[HN Gopher] Windows 95 - How Does It Look Today?
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Windows 95 - How Does It Look Today?
Author : hu3
Score : 411 points
Date : 2021-04-02 23:24 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dmitryelj.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (dmitryelj.medium.com)
| dusted wrote:
| putting them side by side like that leaves no doubt that 95 looks
| a lot nicer and cleaner than 10.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > (Boot to DOS) This feature is not available more, but in Linux,
| the possibility to boot in a console mode still exists.
|
| That's not really how it works - there's no "console mode" in
| Linux. On Linux the Desktop environment is built on top of
| underlying OS interface - that's precisely why you can run it
| completely headless, or why you can completely switch desktop
| environments in a few seconds.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The Linux system console is implemented directly in the kernel
| and is not really "on top" of anything, so I'd say that Linux
| having a "console mode" is a rather on-point description. This
| isn't always a good thing, since it includes a whole terminal-
| standards-emulation component that's one of the kludgiest in
| Linux itself.
| ok123456 wrote:
| sure there is.
|
| telinit 1.
| bawolff wrote:
| Win95 was kind of the intermediate between win 3.1 where it
| really worked that way, and later windows where its definitely
| not on top of a cosole based os.
|
| If you boot into dos mode on win95 its just stopping the boot
| process at the start windows step, which is not that different
| from booting linux but not starting x windows.
| omnibrain wrote:
| No, that's not exactly what happens, albeit a commen
| misconception. Win 95 (and earlier releases) were not just a
| GUI shell on top of DOS. They were Operating Systems (with
| their own functions and capabilities) that used DOS as part
| of their boot process and to provide compatibility for some
| things (oder drivers, etc.)
|
| If you executed a DOS program within Win 95/3.1 it did not
| run on the underlying DOS "layer" but in some sort of DOS
| virtual machine.
|
| So what happened when you booted into "dos mode"? You really
| booted into DOS like you said without the last step of
| loading Windows. But loading Windows was not just like startx
| but more a continuation of the boot process into the Windows
| Operating system.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| It still looks and works great, better than most UIs today.
|
| I use it regularly for testing, and it's a great platform for
| writing and updating my blog (from within a VM)
| [deleted]
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| The greatest difference is how inefficient we have become. 10kb.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > In 1996 the ICQ -- the first so-called "instant messenger", was
| released. Now it is standard to be always online and to have
| different chats in Slack or WhatsApp, but in 1996 it was a sort
| of new idea.
|
| What? IRC was well alive back then and you could have multiple
| chats in a single IRC client. This claim makes no sense. What ICQ
| brought was not the idea of multiple chats going on, but a single
| identifier to connect to people you knew (and that NOT a mobile
| phone number)
| icedchai wrote:
| IRC was too hard for most people to use. Also, "IRC" is not a
| single entity. Which network are you connecting to? What's your
| nick? Is it reserved? Are you running a bouncer, or can I only
| message you when you're online? Way too complicated.
|
| ICQ, and later AIM, made most of this stuff "easy" for the
| average person. Too bad AIM didn't evolve more... It could've
| been Slack 20 years earlier.
| nikau wrote:
| IRC could only compete with slack if they added a
| sleep(1000ms) between each channel change...
| H8crilA wrote:
| It's about the popularity of the product. Yes, IRC is much
| older, but it was only for geeks. ICQ and the successors
| (including recent ones, such as WhatsApp) are for the masses.
| anthk wrote:
| IRC had zillions of web interfaces everywhere, and it was
| used by everyone in Europe, at least in order to chat in
| public channels based either by theme or by regional
| locations.
| ekianjo wrote:
| The internet was still pretty much for geeks or professionals
| in 1995. Lets not pretend otherwise.
| Yuioup wrote:
| You can run Windows 95 in your browser, if you're curious:
|
| https://archive.org/details/win95_in_dosbox
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Did you know that you can upgrade from Windows 1.0 all the way to
| Windows 10 if you go version-by-version? I found that amazing.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=windows+upgrade...
| gbraad wrote:
| Boot to console still exists in Linux? What a comparison ... :-/
| gbraad wrote:
| ... it's on Medium, so shouldn't expect too much.
| hyakosm wrote:
| Windows 95 is probably the oldest OS easily usable by young
| people. It's fascinating because:
|
| - It has established strong foundations about Windows UI. The
| Menu/Toolbar couple, scrollbars with a relative size, 3D buttons,
| start menu, toolbar...
|
| - The gap between Windows 3.1 (1992) and Windows 95 is insane.
|
| - It was beautifully coherent. Today, Windows 10 seems like a
| mess with different UI pieces from different universes: Modern
| UI, Windows Vista/7 era utilities, Windows XP/2003 config things
| and some older gems. Fun thing: open a Word document from a
| pendrive and unplug the pendrive, MS Word will show an error box
| from Win95 era, asking to insert the floppy in the drive.
|
| - When booting a VM or an old computer with classic Windows I
| feel "at home". Our first family computer when I was a child was
| a Pentium II / Windows 98. I have strong reflexes with this kind
| of UI and I'm faster with classic window and menus compared to my
| phone or a tablet with modern touch interface.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| I fired up my Windows 3.11 recently- one thing I had forgotten
| about is that there is no right-click to get to icon
| properties, instead there is only Alt-Enter.
| chemmail wrote:
| I always install Classic start on all my systems no matter if
| its just testing for 5minutes, or anybody's computer to make
| life easier for me and them.
| herbst wrote:
| > It has established strong foundations about Windows UI. The
| Menu/Toolbar couple, scrollbars with a relative size, 3D
| buttons, start menu, toolbar...
|
| Or maybe windows just never progressed. If you see how much
| linux desktops changed over this period. Windows today just
| looks like a fancy clone of 95, always has.
| why_Mr_Anderson wrote:
| Which is as it should be. Backward compatibility and
| 'stability' (maybe familiarity/recognizability would be
| better words) are far more important than random
| changes/experiments that are the core features of Linux
| desktops.
| fsiefken wrote:
| You say the gap between Win3.1 and Win95 is insane. I don't
| agree with that. Before I was able to run Win95 I used Calmira
| with Windows 3.11 - it provided a nice Wind95 like taskbar.
| There was also win32s to run most 32bit applications. Yes the
| multitasking was better on Win95, in Win3.11 I had to wait
| until a floppy disk was formatted before I could do something
| else. I totally agree I feel at home with the 98 classic and XP
| classic UI's. It's a pitty I can't run modern browsers and java
| on XP, otherwise I'd be tempted to use it. There are some
| themes for Linux though, perhaps the Xplorer2 runs under wine.
| I could use ReactOS as well.
| _fzslm wrote:
| i don't know if you have any particular objections to using
| Windows 10 as your main operating system, but there's a
| pretty cool tweak called SimpleClassicTheme which can get you
| a surprisingly long way in replicating the classic Windows
| aesthetic in modern Windows:
|
| https://winclassic.boards.net/thread/456/reversibly-
| enable-d...
| tomduncalf wrote:
| > Calmira with Windows 3.11
|
| Ah that takes me back, I remember having a computer magazine
| at the time when Windows 95 was in development (and was just
| known as Chicago) which came with a bunch of software on the
| free disk/CD which "emulated" the Win95 look and feel on Win
| 3.11. Was pretty fun at the time. I guess Calmira might have
| been one of them!
| fsiefken wrote:
| Yes, at one time it was renamed into Calmira. I think it
| was written in Delphi, but I'm not sure - it now has LFN
| support. The nice thing is it can run on a 386 with 4M..
| which can easily be emulated on for example DosBox or Qemu.
| You perhaps could virtualize the whole thing in javascript
| and run it in a browser like here:
| https://archive.org/details/win3_stock
| http://www.calmira.net/
| techrat wrote:
| I recently revived an old laptop that was sold for scrap, it
| was fully working... just missing a power adapter.
|
| Dos 6.22 and Win3.11.
|
| Much more usable than I remembered. Was kinda sorta able to
| get online with a PCMCIA Ethernet card.
|
| Aside from the whole, well... lack of HTTPS support in any
| browser you could possibly use on that OS. Also in Win95. And
| Win98. But regardless...
|
| The UI was very straightforward even then. Open folder. Click
| icon to run app. It wasn't hard to use. Like you say, the
| bigger issue was the amount of power we had under the hood.
| Task switching wasn't perfect but it didn't exactly hurt us
| then, either.
|
| I realised that for as long as I have had a Windows system
| (all the way up through to my Win10 box though I now prefer
| xUbuntu)... I always did something that is kind of a holdover
| from my days of using Win3.0... Instead of using the start
| menu, I put shortcuts to all of my mostl commonly used apps
| in a folder called 'Proggy Bin' on the desktop so I can alt-
| tab to it when I needed to instead of dragging my mouse to
| the corner. So, in some ways, the old Win3.x UI was more
| productive in my workflow.
| dawnerd wrote:
| There's been some projects that try to get the new internet
| working on old computers. One off the top of my head:
|
| https://github.com/atauenis/webone
|
| Also saw one recently that proxies to archive.org for that
| really nostalgic feel.
| anthk wrote:
| Install wsgopher and head to:
| gopher://sdf.org gopher://hngopher.com
| gopher://magical.fish gopher://bitreich.org
|
| Wsgopher it's out there, search for in under old win 3.1
| software archives, where are several.
| t90fan wrote:
| > Aside from the whole, well... lack of HTTPS support in
| any browser you could possibly use on that OS. Also in
| Win95. And Win98. But regardless...
|
| Use a proxy running on your LAN.
|
| The proxy connects to the site over modern HTTPS (i.e. TLS
| 1.2 or whatever) and you connect to the proxy over plain
| HTTP, or whatever old version of HTTPS your client supports
| (NT4 sp6 with IE6 supports TLS1.0 or SSL3, as the latest,
| dunno about win 98), if you make sure to trust its cert.
| datavirtue wrote:
| XP and previous versions were susceptible to root kits. Once
| you had one the the OS was toast. Removing them and
| mitigating the impact used to be a prolific business. At the
| end it was so bad that companies were forced to migrate to
| Windows 7. Windows 7 introduced a protection feature that
| somewhat randomized the once predictable memory locations of
| the kernel drivers. Root kits disappeared as a common
| occurrence. XP in the hands of a lay user will be trashed
| almost immediately if exposed to the internet.
| fogihujy wrote:
| Calmira was amazing! It, along with Win32s and the 16-bit
| version of Internet Explorer, brought a lot of second-hand
| 386's with 4 Mb RAM into the modern world, by providing
| working Internet access and32-bit app support and a modern
| UI.
| anthk wrote:
| XFCE + Classic95 from Github = heaven.
| hestefisk wrote:
| IceWM also has a nice Windows 95 theme. I used to run it
| with Gnome 1.0 on my Red Hat 5.2 system (Linux kernel
| 2.0.36!) system in 2000.
| longtom wrote:
| This one?
|
| https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| Wow. These usually get it just wrong enough that I can't
| use it, but this is REALLY close! I'm impressed.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| It was not THAT coherent. The UI sometimes took weird turn to
| 3.11 design or even DOS
|
| But in general you are right
| flowerlad wrote:
| > It was beautifully coherent.
|
| And that's because it copied heavily from NeXTSTEP of the late
| 1980's.
|
| See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_...
|
| That beveled look was invented by Steve Jobs's team, and copied
| by Microsoft.
|
| I would much rather use NeXTSTEP look & feel than Windows 10 or
| even OS X.
| core-questions wrote:
| I want to go to the alternate timeline where a major distro
| actually picked up the GNUstep ball and ran with it, and
| built out a full desktop based around WindowMaker. It's still
| faster and more fun than most modern desktops.
| feanaro wrote:
| What is so special about NeXTSTEP and WindowMaker? I see it
| often brought up and I actually used WindowMaker briefly at
| some point in the past, but I don't "get it". Could someone
| explain?
| Lammy wrote:
| > It's still faster and more fun than most modern desktops.
|
| And doesn't even look (too) dated when paired with a
| compositor: https://i.imgur.com/YJkDMjr.png
|
| If Wayland could just give me this I'd switch to it in a
| heartbeat, versus possibly-never :(
| fsiefken wrote:
| Hi Lammy, perhaps this project works with Wayland?
| https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace
| Lammy wrote:
| This looks wonderful, thanks for the link! I'll spin up a
| Linux VM and play around with this when I have some time.
| phire wrote:
| It's besides the point where the ui style came from; It was
| coherent because it used the same ui patterns and styles
| everywhere.
|
| But your enthusiasm for NeXTSTEP really makes me think of
| this Steve Jobs anecdote:
|
| https://twitter.com/imranchaudhri/status/1374934903188414467
| [deleted]
| pjmlp wrote:
| Feel free to contribute to GNUStep. :)
| datavirtue wrote:
| I remember seeing the early peeks at Windows NT in Byte
| magazine. Jaw dropped. Reading about features had me drooling
| over the future. It was similar to Win 3.1 at the time but
| with a much more serious look. As a pre-teen I was obsessed
| with the asthetic and the idea of having a multi-user
| security model and built in networking. This was during a
| time when you had to buy expensive products like Lantastic
| (hardware and software) to have a network in your small
| business.
| hyakosm wrote:
| NextStep was awesome but the computers were high-end
| expensive workstations. Windows 95 works on a 486 without
| FPU.
| madflame991 wrote:
| You don't need an fpu at all to draw those bezels do you?!
| Tagbert wrote:
| No, but the Nextstep UI was generated with PostScript, so
| lots of floating point and rasterizing. It basically
| treated the screen like a PDF.
| fsiefken wrote:
| exactly. it would be a bit anachronistic but you could
| conceivably run NeXTSTEP on a 486 without a FPU right now
| https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace
| flowerlad wrote:
| Check out the hardware info in this screenshot:
|
| https://infinitediaries.net/wp-
| content/uploads/2018/05/NeXTS...
| bitwize wrote:
| "High end expensive workstations" with 25-MHz 680x0
| processors.
|
| OpenStep ran on a 486 without FPU.
| why_Mr_Anderson wrote:
| That looks like AmigaOS in higher resolution?
