I've still got the Windows 95 startup sound as my ringtone. #95foreva
Windows 95 roars once more in the Microsoft round-up
While storm clouds gathered over the UK in time for the August holiday, all was sunny in world of Microsoft. Except, perhaps, in the Israel office. While Redmond goes toe to toe with Tel Aviv over licencing, what else happened last week in Windows land? Encrypted Skype Microsoft has brought encrypted conversations to Skype. …
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Tuesday 28th August 2018 07:49 GMT RyokuMas
Re: Windows 95?
Probably a plot by Google/Facebook attempting to divert all the negative attention they've been getting of late by re-igniting hatred for Microsoft among those in the technical arena...
... I'll get me coat - it's the one with the tinfoil hat in one pocket and the trollface mask in the other
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Tuesday 28th August 2018 15:24 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Windows 95?
"This was a bitter disappointment of an operating system that took us nowhere"
You have to look at context. The underpinnings were still MSDOS. I'd been using W3 with HP New Era on top of it and that was a distinct improvement, introducing a good few bits of what we now take for granted in GUI which weren't there before. A lot of that seems to have been incorporated into W95 but the scatter of files which held it together were rolled into the Registry. It also introduced some elements of HP VUE which became CDE but its single cascading menu was, in my view, a step in advance of that.
Its weakness, however, was that it didn't have anything Unix-like under it, nor even VMS-like along the lines of NT. This is maybe not too surprising given the minimal H/W requirement.
I think it's fair to say that the Registry is a confused and confusing structure. OTOH the Open Desktop stuff underlying the various Unix-like desktops follows on from the New-Era style of multiple files even more widely scattered through the file system.
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Tuesday 28th August 2018 08:58 GMT 0laf
W95 probably still does 90% of what most users need and on a footprint hundreds of times smaller than a smartphone OS.I don't remember it taking too long to load up on my P1 200MHz with a it's 20Gb HD (or was that 2Gb I can't remember). It might still be up in my parents attic complete with voodoo 1 add on card although it'll be running 98SE.
Themehospital FTW.
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Tuesday 28th August 2018 09:42 GMT bpfh
Methinks...
That most of my applications will run on NT 4.0... though the lack of built in USB support is a nutache. Cut down Windows 2000 server anyone? 24 meg memory footprint running on a recycled P3 450, adding MySQL, Apache and PHP brought that to 48 meg... and ran part of Kodak France's photo developement tracking systems for more than 2 years. Built and delivered in 2006 on zero budget... I still don't know if I should be proud or ashamed...
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Tuesday 28th August 2018 10:50 GMT AJ MacLeod
Re: 200Mhz
They definitely did (presumably, do) exist. My Pentium PC was only a 166 though, and not even MMX. Still staggers me to think it cost £1,645 (32MB RAM, with 17" monitor.)
Its install of Windows 95 (the first version, not OSR2) lasted two years before finally grinding to a complete non-booting halt, when it was replaced by Linux - never looked back since!
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Tuesday 28th August 2018 12:52 GMT 0laf
Re: 200Mhz
It was a P1 200MHz MMX (an upgrade over the 166) with 16Mb ram (up from 8) and with a 15" crt (upgraded over the standard 14"). Bought from Simply Computers as did a few of my mates. I think it was about £1200 inc an epson inject.
I remember the company being great to deal with and when I fecked it up within a few days I phoned up and spoke to a bloke who knew exactly what to do. No helldesk no tickets no email. I probably spoke to the bloke the screwed it together.
Happy days.
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Tuesday 28th August 2018 19:33 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: 200Mhz
It was a P1 200MHz MMX (an upgrade over the 166)
I have a dual P1 MMX system down in the basement. Don't remember if they're 200 MHz or 166. Haven't powered it up in a dozen or more years; it probably wouldn't come up, now, and I doubt I have a compatible monitor or keyboard.
