Twenty years ago today: Windows 98 crashed live on stage with Bill Gates. Let's watch it again... Let us pause for a moment and reflect on the fact that 20 years have passed since Windows 98 memorably fell over during Bill Gates' presentation at Comdex. A nervous-looking Chris Capossela, now chief marketing officer at Microsoft, attempted to plug a scanner into a Windows 98 PC while Gates looked on. The intent was to …
Just Google up "Microsoft on stage fail".
Guests in the first 8 rows will get wet also the splash zone is up to 12 rows.
WOOOOOOOOO!!!!
DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!!!
WOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
In case you haven't seen maybe the sweatiest man on the planet get overexcited...
"Either quick thinking or a case of anticipated.
Whatever the case good response."
Agreed. Love him or hate him, he did handle that rather well. I can imaging a lot of other CEO types who would handled that rather...rather...differently :-)
Can you imagine how Elon Musk would have handled it? Screaming tantrum, wild accusations of big oil shills, the poor bugger doing the demonstration sacked before he left the stage and then a blank denial that any of it ever happened.
I thought it happened at the 1997 PDC, but apparently I was mistaken.
'Developers Developers Developers Developers' was in 1993, as i recall [though Ballmer may have done it more than once].
And I _MUCH_ prefer Win '98 to Win-10-nic, in AS MANY WAYS AS ARE POSSIBLE!
@cornz 1 you beat me to it.
The last time I saw a machine bsod due to hardware was a win7 machine I forced to use a winxp driver and I knew the chances were high it'd cause problems.
In fact I can count on one hand the number of times i saw an XP machine bsod
I managed to BSoD Win10, but that was a bad stick of RAM. Not cheap stuff either, but it managed to reduce Mint to a screen full of random colours when I tried that, which I guess leaves Windows slightly ahead, because at least it gave me a readable error message.
"...Utter bollocks! I have a Dell XPS 13 (i7, 16gb RAM, with Windows 10 etc etc)... Had several BSODs..."
Sample size of one. What, exactly, have you done to diagnose the issue on your Dell? Ever stopped to consider it could be hardware related? Or even Dell-created? Tried blowing it away and putting a vanilla copy on?
Or was it a corporate image? I've never seen them be problematic...
"...Luckily I have another machine running Linux Mint... which never fails..."
I had a Mint Cinammon VM that would freeze almost without exception. It was being run on VirtualBox and was a know, but to the best of my knowledge never fixed, issue.
Sample size of <some> as it was on the various forums.
Wait one moment whilst I rant about how crap it was...oh hang on.... one use case was problematic and using an alternative OS fixed it.
I think your famous Commodore engineer should talk to Paul Allen, for example ... yes, Gates' high school buddy with whom he founded Microsoft! For those who do not know, one of the two was undergoing cancer treatment while the other tried the dilute his buddy's shares.
Besides, when Commodre was still in business, Gates was the most hated professional ... Gates later made ONE promise and has since become a philantropist-hero-angel-demi-dog, all previous lies, betrayals, bullying, extortion ... all forgotten, all thanks to one promise ... I judge people on what they do, NOT what they say ... and I ignore what serial liars say, regardless of what they have done, good or bad.
PS: I want a reliable source for your quote or I call bullshit. I cannot see how a "famous" (whatever that means in this context) Commode engineer could have any form of affection for Gates.
PPS: Regarding Steve, I do not think it is right to make up something like that considering he is dead!
"Libel is printed, Slander is spoken, but it's only libel or slander if it's NOT TRUE."
Perhaps in your jurisdiction but not in England and Wales. The old saying was "The greater the truth, the greater the libel."
As an example, suppose you ran a car dealership in a town full of fundie Christians and I printed in the local paper that every Friday night you used to whip Mrs. Bob with a riding crop and then pleasure her with a gigantic vibrator. Regardless of truth, it would be libel because your business would be harmed but your kink would have no relation to the business of selling cars. Unless you were also the local preacher and telling your congregation that anything other than straight sex through a hole in a blanket would send them straight to Hell, when a public interest defence would apply.
In effect, you have no right in the UK to reveal damaging information about people that has no implications for their interactions with others. And that is surely as it should be.