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Some are still going for this kind of "physical" look :
| https://factorio.com/
| thendrill wrote:
| I can't belive no has yet mentioned Litestep
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiteStep
|
| It was my favorite ui replacement on Win98/95 until Win2k
| come out.
| hestefisk wrote:
| I remember Litestep. It was very good. You would edit the
| wm config using notepad and then do hot reload. Unheard of
| in the Windows world.
| asddubs wrote:
| the partition manager on windows 10 is even more unchanged from
| the 95/98 days than the example given in the article. it seems
| to literally still be the exact same interface
| hestefisk wrote:
| The Windows 10 partition manager (Disk Manager) stems from
| Windows NT / 2K. Windows 95 / 98 only had fdisk.exe, which
| was horrendous.
| usrusr wrote:
| That's a holdout from the configuration UI style introduced
| in Windows 2000, not 95/98 (unless it was already there in NT
| 4, or unless we aren't talking about the same thing are all)
|
| 2000 reigns as the pinnacle of Windows UI consistency in my
| perception, but that particular management UI style was a
| first hint at future deviations, it was an outlier even then
| (I think it's because it's a family of UI built to interact
| with a separate system service, potentially remote?)
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Yes I believe the management console can connect to remote
| systems.
| morsch wrote:
| The partition manager in Windows 9x was FDISK.EXE.
| 2ion wrote:
| I do not really understand how Microsoft could drop the ball
| that low on Windows 10 usability. It feels like a cramp to make
| something different but without any foundational insights how
| it could be better than past iterations on the UI nor with the
| budget and man power actually needed to pull the project
| together. Putting all other things aside, the "Windows shell"
| today is so much inferior to even latest GNOME and KDE
| iterations.
|
| On the other hand, what's changed massively is how easily
| Windows 10 can be used as a power user, single-user desktop
| computer from the shell through powershell. I do not even have
| to rely on bad or outdated click UIs --- although my employer
| recently sent me to a AWS course where the task was to
| configure a Windows Server based AD controller, and the
| experience involved admin GUIs from my worst nightmares --- to
| do things like checking the current IP addresses, configuring
| and overriding DNS servers, or definining/scheduling custom
| background services anymore.
|
| While other parts and usage paradigms of the Windows computer
| are experiencing a boost and are being "supported" right now,
| esp. when it comes to developer tools and developer workflows,
| package management (winget...) --- thank you Microsoft for that
| vision ---, the "classic way of using Windows" and the use of
| good UI to make the OS accessible to users of all PC user skill
| levels is being neglected to such a degree it's not even funny.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Windows is, unfortunately, just following the general trend
| of letting brain-dead "UX designers" make everything look
| like a website on a fucking iPhone. More wasted screen real
| estate, fewer features, slower to load, and built-in adtech.
|
| It is our fault as an industry that this has happened and we
| are reaping what we've sewn.
| titzer wrote:
| I lol'd at your comment. Poor UX designers. In an age of
| gentleness, I wish I could barge into their houses and
| rearrange all their furniture, toss the contents of their
| refrigerators into the bathtub, and spraypaint their
| bedrooms a cheap pink color. Because that's what they do to
| my computer interfaces at random intervals, and I have no
| power over it anymore.
| [deleted]
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| I think what it really is is that the power user is no
| longer the target audience. It's the 18 year old who wants
| a new flashy thing every few versions. Regular users think
| the same is boring and old, so the need to "change things
| up" is higher than ever.
|
| Look at iOS (and to a lesser extent Android) for instance.
| It has had I believe 3 or 4 major UI looks in its 13 year
| life.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| And I have no idea how to use an iPhone because I haven't
| used one in years.
| epanchin wrote:
| Microsoft didn't just drop the ball on the general design.
| Individual features have fallen behind. The calculator in
| Windows 7 was great, you could type sums and edit your
| history to quickly make changes to calculations. Windows 10,
| history is just for looking at.
|
| I now have a Texas calculator on my desk.
| tomerv wrote:
| I just installed calc.exe from Windows 7 on my work laptop
| with Windows 10. You can find copies of it online.
| splithalf wrote:
| Why not use a spreadsheet? You can save a spreadsheet and
| do linked graphics. Spreadsheets are the future.
| erfgh wrote:
| Pro tip: Install python and do your calculations on the
| command line.
| akalsz wrote:
| Or if you prefer JavaScript, try qjscalc from QuickJS
| [1].
|
| [1]: https://bellard.org/quickjs/
| FpUser wrote:
| Install that giant monster just as a calculator? This
| does not make sense. There are free calculators for
| windows with very nice functionality and no bloat.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Even proer tip: https://github.com/lcn2/calc
|
| Can't live without that one in $PATH.
| Darmody wrote:
| Or use a good calculator like Speedcrunch.
| mrweasel wrote:
| That's not really the point is it? Windows 7 had a good
| calculator, which have been reduced to a bad one, for no
| real reason other than a GUI refresh.
| snazz wrote:
| The system I'm typing on runs Windows Server 2019, which
| has the Windows 7-era calculator and very little ability
| to use UWP apps, and I still do my math with Speedcrunch,
| Desmos, or an emulated TI-84 Plus CE via CEmu.
|
| The Windows 7 calculator is a solid basic calculator, but
| I think most power users in that time used third-party
| options or something like a spreadsheet. Microsoft
| clearly thinks of the calculator as a demo application
| for UWP and XAML, as evidenced by them open-sourcing it,
| sort of like how Apple treats TextEdit like a Cocoa text
| rendering demo. If you want a serious calculator or a
| serious text editor, you're better off looking outside
| these bundled tools.
| 2ion wrote:
| Personally, I always use ipython. I have ipython aliased
| to "I" in every OS and my preamble/startup environment
| contains from numpy import *
| from numpy import array as c from math import *
| import numpy as np import pandas as pd
| import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
|
| Previously I used to use R, which also has a very fast
| REPL with self-documentation similara to ipython's '?'
| magic.
| andrepd wrote:
| Qalculate is by far the best calculator app I've ever used.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| I don't think I've seen a single person in any office using
| the calc on windows- anyone who needs to do simple
| calculations more than once a day has a physical calc on
| their desk- so much better and easier to use.
| rvba wrote:
| Excel or apps that allow to edit history are much better
| than an old school calculator
| cosmodisk wrote:
| I meant for simple calculations only- there's no way a
| pocket calc can be better than Excel.
| anthk wrote:
| any REPL >>>> spreadsheet.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| That's the point. No one uses it because it sucks.
|
| Meanwhile, my linux box has a dedicated macro to opening
| and closing SpeedCrunch, I also have br from the command
| line. Along with a numberpad input, there is literally no
| difference here from a desk calculator (which I still
| have, of course)
| 20thCB wrote:
| My kids just type the calculation into Google.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Your kids are smart. I have a pinned wolframalpha tab
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| i think they tried to create a common UI experience with
| windows 10 mobile; they even had the concept of 'universal
| apps' that could run as is on both the desktop and windows
| phone; They really tried to make it on the phone, but it
| didn't work out. Now the desktop is stuck with the result, as
| they decided to change priorities to the cloud, and windows
| 10 turned into the 'last good version'.
| tapland wrote:
| The one I run into the most is the new modern settings-
| interface which looks nice but is bloated and contains 1/10
| the features of the control panel categories I'm actually
| trying to get to.
| Causality1 wrote:
| I still remember the first day I used Windows 10 and tried to
| make a desktop shortcut. I opened the Start menu, began
| typing the name... and then dragging a program off the search
| result list didn't work. I right clicked, expecting to get
| the option to "send to desktop(create shortcut)" and that was
| gone too. I found I had to add it to the Start menu, drag it
| from there onto the desktop, and then delete it from the
| Start menu. The feeling of dread that settled onto my stomach
| at that moment has never been matched by any other computer
| event in my life.
| boatsie wrote:
| Had this exact experience and had to google a solution..
| Why they didn't use the same control element for an item
| found with the search versus in the start menu is mind
| boggling.
| Causality1 wrote:
| The same attitude extends everywhere else in the
| operating system. In any other version of Windows if you
| drag a folder onto the taskbar you get a labeled icon
| that opens that folder when you click it. In Windows 10
| it just adds to the list of possible folders when you
| open the file manager shortcut. You can create a shortcut
| to a folder by adding an Explorer argument to a folder
| shortcut but it still won't have a label when you put it
| on the taskbar.
| ziml77 wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean about the behavior of dragging
| a folder onto the taskbar. If I do that on Windows 7, it
| adds the folder to Explorer's jumplist.
| Anthony-G wrote:
| > The feeling of dread that settled onto my stomach at that
| moment has never been matched by any other computer event
| in my life.
|
| Consider yourself blessed if that's the most dreadful
| computer experience. I've had severe anxiety induced by:
|
| * user errors, e.g., why is that "rm" command taking so
| long? or "Save As" over-writing an important file
|
| * software bugs, e.g., "no boot device found" after the
| most recent Windows 10 update
|
| * hardware errors, e.g., USB flash drive suddenly becomes
| unreadable
| Causality1 wrote:
| Those are bad events that happen once and then are over
| and you pick up the pieces. Windows 10 is like learning
| you have a terminal illness. It's a few small
| inconveniences now but you know it's just going to get
| worse and worse and worse.
| bernardv wrote:
| Agree with the state of UX and UI's these days. Younger
| developers are missing out on the UI design standards which
| worked very well and were introduced back in the late 90's with
| Win95 as well as Windows Forms (in Visual Studio). There used
| to be a Microsoft UI best-practices/standards document which
| most developers actually followed, resulting in predictable
| interfaces which did not force users to have to guess their way
| around (to be fair Apple did a better job maintaining their UI
| standards I think).
|
| No matter the framework flavor of the day, web technologies
| make for sub-standard user interfaces.
|
| Win95 was a big step from Windows 3.1x. Being a Microsoft
| Windows support tech at the time, supporting both the older
| Windows 3.1x and new Windows 95, it made for many lengthy
| support calls. It definitely took a while for the new look &
| feel to catch on.
| jcpham2 wrote:
| I still use win9x .cpl and .msc shortcuts for everything. Win
| 10 UI be damned.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| You are right, it's been 25 years and what we have today is
| nowhere near better. Windows 95 was consistent, there were very
| few UI surprises compared to almost every single version that
| followed after it. Frankly I don't even know how people learn
| how to use computers nowadays, if someone like me, who used
| computers for most of their lives+ use them professionally for
| living, struggle on daily basis.
| sigg3 wrote:
| >It was beautifully coherent.
|
| Not really. While Linux DEs had open in place, Windows would
| keep opening new Windows when clicking a folder. Until the UI
| crashed. I believe the NT line had open in-place.
|
| That's besides the point though. The same list of actions would
| randomly BSOD in one case and not the other. Windows 95 was not
| coherent it was chaotic.
|
| You only had 4 hours left on the 0day FtP WaReZ site? Tough
| luck. Deadline at work? Too bad. With Win95 randomly crashing
| and corrupting files whether you'd get there or not depended on
| Russian roulette kind of luck.
| Delk wrote:
| Folders opening "in place" was a deliberate design choice
| called spatial file management or so [1]. It has its
| downsides and IIRC I wasn't a huge fan, but I wouldn't call
| it incoherent.
|
| I don't think anybody misses Windows 95 in terms of
| technological quality, but there was actual deliberate and
| well-researched design behind its UI.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_file_manager
| grishka wrote:
| I recently ran Mac OS 9 on an emulator, out of curiosity, after
| having been using modern macOS/OS X/whatever you call it for
| the last 10 years. Now, to set the context, I'm Russian, and
| back when classic Mac OS was current, Apple computers were
| generally stuff of legends. "Insanely expensive beautifully
| made things, very good with colors and fonts, that professional
| designers sometimes use and most people can't afford". Macs
| only started gaining popularity around the very end of 00s --
| probably not least because of the Intel transition and the
| ability to try out the OS as hackintosh.
|
| Anyway. It was interesting to see how it evolved. There
| definitely are familiar elements and patterns, but it's...
| different. There's no dock. You can't minimize windows. The
| menu bar is there, but the item with the current app name is to
| the right and it's an app switcher; what is now in that item,
| is under File, so you do File -> Quit. There are no status/tray
| icons in the menu bar, they're instead in a separate bar at the
| bottom left. There are desktop shortcuts to programs, something
| that feels Windows-only to me because no one does that in the
| modern macOS. Files don't have extensions, but instead rely
| heavily on extended attributes in the file system to remember
| what type the file is and what program it opens in. There's
| some third-party software installed with the system, and
| craploads more bundled on the installation CD for you to
| install manually. Inclusion of third-party software with the OS
| felt very un-Apple to me. And, the most perplexing thing,
| there's no support for scroll wheel and right mouse button! I
| understand that Macs of the time came with single-button mice,
| but c'mon.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I'd encourage you to also take a look at one of the very
| early versions of Mac OS, up to System 4 or so, from before
| they added multitasking. IMO, it was better designed--
| masterfully well designed, really--and a lot of the UI
| decisions make more sense.