Destined for the next run to the electronics recycling place, I'm afraid. (I kept thinking I'd reuse the cabinet, but at this point that's clearly wishful thinking. Ditto the fine 1989-vintage AS/400 B-series cabinet I have.)
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Tuesday 28th August 2018 16:44 GMT Daniel von Asmuth
Windows '95 = cybercrime
"W95 probably still does 90% of what most users need"
90 % of users don't need a computer, but they need food & drink, clothing, shelter, transportation, heating & lighting, health care, protection from evil (put them in prison), forgiveness for their sins & salvation for their souls, entertainment, education, but love they need most.
You could use Windows '95 for heating; what else? Mostly it crashes regularlty, thereby losing your unsaved files. It has no security whatsoever. it promotes the spreading of virii and other malware. If you need software for it, go looking for the old MS-DOS shareware archives. Furthermore it costs a lot in licensing fees, but your money goes to the Bill & Linda Gates Foundation, which people believe does good things. Then it's mouse causes RSI. On a good day, Windows PCs just waste hours of productivity. Windows '95 does what only Wall Street investors seem to need.
23 Years old? Is that too late to sue for the damage of WIndows '95 to the people and the economy?
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Tuesday 28th August 2018 16:59 GMT bombastic bob
Re: Windows '95 = cybercrime
yes but here's what '95 does NOT have:
a) spyware and adware built-in
b) 2D FLATSO FLUGLY UI
c) a 'start thing' with "the Metro" style PANELS in it
d) touch-friendly aka user-hostile spaces between everything
e) bright blue on bright white, destroys your eyesight
f) FORCED UPDATES that take for-freaking-EVAR and dominate your bandwidth, lock you out of using the machine on its own schedule, yotta yotta [and might not work after updating]
and so on
I'll take '95 thanks.
(icon because facepalm)
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Tuesday 28th August 2018 12:17 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Encrypted Skype?
yeah... NSA couldn't handle not listening in. Put out a bid to crack.
Microsoft accepted, absorbed the software and infected it with back doors.
Had a good laugh a few years back. Upper management forced the issue to have Skype inside the network.
...Then a ransomware attack came in. Guess what our IDS told us???
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Tuesday 28th August 2018 12:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Love Skype...
and the 15 pages of exceptions I have to put into my firewall to avoid my Websense Proxy from sniffing the trafffic and crashing the experience.
There is nothing like "Drop everything and come fix this software for us so we can have a meeting" only to find out you have to exempt every ip address Microsoft owns. This is also a benefit if you are using "Office 365" because it uses the same ignored ips....
What a concept... Lets get email, office documents, etc. coming into the Corporate network without the sticky entanglement of virus/malware protection.
Thanks Microsoft!
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Tuesday 28th August 2018 13:23 GMT MVS
BSOD - Bill got some
I was at a Windows World conference in Chicago (96 maybe) and was there when B.G. was proudly demonstrating this new technology called USB; it blue-screened. I suspect some engineers were fired. It was a moment in time, though I was only amused, not gleeful. He probably should have rebooted first.
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Tuesday 28th August 2018 16:43 GMT Luiz Abdala
I remember...
A friend of mine had a game rental store (cartridges for Genesis and SNES back then) running a Windows 3.11 app in a then several-orders-of-magnitude faster Pentium 4 hardware than the 3.11 had ever required.
It ran on bare metal, no emulation or virtual machine here. And it was FAST.
It was so fast, in fact, that it could freeze in your face, and he could hit the reset button and finish your order before you could complain it had frozen.
It was not FAIL-SAFE. It was FAIL-EXPECTED. It WOULD crash, but it could recover in 15 seconds, I kid you not.
Some lesson can be taken from here... it can fail, as long it doesn't take long to recover. Either this, or you design it not to fail for long periods of time...
The guy running a Windows 95 (which we loved) over a MacOS (that is nearly failproof) is a god damn GENIUS.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
