GNUstep.
I'm writing this on a Window Maker desktop
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I was using Window Maker in high school.
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NeXTStep had a lot of nice nifty features. Anyone remember FastECC... an E-mail encryption program so secure that it got pulled out of the OS. Even the "demo" program that used a password as a private key, and a hex string as a public key was nice, but never lasted long.
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I agree. The 2 best OS's I used were:
* NextStep
* BeOS
Everything else pales in comparison.
Look at it the other way: (Score:2)
How much has the basic UI changed since Windows 95? It hasn't, because 95 got it just about perfect for comfortable productive. There are minor variations in the size of component and placement, but almost every OS since has used the same basic concept: A 'launch programs' button, a task bar with a tab for each open window along one edge of the screen, and a notification area. Almost all major linux distros use that, Ubuntu with Unity being an exception. Microsoft tried to change to something new in Windows
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> It hasn't, because 95 got it just about perfect for comfortable productive.
Except the fucking close button is next to the maximize button instead of being on the other side of the window where you can't accidentally mis-click it.
It hasn't changed because MS doesn't know what the fuck they are doing on how to make _great_ UI. The only thing they know what do is copy others without understanding why or why not.
Window's UI for window management is still shit compared to BeOS. e.g. You can "drag" the Wind
Not really (Score:5, Interesting)
I would agree that Windows 95 is influential, but let's not go overboard. It's the first instance that I know of with the "taskbar" along the bottom including a main menu button on the lower-left, which has become a very common arrangement. However, it's largely become an arrangement common to desktop environments attempting to mimic Windows in order to be approachable to Windows users. It's not the arrangement of all operating systems.
Claiming that OSX is copying the task bar with its dock is a bit of an overstatement. Various environments had different permutations of a "dock" concept, including NeXTSTEP, the forerunner to OSX. I think BeOS and Amiga also had docks of sort, though I admit I haven't seen any of these operating systems in action and I don't remember exactly what they looked like back in 1995. Also, the way the Apple dock operates is significantly different from the Windows task bar, and arguably the Windows 10 taskbar takes some things from Apple's dock.
Part way through the article, there's a big quote that says, "Without Windows 95 there would be no Steam or XBox and we would still be playing Pong." That's just nonsense. I mean, it's true there might not be steam or XBox, in that Steam was originally developed for Windows and XBox is a Microsoft program. However, we wouldn't still by playing Pong. There were more advanced games than Pong before Windows 95, and it's not as though people wouldn't have continued to develop video consoles and video games. In the end, he wraps things up by arguing that Windows 95 was just so amazingly good that it pushed everyone out of the market, as though Microsoft's monopoly was a good thing that was achieved purely through the quality of the product.
Honestly, I don't know if this author is a bit dim or ignorant, or if the author is intentionally pushing a false narrative, but this article is pretty bad. Obviously Windows 95 had a big impact on the computing industry and the operating systems that came afterwards. I wouldn't argue against that. Still, let's not pretend that it was a wonderful product that took over the world by being the best thing ever, and let's not pretend that everything that came after is simply copying Windows 95. It was a relatively crappy operating system that became dominant because Microsoft was largely already dominant, and there wasn't really anything much better at the time. Microsoft had already squashed a lot of their competitors, and continued to do so with anti-competitive practices.
Re:Not really (Score:5, Funny)
Honestly, I don't know if this author is a bit dim or ignorant, or if the author is intentionally pushing a false narrative, but this article is pretty bad.
...And now you know why there's a rule against reading the article.
Re:Not really (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as games go, Microsoft (smartly) killed gaming on the Mac.
There was an awesome game called Marathon on the Mac, from a new firm called Bungiesoft. It was a quantum leap past what most Mac games were (and PC for that matter), and could have made PowerPC the gamer's choice (anyone remember the Pipin? im sure you don't). But Microsoft and Gates smartly bought out Bungiesoft, and their next Mac game Halo got quickly made into a PC/XBox only affair. Imagine a world where Halo was a Mac game, a Halo halo effect as it were, and the home computing world is much different.