| philistine wrote:
| I did the same thing recently too and felt elated. I ran
| System 7.5.5 and Mac OS 9. The simple fact that a drive with
| System 7 installed is completely empty, save for the System
| folder, made me see my macOS drive structure in a whole new
| way. Mac OS 9 is clearly made by people who were also working
| on OS X at the time, and it includes a ton of little hints of
| it which kind of hide the simple zen of System 7.
|
| I hope you give 7.5.5 a try with Basilisk.
| desert_boi wrote:
| macOS is macOS because the latest version is now 11.2.3. They
| could have gone with OS XI though.
| grishka wrote:
| I've always read is as "mac os ex" anyway.
| city41 wrote:
| MacOS classic had some nice UX touches that modern MacOS
| lacks though. For example having the close button on the
| opposite side of the window, so there's no questioning you
| meant to close the window. Same with the trash can being in
| the corner of the screen, if you dragged something there,
| there really was nothing else that could have been your
| target.
|
| Apple really thought about those things a lot back then. In
| some ways, modern MacOS is a step backwards on details like
| this.
| yakz wrote:
| It wasn't so much evolved from OS 9 as copied; macOS is an
| evolution of NeXTSTEP/OpenStep, not the classic OS.
| grishka wrote:
| Of course the internals are entirely different, I meant
| UI/UX evolution.
| monocasa wrote:
| Yeah, the UI/UX arguably evolved more from Next than OS9.
| Jobs wasn't going to embrace the UX of the company that
| stagnated with him gone for a decade. Even at launch of
| OSX the old Carbon based applications felt behind the
| times compared to the rest of the OS.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| A lot of the UI is pulled out of NeXTStep. That's where
| the dock comes from. That's where Finder's column view
| comes from. The early Mac OS X's were even more like
| NeXTStep but users revolted a little and they nudged it
| more towards classic Mac OS.
| city41 wrote:
| I've always felt Windows 2000 was the pinnacle (or perhaps XP
| with the classic theme turned on). So consistent and clean. The
| emphasis back then was a computer is a tool you use, not
| something that needs to be "pretty".
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| I completely agree. Windows 2000 (classic theme in XP and
| later) was the best Windows has ever looked. The foundation
| was already fantastic _and_ it had extensive customization
| options.
|
| I still long for the Rainy Day theme. I wish Windows 10 would
| allow us to use the classic shell.
| sixothree wrote:
| Windows 2000 was such a surprise. The "look" was not vastly
| improved from 98se, but for a power user it was clearly a
| better OS. Everyone I met who had tried Windows 2000 a
| similar reaction - this is really good stuff.
|
| I feel like Win 2k was "underappreciated" because of that
| surprise, but also to the point of the author. The visual
| design was not a huge improvement over previous editions. I'm
| sure it didn't "feel" like an upgrade.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Well, it _was_ the first Windows based on the NT kernel
| that found its way to consumers ' computers. Well, at least
| the computers of enthusiasts and power users - as far as
| Microsoft was concerned, the 2000 was still meant for
| workstations and servers and did not have a "Home" edition.
| For home use there was the much-maligned Windows ME which
| ended up being the last non-NT, not-memory-protected,
| still-sorta-just-a-fancy-shell-over-DOS Windows that
| Microsoft released. Only with XP did Microsoft completely
| unify their "home" and "professional" lines.
| city41 wrote:
| I felt like for 2000 they took the 98 look and just nicely
| honed it. Things like the gradient in the title bar of
| windows, or switching from the default aqua of 98 to the
| nice blue of 2000. Little things that pushed this overall
| look and feel to a nice sheen.
|
| I do remember back in the day the name was confusing, up
| till that point all DOS based Windows had a year name, and
| all NT based windows were, well, called NT :) I remember
| people being surprised to find out 2000 was an NT based
| Windows.
| [deleted]
| megous wrote:
| > Windows 95 is probably the oldest OS easily usable by young
| people.
|
| I grew up in DOS days, and a lot of kids back then were using
| it just fine. You learned some dual pane commander, how to
| navigate/copy dirs/files around on floppies, a:, c:, what files
| are runnable and you could run and share games and programs.
|
| It was not that incoherent either. Norton/Volkov/M602 commander
| was the main interface, had popup menus for most functions (so
| everything was quite discoverable), and the rest was just about
| running random executables you got from someone on a floppy.
| There was barely any multitasking. At most you got to run some
| resident programs (mouse driver or various cheats for games
| :)). It was conceptually simpler than what you get these days.
|
| And having a file manager as a primary interface kind of
| invited you to explore what's on your computer.
|
| People who still like to use two pane file managers probably
| come from those days. :)
| Bluecobra wrote:
| > I grew up in DOS days, and a lot of kids back then were
| using it just fine.
|
| My first PC when I was a kid came with Win95, but all the
| good games were still on DOS. Some games like Ultima VII had
| their own extended memory system and was a pain to get
| working right, especially on a newer PC running Win95. It
| took a lot of trial and error to get the right boot
| disk/config.sys to get the game to work. It was like a game
| in itself. Needless to say, I got DOS-savvy pretty quickly
| since playing cool games was my motivation.
| oceliker wrote:
| I thought they meant "oldest OS easily usable by young people
| of today", but I might be wrong.
| megous wrote:
| Yes, I understood that. I just assume that young people
| today are no different from young people 25 years ago,
| other than maybe having the (dis)advantage of preexisting
| knowledge of today's computing. Which may be the parent's
| point, I guess?
| hyakosm wrote:
| Yes! I meant "by young people of today used to modern
| Windows"
| rakoo wrote:
| I used to spend hours in those installers waiting for games to
| install. The look and feel with the background image and the
| distinctive "grain" on it, the font... nostalgia moments.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| The biggest surprise for me in reading this was the complete lack
| of any SSL functionality in the original version of Internet
| Explorer, rendering most of the modern web not merely broken, but
| fully inaccessible.
|
| I wonder what the earliest version of Windows would be that can
| at least establish a connection to a 2020s website out of the
| box.
| Macha wrote:
| Out of the box you're looking at probably Vista SP1, or maybe
| even 7. SNI support is basically mandatory now. You could
| install older versions of firefox or IE8 for XP, I guess.
| Multicomp wrote:
| Windows 7 RTM cannot install the chocolatey package manager
| OOTB due to TLS 1.2 expectations, necessitating some work to
| get Windows up to date with Powershell V3 and such[1]. So
| maybe Windows 7 SP1, or Windows 8?
|
| [1] https://blog.chocolatey.org/2020/01/remove-support-for-
| old-t...
| Izkata wrote:
| The past couple years SSL has been disappearing completely, and
| TLS is now required. It didn't exist until at least 1999. So
| even with SSL support, you'd still be out of luck.
| toast0 wrote:
| SSL 2 and 3 wouldn't get you anywhere anyway.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| The IE in the screenshots is IE 3.x (I think - judging from the
| swirlies in the toolbar background), which does have SSL.
|
| The problem is it isn't going to have SSL versions or cipher
| suites that are compatible with the modern Internet so it's
| going to be pretty useless.
| michrassena wrote:
| About five or six years ago I found an old CD of Windows ME.
| Having moved on from Windows 95 to NT, 2000 and so forth, I was
| curious about it. Needless to say, even a few years ago getting
| on the web with Windows ME out of the box was broken. I
| eventually found a version of Opera I think which was new
| enough that I was able to use the Internet. More recently I
| read of someone using a SOCKS proxy to make using the Internet
| more functional for an older machine.
| flomo wrote:
| Internet Explorer v1 was not really a product. I think the only
| place I saw it was on a documentation CD which contained HTML
| files. The original internet pack for Windows 95 came with IE2,
| which had SSL.
| app4soft wrote:
| > _But DOSBox officially does not support Windows, in theory, it
| can be possible but it's much easier to use a fully-fledged
| virtual machine. I've used Oracle VirtualBox, which is free and
| can be installed on any modern PC._
|
| JFTR, _Win3.1_ & _Win95_ could be installed even on _Symbian 9.x
| smartphones (e.g. Nokia N95, N82, E63)_ via _DOSBox_.[0]
|
| _Win95_ works and some apps could be launched under _Symbian
| 9.x_ , but not so usable as _Win3.1_ , the last one works mostly
| well.
|
| [0] https://www.instructables.com/How-to-install-
| Windows-31-on-S...
| timonoko wrote:
| Remarkably un-Fascinating, because Win31 was the last one ever
| needed. In 1995 Slackware was already running directly from CDROM
| surpassing Windows on o'so many levels. When Android came about,
| it was also remarkably un-fascinating, but it was better with
| rooting and those tools needed pirating Windows XP. So I have XP
| on some bootmenus.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > But this connection is practically useless -- web standards
| went so far ahead during the last 25 years, 99% of websites just
| cannot be opened. I can ping the website, and that is mostly the
| maximum I can do:
|
| You can still open http only websites fine, even in the original
| internet explorer : https://whynohttps.com/
| sbierwagen wrote:
| There are a couple HTTP proxies that will translate HTTPS and
| Host: headers for very old browsers that don't support them:
| https://github.com/atauenis/webone or
| https://bitbucket.org/ValdikSS/oldssl-proxy/src/master/
| pentagrama wrote:
| Windows 95 nailed it from the start with the UX, I believe it was
| heavily researched and thought. A bold vision for a new era.
|
| Here is an interesting Windows 95 usability case study from
| Microsoft at the time, I love the attention to detail and how
| many not-visual design things are considered
| https://archive.is/Uj71F (original link now broken)
|
| The nostalgia factor is heavy here too, not only with
| contemporaneous (Gen X and Gen Y), some of Gen Z discover the
| aesthetic as a internet trend who peak around 2012, is called
| Vaporwave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporwave
|
| Sorry if my English is not the best :/
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| Microsoft putting a lot of effort into usability research,
| especially for first-time users, is clearly why Windows 95's UI
| came out so good. Imagine if they'd done the same for later
| versions: Windows 8 and 10 would never have happened.
| sim_card_map wrote:
| that's a great study!
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Sadly, what I really want is to be able to boot Win98/SE in a
| virtual machine with DirectX 9 or better support. I have a ton of
| old Win98 games that were fun (if pixelly) and while I've got the
| DirectX install files (often from old PC Gamer CDs (remember when
| Microsoft shipped them on those disks?) I haven't found a virtual
| machine video driver that is DirectX compatible.
| Narishma wrote:
| Have you tried PCem?
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I have not but I will, it seems to have the emulations that I
| can use.
| voidfunc wrote:
| I really miss this era of computing... everything was so fresh
| and new feeling back then and there was a lack of polish to
| everything. It was a lot of fun as a kid learning to use all of
| this stuff.
|
| I remember being fascinated by network apps and stuff that let
| you send messages and data between computers... that's how I
| really got interested in programming because I wanted to figure
| out how to build something like ICQ/AIM.
| reader_mode wrote:
| One interesting thing I noticed (obviously IMO) is that even
| Office 95 looks better than LibreOffice.
| nahuel0x wrote:
| Open the Google Cloud Console (probably the most complex Material
| UI example), and imagine it in Win95 style. It will be so much
| better.
| molasses wrote:
| I have a friend that has run blackbox style desktop for an age.
| He still prefers it over native win 10.
| worik wrote:
| "It's a known issue that occurs on processors with a frequency
| higher than 2.1 GHz......in 1995 nobody was thinking that Windows
| will be running on a CPU with a so high frequency."
|
| The good old days. Earlier no body would ever need more than 640K
| main memory....
| kstenerud wrote:
| Windows 95/2000 was as close to the perfect UI look & feel as
| we've ever gotten. No crazy eye candy, good contrast, easily
| recognizable and consistent UI components, decent amount of
| information available on the desktop, and an overall UI that just
| gets out of your way. MacOS and AmigaOS came close, but they had
| more warts overall.
|
| The only thing Windows did poorly (besides stability) was the
| amount of drilling down you needed to do to access some parts of
| the 80% use cases, but that can be fixed easily enough.
|
| Today I use Mate desktop with the Redmond tweak, because once
| again it gives good feature coverage, good screen real-estate,
| low overhead, and generally gets out of your way.
| haddr wrote:
| "it is interesting to see, that physically, Windows 95 can be
| connected to the internet. But this connection is practically
| useless"
|
| It could be also quite unpleasant. The TCP/IP stack that Win95
| was using had plenty of bugs (e.g. ping of death) that could
| allow someone to remotely freeze Win95 box.
|
| Although, today no one would exploit win95 machines in the
| wild...
| vidanay wrote:
| I still have winsock PTSD
| ekianjo wrote:
| > It was also interesting to see the beginning of the new era,
| the era of connected devices and online services, and to see what
| will happen with all these services after 10-20 years. This is
| something that is interesting to think about -- will we be able
| to show our grandchildren how did old stuff work, or "Cannot
| connect to server" will be the only message that will be
| displayed?