Perhaps in your jurisdiction but not in England and Wales.
Where did you source your facts from, wikipedia? Let's read the primary legislation, shall we?
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2013/26/crossheading/defences/enacted
Defences
2 Truth
(1)It is a defence to an action for defamation for the defendant to show that the imputation conveyed by the statement complained of is substantially true.
And therefore, should you make a substantially true statement you cannot be found guilty of libel or slander.
"These days it seems you don't have to write your own autobiography."
Nothing wrong with a posthumous unauthorized autobiography. That's what ghostwriters are for, particularly the posthumous part. Getting the ghost to unauthorize the autobiography can be a little tricky, though, I understand ...
To clarify on the autobiography comments, the book was not an autobiography--it was a standard biography, not written by a ghost writer helping Jobs, but by a writer who wrote about him. The writer in question is Walter Isaacson. He got approval to interview people, including long interviews with Jobs and his family, as well as many people who worked with, lived with, knew in some capacity, or talked about Jobs at some point. The number of times the word "jerk" and less complementary synonyms appeared should at least assuage the comments that the book will tell only the story from Jobs's perspective.
Regarding Steve, I do not think it is right to make up something like that considering he is dead!
forget the comment was St Jobbs for a moment, but Just because someone is dead does not excuse or alter someone's opinion of them.
People often recite terrible things about for example Margaret Thatcher. They call her a milk thief for taking the milk from kids in schools. She killed a bunch of Argentinians in a boat heading away from an exclusion zone. She Killed off British coal mining.... Where what she did was take the milk from schools and give it it to the kids in the way of milk tokens that parents could buy milk with (or booze in the pub as I know many of them took milk tokens). The Belgrano was in a direction heading out of the exclusion zone, but with a quick change of direction that could have took but a few minutes, put a significant number of ships in the task force in danger. And she stood her ground to a dictator who called the miners out on strike for a year without a ballot...
And dont forget, she worked on the team that invented mr whippy icecream....
Do a little more reading about St Jobbs and you find he really was not a very nice person at all. he was a very driven person getting what he wanted and spitting his dummy if he didnt get his own way..
Interesting story and I'm not surprised - Bill Gates was ruthless in business. But he wouldn't fire anyone for something that wasn't totally in their control - Jobs would.
About the pledge - I think he will be remembered for his philanthropy a lot longer than his role at Microsoft, even Jobs will be forgotten by then. Its no use hoarding your money if nobody else benefits from it - once you go past a billion it makes absolutely no difference, all those extra billions are just wealth you are keeping from everyone else. Get the hint Mr Bezos?
Its no use hoarding your money if nobody else benefits from it - once you go past a billion it makes absolutely no difference
Or as Andrew Carnegie put it, "A man who dies rich dies in disgrace."
Sadly some people seem to think that looking at a big number is the thing that will satisfy them. I know some of these people.
Plug-and-play was always a hack, it dynamically bumped a device up and reallocated the old interrupt number to the new device. Unfortunately if the old device was doing something vital the machine went blue-screen. The solution being to manually set the devices to the highest interrupt, that way they won't be changed when a new device is plugged in.
@J. R. Hartley: 'as a famous Commodore engineer once said: "There's nothing nasty about Bill Gates, and nothing nice about Steve Jobs"'
A better metric would be to count how many times Steve Jobs has been in court as compared to Bill Gates. Gates faux geek persona was what let him for years, get away with murder.
"A better metric would be to count how many times Steve Jobs has been in court as compared to Bill Gates. Gates faux geek persona was what let him for years, get away with murder."
Not wishing to take sides between either of them but the second item on that page is Apple suing Microsoft.
> Imagine what Steve Jobs would have done to that guy.
The announcement of the first iPhone was said be a scary time for some engineers - it was touch and go that it would make it through the presentation without crashing.
Still, I seem to remember a technical issue during a Jobs keynote that he handled well - I can't imagine him not having practiced such a response.
Are the down votes from the people who also believe WWE is real? :) I like WWE despite knowing it's not real.
Anyway, look it up on YouTube. The first iPhone release. You'll see people who were part of it stating it didn't work and they thought it would crash. Steve had to follow a script with what he was running. There were also multiple phones behind his stand and he, like a magician, would switch phones when one of them wasn't working but everyone was lead to believe it was just one phone.