In MacOS6, all control panels were in a DeskAccessory called Control Panel. There was a selector on the left, and a general area to fill with content on the right. Why did the author pick windows 95 for this "all in one control panel" instead of the Mac's own legacy from 5 years previous to Win95 I don't know.
Also, the 3 buttons in the window, that's as much to do with XWindows as Microsoft. Remember MacOSX has roots in NeXT which has roots in UNIX. It's odd to attribute to Windows when there's a direct line to XWindows.
I had TCP/IP on my personal Mac in 92 or 93, with MacTCP and either MacSLIP or MacPPP (as my back end improved). I don't know how you go from "Apple bundled previously separate Mac Specific freeware" to "it was Win95 that did it sir!". Everything going to TCP/IP was obvious back then.
There are several stretches in the article to attribute things to Win95 when it's easy to see sources elsewhere. Not that Win95 didn't have influence. But no need to say the world changed ONLY because of Win95 when there were several things moving in the same direction.
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I remember thinking that Windows 95 was just a bad copy of OS/2 with some Macisms sprinkled around for good measure. I don't think it would be too far off the mark to say that Windows 95's main claim to fame was that it copied the right combination of features from other systems which were already around. That's not necessarily a bad thing; it's frequently how big successes happen in computing and elsewhere. However, to say those features themselves were Win95 innovations would be stretching things more tha
Re:Not really (Score:4, Insightful)
Part way through the article, there's a big quote that says, "Without Windows 95 there would be no Steam or XBox and we would still be playing Pong." That's just nonsense.
Absolutely. Doom predated Windows 95, which was in turn predated by wolfenstein 3D which was arguably the most influential game of all time. How many FPS games owe their look and feel to those two games?
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Space Invaders was 1978
Asteroids was 1979
Pac-Man was 1980
Donkey Kong was 1981
Dig Dug was 1982
Punch-Out!! was 1983
etc.
There were plenty of games beyond Pong even before 1995...
Microsoft Menus .. (Score:2)
Re:Microsoft Menus .. (Score:5, Interesting)
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That was the second OS/2 Warp (OS/2 4) actually. OS/2 3.0 Warp used the launchpad still - kind of CDE like in retrospect. Among us OS/2 users at the time few of us liked the addition of the top bar in Warp 4.
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A menu that pops on the bottom right on clicking 'START' can hardly be called UI innovation.
Which is why MS put it on the bottom left.
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There was a crappy icon dock extension in System 7.5 that was sort of like the modern ability to pin programs to the taskbar though.
I can't help but think that you're thinking of DragThing. It wasn't an extension, though, it was its own program. And it certainly wasn't crappy.
I personally think Microsoft Bob did it all (Score:2)
The virtual reality interface in Minority Report, it's Microsoft Bob i tell you. If you rent the movie and freeze frame, you can see that dog pop up every once in a while. And Clippy talks to Tom Cruise in Comic sans thought bubbles.
Start button! (Score:2)
Just sayin'....
Sorry to say so, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
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You're confusing Internet for the web. It did have TCP/IP, which is a bigger deal than people today realize. Before Windows 95, people generally had to use one of several third party TCP/IP implementations. Trumpet Winsock for Windows, MacTCP for Mac (was not free originally), several commercial applications shipped along with their own stacks. Microsoft did release a version for Windows for Workgroups 3.11, but it came along pretty late and would have required someone getting ahold of it separately as it d
newshell.exe (Score:4, Interesting)
actually... newshell.exe as it was known was written by the NT team, when Windows NT 3.1 was new and NT 3.51 was in beta. the windows 95 team - who were universally absolutely hated by the NT team - legitimately "stole" newshell.exe from the [internally and legitimately accessible] source repository of the NT team at the time, and release it as the default shell of windows 95 *before* the NT team were able to release it. it wasn't until NT 4 beta that the NT team was able to catch up.
unnnfortunately, the NT team were being pressurised to do some pretty stupid things, because windows 95, being a PROGRAM-RUNNER *NOT* repeat *NOT* repeat *NOT* an "Operating System" (windows 95 didn't even have proper virtual memory management for god's sake: programs were either fully-swapped-out or fully-resident: absolutely nothing in between) - windows 95 was unfortunately *faster* than the flagship operating system (NT).