|
| You can't compare the very beginning of the internet and what
| will come from where we are now in the next 10-20 years. Most
| likely a lot of things will still work in 10 years, because the
| underlying foundations of the protocols are now standardized and
| fixed for a while. Same thing with cars from 30 years ago: they
| can run just fine on the road and with regular gas, because its
| matured technology.
| bawolff wrote:
| The very beginning of the internet was the 60s not the 90s.
|
| And honestly where protocols have changed its been very recent.
| There was a big lull between the 90s and last couple years. TLS
| 1.3, the most obvious example of something new, was very recent
| (1.0-1.2 were minor but important improvements to SSL 3, which
| until recently was still widely supported. TLS1.3 was the
| biggest change in a long time). Http/2 (and 3!) Are super new,
| and earlier versions of http which date to the 90s are still
| universally supported.
| aflag wrote:
| He probably meant web and not Internet. The IP protocol,
| which is arguably what is closest to what internet really
| means haven't seen a change since the 80s. We are still
| struggling with moving to IPv6.
| bawolff wrote:
| But his point was that the foundations were fixed. You
| could say the same thing about the internet in the early
| 90s, and then http changed a bunch of things. Whose to say
| the same thing won't happen tommorow. It doesn't seem like
| HTTP is any more of a fixed foundation today than tcp/ip
| was in the 90s
| aflag wrote:
| TCP/IP is still strong with us today. The whole web is
| built on top of that. Given that browsers today already
| support HTTP/2, it is hard to imagine that in 25 years
| the web would have moved to something else. HTTP/1 has
| been around for longer than that and it's still strong.
| The only change that made things incompatible was SSL,
| but it is unlikely that will change anytime soon either.
|
| I think the take away from that blog post is that the
| user experience from 95 is not that drastically different
| from the experience from today. The leap from the 80s UI
| to 90s was drastic, but it has been getting more stable
| since. To the point that I would call it stagnated for at
| least the past 10 years. The web UI did change a lot and,
| as noticed, it is completely incompatible with browsers
| from 95. But that's largely because it was catching up
| with the native apps/ui. I think we are there already,
| though. So I expect the web to be as stable as the native
| protocols and graphical toolkits have been for the past
| 25 years. Probably even more so, since keeping backwards
| compatibility is much more important in the web.
| abestic9 wrote:
| Windows XP can be considered a mature operating system and is
| barely usable online today. It could be that a new technology
| renders some major components and standards obsolete. It's
| simply not comparable to mechanical engineering.
|
| It's even more possible today, when a small number of large
| companies make up for a huge amount of functionality, that
| we'll suddenly lose it. GameSpy Arcade was one example of how a
| single market shift can end entire communities. I fear IoT will
| be even worse.
| spideymans wrote:
| >Windows XP can be considered a mature operating system and
| is barely usable online today
|
| XP is barely usable online today, but XP itself was released
| (2001) before we had anything resembling the modern web. It'd
| be years before the phrase "Web 2.0" even entered popular
| lexicon.
| linkdd wrote:
| I miss the card games without ads.
| hyakosm wrote:
| PySol (https://pysolfc.sourceforge.io/) is awesome and
| multiplatform.
| agumonkey wrote:
| bonus point: no login
| Aloha wrote:
| I still run the Windows XP version of solitare today, its
| literally my favorite game (if judged by number of games
| played).
| Guest42 wrote:
| I liked how everything seemed intentionally rectangular.
| Perhaps made it easier to organize things mentally. It was also
| nice having full menus at the top of windows.
| acdha wrote:
| There was also a big technical reason for that: graphics
| subsystems sucked back then. Hardware acceleration ranged
| from non-existent to primitive and RAM was tight. If you have
| two objects (window, control, etc.) displayed and they're
| rectangular, you can update one of them without needing to
| involve the other one at all. Since your entire display was a
| single buffer in memory, each application would draw directly
| in its chunk of memory. When you did something which made
| things move you could use simple array math to move the
| previously-painted block of memory to the new location or, if
| you had a really fancy graphics card, call a BitBlt operation
| which would move x1,y2-x2,y2 to the new location. Then you
| had to tell whatever was now visible in the source location
| to repaint that region.
|
| Adding things like transparency or rounded corners breaks a
| lot of that -- you need to know what's underneath to update
| the display -- and that wasn't fast enough to use until you
| had enough RAM to store each object independently so you
| don't need to ask each application to repaint as things move
| around. Compositing window managers started early -- I
| believe the Amiga had that -- but the first mainstream OS was
| when Mac OS X shipped Quartz and it had performance drawbacks
| (i.e. tolerable but not great window dragging performance)
| until they shipped Quartz Extreme which used OpenGL to do the
| hard work. Microsoft caught up about 5 years later with
| Windows Vista, in part because they had more users to support
| with inadequate hardware.
| wruza wrote:
| Apps could draw directly to DC, but it flickered a lot, and
| everyone quickly ended up with CreateCompatible{Bitmap,DC}
| and blitting into BeginPaint's DC after drawing. After all,
| at win95 you had 4 to 8 megabytes or RAM - you definitely
| had the space. Not sure when it happened, but I can
| remember fighting with flicker circa 97. Also, rectangular
| controls were what you had in standard winapi, which was
| based on HWNDs, which were rectangular-only. I don't think
| that unroundness was really forced by hardware constraints
| (transparency - yes), it was just a default simplest flavor
| of time. (And not that I like round/flat/text-only
| controls. What we called "flat" back then is pretty
| 3d-bordered in modern terms, and what we called "round",
| today is border-radius:3px)
| acdha wrote:
| 4-8MB wasn't all that much if you were running more than
| one app at >640x480x256. It was certainly possible but
| fancy visual effects were going to exclude a lot of low-
| end hardware, which is what a LOT of mainstream users
| bought since hardware cost a good but more back then and
| the value proposition was less established.
|
| I agree that roundness wasn't prohibitive in general. The
| rectangular nature of the APIs encouraged it but you
| certainly saw it in applications. What I was thinking
| about most was complex usage where there was overlap
| outside of the active context (e.g. dragging a window
| with the expectation of a lower layer showing around the
| curve, rather than either not having that or being able
| to assume a solid fill color) or interfering with
| hardware accelerated painting or later video decoding
| which only worked in rectangular regions.
| Guest42 wrote:
| Thank you, I have had zero exposure to what goes on in
| those areas.
| KindOne wrote:
| You could always download the card games from early versions of
| Windows.
| eterm wrote:
| I miss an excel that loads fast* and doesn't want to know who I
| am.
|
| * For it's time. I'm sure it wasn't instant on a pentium 1 even
| if I remember it that way.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Excel and Word were blazingly fast on a first gen Pentium
| compared to a 486 like we had at school.
| reader_mode wrote:
| Fast but you had to save often as there was a possibility an
| app would take down the entire OS.
| boogies wrote:
| Come to the Free side! We have Free card games!
|
| OpenBSD has canfield (solitaire), cribbage, [go]fish, mille
| [bornes], and even monop[oly] and bcd (format input as punch
| cards) out of the box (and way more! this is just a fraction of
| intro(6): http://man.openbsd.org/man6/intro.6). Unfortunately
| I'm not aware of any GNU distros that do, but you can get them
| with a simple `sudo apt install bsdgames` on Debian (also emacs
| has tons of games of course
| https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryGames).
| linkdd wrote:
| Debian in the WSL and Docker are plenty enough for work. I
| spent too many years installing/testing distros, and I'm
| tired of having to maintain my system (I was a Gentoo user
| for 2 years, and I built an LFS that I used for 8 months).
|
| Even Debian, if you're not careful, can become a mess.
| Windows is dumb enough that you don't need to be careful.
|
| Chocolatey was the last thing I missed from Linux/Unix
| distros.
|
| And I can still code my own card game if I really want to :)
|
| EDIT: seeing a sibling talking about slackware, it seems I
| missed the joke ^^
| yellowapple wrote:
| > Unfortunately I'm not aware of any GNU distros that do
|
| Slackware does: https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slack
| ware64-current/...
| gxqoz wrote:
| Huh, had no idea Control + Esc loaded the start menu. Of course,
| not really needed these days with keyboards with a Windows key.
| molasses wrote:
| We ran a small drop in cafe and we're excited to run win 2k and
| xp on something like 600mhz Pentiums.
|
| Someone donated an old pc. We turned it on and it had win 3.1 on
| and it booted in a blip. We looked at each other in amazement.
| It's odd what you forget. And at the time I preferred the 3.1
| style to 95, though tooling was pretty horrible. Changing video
| modes for example.
|
| Win 95 also didn't originally come with TCP/IP from what I
| remember. Pre internet os, that you wrestled with to get internet
| support on.
|
| Later service pack version came bundled with the web client
| stuff.
|
| Networking was very hit and miss back then.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| Windows 95 had TCP/IP from the very first version, inherited
| and enhanced from Windows for Workgroups.
|
| The original retail gold package didn't have Internet Explorer
| included, so it only had the TCP/IP stack if you chose it in
| the install process. Every OEM version had mandatory TCP/IP and
| Internet Explorer however (the OEM RTM came out a bit later and
| so there was time to squeeze IE in).
| molasses wrote:
| So many versions. I just remember wrestling with floppies
| getting dial up networking on a wIn 95 laptop.
| richardfey wrote:
| It didn't come with USB, you needed the B version for that.
| DanielBMarkham wrote:
| If you want to learn useful Human-Machine Interfaces, look at old
| tech, even imaginary tech in old sci-fi.
|
| Why? Because almost as quickly as we started implementing UI/UX,
| we started running telemetry on them. At first we did a lot of
| user workshops. Later we got much more sophisticated.
|
| The problem is that people use interfaces to solve problems they
| have, perform work they need to do, and to otherwise help them
| and others reach common goals. When the character "Mr. Sulu" on
| the ancient Star Trek TOS has that little viewer thing come up,
| it's apparent to both the audience _and the other fictional
| characters in that universe_ what Sulu is doing and why. Perhaps
| a few lines later one of the other characters in that universe
| might comment on Sulu 's goals, after all, they all can both
| observe him and how he's solving a problem. Sulu is as much a UI
| for the crew as that cool little scope is. The focus is on goals,
| plot movement.
|
| Why is that important? Because all of that watching people and
| collecting data is not able to understand any of that. Instead,
| all we can really tell is whether or not a set of user interface
| tools are used a lot or not, and if so, how they're used. We've
| got a lot of "how" but no "why"
|
| So we optimize around getting people to use the tools more. After
| all, that's all we've got. UI/UX tools become much more about
| working the human than they are about the human working the tool.
|
| Windows 95 is very close to the inflection point of this story.
| We knew just enough to make things cooler and cooler, yet there
| was an overarching concern that computers do something useful.
|
| If you watch old commercials for tech, the emphasis is all about
| how useful it is: it teaches your kids, it predicts the stock
| market, and so on. Steve Jobs realized that while that remains a
| wonderful rationale, it was all bullshit as far as making and
| selling hardware. So he began emphasizing the coolness and
| disruptive nature of the UI. Buy it because it's freaking cool as
| hell and looks like the best video game you've ever seen. If
| anybody gives you a hard time, fall back to the old "But I've got
| a worldwide information system in my pocket" stuff. It has the
| benefit of being true without being especially relevant.
|
| I miss the pinball game.
| JorgeGT wrote:
| 3D pinball space cadet? No need to miss it when it's freely
| available for modern Windows:
| https://www.ghacks.net/2017/04/21/play-3d-pinball-space-cade...
|
| Direct link: https://www.ghacks.net/download/132446
| jl6 wrote:
| Aside from it not being a UNIX, my main complaint about Windows
| 10 - and the thing I miss most from 90s computing - is the UI
| inconsistency, even across Microsoft's own applications, let
| alone the sprawling disconnected ecosystem of 3rd-party
| applications.
|
| Of course I recognise that Win10 is trying to operate in a far
| more complex environment than Win95 ever did, but that doesn't
| stop me reading every set of Win10 release notes with disinterest
| and disappointment, finding out that they are focusing on minor
| feature churn and not doing anything about the core UI issues.
|
| I often struggle to explain to my non-technical family how to do
| things using Windows 10 because it's all so arbitrary.
|
| Win95 was buggy and crap in other ways, but at least it had a
| manual that explained how to use it!
| legends2k wrote:
| Thanks for this walk down the memory lane, quite nostalgic for
| me; Win 95 was my first OS; boyhood days.
| stiray wrote:
| It is interesting that with 3d buttons in GUI I can immediately
| focus on the presable elements while I often struggle today with
| latest and the greatest flat designs - or rather say, my eyes are
| scanning for the button more time.
| hivacruz wrote:
| Still amazed by the border bottom on letters to show shortcuts to
| the users. So simple and convenient.
| isodev wrote:
| It would be nice to read a post comparing Windows 95 to Mac
| System 7, the OS it used for "inspiration".
|
| By extension one could day Windows 10 today still uses UI
| elements first introduced in Mac System 7.
| collsni wrote:
| I'm excited for all of the bricked iot in 5 to 10 years let alone
| 25 lol. Talk about wasteful. I try to only buy things I can host
| and control myself.
