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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Windows 98 turns 20 today. However, rose-tinted spectacles still don't make a hybrid 16 and 32 bit OS tottering on top of MS-DOS any more appealing.
While Windows NT 4.0 pointed to a future free from MS-DOS, the majority of the Windows user base simply did not have the hardware to run much more than a jumped-up version of Windows 95. Thus Windows 98 appeared to bridge the gap.
Codenamed Memphis, the first beta of Windows 98 arrived in 1996 with the final Release To Manufacturing (RTM – remember those?) version appearing two years later. USB support came as standard (and memorably exploded live on stage) along with a range of functions intended as a nod to that World Wide Web thing. Applications such as Outlook Express, FrontPage Express and a personal web server appeared as part of the installation.
Windows 98 customers were also treated to the joy that was Internet Explorer 4.01, along with the Active Desktop, which allowed HTML content (such as news headlines) to be shown on the user's desktop at the cost of prodigious amounts of CPU and RAM. This integration of Internet Explorer with the operating system would come to haunt Microsoft in later years as anti-trust litigation kicked off in earnest the month before the OS launched.
Microsoft also quietly introduced the Windows Driver Model (WDM) in Windows 98 as a way to create drivers that would work over the software giant's disparate operating systems. Unlike the previous VxD model, which allowed a driver to stomp all over kernel memory, WDMs were somewhat better behaved and lived on to see the release of Windows Vista.
Windows 98 is regarded as the pinnacle of the Windows 9x era, with an update shipping the following year in the form of Windows 98 SE (Second Edition) including a number of minor enhancements such as the inclusion of Internet Explorer 5. The final iteration, the much derided Windows ME, arrived in 2000.
The Windows 98 era also serves as a timely reminder that Microsoft was not always the caring, sharing behemoth it purports to be today. At the time, Microsoft trumpeted its Java implementation as being the fastest for Windows. However, a failure to implement the Java 1.1 standard to the satisfaction of Sun Microsystems, the creator of Java, led to a sueball being lobbed in 1997.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 5, Informative) by c0lo on Friday June 29 2018, @10:32AM (2 children)
Rot in peace
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Friday June 29 2018, @03:12PM (1 child)
Now, now. I have a soft spot for old OS's. I owe at least part of my usefulness at work to them.
In fact I'll be working on a machine running spiffy sparkling up to date Win 95 later this afternoon. :) (It's the embedded computer for a system that reads absorbance and fluorescence from chemicals in a 96 well microplate.)
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday June 30 2018, @03:47AM
Me too. (And I mean that in the conventional way.) I've always been somewhat curmudgeonly in that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". That said, MS products will always have plenty of room for improvement. But you've made me nostalgic for a Win98SE install I should have somewhere, and on it are some files and source code I'd love to find, so thank you for stirring my memory.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @10:48AM (9 children)
Better than Linsux!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by SomeGuy on Friday June 29 2018, @11:00AM
That reminders me of the old suck/rules-o-meter that would poll Altavista.digital.com and graph search results for "Windows sucks" and "Linux sucks".
Oh, look it is still up, but stopped updating after Altavista closed: http://srom.zgp.org/ [zgp.org]
Also reminds me of how people would quip that there were such and such number of search results for "BSOD" while ignoring the much larger number, at the time, for "Kernel panic".
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Friday June 29 2018, @11:04AM (2 children)
Linux was not really ready for the desktop at the time.
OS/2 came to the rescue.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @11:09AM (1 child)
It was the time I switched to Linux, and I agree it wasn't ready for the desktop at that time... OTOH it gave far more useful error messages than the useless error messages that Windows displayed in its BSOD, which was the main reason I switched.
(Score: 2) by tadas on Friday June 29 2018, @01:40PM
Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my drive?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @04:26PM (2 children)
Windows 98-tan and SE-tan still live on in my heart.
(for those who have forgotten the OS-tans: https://www.ostan-collections.net/wiki/index.php/Windows_98 [ostan-collections.net] )
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday June 30 2018, @12:00AM (1 child)
Anime is cool, and a legitimate and often-intelligent genre of media.
However, assigning the likeness of a babe to an intangible sequence of ones and zeros is full-retard. Even the guy in the movie Her had an iPhone or something that he could rub his dick across. Do you rub your dick across your old CRT monitor pining for the good ol' days when more like her were around?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @06:10PM
Porn babe, anime OS babe, it's all in 2D on your screen.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday June 29 2018, @11:53PM (1 child)
Back in the days when everybody ran 98SE, the only reason to boot into Linux was to use war tools and take channels. Linux, after all, didn't have antivirus software co-opted by the Jews, which would delete all of your war-tools during scans because they were "threats to your computer."
(Score: 2) by Marand on Saturday June 30 2018, @03:15AM
That was how a lot of people used it, sure, but it was definitely not the only reason. Somewhat related, its TCP/IP stack was more flexible and less fucked up, which meant that both 1) some of those tools couldn't run in Windows, and 2) Linux wasn't susceptible to the attacks, because they were based on breaking the Windows TCP/IP stack. So in addition to being appealing to script kiddies, it was also a good option if you had a habit of pissing off the script kiddies on IRC like I did. It was amusing seeing them enrage over not being able to knock you offline because they lacked the skills necessary to do anything other than run someone else's programs.
