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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 MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday August 25 2015, @09:59PM
All the PC manufacturers give Microsoft lots of high-end boxen. I was an OS X coder for Microsoft but even so I used the very best that Dell made to check my corporate email on Windows 7.
If you want your code to work well, develop it on the cheapest, nastiest piece of shit hardware your tools could possibly install on.
BeOS 5 Pro installs and runs OK on 8 MB, works really well on 32.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @10:52PM
You are so correct; I have tried to warn folks of this since Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0. I worked at large company where most departments thought that new PCs came out of a magic toybox hidden in the IT department.
The old crusty ones were rebuilt and given to the many folks in the IT departments, with the idea that if you program on the lowest end hardware we have, you are bound to make it work on that. If we give you a high end machine (like a pentium pro!) then you are going to code to make it run well on that.
So eventually when everything got upgraded to pentium IIs and skipped past pentium pros entirely for the most part, the programs were not optimized to run on that architecture and so everything sucked. But man did stuff run well on those pentium-mmx 200 and 233mhz boxes that a few people got!!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday August 26 2015, @12:56AM
When my Bahamian Hedge Fund Client suggested I try a simple problem, just to get started, you know just so they could check me out a little, they had a license to print money.
As a result of all the hard work Intel's performance people put into VTune, when I was done with that simple problem that just got me started so my client's engineers could check me out a little, my Bahamian Hedge Fund client had a license to print money twice as fast...
... on Pentium III Wink2k boxen.
Riddle me this batman:
Octel Communications - Octel invented voice mail, perhaps you're familiar with it - had three SunOS 3/280 servers, roughly 100 glass TTYs and 200 80386 PCs mostly running MS-DOS with PC-NFS but a few SCO Xenix.
That company employed 200 embedded systems developers as well as their management, clerical staff, QA and the like in just the one building where I worked in Milpitas.
Four or five of our refrigerator-size voice mail machines with one single FDDI loop could handle all the voice mail for a city the size of Denver. Each such refrigerator contained roughly one hundred cards each with two 80386s, with the freezer comparment of that fridge being full of unformatted 5 1/4" full-height Micropolis drives.
(Unformatted because telephone voice recordings don't need all that error correction.)
Is all this firepower we have today REALLY necessary?
The iPhone you've got in your pocket has far more storage, memory and FLOPS than did the very first ten million dollar Cray-1 that the National Security Agency purchased to keep tabs on Nikita.
Don't ask what your iPhone can do for your turgid penis.
Ask what your iPhone can do for your users.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]