Windows 95 is 25 years old today - Where do you want to go today?
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- 25 de Jun, 2020
Our first family computer in 1995 was a Packard Bell Legend that came with the then-new Windows 95. I have such good and nostalgic memories of it, so much that I used to use Win 95 theme packs all the way up to Windows 7.
ditto
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- 17 de Ago, 2019
Windows '95.. You make a grown man cry
The Rants page is still being updated.. last entry only a week and a half ago!
cecograph
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- 17 de Oct, 2018
I remember using DOS regularly to play games. I had a menu on startup that had on option for Win95 and the other options were for the games we had installed.
DirectX was still in its infancy then. We got a games disc in 1996 that had a Diablo demo and opened with an FMV with some weird sci-fi shit and a voice-over about how DOS was a dead platform and all the game demos on this disc would target Win95 directly. It was probably DirectX 5, which I think was when DirectX became seriously usable for gamedevs.
DirectX was still in its infancy then. We got a games disc in 1996 that had a Diablo demo and opened with an FMV with some weird sci-fi shit and a voice-over about how DOS was a dead platform and all the game demos on this disc would target Win95 directly. It was probably DirectX 5, which I think was when DirectX became seriously usable for gamedevs.
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- 28 de Dic, 2014
The original release version of Windows 95 was one of the most fuck-awful disasters I've ever seen, and 95 didn't get any better. It wasn't until XP that it was even a functional OS. (Windows NT 3.5.1 and 4 were actually pretty good though.)
cecograph
kiwifarms.net
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- 17 de Oct, 2018
I remember Windows 98 pissing me off the most with BSoDs.
And yeah, WinXP completely changed my estimation of Windows. It would make sense that NT was pretty good, since XP was NT. Windows 95 and 98 were still DOS applications, I believe
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- 29 de Jul, 2020
I remember having to reinstall Win95 once a week because it forgot that my mouse existed but it was kind enough to offer the numpad keys as a bootleg mouse.
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- 21 de Ago, 2019
We jumped from a 286 all in one IBM clone to a Pentium 166 with MMX with Windows 95 and 32 megs of ram and a 2-gig hard drive. It seemed like a god damn miracle to me at the time. Imagine jumping from playing Round 42 off a floppy with 22 other games in black and white with just the PC Speaker for sound to Age of Empires in one go.
I legit have it as my ringtone.
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- 24 de Feb, 2020
Jelly, the win95 startup sound is heavenly, why does it scare you?
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- 4 de Feb, 2018
Just sounds.....strange.
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Ulrich Wessel fiel, doch tausend neu erstehen!
True & Honest Fan
kiwifarms.net
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- 17 de Mar, 2019
The most interesting comparison for me is how Windows evolved alongside other operating systems, and the contrast in the experience that they delivered regardless of technological advantages and disadvantages.
The biggest real advantage of Windows 95 to users was that it let you use the nasty, nasty implementation of long filenames they created as if you were using a civilized operating system. I can still work out the tilde shortenings for long file names in my head today.
You could already run a subset of 32-bit applications on Windows 3.1/3.11 with Win32S, so there was no real 'advance' to what '95 offered over Win 3.1 and Win32S. Nor was the implementation of preemptive multitasking in Windows 95 that important- Windows applications continued to be written by people who didn't care about how anything else on the system performed, and so 'advanced' Windows 95 was less usable with many real-world applications than contemporary Mac OS (or Mac OS 9 half a decade later) was, despite those systems still using a slightly more sophisticated version of the cooperative multitasking Apple implemented in the mid 80s. I used '95/98 with PROGMAN.EXE as the shell instead of EXPLORER.EXE into this millenium.
Microsoft themselves had already implemented far better technical solutions with OS/2 and then NT, as had Apple with A/UX vs. Classic MacOS. Unfortunately, neither company really saw advantages to giving regular users a better solution at the time.
MS wanted to make a big premium off their investment in NT, but it was really only better that 95/98/ME with most software when you were using it with very specialized software in a server role, so they made cream off NT servers while everyone else got to deal with the cancer that was '95. Admittedly, 95/98/ME could be marginally faster at times, used less resources, and various backwards compatibility functions were only implemented on them over NT (at least prior to 2000 and then XP). But that happened because Bill spent the development money on hotrodding his Honda Civic of an OS, rather than on OS/2 and NT.
Meanwhile, even after Apple implemented almost full legacy compatibility with legacy Mac apps on A/UX with a really nice Unix base, they couldn't really sell it as being better than legacy Mac OS. Like NT, it had a higher cost, in resources consumed as well as $ value. But 99.9% of Mac apps were already civilized and worked in a multitasking environment, so your regular user didn't need pre-emptive multitasking to work around incompetent programmers. You would only see a real performance improvement running really demanding server software built for multithreading, and Apple didn't even sell dual-processor systems built for performance until A/UX was already dead with the PowerPC transformation.