so they were forced to remove the user-space GDI implementation and associated API (which buggered up citrix and other screen virtualisation technology completely: it had to be re-added back in many years later and was called "RDP"... it was actually another company's screen virtualisation technology... bought and re-badged... but we're talking windows 2000 by then...). removal of the GDI implementation meant two things: firstly, lots more speed, and secondly, if you moved a window off-screen it caused a BSOD in NT 4.0 betas because of course there was no range-checking any more and this was all kernel-space!
many people loved the fact that NT 3.51's user-space screen driver could actually crash, leaving you with no screen... but the mouse, keyboard and the rest of the OS was working perfectly. many sysadmins didn't bother with a reboot when that happened because they could just use keyboard short-cuts, remote logins, or just pure mouse-guesswork!
the NT team did at one point also try to move printer drivers (including 3rd party ones) into kernelspace (to again avoid a userspace-kernelspace context switch... or 100). for obvious reasons that initiative didn't last long....
yeahhhh we don't hear about the history of pain that windows 95 caused within microsoft. and now, many of the people who knew what was going on have retired as millionaires on the stock options from so far back...
The greatest W95 legacy is spread of medicority (Score:4, Interesting)
Before Windows 95, PCs had a vibrant marketplace of GUI shells, file managers, e-mail applications and web browsers. Netscape introduced Java applets and Javascript, updated frequently and was free with honor system payments. UNIX-based system had a wide choice of free and commercial Windows managers with features like virtual desktops that Microsoft only added in Windows 10.
What Microsoft taught users is to be lazy and not look beyond built in software with mediocre feature set. They have ultimately hurt themselves as mainstream applications became so dumbed down that you can just run the same thing on 4 inch phone and not miss much. Have they cultivated a healthy 3rd party ecosystem, people might be still interested in more powerful desktop/laptop experience in addition to phones and tablets.
Re:The greatest W95 legacy is spread of medicority (Score:5, Insightful)
That's exactly what I don't miss. Regular people aren't power users. They just want things to work. If the included feature set is so deficient that they have to rely on third party software, it's more stuff they have to learn, and more work for those who help them to support.
In the DOS days I used to use Norton Commander. I felt blind without it. I'd go to work and my boss would ask to look at something on his machine, and he was an XTreeProGold guy. OK, it's a great program too, but it's like we spoke different languages. To use someone else's machine, there was always some learning curve to figure out THEIR "bag of tricks". These days I can get most everything done with the tools included with Windows. I don't want to have to rely on some "vibrant marketplace", everything I really need is consistently included on any Windows machine I touch.
Power users are a different breed. Linux seems to offer exactly that "vibrant", choice-filled competitive atmosphere you're looking for. Seems like an OS that would fit you better.
Amiga? (Score:2)
The Right-Click menu? (Score:4, Insightful)
This may (also) have been stolen from some other OS, but Win95 was this Great Leap Forward in usability for one innovation alone, the right-click menu. I think it was the first time that "object-oriented" really showed up at the user level. Whatever object you clicked on - file, device, folder, data-object inside an application - you got the list of methods associated with the object, what you could do with the thing. Instead of applications having menus for their various functions, *data* objects had a menu appropriate to that data-item.
If Microsoft invented that, they have to be given some props. Certainly all the larger Linux distros paid them the homage of stealing the idea.
Oh, and minor point by comparison, but still, props: I remember everybody giving rave reviews to their workaround for storing long filenames while remaining backwards compatible with 8.3 names. Not exactly a leap forward, but it countered the Great Leap Backward that 8.3 was and made the transition away from them almost painless.
Re:The Right-Click menu? (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry. OS/2 had this before win95. Everything was an object. The desktop was basically an object that was a folder. Subfolders had their own individual properties (including backgrounds, permissions etc) being objects themselves.
Windows 95 was still a joke to me (Score:2)
Though at the time, I was a long time user of Commodore Amiga. Most PCs at the time were extraordinarily difficult to configure and keep running. I remember the multi-tasking in Windows 95 being really bad-- explorer.exe getting blocked. Other things that stick out to me were over use of modal dialogs and that lower-right notification tray filling up with animated distracting icons.
