Windows 95 was too fat to install itself so needed help from the slimmer 3.1 Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen has answered the question of why Microsoft insisted on running up a miniature Windows 3.1 rather than a diminutive Windows 95 to install the full-fat version of the latter. The reason? A combination of time, reboots, and size. It is 30 years since Windows 95 graced computers around the …
Clippy came in with Office 97. When Office 95 was released the general consensus is that it wasn't much of an upgrade over Office 4. 32 bitness aside the main visible change was long filename support. The canny people had already got Office 4.2 for Windows NT which offered both, ran fine on 95, and if you already had it for Windows 3 was a matter of £9 for a media kit.
It may ultimately be there where the rot set in. I remember more than one reviewer of Office 95 reflecting that perhaps there wasn't much left that needed adding. After that you're left with things no one asked for. Indeed when 97 was released Clippy was portrayed as the single killer feature that justified the cost of an upgrade.
I remember when got the Win95 betas through at my place. We all installed it, hated it and promptly went back to Win 3.1 while writing scathing reviews of the the new Windows experience that everyone hated! Fast forward 30 years and nothing has changed, people still moaning about how much they hate the latest version of Windows.
Apart from NT4 SP6 which I needed to run as a dongle based network license server (that or 9x/Me) I can honestly say the antipathy to Windows (and Microsoft generally) has been unwaveringly uniform from 2.0 to 11.
Just grateful I was fortunate to never have had to use or support Windows with a few exceptions like license servers that only run on Windows even when licensing software that mostly wasn't run under Windows
Think I agree; I joined IT mid-migration from NT 4 to 2000; having NT's (relative) stability was a breath of fresh air over 9x, then the double punch of Active Directory and Group Policy made deployment and management so much more flexible and simple, And USB Plug & Play support was such a treat.
The idea was perfected in XP, joining the 9x and NT lines together for better compatibility across the board, and completed with .net server... Sorry, Windows Server 2003.
Then came the Longhorn years...
NT4 was ok unti it had to interface to the Internet
I strongly advised customers to only do so via a bastion server unless they liked script kiddies running amok on their internal networks.
Several "consultants" interpretated that as threatening to hack them. They usually persuaded the clients to go elsewhere and then promptly got reamed by script kiddies. At least one multinational went out of business and was "acquired" by its competition as a result
1999 called, and would like its dated Linux commentary back.
The biggest issue holding people back from using Linux today is application compatibility. Linux Mint, for example, is a highly polished and stable platform. Installation is done via a GUI, with hardware detection being flawless in most cases (certainly no worse than Windows 11).
Biggest thing holding back Linux is standardisation, Windows became no.1 because it was one gui across all versions with tweaks, but it was still Windows good or bad.
Linux everybody wants their own thing, there are more remixes of Linux than Depeche Mode Enjoy The Silence on YT.
"Linux everybody wants their own thing,"
You have a problem with that?
Once you get into the "standardisation" thing you discover that Microsoft can shove anything onto its supine user base and they have no alternative.
How many wanted W8? It doesn't matter, they got it whether they wanted it or not.
How many wanted the ongoing rot of the start menu? It doesn't matter, they got it whether they wanted it or not.
How many wanted the growing strangeness of Gnome? It doesn't matter, those who don't want it have alternatives.
The good doctor makes a very fair point, imo.
After much experimenting I can sort of make Windows 11's UI usable, with three or four third-party addons.
At that point it just about gets to the level of functionality and usability that Cinnamon offers me in Linux Mint, just with a far higher system load.
Why should I go and buy a new PC (or upgrade my gaming rig yet again) just because Microsoft can't keep their OS lightweight?
You chose the wrong example. The Model T Ford was not copied. However, the placement of
1) Steering wheel,
2) Gear stick
3) Accelerator, brake, clutch,
4) Indicator stalks,
5) Most on-wheeel buttons,
6) On-screen displays,
7) Windscreen wipers,
8) Door handles, window winders,
9) Door locks
are all almost exactly the same in almost all cars, and it was other cars that did that, just not the Model T. There is no reason for the indicator stalk to be on that side of the wheel, but try putting it on the other side if you want your car to stay on the forecourt.
Weirdly in Japan the indicator stalk is on the other side, as they drive on the left. (As it allows the gear stick to be operated at the same time as the indicators).
However, Japanese cars sold in the UK market have the indicator on the 'wrong' side, despite us also driving on the left.
But what if you want to operate the windscreen wipers at the same time as the gearstick, hmm? What happens then?
Then you're screwed!! I should know, I've been driving like this most of my life with few exceptions. It is literally impossible to drive. It is THE HORROR!