I still don't like Apple or Steve but was interesting to see that video.
"Very much doubt that Jobs would have allowed anyone else on the stage with him,"
Jobs was famous for inviting people on stage with him. I still remember my excitement at seeing him bring John Carmack on stage to show in-development Doom at the launch of whatever Mac was starting to ship with a Geforce3 onboard.
I'm not sure the neighbour from whom he bought QDOS would agree.
that was just a business deal. Like many other deals before and after.
you buy something and sell it for more money. Thats the very basics of how business works.
When Gates bought QDOS, he was selling it on to IBM. He made the money by getting the cravat in on the deal that he could licence DOS to other companies. IBM thought that the money was going to be in the hardware, Gates was thinking otherwise. IBM assumed that Gates may make a few thousand licencing DOS elsewhere so didn't think it would be a big deal.
the bloke who actually wrote QDOS most likely would not have got through the door at IBM. Gates probably thought he would make a lot from DOS, but probably didn't realise how big it was going to get. But just because it turned out more valuable does not mean you go back and give the person you bought from more money.
windows 98 wasnt too bad. it played with citrix faaaar better then 95 (and plus pack). The only issue was good old conventional memory. you needed close to 600k to get 98 booting without any issue. Not a problem for most 95 gamer guys (afterall we had 635k boot disks WITH genius network and mouse drivers).
NT4 matured nicely at the time and was better than NT3.5 I didnt mind 98. 2k were the hey days. I remember getting an early MCSE on server 2k and thinking it was totally revolutionary.
OS/2!
"Bill Gates at Comdex - OS/2 is the plaform of the 90s"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmiwiUeEn4k
And for those who need to run OS/2 on modern hardware...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/new_version_of_os_2_arca_os_5/
It was an unstable beast. Time computers, poor, even for then.
To its credit, I put Win2000 on it and, lo and behold, solid as a rock, almost NT like.
I could even put it in standby, amazing.
And for the record, my son sent me a message about a year ago saying "Dad, my laptop did a BSOD", he had never seem once on his Win10 laptop, which was about 2 years old and came with Win8 originally.
My Linux Mint laptop at work has crashed once in the year I have been using it. No 'BSOD', just a common (about 8 times in that year) failure to respond, super slow mouse movement, taking 15 to 20 minutes to get a console so I could killall Firefox (or Chrome, which caused the first few slowdowns); in this case the machine just rebooted before I could recover it.
To Linux's great credit, it is very nice to almost never have to reboot but Win10 really does not crash much at all. I suspect it is more often than Linux overall, on a per-PC level I mean, but almost everything on Windows carries legacy cruft and it suffers for it. I suspect that it is also technically more complex, not always a good thing of course.
Basically, it offers so much more (to the non-technical user especially), for so little extra risk, a reboot once per month and the very rare possibility of a BSOD and a restart in 30s.
My first PC that ran a "modern" version of Windows run 95 and it was utterly terrible, to the point where I appreciated the direction Windows was going, but stuck with 3.11. I upgraded to 98SE and it was solid and stable. No problem at all. A friend later had ME and it was awful so I avoided that, went directly to XP, which was pretty good once it had matured to the SP3 flavour...
> ME was fine when it came preinstalled
Wrong. WinME had severe issues, including stuttering sound, CD burner support was buggy (in the days before buffer-overrun HW support, it meant "broken CD"), lot's of BSOD because of little QA. Win95 C and Win98 SP1 were very stable, Win98 RTM and WinME RTM were super buggy.
Anyway most people downgraded to Win98 SP1 and dual-booted to Win2000 and shortly afterwards to installed the beloved new WinXP to get rid of the crap that WinME was.
Yup, WIN ME wasn't too bad. It could run for 49.5 days without crashing.
In most cases that was a total non issue. ME was a desktop operating system so would most likely be shut down at the end of each day. The issue began if you decided to cheap out and try to use it as a server platform instead of using 2000.....
I never had that many problems with ME. I'm sure other people did, but the hate it got and still gets seems to be a bit over the top.