| burlesona wrote:
| Honestly it holds up pretty well. That UI isn't quite as "pretty"
| as some modern UIs, but I like it better than most in terms of it
| just being clear, consistent, and unsurprising.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| One brave GUI toolkit continues to use the Windows 95 look.
| Personally I really like that look (or _design language_ , as
| we're apparently meant to say these days). Clean, high-
| contrast, and it's clear which widgets are clickable. It has
| the added bonus that its drawing operations can easily be hard-
| coded for excellent performance.
|
| http://www.fox-toolkit.org/
| nikau wrote:
| The only thing missing is the application search feature where
| you can just type the app name to find it, that's about the
| only decent feature win7 onwards introduced.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Back when the start menu +only+ showed programs, this wasn't
| necessary.
| nikau wrote:
| not sure I agree, back then you had mountains of app
| entries with uninstall and readme and other junk all mixed
| in, it was tedious finding an app.
|
| now you just wack windows key, type in part of the app name
| and press enter.
| RedShift1 wrote:
| That only worked well on Windows 7. Today the start menu
| search is unreliable.
| juliend2 wrote:
| I'm wondering if some people here are still using it for real
| work. Like writing novels. Stuff like that.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| People forget how generally buggy and unstable 95 was, though.
|
| I remember as a kid, it somehow always got into a state when it
| always showed "restore from backup and restart", and that window
| never got away after reboot.
|
| After a while, me and my father learned to drag that error window
| to a bottom right corner and proceed with normal work as if it
| was never there. (There was no internet, and 7 year old me was
| more experienced with PCs than my father was.)
|
| So annoying.
|
| And all the BSODs. Ugh
|
| 98 and later XP were so much more stable.
| baal80spam wrote:
| For those interested in the history of Windows OS, this is hands
| down the best resource: https://www.winhistory.de/index.php
| tonymet wrote:
| In terms of usability, the design is light years ahead of modern
| desktop OS' (Windows 10 or MacOS) * high
| contrast UI with clear controls: clear buttons, scroll bars
| * consistent UI controls * low latency input (clicking
| buttons, opening/closing windows).
|
| I want my OS to be a tool that gets out of the way. It should be
| responsive & obvious.
|
| I think the web has conditioned people to expect 400-800ms
| latency on every interaction & bloated design.
|
| Let's bring back Windows 95 and NT 4.0. IMO , Windows 2k was the
| pinnacle desktop OS.
| userbinator wrote:
| The contrast and distinction between the different UI elements is
| immediately obvious. No mistaking a button for static text, and
| vice-versa. Also, no hidden scrollbars or other auto-hiding UI
| elements that are difficult to discover and irritating to use
| even once you know about them.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| The number of times I have opened a folder on macOS scrolled up
| and down wondering where the hell my file is before realizing
| it's hidden off to the SIDE is too damn high.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| There's an option somewhere in System Preferences to always
| show scrollbars. I wish that was the default.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| If you're talking about the "columns" view in Finder it's
| pretty obvious unless you're not paying attention where the
| contents of the folder you opened are displayed. Unless they
| happen to have exactly the same contents as another existing
| open folder at the same level the next column over's view
| visibly changes.
|
| I guess this would be awkward if you've never used it, but I
| can't imagine it being confusing more than once or twice
| unless you never look at the screen while opening folders.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| Icons view. Not columns. It will regularly open some of my
| folders in a window where the width of what it displays is
| less than the width of where it puts files so some require
| a side scroll. Why on earth it does this I have no clue.
| chiph wrote:
| The windows have edges! That tell you where to grab with your
| mouse to resize it!
|
| These days, dark mode on a black desktop background means you
| can't find where a window's surface ends.
| flowerlad wrote:
| This is one of the biggest annoyances in Windows 10. If you
| use Command Prompt and have several of them open with
| overlapping windows, then it is impossible to see where one
| window ends and the next one starts. If you have text in all
| of them you'll frequently read text from the next window and
| then realize that text is not in the current window.
|
| Windows 10 UX is under the control of the guy who came with
| the Flat UI and they don't care about annoyances such as
| this. They are very dogmatic, and no matter how many people
| complain they aren't going to give up any of their Flat UI
| principles.
| Flow wrote:
| There's a rumor that Windows 10 will be getting a major
| graphical redesign. Most welcome by me if true!
|
| https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/05/tech/windows-10-redesign
| -...
| baud147258 wrote:
| though today you can resize the window with Win key + arrows
| or by dragging the window.
| chiph wrote:
| Alt + Space will (still) bring up the control menu, and you
| can move or resize from there.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Win XP was better. You could specify where to put the
| window by keys and put n windows in tiles over the screen.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| > ...resize it!
|
| I began using altmove after discovering xfce's alt
| <mousebutton> functionality. I think I had to remap the move
| or the resize, one of the two, in altmove to get it to behave
| properly.
|
| http://www.altmove.com/
| grishka wrote:
| > Also, no hidden scrollbars
|
| I agree with the rest but not this. You no longer need visible
| scrollbars now that you do 99% of your scrolling with the wheel
| or the trackpad or sometimes the keyboard. You did need visible
| and prominent scrollbars back when mice lacked wheels so you
| actually clicked and dragged them.
| arp242 wrote:
| It still has value as 1) an indicator you can scroll in the
| first place, and 2) an indicator of where in the document you
| are.
| feanaro wrote:
| In fact, I would argue that 2 is the _primary_ use case for
| scrollbars.
| MawKKe wrote:
| 1) case in point: Windows 10 Settings
| fireattack wrote:
| I still click and drag scroll bar frequently. It's faster,
| easier to fine control the position (especially useful when
| you want to toggle between two or more positions).
|
| To me, all three ways to scroll (scrollwheel, auto-scroll,
| dragging scroll bar manually) have their uses.
| tartoran wrote:
| Even if it looks 'ugly' by today's standard those were good
| days UI/UX wise and things kept on improving. UIs were
| consistent and easy to use by mouse or keyboard and in my
| opinion things started going downhill ever since. I think good
| UI/UX will of course be rediscovered and the old ideas will be
| recycled into something new at some point.
| UIZealot wrote:
| > Even if it looks 'ugly' by today's standard
|
| No it does NOT. It's beautify because it's simple, yet
| consistent and clear.
|
| Today's "standard"? That's the ugly one.
| grishka wrote:
| IMO things started going downhill the moment laptop
| manufacturers started putting touchscreens into laptops. No
| one uses them with any kind of seriousness, but apparently
| every single UI designer now designs with them in mind for
| some bizarre reason.
| tartoran wrote:
| Yes, mixing the 2 paradigms was a disaster. Windows 10 got
| a lot of pushback when it removed the start button. They
| put it back and things improved a bit since then but I
| still disklike windows 10 a lot.
| pilsetnieks wrote:
| To offer a counterpoint - back then everything in an
| interface had to be painfully obvious and usable in a myriad
| of ways because a significant portion of users were computer-
| illiterate first timers.
|
| As it is now, and forever will be, I think the balance
| between usability and ease of development will be those 20%
| of effort to make your app palatable to 80% of the users
| (barring some exceptions by people with underdeveloped
| moneymaking sense whose self-description might involve the
| word "artisanal".)
| tartoran wrote:
| Yes, you have a point. When IPads/Iphones first came out
| they were so usable that old people who never touched a
| computer or toddlers could use them without much direction,
| they were quite intuitive. They've messed up since then
| though, they've gone into a dubious direction. And the rest
| of the industry followed good and bad apple UI/UX
| decisions, some of them even poorly and we have a confusing
| mess, confusing and headache inducing at times even for the
| computer literate.
| titzer wrote:
| I find touch interfaces have infantilized computing,
| turning everything into scrolling and big, fat, ad-
| looking buttons, and there is no way to really become
| skilled at them.
| swader999 wrote:
| I remember teaching old guys how to use a mouse in my first
| real programming job after school.
| laurent92 wrote:
| Windows classical UX was awesome:
|
| - Menus
|
| - Easy keyboard shortcuts with underlined keys in menus
| (Alt-F Alt-O!), and reconfigurable in general,
|
| - F1 Help working everywhere,
|
| - Unified keyboard shortcuts: F2 to rename, F5 to refresh
| (except in Lotus which closes entirely),
|
| - Reconfigurable an draggable toolbars!
|
| - Icons (those don't exist in the web)
|
| And so on. Treeviews! Lists with sortable and reorderable
| headers! They were awesome. It was the ultimate UI. Then they
| flattened everything and, worse than everything, came the
| time where treeviews disappeared and were replaced with
| infinite list sorted by "last document opened" like in Google
| Drive... That is what I regret most: Old documents being
| buried behind an infinite scroll, you can never be sure that
| you see and sort everything.
| core-questions wrote:
| Remember selecting more than one of something, and then
| being able to drag-and-drop it somewhere, or right click it
| and perform actions on the whole list?
|
| Remember tables with sortable column headers, in every app?
|
| Oh man. The web sucks so hard, and the kids working on it
| now are so used to it they don't even know how hard they've
| been fucked over. To think that in 2021 people still have
| to think about how to wire up a data table to some backend,
| thousands of people writing their own version of that every
| year....
| titzer wrote:
| Menus are so. fucking. awesome.
|
| Imagine. The computer giving you a list of the actions you
| can do, written in a language you already understand,
| organized hierarchically by the kind of thing you are
| operating on. And as a bonus, most of them have keyboard
| shortcuts that are/were immediately spelled out directly on
| the menu!
| cytzol wrote:
| You're damn right.
|
| The other day, I was using the Twitter web interface, and
| I realised I'd accidentally clicked the "Like" button on
| a tweet as I was going back to the previous page. Oh no,
| I haven't liked a _bad_ tweet, have I? Of course, I go
| forward, and the page has completely changed, showing me
| a bunch of stuff that wasn 't there the last time I saw
| it. Great, now I need to navigate the UI. I scan the
| interface for some sort of "likes list". It's not in the
| sidebar. It's not in the "more" in the sidebar. It's not
| even in "lists".
|
| So I open Tweetbot, search the menu bar for "like", find
| it in "Tabs - Likes", and perform the action I want in
| seconds. Web applications can never compare.
| ChickeNES wrote:
| It helped that Microsoft put out a design manual laying out
| their standards: "The Windows Interface Guidelines for
| Software Design: An Application Design Guide"
| Narishma wrote:
| I think it looks better than modern UIs.
| zbuf wrote:
| Interesting to see that screenshot of the old IE as it was the
| first time we started seeing toolbar buttons that didn't have a
| static border to show they were a button.
|
| You had to hover the mouse to know that it was clickable.
| Causality1 wrote:
| I remember being so excited every time a new Windows came out.
| These days I just dread what the next update is going to break.
| desktopninja wrote:
| Personally: Windows 2000 GUI any day. clear,
| concise and consistent.
| HenryKissinger wrote:
| How vulnerable was Windows 95 to computer viruses?
| II2II wrote:
| Windows 95 was very vulnerable to computer viruses. That being
| said, almost every personal computer operating system of the
| era was vulnerable. This was an era of single user operating
| systems where software could easily gain full access to the
| machine. The notion of the operating system running with
| greater privileges than applications was fuzzy since
| applications could simply inject a device driver override that.
| (Granted, that isn't technically necessary for computer
| viruses.)
|
| There were, of course, exceptions (e.g. Windows NT). Those
| exceptions were rare in homes and small businesses. There were
| people who would claim that their operating system is an
| exception, but most of those claims were only supported by
| virus writers having limited interest in those platforms.
| [deleted]
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Probably not very much, how many people out there are running
| Windows 95? The botnet authors have probably long ago trashed
| their win95 payloads.
| kristopolous wrote:
| You gotta more carefully define "vulnerable" and "computer
| virus" here, otherwise answers can only have equal hand-waving
| vagueness.
|
| There's security related processor features that the CPUs at
| the time didn't have and the kind of complete sandboxing
| abstractions we take for granted came at a high cost (VT
| instruction sets were a decade off and minimum ram was 4MB, not
| GB, but MB ... for everything, the whole system, all of it).
|
| As far as encryption goes, it was slow. Transparent disk
| encryption was totally possible but the performance hit was
| significant. People could be forgiven for deciding they really
| didn't care that much. Home users weren't keeping the kinds of
| secrets on their home computer that people do on their cell
| phones these days. The world was less digitally integrated.
| msla wrote:
| Windows 95 never ran on anything less than an 80386, which
| could and did run reasonably secure OSes. That CPU didn't
| have support for hardware virtualization, but "sandboxing" is
| vague enough that you can reasonably say that 32-bit
| protected mode enforced secure sandboxing at the hardware
| level on those chips.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Yes, 80386 had memory protection but windows 95 did not
| enforce it. That is the reason I started using linux.
| kristopolous wrote:
| I was talking about things like Skylake's Memory Protection
| Extensions, Nehalems Safer Mode Extensions, Software Guard
| Extension, the virtualization extensions around 2005, page
| table virtualization with EPT, TXT, RDRAND for hardware
| entropy etc
|
| That's why it depends
|
| Things like AES and SHA are implemented in hardware these
| days.
|
| We can get into discussion on whether netware or xenix on a
| 386 is an unusable dog or not, I've got an actual 386 about
| 6 feet away from me as I write this. I could even give you
| login if you want to live the pain.
|
| Windows 95 made compromises, read barbarians led by Bill
| Gates for a good rundown. It was never intended to be their
| network line (NT), but instead for traditional home
| computers. Internet explorer was super last minute that's
| why it was just licensed code from spyglass mosaic. It was
| released the day _after_ OEMs got windows 95.