Regardless of any technological improvements in process separation, Win95 enabled new and ever worse innovations in driver design, so any technical advantages over Windows 3.1 were cancelled by the fact that any non-premium system would have at least one driver written by drooling retards that would cause instability that a 3.1 system wouldn't encounter.
The real killer advantage of Windows 95/98? Microsoft introduced new 32 bit APIs that they refused to support in Win32S/Win 3.1, and in some cases barely supported in NT before Windows 2000. The 'Windows 95 advantage' was that 'DirectX is not available in Windows 3.1', not that there was any real technological advance.
Windows 2000 was the apex of Microsoft operating systems (at least post OS/2) and unfortunately, we will never return to those golden times, when there was no such thing as a 'Themes' service.
The biggest real advantage of Windows 95 to users was that it let you use the nasty, nasty implementation of long filenames they created as if you were using a civilized operating system. I can still work out the tilde shortenings for long file names in my head today.
You could already run a subset of 32-bit applications on Windows 3.1/3.11 with Win32S, so there was no real 'advance' to what '95 offered over Win 3.1 and Win32S. Nor was the implementation of preemptive multitasking in Windows 95 that important- Windows applications continued to be written by people who didn't care about how anything else on the system performed, and so 'advanced' Windows 95 was less usable with many real-world applications than contemporary Mac OS (or Mac OS 9 half a decade later) was, despite those systems still using a slightly more sophisticated version of the cooperative multitasking Apple implemented in the mid 80s. I used '95/98 with PROGMAN.EXE as the shell instead of EXPLORER.EXE into this millenium.
Microsoft themselves had already implemented far better technical solutions with OS/2 and then NT, as had Apple with A/UX vs. Classic MacOS. Unfortunately, neither company really saw advantages to giving regular users a better solution at the time.
MS wanted to make a big premium off their investment in NT, but it was really only better that 95/98/ME with most software when you were using it with very specialized software in a server role, so they made cream off NT servers while everyone else got to deal with the cancer that was '95. Admittedly, 95/98/ME could be marginally faster at times, used less resources, and various backwards compatibility functions were only implemented on them over NT (at least prior to 2000 and then XP). But that happened because Bill spent the development money on hotrodding his Honda Civic of an OS, rather than on OS/2 and NT.
Meanwhile, even after Apple implemented almost full legacy compatibility with legacy Mac apps on A/UX with a really nice Unix base, they couldn't really sell it as being better than legacy Mac OS. Like NT, it had a higher cost, in resources consumed as well as $ value. But 99.9% of Mac apps were already civilized and worked in a multitasking environment, so your regular user didn't need pre-emptive multitasking to work around incompetent programmers. You would only see a real performance improvement running really demanding server software built for multithreading, and Apple didn't even sell dual-processor systems built for performance until A/UX was already dead with the PowerPC transformation.
Regardless of any technological improvements in process separation, Win95 enabled new and ever worse innovations in driver design, so any technical advantages over Windows 3.1 were cancelled by the fact that any non-premium system would have at least one driver written by drooling retards that would cause instability that a 3.1 system wouldn't encounter.
The real killer advantage of Windows 95/98? Microsoft introduced new 32 bit APIs that they refused to support in Win32S/Win 3.1, and in some cases barely supported in NT before Windows 2000. The 'Windows 95 advantage' was that 'DirectX is not available in Windows 3.1', not that there was any real technological advance.
Windows 2000 was the apex of Microsoft operating systems (at least post OS/2) and unfortunately, we will never return to those golden times, when there was no such thing as a 'Themes' service.
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- 7 de Sep, 2016
Win2k was the first complete MS OS, XP was some nips and tucks and a botched facelift on top of that.
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- 24 de Feb, 2020
Eh, I guess that's understandable, can't really dunk on you since the 3.1 startup scared the ever living fuck out of me
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- 12 de Jun, 2020
Win 98 is better 
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- 29 de Mar, 2014
A person born when Win95 was released could now be having children of their own.
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- 13 de Abr, 2015
98SE with 98lite is peak Windows.Win 98 is better
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- 17 de Ene, 2016
Showing my age here but when I saw that message as a kid I thought I'd get in trouble with the police who I imagined would knock on my door and tell me off for messing with the computer because it said 'illegal'.
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- 19 de Feb, 2018
My step dad at the time legit yelled at me once because he thought the very same thing.
Difference is you were a kid and he was an adult.
Dumb boomers, lol.
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Ulrich Wessel fiel, doch tausend neu erstehen!
True & Honest Fan
kiwifarms.net
- Registrado
- 17 de Mar, 2019
What, and not be able to use Active Desktop to put horrifying videos on someone else's desktop?