I put Windows ME on my home PC. Between the Diamond Monster MX300 sound card an a Gainward Geforce2 video card I never got the thing to stay up for more than 15 minutes.
The next day I put 98SE back on it and got back to enjoying it. Fuck Windows ME and everything it ever stood for. I think I saw it on 3 machines ever, and those three caused more headaches for me than Vista.
(Also put 2000 Workstation on my PC later and it was great until I finally went with XP x64.)
incorrect. time computers were poor because of the kit. they were shit cyrix on shit boards with shit ram. Dell pentiums ran nicely on 98. gateway machines did too.
I had a small nt4 network with about 100 dell pentium 133s all with 98 (citrix login of course). they ran lotus notes and 123 just fine.
I spent a few years working as a volunteer cybercaf guy for a community cybercaf that was originally all higgledy-piggledy second-hand PCs all running MS Win98SE.
It hurt having to reboot some poor dude's PC because MS Win98SE had frozen, locked up, gone to lunch, BSoDed.
Some time after I started, we had a meeting, voted to apply for a community grant for a new set of PCs and a non-profit set of WinXP Home licenses, and never had that happen again. But of course, being Microsoft of Monkey Boy Era, it had security holes like a sugar junky has fillings.
... and Bill quipped that must be why they weren't shipping it yet, however the release date meant that retail boxes had almost certainly shipped from manufacturing - so a complete blag....
... yet a shedload of people bought it and still do to this day?
And they call Apple users sheep.....
For a more recent example, refer to Steven Sinofsky's Surface tablet crash of 2012. That bald twerp was obviously rattled on stage; you could sense the fury welling up within him. I would imagine some backstage tech guys getting screamed at after the event.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QRWa68MtLc
Yeah, Steven Sinofsky. Julie Larson-Green invented those infamous Metro tiles, Sinofsky green-lighted them and made them ubiquitous. He left (was probably fired) but his horrid legacy endures on.
Many BSOD's were due to autoplay/autorun, Microsoft allowed companies to create a menu for their CD disks. To do this Microsoft had deigned it would be written to the registry and function like other shell right click menus. When the CD was inserted autolpay would enter the menu reference into the Registry, and when the CD was withdrawn from the CD tray, the Registry could not find a registry reference and would BLUE SCREEN. This was one of the most common BSOD's experienced by users. Thanks Microsoft.
A little "Autoplay Off" tool helped to stop menu creation and hence many BSOD's. most menus were not important to the function of the CD anyway. I had almost none.
As for Mr Bill the then CEO and chief software engineer, Pffffff! shulda blue screened him long ago.
> Many BSOD's were due to autoplay/autorun. Microsoft allowed companies to create a menu for their CD disks.
Bullshit. The BSOD were because of either:
A) buggy third party device drivers
B) buggy third party software
C) buggy WinME, because of rushed release and lacking QA. And yes WinME was horrible buggy. Win95 and Win98 SP1 were very stable, in comparision.
The Blue screen you are referring to is the Windows 9X 'Please re enter the disc in drive X' prompt. Being Windows 9X such low level prompts were displayed in a text 'DOS' screen and not using the Windows GUI. This wasn't a BSOD as simply choosing 'Abort, Retry or Ignore' (Anybody remember that??) would make the screen go away.
Hmm, why is it that whenever MS completely rewrites Windows for a new major release, all the old bugs are also faithfully rewritten?
We are now on W10 and it still BSODs for many of the old reasons and the USB subsystem still doesn't work properly - What a bunch of sad sack developers, developers, developers...
...and in 1999 I moved on to Linux -- first with Red Hat 5.2 to be precise.
*
Since then I've used Red Hat and Fedora (currently Fedora27/XFCE). This means I'm involved in the detail of re-imaging and support for my multiple machines. That said, I've never had a repeat with Red Hat or Fedora of the year of aggravation I had with Windows 95 and Windows 98.
*
In 1998 I spent around £500 on Windows licences. Since moving to Linux, my total expenditure on licences in twenty years has been less than £200.....and I'm still able to do everything I've ever wanted to do. It's only one data point, but the point is that Linux actually does work well on the desktop, something that the single data point of the Bill Gates demo couldn't demonstrate for Windows 98!
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