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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: 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]