That was due to EU regulations designed for left hand drive cars on the continent. Japanese cars have the correct arrangement for a right hand drive car of the indicators on the right, so you can indicate with your right hand while changing gear with your left.
Incidentally they do other things correctly such as a single exhaust being on the right, away from the pavement, and fuel cap on the left next to the pavement (filing stations used to be on the side of the road).
That's largely the product of safety and efficiency legislation pushing manufacturers into a corner. Back when you were allowed to sell a car with the aerodynamics of a house brick that would bisect a pedestrian if they so much as stumbled into it, there was much more wiggle room.
Ironically, the same rules that mean a pedestrian has to be ejected back onto the pavement and handed a nice cup of tea in the process means it's not possible to see children over the bonnet.
Actually there are increasing calls especially in the EU to ban tall flat fronted vehicles such as north American pickup trucks due to the risks they pose to pedestrians and particularly kids, where euro model cars they would interface with a much lower deformable bonnet
I've been running Bazzite (yes, I have become a fanboy of an OS for the first time in ages) for a bit, there are many emulators "pre-installed" that you can play around with to get your Windows software working.
Games were really my last hold back for dumping Microsoft from my personal life. Disclaimer - I don't play any games with dangerous kernel level anti-cheats that can see everything you do on your computer and then potentially sell that info to whomever.
Bazzite has Steam built in with Proton, everything works so far, I can run EA Launcher in bottles, Epic through Heroic and I have Blizzard launcher as a Non-Steam Game (which is a bit odd, but it works)
It also has Lutris which I have not tried for anything yet, but is often mentioned as a good compatibility option.
Heck I even got a C64 emulator working so I can play my Avalon HIll Nukewar game from circa 1980 without having to dig the C64 out.
I don't hate Windows, for many years it was the best option for home users, I just don't trust Windows anymore.
> Windows became no.1 because it was one gui across all versions ...
Nope, it became no. 1 in the home user market because it came pre-installed on your PC, and you had no reason to replace it (even if you knew you could, which as a regular user you almost certainly didn't).
It became no. 1 in the business sector because of dodgy lock-in deals with Microsoft (and other) corporate software, so that it became a de facto corporate standard.
FTFY.
Perhaps I misrecall, but I don't think "everyone" hated Windows 95. The problem was more that Win95 when first released was a massive (by standards of the time) bundle of bugs. It took a couple of years and two dozen or so "Service Packs" -- each fixing a bunch of problems -- to domesticate it into a reasonably decent (for the time) OS. It also was quite poorly documented.
"It also was quite poorly documented."
And poorly designed. And poorly coded. And poorly shipped.
W95 tried to be many things at once: a DOS foundation to support legacy applications, a separate support layer and GUI shell added to that foundation to support Windows 3.x applications, and an integrated OS trying very hard to pretend that it was an entirely new approach to having all OS functions including the GUI in one sort-of-monolithic package. That in itself is a challenging combination of conflicting requirements, but when MS started to cut major corners (some of them with a chainsaw) to simply get W95 out the door before the heat death of the universe, the end result was nothing short of ugly.
Compared to that, using W3.x as an installer is the least of sins.
I remember working with a gaggle of application developers at the time who were working on various products that would run on W95. The things they had to say about what they found under the bonnet are not suitable for repeating here.
Triumph of marketing, under the hood Windows Vista was Windows 6 and Windows 7 was actually Windows 6.1 (8 was 6.2 and 8.1 6.3 if you were creating WMI queries in SCCM or similar to auto-populate collections and see what you had).
Even those looking back with misty eyes at XP forget it wasn't really "good" until SP2 came out, and that was also a very painful upgrade for a lot of people due to the massive changes in security.
At the time it came out Windows 95 felt like a quantum leap from Windows 3.x and DOS to the average consumer.
Was it stable, nope, was it full featured, nope; yet end user computing was not really that stable or feature rich back then anyway unless you were using a Unix terminal.
Think of it like the first color TV's, they were huge, horrible, ate vacuum tubes like chewing gum and only had tiny screens.
Yet they were amazing to someone who had only ever seen black and white ones (or maybe even had never seen one at all)
That's because you can count on Microsoft to find a way to make their operating systems suck more with every iteration. With some notable exceptions. I can't remember many people hating Windows XP, 7 and 10. And I can guarantee you that if MS re-released one of them without all the crap that's being forced down our throats in W11, it would steadily climb the usage rankings.
Functionally, Windows peaked with 7. That's when it stopped being an operating system and started being an ad platform.
From memory there was a lot of enmity for W10 in these pages when it first launched, about all the built-in slurping & the broken UI, the forced updates which wiped drives etc etc. It's only since we've had W11 to contend with that W10 seems reasonable by comparison?
