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Happy Birthday Windows 95!

(8 posts) (4 voices)

Started 8 years ago by mikiem2
Latest reply from Dragonlair

mikiem2
Moderator

It's been 20 years!

I remember it maybe a bit more since at the time we bought our 2nd PC -- I'd been upgrading &/or building them before & since, but finding & buying parts was nowhere near as easy in 95, & it seemed everything Windows 95 compatible was new.

I was also much more naive... I was thrilled not to have to sometimes spend days with config & ini files & such, & hadn't yet learned the potential for evil that was the registry. :)

[http://www.neowin.net/news/back-to-the-start-windows-95-celebrates-its-20th-birthday]

[http://www.windowscentral.com/windows-95-20-years-old-today-and-windows-10-still-has-lot-its-features]

Posted 8 years ago #
ChrisS
Administrator

On one hand it's hard to believe that it's been 20 years; on the other hand it's hard to believe that it's only been 20 years.

Those authors clearly never used Windows 95. Both seem to think that the Start Menu is the greatest thing to happen since toasted sliced bread. And the best thing about Windows 10 is the return of the Start Menu? That's not much of a Windows 10 sales pitch since their geezer readers probably started with XP (except for Crazy Bob who had a copy of ME!).

I think that the introduction of USB support is far more pivotal (and with Windows NT support for dual monitors).

But, yeah, the registry is one of the best decisions and the absolute worst decision Microsoft ever made.

Posted 8 years ago #
mikiem2
Moderator

I remember my 1st CD ROM drive. Had to travel to a town down the coast that had a brand new BestBuy store to buy it. Connected via the kit's included soundcard, & took a bit over a week to finally get everything working, playing with interrupts, memory settings etc. Remember emm386 with a small bit of loathing. Win95 had a lot less drudgery attached -- I was ecstatic. :)

98 & 98SE came & went. Never really got hands-on with ME. I wanted to, but it seemed like it was over before I had much of a chance. XP OTOH I remember as being pretty controversial -- it added roundness, what was called by many a Fisher Price interface. Why in the world waste precious resources on looks? PCs were to get stuff done, &/or for hard core gaming -- if we wanted something to look at we'd use Macs. ;)

XP also [at least eventually] made upgrading mandatory for hardware & software compatibility. I was expecting similar from Vista, & did quite a bit of work getting some XP hardware working there, but turned out I was wrong. My hardware & software continued to work not just OK, but better in XP. For me the experience was very much like 8/8.1 -- had the newer OS installed, but never found much reason to go there.

To me 10 today feels like win7 when the 1/2 way point was still ahead of it in Beta. I got my cheapie tablet with 10 in mind, but so far it's a shrunken desktop PC while I wait for the October update, so I can install store apps to the microSD card. I play with or in 10 from time to time, but the upgrade is so onerous with software installed, it feels like one or two more ISOs & I'll be ready to install my main copy of 10 fresh & finally start adding a bunch of software. I upgraded the copy of 8.1 I was ignoring so I can wait a bit longer.

You're right about USB -- probably right about dual monitors, but I've just never gotten into multi-monitor setups. I've tried it, can see how some people want or need the screen real estate, but wound up with the 2nd monitor turned off most days.

Posted 8 years ago #
Whiterabbit-uk
Games Guru

I agree on both counts Chris.

I remember the first time I saw Windows 3 in action. It was the very first day back at uni after I'd met my future wife on a residentail marine biology field course over the summer. I'd been part staff part student (was doing my masters and had befriended the lecturers who ran the course and they had graciously let me attend as a demonstrator (a job that basically meant helping the students identify marine flora and fauna, helping in the labs and field work etc) for the past few years, plus it paid a decent wage)

After looing after her group of students on a particular day, I'd then met her in the local pub and we'd basically talked all night ignoring our respective friends and had arranged to meet up at the start of the new term a few weeks away. She'd arranged to meet me during Freshers week on the stall she was running for the university Green party group and she'd told me to meet her at her friends house that evening as she would be working on her field trip project and had asked me for some help.

On arriving at the house I remember seeing her friend sitting in front of a nice looking 386 desktop and was transfixed by the ease at which he was navigating around the various programs etc. I'd never seen windows until that moment having been used to DOS. I purchased a copy a few days later and have been a fan of windows ever since. I've had copies of ever version since.

Posted 8 years ago #
mikiem2
Moderator

"On arriving at the house I remember seeing her friend sitting in front of a nice looking 386 desktop and was transfixed by the ease at which he was navigating around the various programs etc. I'd never seen windows until that moment having been used to DOS."

Wish I could say I was transfixed, or had a great [I'd actually settle for decent] story. :)

Running DOS was useful for work at the time, I was learning coding & image editing & DTP, win3.1 came out so I grabbed & learned it, & then things came to a bit of a halt when I got what I thought was a bad case of the flu. With the exception of any coding I've just tried to stay current since.

Posted 8 years ago #
Dragonlair
Member

Windows 3.1 was out for some time before I tried it. It came with my 2nd PC - a Gateway 2000 386 back in '92.

My first experience with Windows, though was far from pleasant! I was working as a software engineer at the time and was assigned to work with one other person writing a proposal for a project. It was to be done using Windows 1! We went through all sorts of hoops trying to find out one simple thing (at least from a DOS point of view) -- How do you trap the data from a print screen?

No where was that piece of information documented. Now it's trivial and I do it all the time (just sent one to Kindle Technical Support to show them a problem they promised to fix with Kindle for PC in March of 2015). At that time we never did figure out how to do it! We had to write the proposal describing the page since we could not SHOW it.

That bad experience held with me and I wasn't that anxious to even have Windows 3.1 but it came with the machine.

My first TRUE windows machine was ME. Believe it or not -- I only have one complaint with ME. A system recovery didn't work (FAT32 disk). Other than that, it worked fine for me!

Posted 8 years ago #
mikiem2
Moderator

We went through all sorts of hoops trying to find out one simple thing (at least from a DOS point of view) -- How do you trap the data from a print screen?

I think you were in the upper, maybe even top tier understanding DOS, Dragonlair.

I remember one incident that taught me that in those days maybe there were few people who actually knew DOS well -- there was no web, the local university was still a few years away from offering public access to the Internet, Prodigy wasn't available yet, & so I had little way of knowing what skill level was common. What happened was I helped out a senior engineer at Ratheon -- a friend of a friend sort of thing. It was actually quite trivial, & the only reason I remember it still today was because I was so surprised at the time that it was so trivial. And the guy wasn't dumb. [For those outside the US, Ratheon is a major defense contractor.]

My first TRUE windows machine was ME. Believe it or not -- I only have one complaint with ME. A system recovery didn't work (FAT32 disk). Other than that, it worked fine for me!

Cool! ME introduced the underpinnings of XP, the same way that Vista did for win7, so I never have understood completely why it got such a bad rep.

Posted 8 years ago #
Dragonlair
Member

[For those outside the US, Ratheon is a major defense contractor.]

The company I was working for at that time was Magnavox (defense contractor -- the TVs and such had been moved years before) but it was in transition. That "Magnavox" is now Raytheon after being sold at least 3 times.

Posted 8 years ago #

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