|
| Gates didn't think there'd be a large demand for dialup
| modem based internet and that they had a few years to worry
| about it. He pivoted effectively a month or two before
| release. That's why MS pushed multiple patches out quickly
| after the release to get a competent networking stack
| outside of winsock.
|
| The people making windows 95 were competent and cared, they
| just had lots of conflicting priorities to attend to at
| once and people used it not as the manufacturers had
| intended. It's wasn't an easy job.
|
| Sure it has security vulnerabilities by 2021 standards. I'd
| venture to say every system in 1995 that could reasonably
| run on a typical 4 year old home computer did at the time.
| 386BSD 1.0, NetBSD 1.1, Linux 1.3, likely all riddled with
| issues by modern standards.
|
| And yes I'm obviously totally aware of the mainstream pop
| culture consensus of windows 95 sux or whatever. I mean
| duh, do you really think that's news to me?
|
| I know it could BSOD with some malformed packets and that
| its user security was totally fake. It was totally used in
| ways it wasn't designed for.
|
| Microsoft honestly thought serious stuff would be run on
| netware, MVS, sunos, os/2, hpux, nonstop os, tru64, os
| 2200, qnx, etc, certainly not windows 95. "Ah shit, here we
| go anyway"
|
| The curse of success
| exmadscientist wrote:
| > _It was totally used in ways it wasn 't designed for._
|
| Isn't this the hallmark of all truly revolutionary
| technologies?
| corey_moncure wrote:
| Never connect it to a network, and install all software from
| read only CD media, and you'll be just fine.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > and install all software from read only CD media
|
| Malware and AUTORUN.EXE: name a more iconic duo.
| Macha wrote:
| Yeah, there were even cases of malware making its way onto
| commercial software releases in those days.
| juotlrjrb wrote:
| Most viruses back then travelled through infected executables
| on diskettes and CDs.
|
| Many Win 95 computers had only sporadic net access or none at
| all.
| ggm wrote:
| Worked in an ISP whose bulk ordered install media for dialup
| config was preinfected either at the diskette factory or the
| bulk copyist. We'd shipped to customers before it was
| detected.
|
| A lot of virus came from people in supply chain basically.
| Even extra goodies installed in the handy local pc shop, "he
| said it made my pc faster" still happens.
|
| A lot of viruses were glued to the front of magazines
| marcodiego wrote:
| Extremely vulnerable. The whole time you're running the machine
| as root, there's simply no other option. Drivers could be in 16
| or 32 bits causing instabilities and kernel-level
| vulnerabilities. Memory protection was easy to circumvent and
| no special rights are needed to listen to keyboard, record
| audio, video or take screenshots.
|
| Auto-run was enabled by default. It was very easy to make bomb-
| cd's that installed anything just by inserting it on the drive.
| No centrally verified software repository and hard to acquire
| dev-tools forced the users to basically run whatever software
| was needed without compiling it themselves or by passing
| binaries from person to person. This alone made viruses spread
| vastly.
|
| And it created bad habits that survived to this day like hiding
| extension of files and installation processes that encourage
| the user to not pay attention on what is happening and simply
| accept what is asked.
| joejacket wrote:
| The release was painful even at the time:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lAkuJXGldrM
| yellowapple wrote:
| I'm convinced that the stark contrast between Bill Gates'
| awkward shuffle-clapping v. Steve Ballmer's cocaine-fueled
| mania is some kind of metaphor for the duality of man.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Common opinion agrees that windows 95 was the culmination of good
| UI. We've been down hill since then.
| sjwright wrote:
| IMHO Windows UI peaked with Windows 2000.[0] The main
| difference being that it eliminated redundant lines and reduced
| contrast where it wasn't needed. This improved the visual
| signal-to-noise ratio. I recall no significant regressions.
|
| [0] Functionally identical to Windows XP with the luna skin
| disabled, as well as Windows Server 2003.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| So written by a rodent user.
|
| What manner of masochism would inspire a man to waste his time
| "clicking" onto icons with a peripheral whose true function is
| video games? -- it is as though one enter text by way of a
| video game controller manually selecting characters one by one
| from a grid.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Boring but consistent design and near perfect implementation of
| controls.
| toast0 wrote:
| Windows 2000 is, I think, windows 95 refined, and really the
| peak (although some may prefer XP in classic mode).
|
| If you tried hard, you could see bits and pieces of 3.1
| interface in 95, but it was because you were running a fpga
| tool with an ancient file dialog, or you went out of your way
| to run progman, or an old installer launched progman for some
| reason (I think that sometimes happened, but could be
| misremembering 25 years ago). As opposed to newer windows where
| they change things, but not everything.
|
| I think 95 was the last time Microsoft did user research to
| figure out how to make UI that is appealing and useful. At
| least, it was the last time they published anything about it.
| Newer stuff may be more appealing, but seems to make things
| require more clicks or wait to load more often, meaning it
| takes users longer to do tasks, and is less useful.
| icedchai wrote:
| I also felt Windows 2000 was the peak. It was still
| relatively simple, no "eye candy" like you had with XP,
| Vista, and onward.
|
| I have an old Pentium III in the basement, running Windows
| 2000 server, which used to be my main desktop for a while. I
| haven't turned it on since 2005-ish.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > although some may prefer XP in classic mode
|
| XP was IMO the inflection point, where Windows started to get
| worse faster than it got better. And close to my heart,
| Windows XP was the first version of Windows that was too big
| to fit on my trusty Compaq Presario 1210 and its whopping
| 1.4GB hard drive.
|
| If Microsoft had "stopped" at Windows 2000 (like it has
| ostensibly "stopped" at Windows 10), and had focused on
| refining that piece of near-perfection, I'd probably still be
| a Windows user today, and happily so. My dissatisfaction with
| Windows - starting with XP/2003, but _especially_ every
| version after - was the big reason why I looked into
| alternatives like Linux.
| UIZealot wrote:
| > If Microsoft had "stopped" at Windows 2000 (like it has
| ostensibly "stopped" at Windows 10), and had focused on
| refining that piece of near-perfection
|
| I for one, wished for the same thing.
|
| Alas, once Apple came out with its shiny Aqua UI (which I
| must say was beautify in a totally different way),
| Microsoft was too insecure not to try and match that. They
| failed miserably in Windows XP, which felt rushed, forced,
| and contrived. But it certainly looked more colorful.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > Alas, once Apple came out with its shiny Aqua UI
|
| Which is another thing that I can't stand: "Apple did
| something, so now we have to do it, too". Apple changed
| some UI element? Guess what everyone's gonna copy. Apple
| ditched the headphone jack? Guess what everyone's gonna
| copy.
|
| You'd think that more companies would figure out that
| product differentiation is what makes them, you know,
| actually relevant amidst competition.
| UIZealot wrote:
| I can't stand it either. But I think I'm beginning to
| _understand_ it.
|
| It seems that's the way it works for competition in the
| _consumer_ market. Consumers respond to the coolness
| factor in a major way. Microsoft probably felt that they
| _had_ to try to keep up.
|
| As near perfect as Windows 2000 was, compared to Aqua it
| was also perfectly ...boring.
|
| Come to think of it, XP wasn't even a bad start given the
| less than two years it had in development. The real
| tragedy is that Microsoft couldn't do any better for the
| next _two decades_. Windows 7 was worse, 8 even worse,
| 10? hopeless.
|
| Maybe it's time Microsoft throw in the towel, admit that
| they have no taste[0], and go back to the Windows 2000
| look. They lucked into it somehow, and it still holds up
| better than anything else they have tried.
|
| One can always hope.
|
| [0] https://www.cnet.com/news/steve-jobs-our-favourite-
| quotes/
| hyakosm wrote:
| The control panel was simple and clean in classic Windows,
| in Windows XP it's a maze with big icons and hypertext
| links, hopefully the classic view was still there.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Yep. Switching back to that classic view is the first
| thing I do on any Windows machine I touch. I've given it
| plenty of honest tries and in all of 5 minutes I'm fed up
| with it. So much easier to find things when they're, you
| know, actually visible and not hidden behind multiple
| different screens.
|
| Discoverability in general seems to be a long-forgotten
| virtue of UI/UX design. Everything insists on hiding
| everything now. Phones do it, websites do it, macOS is
| increasingly doing it, Windows is increasingly doing it,
| Linux desktop environments are increasingly doing it
| (though thankfully there are a lot of holdouts)...
|
| The "cluttered" UI is long overdue for a comeback.
| dleslie wrote:
| I dual-booted 2000 and XP for a time because 2000 was
| simply superior for meaningful work, while XP was good for
| gaming. And it looked like a toy, too.
| Narishma wrote:
| That was just the default theme. You could make it look
| exactly like Windows 2000 by switching the classic theme.
| dleslie wrote:
| I'm aware, but many of the settings interfaces and system
| UIs were nerfed.
| XorNot wrote:
| Things like the Office ribbon were a product of Microsoft
| user research, I just have no idea how they reached the
| conclusions they did with it (and I've watched a presentation
| by one of the lead designers on their reasoning - which all
| sounds valid, but doesn't explain how they specifically
| reached "the ribbon" and "personalized menus moving all over
| the place" as a solution).
|
| I have a suspicion that the rise of the "user experience"
| engineer as opposed to UI designers played a big role - they
| got a bunch of people, did a bunch of research, and managed
| to narrow their focus to "so the first time a user ever opens
| Word, having somehow never used anything like it
| previously..." and ignored "our entire company is powered by
| enterprise sales of this product".
| RedShift1 wrote:
| The ribbon get a lot of flack but personally I love the
| ribbon. I fell in love with it the first time I used it, so
| much better than navigating through classic menus. The
| implementation of it is excellent in Office. Other
| applications have tried implementing the same thing but
| they don't get it as right as Office does. Many seem to
| think the ribbon is how you control the program, but that's
| not really the point of the ribbon: the ribbon is dependent
| on the context, it supplies you with the tools that are
| available for whatever part of the work piece you have in
| front of you.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > the ribbon is dependent on the context
|
| Is it? That would explain why I find it confusing and
| moving buttons around randomly.
| RedShift1 wrote:
| Yes, that is one of the tenets of the ribbon. For example
| in Word, it makes no sense to show you options to style a
| table if your cursor is not inside a table.
| michrassena wrote:
| Whatever the reasoning behind the ribbon, I still associate
| the era the ribbon was introduced with 16:9 displays
| becoming common, starting with laptops. In that case, users
| would have had less vertical screen real-estate for
| developers to work with. If you remember the old Office,
| the menus were nested fairly deeply and it became a bit of
| a maze to use some of the features.
|
| I had been using computers for so long at that point that I
| still don't feel 100% comfortable with the ribbon. It's
| fine, I can do what I need to do to work the programs. It's
| just a bit fiddly in a way the standard menus weren't. I
| used to be able to invoke commands with keystrokes and
| arrow keys. Now there's are bunch of icons on different
| scales, which sometimes hide if the window isn't maximized.
| XorNot wrote:
| Where it kicks me is the loss of real estate for toolbar
| buttons.
|
| Pre-ribbon (and currently in LibreOffice which is what I
| now use), I could keep File control, Fonts and Styles,
| Reviewing and Drawing all on the one screen.
|
| Post-ribbon...this is literally impossible.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Here's my theory, having never worked there but having seen
| how sausages get made in a hierarchical company. A "VIP"
| designer in Microsoft invented the ribbon out of some
| creative inspiration or chemically induced fever dream. In
| order to justify developing it, _user research_ had to be
| conducted. Since the designer was a very high ranking
| person, the research obviously could only have one
| conclusion: the ribbon is good and should be implemented.
| And so data was found that showed the ribbon was good, and
| data that showed otherwise was discarded, and like that, we
| got the ribbon!
| nikau wrote:
| The worst is going back to mac versions of office after you
| have finally gotten used to everything being in the ribbon,
| half the stuff is in the ribbon, the other half is buried
| in menus, its incredibly frustrating.
| frompdx wrote:
| My vote goes to either 2000 or NT4. Believe it or not I used
| NT4 as late as 2011 to load programs on an even older CNC
| lathe.
| lmarcos wrote:
| > This problem, by the way, is even more important today. Now,
| most of the services are on the web and in the cloud, and I can
| guess that all "smart" devices, we are using today, will not be
| able to start at all 25 years later.
|
| Imho, that's the most important part of the article.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Ah the 90s when computers were cool!
| ralphc wrote:
| If you're thinking of doing something similar, either in a VM or
| on compatible hardware, I recommend Windows 98. You get FAT32
| which gets you larger hard drives, where pre-OSR2 Windows 95 has
| FAT, where the max hard drive size is 2GB, you need to divide
| larger drives into multiple drive letters. Windows 98 also gives
| you easier third-party ways to turn on universal USB flash drive
| functionality. Without it you need a driver for each flash drive,
| good luck finding that today. Windows 98 is basically the
| pinnacle of DOS-based windows for gaming, Windows ME takes away
| some DOS functionality.
| Narishma wrote:
| VMs tend to offer poor to non-existent support for anything
| pre-Windows XP. I recommend PCem instead.
| rnd0 wrote:
| I'd recommend 86box over pcem, myself. It has support for a
| lot more machines, frequent releases (including snapshots)
| and a better UI.