(Much like music in what I persist in calling "the singles chart" wherein I generally detest whatever's current, but ten years later it seems to be the height of musical achievement compared to the latest iteration of "current.")
A deja vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.
Was 98 or ME installed using a mini win9x? I remember the installer back then I never gave any thought as to how they built it, it didn't really remind me of win3 at the time I think. Perhaps a more annoying thing in the days was in NT being unable to install to NTFS directly it converted from FAT to NTFS during the install, perhaps for a similar reason. That of course had functional limitations as you couldn't create an initial filesystem that exceeded FAT's limitations.
While I had many pirated copies of win95 betas and stuff I still remember buying the retail box version and later being very disappointed that I didn't realize at the time I was buying the floppy version. Made the same mistake with os2 warp 4.
I fairly quickly switched to NT3.51 then 4 maybe a year after win95, then switched to linux as my desktop in 98. Both times for stability, not enjoying reinstalling windows every few months.
"That of course had functional limitations as you couldn't create an initial filesystem that exceeded FAT's limitations."
In hindsight, a major limitation at the time was the limited availability of RAM. These days Linux installers typically boot the OS using tmpfs in RAM, and from there create whatever partitions and filesystems you need. In 1995 most PCs couldn't be counted on to have enough memory bricks installed to make that a viable across-the-board option.
The Win95 installed needed to be launchable within Windows 3.1 therefore regardless of anything else, it just could not be a 32bit executable as that kind of thing would have sent 16bit Windows 3.x into utter meltdown. I agree that it could have easily been a DOS based installer but, for quite reasonable marketing reasons, I suspect that needing it to be graphical was important. Therefore a 3.1 based installer was a good compromise.
They didn't always land the execution, but the *idea* behind Windows 95, of making the PC simpler and more accessible to more people was a good idea, and given the sales numbers and cultural impact, it succeeded at some level.
The idea of sticking a Floppy in and typing one command (or later, booting direct from the CD) into a click and go interface was so much simpler than the piles of codes and questions other contemporary installers needed at the time.
I wrote a Win3.1 installer for the Win3.1 astronomy software that was my first self-employment project, circa 1994. When I came out with a 32-bit version of the software, I saw zero need to update the installer, since it ran Just Fine under 32-bit forks of Windows.
The installer did fail a decade or so later when 64-bit forks of Windows came out. When they did, I ported the installer to Win32. But before then, I can't think of anything I'd have gained by porting the installer to the 32-bit world (didn't need large amounts of memory, performance was fine).
(The actual astronomy program benefitted immensely from moving to 32 bits, of course. At one point, I had 16-bit DOS, 32-bit DOS, and Win3.1 and 32-bit Windows versions... not quite as difficult to manage as one might expect, and I had a diverse customer base.)
I'm kinda sad that this October, With the last niche but still supported 32-bit Windows going End of Life, we're finally seeing the death of 16 bit apps, some 30-odd years later.
Windows compatibility, when you stop and think about it, is pretty amazing; I can still run Cakewalk 3.11 I bought in 1993 on my 32-Bit Win10 system, complete with Hardware MIDI Support.
The goal of "If you follow the SDK for the target version of Windows, we won't break your app" is a different philosophy from, say, Apples drive for security and efficiency by deprecating and legacy parts (or even processor architectures), but I appreciate and see the value in both methods.
Agreed, the balance between backward compatibility and keeping things simpler/more secure is tough to strike.
We are not totally out of luck for 16-bit Windows; Wine still supports it, and this may be a legitimate reason for running Wine in WSL in Windows. As the post indicates, one would normally do this just for yuks; but if it's the only way to run some truly essential 16-bit Windows program, it might have some actual utility.
All installed into a single directory you could immediately zip up after install so as to have a pristine copy to debloat at will.
Godsend when testing installation routines - in particular registering OCXs and DLLs.
I have installed NT4 from floppy, as an aside ....
Ironically I once used Windows 95 to make a CD with the install of Windows 3.1 (10 floppies IIRC ) and the Workgroup upgrade (11 floppies IIRC).
The install consisted of whacking the enter key every few seconds as each disk was installed.
It was very quick to run.
The company I worked for back in 1995 was a tech cabling company, so naturally all the offices were networked - which was considered very modern at the time.
I was a draughtsman back then, using CAD to churn out cable connection diagrams.
I'd also recently got online and became obsessed by all things internet and networking.
I set about browsing every single shared network resource I could get my hands on.
I was using a pokey 386, 256 colour graphics card, DOS apps and windows 3.1.1.
I came across a folder called "win95" on my network travels, with subfolders representing each disk.
I "diligently" downloaded each one, "borrowed" a stack of 1.44 MB floppy disks, slowly copied the contents of each subfolder to a disk, then figured out how to start the install from DOS.
