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posted by martyb on Tuesday August 25 2015, @03:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-out-of-the-teens dept.

It was twenty years ago yesterday (August 24, 2015) that Windows 95 was introduced, says El Reg.

Windows 95 was a great success, despite not being the most stable of operating systems. Microsoft's own Windows NT 3.1, released two years earlier, was built on stronger foundations, but high system requirements and lack of compatibility with many DOS applications and games made it unsuitable for consumers. Windows 95 was better in both respects, running in as little as 4MB of RAM – though painfully, with 8MB a more realistic minimum – and retaining DOS complete with 16-bit device driver support.

At the time, most PCs ran Windows 3.1 or 3.11 (Windows for Workgroups), and IBM was pushing OS/2 as a "better Windows than Windows". Windows 95 was a considerable improvement on Windows 3.x, with pre-emptive multitasking, mostly 32-bit code, and plug and play hardware detection. There was also new support for "portable computers", with a battery indicator on the taskbar and the ability to suspend the system without turning it off completely.

Perhaps what I'm going to say will be controversial, but I'm of the opinion that Windows 95 is the greatest software engineering feat ever, given the challenge Microsoft faced at that time. Unlike Apple, which continues to make its own computers, Microsoft did not and, therefore, had to do a vast amount of testing in order to ensure that Windows 95 would work on most existing 32-bit Intel machines.


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  • (Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday August 25 2015, @03:22PM

    by nitehawk214 (1304) on Tuesday August 25 2015, @03:22PM (#227629)

    I wouldn't put the achievement based on QA effort alone. There are vastly more types of computers now than there were in 1995, the QA effort on releasing an operating system is much more difficult now than ever.

    --
    "Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Francis on Tuesday August 25 2015, @03:41PM

    by Francis (5544) on Tuesday August 25 2015, @03:41PM (#227639)

    That's true, but it's also largely MS' fault for being willing to cater to hardware manufacturers that can't be bothered to follow spec properly. 20 years ago if your hardware didn't follow spec, it wouldn't work at all. You might not get the chance to install a driver for the video card because you wouldn't see anything at all.

    These days, you have things like ACPI being tailored to the hardware because the manufacturer can't be bothered to make sure it complies with the official specification. I remember having to fix a few of them myself. It never took a lot of time or effort to get them fixed, but I had to do it manually because MS was willing to bend over backwards and Linux didn't already have somebody that had fixed it.

    You're not going to fix things completely like that, but taking a firmer stance on it would make things a lot easier. MS just realizes that doing that would also help the competition and would rather fix these problems and have sloppy QA than deal with the increased competition.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @09:12PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @09:12PM (#227787)

      Excellent example.
      At the other site on 2008/07/25, there was a story about a guy who had installed Linux and "his new Foxconn motherboard caused his Linux install to freeze and fire off weird kernel errors".

      There were many comments that suspected collusion with MSFT. [google.com]
      (Bill Gates' memo of 1999/01/24)

      On 2008/08/08 there was a followup story about how Foxconn had scrambled and corrected the faulty, improperly-tested BIOS.

      -- gewg_