It was especially dangerous being on IRC as a Windows user after the discovery of a bug involving "special files" like CON, NUL, and AUX. Special files in DOS and Windows quietly exist in all folders, available but hidden from most forms of display, so that you could do things like pipe output to PRN (printer) or NUL (like /dev/null). It also meant that you could attempt to access, say, c:\NUL\AUX and cause a Windows system to bluescreen. Most people were more worried about assholes putting "file://c:/con/con/" in html documents, but where the bug really got attention was on IRC, because most IRC clients could be tricked into accessing them in various ways (like client-specific CTCP messages). That made being on IRC as a Windows user pretty hellish for a while, due to a combination of users being slow to update and IRC client and addon devs being shit at fixing the bugs (for example, a lot of people "fixed" it by blacklisting con\con specifically, not understanding it worked on other special files as well). Kind of off-topic, but that bug showed up again last year in a slightly different form [arstechnica.com] for Windows 7 and 8 users.)
Even ignoring those special outliers, it was also just generally more stable than Windows 95 and 98, and had much lower system reqs in comparison. After I replaced my AMD K5 133 (upgraded to 16MB of RAM!) with a 400mhz K6-2, Instead of dual booting, I installed Linux on the K5 and used it as a secondary system. Where Windows was sluggish and bloated, Linux was fast and lean, and it gave new life to that system. Kept it as a secondary PC and later a server for years, and I even ended up using it as my primary system for something like five months when my primary system died. (Long story, but the builder did some fucked up non-standard configuration that ended up damaging the motherboard under warranty and I spent months fighting the company over it.)
Somewhat ironically, Linux was also a more comfortable environment for someone like me that had experience with Commodore systems and with DOS. The commands were different but the interaction was similar enough, and it felt like I still had control over the system. I didn't even start X11 (XFree86 at the time) automatically, preferred the virtual consoles and screen most of the time.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Friday June 29 2018, @10:51AM (5 children)
"This integration of Internet Explorer with the operating system would come to haunt Microsoft in later years"
And this, children, is why Windows 10 has TWO web browsers. After all these years they still can't upgrade or remove the "integrated" one without breaking legacy applications. What a total clusterfuck.
Damn I feel old.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @11:33AM (3 children)
Meanwhile what versions of Gtk and Qt are you running? One thing I'll give Microsoft credit for is the amount of engineering they've put into backwards compatibility with the ongoing clusterfuck and I don't recall a case of DLL hell in many years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @04:29PM
That is a double edged sword. If they would just jettison some of that backwards compatibility they could (probably? hopefully??) release a much better OS ... and it would certainly be more stable and have a smaller disk & memory footprint.
I'm not giving them credit for finally getting their shit together regarding DLL hell. They just switched their lack of focus & attention to system updates (especially on Win 7).
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @06:33PM (1 child)
The new version of dll hell is called winsxs [microsoft.com]. I can't count the number of times I've had to expand Windows Server's system volumes because Microsoft can't keep its operating system from bloating beyond 400% of its initial install size.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday June 30 2018, @04:01AM
Do you just need to clean out all the junk including update uninstallers, the updater downloads, etc?
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @04:24PM
Hey, some guy feels old. News at 11.
(Score: 5, Funny) by chewbacon on Friday June 29 2018, @11:43AM (3 children)
Windows 9x: 32-bit graphical extensions for a shell for a 16-bit patch on top of a 8-bit operating system written for a 4-bit processor by a 2-bit company that cant stand one bit of competition.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday June 29 2018, @01:22PM
That's pretty good. Actually Gates was known as a ferocious gamer, and very (too) much enjoyed competition. You know, the threaten, lie, cheat, steal, backstab kind. It was many other companies who were more into science / tech. and were unable to compete. I wanted to see MS dismantled as a monopoly, and many states' Attorneys General had filed suit, but then elections, politics, and something else became front-page news. Sigh.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @05:27PM (1 child)
Do I detect just a hint of jealousy? Hmm?
Besides, we all know they took one look at the Mac, and said, "We can do that..."
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Friday June 29 2018, @09:12PM
Of course, the people at Apple took one look at what Xerox PARC was doing and said the same thing.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 3, Funny) by inertnet on Friday June 29 2018, @11:49AM (5 children)
Should have been named Windows Meh.
(Score: 2) by chewbacon on Friday June 29 2018, @12:41PM (1 child)
Winblows Meh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @09:38PM
That sounds a lot more positive...
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday June 29 2018, @01:26PM (2 children)
I remember the moaning about Windows ME but I'm not sure why. I don't think I ever ran it, but I had 98SE very fast and stable thanks to autopatcher.net http://www.autopatcher.net/forum/ [autopatcher.net] There were a couple of .dll files you were supposed to get from a ME install, which I happened to have, and everything worked. I had a 3rd party USB 2.0 card and as I recall it always worked well too.