Bear in mind this was a work computer, had no backups at all and I had no permission to do what I was doing.
It was 6 months before anyone noticed I was using win95 - and only found out when my team lead saw the boot up screen.
"How did you get that? You aren't supposed to have that?"
I got fired.
A lot of this info about the early days of Windows came from an interview of Raymond Chen by Dave Plummer, an ex-DEC and early Microsoft engineer. His youtube channel is well worth a look - https://www.youtube.com/@DavesGarage - there is also a long interview with Dave Cutler, the architect of VMS and Windows NT.
Dave Plummer has also admitted to setting the size limits for Fat32 drives.
Phil.
by Dave Plummer, an ex-DEC and early Microsoft engineer
Nothing in his bio mentions working for Digital / DEC.
Dave Plummer has also admitted to setting the size limits for Fat32 drives.
He did make that claim, but his statements are riddled with inaccuracies:
He claimed it was done for NT4 in "1995, 1996." But NT4 never had FAT32 support; not until Windows 2000.
His claims about tiny flash sizes also align with NT4 and not Windows 2000.
He claimed that rationale was that flash drives were only a few MBytes at the time, but back in 1996 it was common for people to format partitions on their NF4 hard drives as FAT16, for interoperability with Windows 9x, DOS, and more. (Unlike today, no other OSes had NTFS support back then). It made sense to do the same with FAT32 and hard drives were certainly nearing the 32GB limit when Windows 2000 was released.
It's far too convenient to claim the 32GB limit was an accident, when Microsoft really wanted to push their exFAT file system, and got many millions in patent licensing fees from Android phone manufacturers to include exFAT. While FAT32 was old enough to lack the same patent protection.
literally ms-dos in 32bit nt versions (yup, really. up until windows 10, dos was bundled as a bootloader. and the only reason theres none in 11 is because 11 only ships in 64bit)
(edit made mostly for the mod team: reposted because accidentally hit the submit as anon thing)
Forget system updates, Windows 95 required a reboot after installing every driver. Even stuff that seems laughable today, like a "monitor driver".
"Try to remove the color-problem by restarting your computer several times."
-- Microsoft-Internet Explorer README.TXT
I ran 'shutz2000' just because it made rebooting a bit quicker. https://jthz.nl/puter/shutz.htm
"Windows 95 required a reboot after installing every driver."
I just tried to fix a user audio issue by removing and reinstalling the audio drivers. Win 11/the driver insisted on a reboot. The *one* driver on Win95/98 that mostly never needed a reboot after install/upgrade was the audio driver. I was a little surprised.
(all I managed to do was confirm the audio hardware was faulty as I eventually left it doing a complete wipe/reinstall and the audio still didn't work, unlike the 100's of other same model laptops with the same build on them)
No different to now.
Most deployment systems consist of some WinPE systems (often of an older and more basic version of the OS) booting in order to run the installers in order to install the newer version.
Whether that's PXE or disc or USB or even driect off the net... you're basically still doing the same now as you were then, and have been since the days of WDS.
Two whole floppy disks!
For MacOS Tahoe I had a 10.98gb download on Sunday night, then another 10.98gb download on Monday night.
No idea why I had the second download, because Apple don't like to keep their customers informed.
Damn good job I'm on fibre or I would still be downloading the first update...
Is it really thirty years since I was tearing my hair out trying to get 95 to load off a stack of floppy disks ? An early taste of Microsoft forcing adoption of new hardware in that case pushing CDROM drives. After the second abortive install when it again stalled at the final disk and refusing to proceed further-that last disk which I think was mainly geographical and language causing the issue. So I wiped the drive and reinstalled WIN 3.11 cursing M$ into the bowels of hell. Here we are again M$ pushing hardware upgrades with that new pile of trouble well I will be updating my primary computer but not to Microsofts latest attempt at world domination.
"Is it really thirty years since I was tearing my hair out trying to get 95 to load off a stack of floppy disks ?"
After having done similar installing MSDOS by XCOPYing the disk contents into a directory and running INSTALL.EXE from there, I found the same "trick" worked with Win95. It made the job quicker because just the raw CAB files needed copying fairly rapidly and no disk swapping during the actual install. ISTR, depending on your HDD format, you booted from disk 1 and did a format c: /s to get a FAT32 bootable OS to get started, but it was a ling time ago and I'd prefer to forget it now.
"Microsoft cared more about the user experience than trying to cram AI down people's throats"
In that era Windows got installed because the PC's owner chose to do so and probably paid for a retail copy. So there had to be a compelling reason.
The rot set in when OEMs were "persuaded" to preinstall whatever cack Microsoft decided it wanted to inflict on the world that week.
-A.