Don't get me started on clippy, or DOS, or file system naming conventions. Sure, compared to Windows 3.1 it was bliss-- bu
Magic Internet Access (Score:3)
Windows 95, if I remember correctly, solved the modem-to-internet problem. Up until then, I remember getting a modem to dial out meant starting some specialized dialer app or other (like AOL), and this might make it possible for other internet programs like FTP or telnet or Gopher [wikipedia.org] or Navigator [wikipedia.org] to work. Windows 95 had all this plumbing built-in. You set up your dial-up number (or two) and account information in a control panel applet, and then whenever an IP-aware program or app tapped for an address that wasn't available locally, the modem would automagically wake up and dial your ISP while your program patiently waited for the handshaking to complete.
This was pretty damned cool. You could have a LAN card and a modem on the same system, do all sorts of LAN-based stuff and the modem would stay asleep until you pinged a host outside the LAN. It. Just. Worked. With Windows 95, people could ditch AOL, and just subscribe to something cheap and simple like Earthlink [wikipedia.org]. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Macs got this functionality until the iMac [wikipedia.org] in 1998. For Windows 95 users, this made the Internet a LOT easier to use, and meant any internet app like Navigator would just plain work.
This magic carried on into Windows 2000. I once carried a mid-size office LAN over a single dial-up bridged by a Windows 2000 box and a modem. Windows reliably squeezed every packet through, and re-dialed automatically whenever the connection went down. Slow, but it worked! Why do something like this? Because Verizon couldn't deliver our T1 on time!
Start Me Up! (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
IE was on the Windows 95 plus cd. Not that it was near useless in Windows 95 as it was obsolete in 1995 when it came out.
Ah the days where you had to FTP from the Dos prompt to get your first browser. Fun
Re: (Score:2)
Yea then they bought the NSCA mosaic engine and they were all happy they were getting royalties and then MS gave it away for free. ...anyone remember NSCA Mosaic?
Re:They don't make 15-year-olds like they used to (Score:4, Informative)
Yup, and I also remember having to have Trumpet Winsock to get connected at all. Fun times playing with the configuration to get it to handshake with the terminal adapter and get a SLIP/PPP session started.
Re: (Score:2)
A win95 machine would have most of the software on local disk, a vast improvement over the 'software-as-a-shackle' that would replace it. The only online services were those that actually needed connectivity by nature (such as chat) were a free download away.
Re: (Score:3)
I remember it was very fast - to BSOD.
Re: (Score:2)
A fresh install was pretty quick, but it would slow down a lot over time as you installed applications which added DLLs, registry entries, fonts etc. And uninstalling an application usually didn't remove everything, so the only way to make Windows 95 quick again was reinstalling the whole OS.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not a kernel engineer (just a sysadm from way back) but I seem to recall that Windows NT inherited quite a bit from VMS under the covers, both good and bad. (An example of bad, I was told, had to do with security issues with message passing. I can't remember anything more than that.)
Re: (Score:2)
My favorite dig at Windows 95 was that it came on like 22 floppy disks.
Oh, I want to install TCP/IP networking.... Ok, insert floppy disk 3 followed by floppy disk 20.... oh, don't have either of those? no networking for you!
Re: (Score:3)
Enh, as someone who had to struggle late into the night trying to resolve driver issues, PnP issues, master browser storms, and other idiotic issues, I'd say Windows 95 sucked its entire life, and Windows 98 did too. 98 SE was when they finally got it right. Or, at least, usable.
From a conceptual standpoint, Microsoft really had something with 95. But under the covers, it could get really ugly.
Re: (Score:3)
Even multitasking under 95 was a shit.
No joke. The most visible parts of Windows 95 were - despite appearances - maintaining a lot of Windows 3.x compatibility underneath. The entire GUI app system was only capable of co-operative multi-tasking. It actually ran within a single virtual DOS box. The DOS boxes and virtual device drivers were pre-emptive multitasking between themselves, but not the GUI.
The Amiga, on the other hand, from Day 1 had full real-time capable pre-emptive multitasking. The Interrupt Services were themselves interruptible b