|
| Plus you don't have to go on a wild goose chase hunting down
| roms.
| Narishma wrote:
| In my experience, 86box tends to require a lot more
| resources than PCem. For example, a standard PC XT
| configuration will peg a whole CPU core in 86box at 100%
| while PCem will use just 10% of a single core. I don't know
| if it's a bug but it makes using 86box on a laptop
| uncomfortable.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| For a quick lookaround, launch one in a WebAssembly VM in your
| browser: http://copy.sh/v86/ or https://bellard.org/jslinux/
| (faster, but only has Windows 2000)
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| I would recommend Windows NT 4. Because it is NT-based it runs
| well on modern systems and VMs without special patching, and
| even has VirtualBox integration. Yet it has that lovely Windows
| 95 UI (though slightly different in a few places). If you
| prefer the Internet Explorer-infested 98 UI, you can install
| the Windows Desktop Update in NT 4.
|
| It can run most Windows 9x software, though games may be a
| problem. It has Pinball though!
| dkarras wrote:
| Anyone remember the "hipster winamp" Kjofol?
|
| Also there was an application, I believe called "gooey" that
| would automatically create a chatroom for any site you visit. So
| when you visit a site, there would be a chat for that particular
| url and people would chat in it.
| jonplackett wrote:
| This brings back soooo many memories. Half good, half bad.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Yeah, I'm fondly remembering spending many hours just waiting
| for the OS to install, with me having to check back on the
| computer every so often just to insert disk 7 of 13. But no
| question it was a historical event when Win95 launched. The
| right culmination of factors came together in the mid-90s where
| now everyone needed to own a personal computer. Ink jet
| printers were becoming decent. Digital cameras went mainstream.
| CD burning with an MP3 capable stereo receiver meant you could
| carry 100 songs with you on the go and kids would make bank
| selling custom mixes for $5-$10 a pop (not everyone had a
| burner yet, they were expensive at the time). And of course,
| that whole dot com craze that turned out to be an insignificant
| bubble...
| jonplackett wrote:
| Windows 95 was the first thing I got on CD, which was awesome
| for installing.
|
| But it also came with a music video from Weezer which played
| FULL SCREEN. And felt like full on witchcraft after the
| pixelly goodness of windows 3.11
| superkuh wrote:
| It looks better and more functional than my Gtk3 based desktop
| environment on linux today. It's amazing how much the desktop
| environments have regressed in linux over the last decade.
| Cloudef wrote:
| Use something else than gnome. Gnome devs live in their own
| bubble
| superkuh wrote:
| I have used something other than GNOME for more than a
| decade. The GNOME devs still control Gtk3 and the Gtk3 file
| chooser is used by many DE and applications. Heck, I can't
| even get my KDE/Qt applications to use their native file
| chooser under Debian 10 w/MATE. So even using KDE
| applications is no escape.
| RedShift1 wrote:
| You're getting downvoted but this is absolutely true.
| OJFord wrote:
| Love or hate the UI, my basic reaction is 'recognisable'. What's
| changed, really?
|
| Superficial churn like flat, skeumorphic, minimalist, whatever,
| sure, but nothing like TUI to GUI, windows, or the mouse.
| arendtio wrote:
| What I like most about Win 95 when I started it a few years ago
| on the original hardware (some 133MHz PC), was the speed. Sure
| the old harddrive was quite slow, but if the harddrive is not
| involved the OS is actually pretty fast.
| nayuki wrote:
| UI tip: In any window, double-click on the icon at the top left
| to close the window.
|
| This has existed since Windows 3 and persisted through 95, XP,
| 10, etc., but not many people know about it.
|
| App windows that have custom chrome like Chrome, Firefox, etc.
| cannot use this trick, however.
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| The best thing about win95 was the built in drivers for common
| network cards, as well as TCP/IP support without jumping through
| a lot of hoops.
| frompdx wrote:
| One of the most frustrating things for me about Windows 8/8.1/10
| was the classic theme (Win95/NT style) was no longer a UI theme
| option without downloading something third party. It really is
| the thing that killed my interest in Windows after Windows 7.
|
| Good things don't need to change. I'm thankful my remaining
| reason for having a Windows OS available is becoming irrelevant
| due to progress in running games on Linux.
| techrat wrote:
| I, too, always switched on Classic Theme after every Windows
| install. It was a large part of what drew me to XFCE/xUbuntu in
| the end. Numix and Adwaita-dark gets close enough to the
| Classic UI Windows the way I had it configured.
| [deleted]
| limeblack wrote:
| If I recall UXTheme patcher unlocked the themes and let you
| download classic. This isn't pretty bad and yet annoying.
| gerdesj wrote:
| "Windows 8/8.1/10 was the"
|
| Which bit of 95 did you fail to understand?
| jfoutz wrote:
| Microsoft's legendary backwards compatibility not being
| extended to support win95's look and feel.
|
| That part.
| tomerv wrote:
| You didn't even finish reading the first sentence.
| LocalH wrote:
| Did you just stop reading there?
| [deleted]
| doubleunplussed wrote:
| > Is 100 MB is the minimum program size in 2021? Last time, when
| I was downloading the drivers for my new Brother printer, it was
| about 250 MB, I still have no idea what they did include in the
| archive.
|
| When I see something that should be tiny being about 250MB, it's
| usually that they bundled Qt for the GUI. I suppose that's a cost
| of cross-platform tools. The 10kb executable the author made was
| using system GUI libraries, a dynamically linked executable on a
| system with Qt etc already installed would be similar.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| VLC "only" clocks at 38 Mo, and uses Qt. It's also pretty much
| today's Winamp.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| I hold out a hopeless wish that the source code for Windows 95
| and Windows 98 will someday make it to GitHub under a MIT
| licence, like the File Manager, DOS 1.0 and the Windows Console
| did.
|
| Imagine it with a new jolt of life for modern hardware. Office 97
| on a 16 core CPU is the dream.
| techrat wrote:
| I'd love to see Win NT4 sourced. Rock solid and minimal
| compared to Win95 and Win98. I loved using it... until I
| realised how much slower everything felt because drivers were
| optimised/accelerated for the other Windows OSes instead.
|
| Complete graphical OS in ~200 MB. Miss those days.
| convery wrote:
| Recently I went through the attic and found an old laptop (120Mhz
| CPU, 32Mb RAM, low-RPM 810Mb HDD) with Win98 installed on in. To
| my amazement it could boot and start Excel and Word within 10sec.
| Compared to my workstation (20 cores + HT @ 2.5Ghz, 110Gb RAM,
| PCIe SSD) which takes upward of 40 sec to get to the desktop.
|
| Really makes one question the current state of software. Sure,
| Win7 has some more features, but imagine someone in 98 saying:
| "we have a great idea for a new OS, it'll have more features than
| Win98 and it'll only take 4 times longer to boot if you are
| running it on a cluster of supercomputers, but those new features
| are gonna be worth it" =P
|
| Sidenote on the hardware side: The laptop had a hinge for the
| keyboard so you could raise it to a 20 degree angle, the
| CD/Floppy drive had the same connector as the battery so you
| could swap the drive for another battery if going on a trip.
| There were two sliding switches for backlight and speaker-volume.
| Access to the internals via a simple latch. It may have been a
| brick but it had interesting ideas.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ThinkPad_760
| Yhippa wrote:
| When I was a kid I remember thinking that if it took 20 seconds
| to boot now, how fast would it be in 20 years when hardware got
| significantly better.
|
| Fast forward to now and I'll hit the power button, go do some
| stuff for a few minutes, and then finally use the damn thing.
| moron4hire wrote:
| What kind of janky jalopies are you folks running? It takes
| my machine all of ten seconds to boot, wait for me to enter
| my pin, and load the desktop fully.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| Yeah... I mean, I bag on Windows as much as the next Linux
| zealot, but my Win10 gaming machine -- still an Athlon64 --
| boots from cold start to usable desktop in 5 seconds. It
| ONLY plays Civ V, but still.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Half the time when I reboot my windows box it will want to
| install updates....
| brundolf wrote:
| I commented above but I think it's because they're still on
| Windows 7. Significant improvements were made in Windows 10
| notriddle wrote:
| Corporate spyware.
|
| I have two laptops. One I own, with Windows 10, and one
| from work, also with Windows 10. Both Thinkpads, but not
| the same model.
|
| I own the cheaper one. It's faster.
| slacktide wrote:
| My work computer is like that. It takes a while to reconnect
| to all the servers and get the corporate spyware up and
| running.
|
| My Windows 10 PC goes from cold/dark to ready for use in,
| well, 20 seconds. I keep it lean.
|
| My 1982 TI99/4a can go from boot to running a program in
| about 1.5 seconds, if you can hit "2" as soon as the program
| selector screen shows. SOLID STATE SOFTWARE
| muxator wrote:
| You have my upvote for "corporate spyware" :)
| avereveard wrote:
| What annoys me isn't boot time per se, but the sluggines that
| permains after login as the services-not-services start up
| and one after another try to steal bandwidth from a WiFi that
| isn't yet connected.
|
| If I could wait whatever time and then log into a usable
| system it'd be fine, but no, it's a minute after login before
| I'm in control of local resources
| bawolff wrote:
| Otoh, linux used to take forever to boot compared to windows,
| now its speedier than windows.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| Not on my machine. Windows 10 takes just a few seconds
| (fast boot disabled because of dual boot), whereas Linux
| Mint takes around 20 seconds. Maybe it's because I have
| many USB devices attached.
|
| It doesn't matter but shutdown matters a lot on dual boot
| systems, and unfortunately Linux Mint sometimes takes
| minutes to restart. I believe it's related to systemd and
| it's very annoying (sometimes I need to switch quickly
| because I take Zoom calls on Windows).
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| What machine? I've got a 16GB i7 SurfacePro, seems to
| take minutes compared to other computers I use.
|
| Windows updates still take hours and still sometimes need
| multiple reboots vs Kubuntu which updates whilst in use
| and barely ever needs rebooting.
|
| Having come back to MS Win (for work) after a decade+
| away, and with an MS produced computer I was expecting to
| be blown away by the speed.
|
| Aside: have you tried systemd-analyze blamw, very useful
| for diagnosing boot slowdowns;
| https://www.commandlinux.com/man-page/man1/systemd-
| analyze.1...
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| I agree. Even when Windows has "fast startup" enabled, the
| time from POST to actual desktop in Linux is still better
| and has improved significantly, and Windows still has that
| "tends to go slower as you start to install stuff on it".
| These days I can usually reach Gnome even before my
| _monitors_ have had time to boot.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I used to like how KDE could load a session in the
| background so when you logged in it was ready: for me the
| post-login takes as long as boot; which makes it
| annoying.
|
| Not as bad as it used to be when the audio tape failed
| after 20 mins, but still.
| robryan wrote:
| It really depends what is running. By default on Ubuntu at
| least it has a service that is blocking waiting for a
| network connection.
| bawolff wrote:
| Hmm, i dont run ubuntu, but what happens if the wifi is
| down? That seems exceptionally silly.
| toast0 wrote:
| It used to be you could hit ctrl-c to stop waiting for
| dhcp. But last time I ran into that on Debian, you just
| had to wait for it to give up; of course that was also
| waiting for dhcp on a wired NIC that wasn't even plugged
| in.
|
| That was quite a few years ago, I'd hope it got better,
| but it was one of the things that made me decide to move
| to FreeBSD.
| theodric wrote:
| In 2001 I could go from LILO to idling WindowMaker in 12
| seconds, far faster than Win2k or XP or any of the earlier
| DOS-based Windowses
| ryandrake wrote:
| My Commodore 64 from the early 80s booted near instantly.
| Maybe 1 or 2 seconds. This was a cold boot from zero--no
| hibernation or standby. How far we have regressed!
| vidanay wrote:
| Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Everything from my
| TI-99/4a to my Apple IIc were basically like turning on the
| radio. Instant. But that's mostly because they didn't
| really do ANYTHING at startup.
| michrassena wrote:
| I didn't realize at the time how fortunate I was to have a
| Tandy 1000HX when I was growing up. It was one of the only
| PCs I'm aware of which had DOS in ROM. Of course you were
| stuck with DOS 2.2 or something. But startup times were
| beyond almost every device I've used since, and certainly
| miles ahead of any PC.
|
| Here's a quick demo from a similar Tandy model:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaSkda4XW3k
| kiwijamo wrote:
| Acorn also had RISC OS in ROM. Booted in about two
| seconds. Yes it was tricky when you had to upgrade but I
| suspect the constraints made the ROMs better quality.
| Certainly was rare to come across bugs etc and the
| performance was miles ahead of the current software we
| have today.
| goatgoatgoat wrote:
| I upgrade the OS for an Acorn A3000 around 30 years ago.
| It wasn't too bad. Carefully remove the old ROMs from
| their sockets and carefully push the new ROMs into the
| now empty sockets. Quickest OS upgrade I've ever done.
| stonogo wrote:
| The IBM PS/1 had MS-DOS 4.01 in ROM. You could install
| newer versions on the hard drive, but I remember being
| bitterly disappointed on installing the 2.5MB RAM
| expansion, because the memory test slowed the boot
| process down tremendously.
| raydev wrote:
| Sounds like you're still running a spinning hard drive?
