SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by skater on Tuesday August 25 2015, @04:45PM
I remember all the comments - "I'm not going to downgrade to Windows 95 from Windows 3.1!!!!" As though Windows 3.1 was some kind of wonderful flower.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Tuesday August 25 2015, @05:21PM
I bounced back and forth between Win95 and 3.x. IIRC the main problem I had with Win95 is that it crashed a lot, just like 3.x. When your computer crashes multiple times per day, the boot-up time becomes pretty noticable. Win95 took much longer to boot than 3.x.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by skater on Tuesday August 25 2015, @05:54PM
Of course, when Win 3.x crashed, you just fell back to DOS and could restart it (usually). Win 95 required a hardware reboot. But I don't miss worrying about 640K, extended, and expanded memory... sheesh that was annoying. You could have a meg of RAM and still not enough memory to run something because of the way memory was allocated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2015, @12:06AM
I remember having multiple configurations available with my config.sys and autoexec.bat, so I'd be able to play particular games. Frustration endless, until I worked out how to do that.
(Score: 2) by skater on Wednesday August 26 2015, @11:26AM
Oh, yeah! Hey, now I want to do "x"...oops, gotta reboot, wrong config loaded.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday August 26 2015, @09:46AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Wednesday August 26 2015, @09:52AM
I bought Wing Commander II and me and my friend spent about four hours diddling config.sys and autoexec.bat before we had enough EMS (or RMS I've repressed those memories [no pun intended]) for that piece of shit to run! Every driver mouse.sys sound.sys and the fucking glorious awesome memory hogging mscdex.exe driver to fit in the right places before the game would run. I'm surprised anyone even got to play the game! It sure as hell wouldn't work with QEMM (quarterdeck extended memory manager) that's for sure.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 2, Informative) by canopic jug on Tuesday August 25 2015, @06:02PM
I had Windows 95 and later 98 on a home notebook that I often brought in to work to test web designs. I learned not to try to do any work from it other than viewing because it would crash very frequently, like every 30 to 40 minutes. I did sometimes use the M$ wordprocessor or spreadsheet and learned to save every time I paused in typing or got to the end of a sentence or clause. It didn't matter which application or applications were in use, it crashed often. I can't remember whether Windows 95 or 98 was worse [dilbert.com], they were both that bad.
I also remember it was hell to set up the modem on both, requiring expert help and some external drivers the first time.
So yeah 20 years is a milestone but not of a good thing.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Tuesday August 25 2015, @07:23PM
Yeah, it crashed on occasion. The Blue Screen of Death was sometimes your constant companion. However, I was in grad school when it came out and was doing a lot of writing in MS Word 6, a Windows 3.1 app that ran splendidly in Windows 95, except for the short file name conventions you had to follow because it didn't know about long file names. But I was also doing a fair amount of Windows programming for an on-campus job I had. I still remember some recursive code I wrote and botched that caused a stack overflow. When I was doing the development in Windows 3.1, the overflow not only ate Windows, it ate DOS, forcing a reboot. You hoped you saved your code in the IDE (Borland C++ for Windows I believe) because all you could do is reboot. In Windows 95, a similar error simply caused the program to crash, and the OS dutifully reported it to you. No reboot required. Now, for me that was an improvement.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2015, @09:37AM
You were lucky. I was developing a program that made Windows 95 BSOD. After several tries to get the right spot in the debugger, I gave up.
I ended up trying on Linux, and even though the program ran fine, I managed to find the problem. A simple memory leak. Linux simply swapped out the leaked memory, and the program continued merrily on its way. Windows 95 gave a blue screen of death every time I tried to debug it.
(Score: 2) by skater on Wednesday August 26 2015, @11:31AM
Remember the bug that Windows 95 (or was it 98?) would crash if you let it run for 24 days or something like that? Everyone I know was wondering how it was possible to have Windows running that long without otherwise crashing.