(Score: 3, Informative) by SomeGuy on Friday June 29 2018, @01:46PM (1 child)
The primary problem with Windows ME was that Microsoft made some driver-level changes. But many apparently vendors did not update their drivers, partly because 98 drivers world "work", and because Microsoft was officially ending development in favor of NT. This resulted in many buggy, unstable drivers.
The other problem was that Microsoft changed a few lines of code to cripple the use of DOS. DOS was all still there and could even be hacked to bring it back, but many people still needed to run pure DOS mode programs and this was now more of a hassle under Windows ME.
When using Win9x era machines for DOS stuff, Windows 98SE is considered the best. It has most hardware support, is fairly stable, and has full DOS compatiblity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @07:37PM
At the green site, Hairyfeet [soylentnews.org] noted multiple times [google.com] how, if you stuck to 1 type or the other, you were OK; mix them and you got shit.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @03:16PM (3 children)
The first NSA edition.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Friday June 29 2018, @03:59PM (2 children)
Perhaps, but it is still interesting to think about how much has changed in that regard. 20 years ago most people would have thought that things like spying on users or telemetry were illegal. The idea of putting advertising in a mainstream OS would have been outright absurd. Forcing updates? Right, as soon as I get the update disk in the mail.
(Score: 2) by stormreaver on Friday June 29 2018, @04:37PM (1 child)
It still is absurd. That anyone accepts this is mind-boggling.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Friday June 29 2018, @05:17PM
Well, Google perfected how to show an ad and we all cheered for it. The browser as an OS came, and Microsoft realized they already have a vehicle to deliver ads.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @03:30PM
Still active:
https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/svn/1823/log/?path= [sourceforge.net]
https://github.com/ercanersoy/DOS-Coreutils [github.com]
https://github.com/ercanersoy/FreeDOS-TUI-Shell [github.com]
God knows why...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @03:49PM (1 child)
I kept using Win98 for a few more years after WinXP came out. Completely switched to XP only after a service pack or two. Sure, there were occasional BSODs on Win98, but overall, it worked pretty well (assuming yearly-or-so reinstalls).
BTW, just a week ago, the excellent blog about computer and gaming history, The Digital Antiquarian, began a series of articles covering the early days of Windows: part 1, [filfre.net] part 2, [filfre.net] more to come. They're pretty good.
Caring, sharing behemoth my ass. Telemetry-collecting, privacy-invading, over-controlling, update-forcing, compatibility-braking behemoth, maybe. (I do miss the days of "compatibility uber alles". From what I hear, I'm-guessing-untested Win10 updates keep breaking software every few months.)
(Score: 2) by chewbacon on Saturday June 30 2018, @01:41PM
I was so ready to get away from Win98, I jumped to Win2k which was probably my favorite version of Windows before Win7. It was just solid and such a breath of fresh air compared to Win98, albeit the driver support for consumer devices had to catch up. XP improved upon that and was more consumer focused.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @05:57PM (3 children)
Got it with Plus, the resource kit, and Office 98, with the desktop sidebar... I'm using the 'Science Fiction' theme, so trashy, but so totally hip! I did have to download a third party display driver. I hope that was safe. 'Guest Additions' doesn't work though.
I thought it was pretty convenient to be able to run Lotus and WordPerfect without having to launch Windows. And I could still play with memory management. DOS was cool, and there's nothing wrong with laying an optional graphical interface on top.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @06:37PM (1 child)
Office 98 is a Mac edition. Are you sure you aren't happily running a different OS with an X in its name?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @07:43PM
Office 97 then, whatever... Windows, Mac, they all look alike to me...
Will MacOS run in VirtualBox?
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Saturday June 30 2018, @06:23AM
Even better, I've got it running on an old 700MHz Celeron system. With 256MB of ram it runs pretty well. Every once and a while I'll fire it up to use an ancient parallel port flatbed scanner that has managed to outlive all of its replacements. Or if I need to read a floppy disk or a zip disk. It used to be more useful for gaming, but nowadays it's easier to just use Dosbox for that kind of thing.
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Friday June 29 2018, @11:00PM (2 children)
Win98SE was pretty decent (for that time). What followed were multiple versions of windows, most of which were decidedly less decent.
Remember Windows NT, Windows ME and Windows CE?
The frequent mishaps on these led to the inevitable moniker: Windows CEMENT.
(I didn't experience NT, so maybe it wasn't completely horrible. The other two definitely had their share of woes.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @12:08PM (1 child)
Windows NT was a completely different server codebase that MS took over from someone else. NT 3.? was very stable and a good system. With the NT4.? and later systems MS tried to merge the two, and pretty much just fucked up the NT series.
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Sunday July 01 2018, @03:36PM
As I understood it, there were two families of Windows kernels:
- 95 -> 98 -> 98 SE -> ME
- NT3.x -> NT4 -> 2K
2K just felt better - even after XP came out, 2K was much more to my liking.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30 2018, @03:19AM
As far as I recall 98SE or around there was the last MS os where you could boot to real mode. Since for some reason this was desirable when learning assembly I used a 98SE system in 2008 when I took an assembly class. It was fun, I think I made an address book in assembly, and a "screen saver" ...
(Score: 3, Touché) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Saturday June 30 2018, @06:52AM
But windows 10 does...
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.