|
| I have two PCs, one with a 2.5" SSD and another with an m.2,
| both are ready to use with 10-15 seconds of cold boot.
|
| But cold boot usually isn't necessary, since they sleep just
| fine.
| spockz wrote:
| I'm not sure it is necessarily the drives. My hexacore
| desktop spends more time in POST (or how it is called these
| days in uefi) than in windows boot. It takes 3s from
| loading the boot partition to when I can enter my password
| and about 20-30s before it actually decides to boot the
| windows EFI rom.
| slavik81 wrote:
| That does amaze me. I remember booting taking ages on my 166MHz
| Windows 98 machine. I'd press the power button and go do
| something else while it booted.
| TheHypnotist wrote:
| Seriously. From powered off to being on the internet (56k) it
| was like 5 minutes. Now with my SSD and modern broadband it's
| about 5 seconds.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| It is incredible how much people's "perceptions" are
| altered after a mere 20 years.
| Tenoke wrote:
| What used to get me was that I'd have to reboot on nearly
| every install/update/significant change to my PC, thus
| waiting hours total on just booting every month.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Not to mention just maintenance reboots because eventually
| the computer would just get nutty if you didn't
| periodically reboot it. Some time around windows 2000 or
| perhaps even Vista was when you finally could run the OS
| for weeks without rebooting.
| Macha wrote:
| I had that for a while on my Arch Linux install. Then I set up
| full disk encryption. So now of my 45s boot, 20s is me typing
| the password, 20s is running the luks kdf, and 5s is the entire
| rest of the boot process.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| There is NO WAY an HDD laptop boots Windows 98 in 10 seconds.
| Even booting Windows 98 in a VM on a 1yr old processor backed
| by _friggin RAM_ takes slightly more than that.
|
| Windows 98 used to take 1-3 minutes to boot on that level of
| hardware. And if you had any type of network, it was probably
| even more than 3 minutes. There is a reason hibernation (even
| at the BIOS level) was all the rage these days.
|
| For better or worse, MS did something on Windows during the XP
| era that finally made it be able to boot fast (on modern
| hardware at least). Win2K still has insanely long "delays".
| madpata wrote:
| Maybe has something to do with cached driver configuration,
| but I don't know which version of Windows introduced it. It
| has to do with remembering which drivers were loaded the last
| time the OS ran and loading those first on reboot. Saves time
| on checking the whole driver catalog.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| I remember at the time some propaganda about XP doing
| "concurrent initialization" for some drivers. My impression
| is they just fine-tuned some of the IO delay loops (or
| equivalent). Most of the Win2k boottime is spent with no
| CPU or disk usage. XP is way more efficient at that.
| jacquesm wrote:
| My old BBC Micro would go from 'on' to 'prompt' in under the
| time it would take my hand to move to the keyboard.
|
| But then again it had a lot less in terms of hardware to deal
| with, memory to test and so on.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| In fact the BBC Micro would "boot" in the time it takes to
| play two musical notes, one octave and a tone apart (double-
| length-B, short-C, _geddit?!_ )
|
| To be fair to PCs the DFS prompt was more like a boot-loader
| than an OS.
| jlarcombe wrote:
| Hah I never noticed that those were those notes! I believe
| that's just a remarkable coincidence because the first,
| lower note is just the result of the SN76489 sound chip
| being powered up but "uninitialised", as it were. In theory
| different chips would give different tones but in practice
| all the ones they used seemed to give a consistent result.
| CardenB wrote:
| I think mainly we have shifted to just never turning off
| computers and optimizing for standby.
| wvenable wrote:
| > which takes upward of 40 sec to get to the desktop.
|
| My ancient Core i5 with a whopping 4 cores gets to the Windows
| 10 desktop in just a few seconds.
|
| The truth is that people care much more about features than
| performance -- especially system/app start up performance.
| Microsoft has always bet on Moore's law -- building software
| just not quite usable on modern hardware knowing that
| eventually hardware will catch up. Anyone designing software
| for today is immediately behind tomorrow.
| baud147258 wrote:
| weird, I got a much smaller workstation (like dual core and 10
| Gb of RAM) and I get to the desktop in ~ 10 seconds. Maybe
| Windows is spinning up each core one after the other?
| Macha wrote:
| It's less likely to be the amount of cores but rather the
| amount of RAM actually.
| rkagerer wrote:
| My first computer was a TRS-80 and it booted faster than any
| computer I've owned since.
| chubot wrote:
| A similar thing that really opened my eyes: running Windows XP
| in VirtualBox on a $999 Macbook Air from 2016.
|
| It really flies!!! It's fast to boot up and fast to use. It's
| more usable than the host OS !!! It even recognizes some USB
| devices quite well and has drivers.
|
| In 2021, the host OS of my Macbook Air has somehow rotted, even
| though I installed like 4 programs on it ever, and I barely use
| it (I use Linux for almost all tasks). Everything is slow, with
| both jank and "intended" animations.
|
| On the other hand, virtualized Windows XP is extremely
| responsive.
|
| It also runs in a tiny amount of RAM -- I think I can set the
| VirtualBox VM to 256 MB RAM or something (don't quote me on
| that)
|
| This Macbook Air has 8 GB of RAM and it's slow. I think when I
| got it in 2016, it was decently fast. Somehow in 2021 all the
| updates made it slow to a crawl. As always iTunes is a big
| offender. Somehow playing MP3s has to be a chore. I think
| Spotlight is another offender and that's something that Windows
| XP didn't have.
|
| I use Ubuntu for my Linux desktop, and it has similar problems.
| There's lag everywhere and it uses a ton of RAM. It's not more
| usable from a UI perspective. I see a lot of "lateral"
| progress, although to be fair Ubuntu from 10-15 years ago was
| pretty bad (definitely less usable than Windows), and they have
| made progress.
| winrid wrote:
| If you're using Win7, it's not taking full advantage of your
| SSD to boot fast. Win8/10 will boot much faster.
| circularfoyers wrote:
| I think it's worth mentioning the reason for this is mostly
| because of the fast boot feature, which means Windows is
| actually just leaving hibernation opposed to cold booting.
| convery wrote:
| I have used Win10 as well, about the same boot time.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| I have to concur with the other commenters, it sounds like
| your system might have some kind of strange configuration.
| I haven't had a computer that took longer than around 10
| seconds to boot since Windows 7. SSDs made a massive
| difference. Then Windows 8 introduced hybrid boot for
| certain configurations, and Windows 10 made it pretty much
| standard. My Android phone (Pixel) takes longer to boot
| than my Windows computer (Surface).
| nikau wrote:
| Not sure what you are doing, my win 10 box boots to desktop
| in around 10 seconds if that
| omegabravo wrote:
| My personal Window 10 box boots within 10 seconds. My
| corporate laptop takes an eternity despite being more
| powerful.
|
| I suspect configuration (software and hardware) has a
| massive impact which is being glossed over.
| nikau wrote:
| Well yes, corporate machines are a different issue.
|
| I have a corporate mac that's sluggish due to mcafee
| chewing 100% CPU for 5 minute intervals, anything with
| "enterprise" management software on it is going to suck
| regardless of OS.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| Just wait until you see windows 10 on a 2GB machine with
| mcafee, and then corona forces ms teams on it. Boot takes
| 15 minutes to usable. Usable means msword produces a
| character on the screen in less than 10 seconds after you
| type it.
|
| IT closed the users ticket without action: As long as it
| boots in 15 minutes or less, there is no performance
| problem.
| lanstin wrote:
| Yeah I have a Mac Book with 32G iof RAM and 8/16 cores
| and always five or so of the top 7 processes for CPU are
| spy ware. Unless I do a massive multi account terraform
| apply - that can outcompete them. Even compiling doesn't,
| go is so fast.
| astrange wrote:
| In my experience as a performance engineer, slow performance in
| things like boot isn't because of "bloat", it's just because of
| random bugs that may or may not correlate to having added more
| features. There is a tradeoff in development time between
| features and bug fixing of course.
| brundolf wrote:
| I was trying to figure out why your experience is so much
| different from mine until I noticed you said "Win7"
|
| You should try Windows 10. They made dramatic improvements to
| the boot time and my (significantly less beefy) desktop cold-
| boots in <10s.
| chemmail wrote:
| Some optimized laptops are pretty insane. I just got an Asus
| G14 with a Ryzen 4900HS, the UEFI boot is animated and has a
| slicing sound and gets into desktop in maybe 5 seconds. I
| think I can even change the boot animation with the "ROG"
| button and can make the lid lights dance around unlike the
| lame Apple logo.
| rubatuga wrote:
| windows 10 actually does "fast startup" which is kind of
| like hibernation, similar to hybrid sleep introduced in the
| past.
| lou1306 wrote:
| They did, but they had to turn "shutdown" into some kind of
| "hibernate on steroid". Doing a clean boots takes a bit
| longer. And we're talking modern, SSD-equipped machines vs.
| old laptops with spinning disks.
| brundolf wrote:
| Shutdown, Hibernate, and Sleep are three different things.
| I'm talking about a proper shutdown; I almost never even
| bother with Hibernate because a regular cold boot is fast
| enough
| nullify88 wrote:
| I don't think you understand the comment parent made.
| Windows 10 comes with a feature called Fast Boot and it
| is usually enabled by default depending on RAM, driver
| support etc. What used to be a "proper shutdown" is now a
| hybrid hybernate. Parts of the OS in particular related
| to bootup are stored in a hybernation file which is
| loaded at boot time resulting in faster boots. This is
| because Windows can now skip driver init and load state
| from previous boots.
| lou1306 wrote:
| Indeed, I was referring to Fast Boot but did not recall
| the exact name. Thank you for providing further insight
| on how it works.
| usrusr wrote:
| I believe that cameras do that to the extreme (at least
| my now comically outdated G1 does that, I think): do a
| full reboot + hibernate on shutdown, which can take
| multiple seconds but which is fine because it's happening
| at a time when nobody is waiting for it, to then "boot
| up" in a fraction of a second because the system image is
| so small.
|
| This is now my mental model for tricks like fast boot
| (which are obviously not applied to the full stack)
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Honestly I've never noticed a difference on any of my
| Nikon DSLRs between waking up from stand-by and switching
| it off. (And I even had a D1 at some point!)
|
| It's just instantly on and working. I also never noticed
| a difference in battery life, so I only used the on-off
| switch as a sort of button lock. I suspect that for
| Nikons that's really all it does, keep the camera from
| waking up from a button press.
|
| I'd guess these use some fairly small, low power RAM
| that's for the "control plane", which is simply always on
| because power consumption is negligible, while the "data
| plane" is just a "dumb" ASIC with some DRAM which can
| turn on in a fraction of a second.
| usrusr wrote:
| My Pana has noticeable shutdown lag (about 1.5s)
| suspiciously contrasting the immediate bootup/wake-up.
| I'd never have started suspecting that they do that
| hibernate trick if the shutdown started with screen-off
| instead of proudly (?) displaying a branded placeholder
| screen. Makes me wonder if maybe far more embedded
| systems that we know actually do have a slow boot
| process, but hide it in a slow shutdown that they run
| invisibly after screen off. If you are as curious as me,
| take one of your Nikon and flick the power-switch off-on
| quickly, that should show how deep it really went into
| off-ness.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| If I hold the shutter down and flick the power switch on,
| it immediately takes a picture, if I flick back and forth
| it keeps taking pictures. There seems to be something
| like a 0.2 s delay between the click of the power switch
| and the clack of the shutter. That's more than the normal
| shutter lag (around ~50 ms for most DSLRs), but not much.
| If I do it two-handed I get around 2 fps out of the
| camera.
|
| The Z6 mirrorless which I also have is noticeably slower.
| I'd say around ~1.5 seconds from the power switch to the
| shutter. From the noises it makes I'm guessing it is
| doing something with the IBIS in that extra time, which
| the DSLR does not have.
|
| Power-up (remove battery, move power switch to "on"
| position, insert battery, observe time until meter (DSLR)
| or EVF (mirrorless) turns on) takes both of these around
| 1.5-2 seconds.
|
| Edit: Old film Nikons also had pretty clever "power
| management". For example, on the Nikon FE the meter
| circuit is switched on and off automatically with the
| advance lever: If the advance lever is flush with the
| body, the cameras is off and the shutter is locked.
| Moving it to the shooting position (where it sticks about
| a centimeter out) the meter is powered and the shutter is
| unlocked. Even while advancing the film the meter is
| powered off. Very clever. Batteries last forever in it.
| usrusr wrote:
| I don't know why, but I enjoy this little round of remote
| reverse engineering, thanks for playing along. "Cycling
| with shutter button pressed" is a very interesting
| technique, particularly when pointing at some digital
| stopwatch as timecode or something like that.
|
| Another interesting specimen is the tiny RX0 I use for
| quick snapshots on the go, it seems to light up
| "services" to the screen in almost random visible order,
| with noticeable differences between a "doubleclick"
| restart and starting from settled state (e.g. screen
| lights up much later in the sequence on quick turnaround)
| squarefoot wrote:
| Too bad they also added Cortana, telemetry, advertising and
| all sorts of annoyances. It would be nice if there was a safe
| (no warez) way of disabling, or better removing all of them
| for good. Win 10 would still have an atrocious UI compared to
| everything since XP, but there are mods for that.
| dunnevens wrote:
| Cortana is basically dead. Microsoft has finally
| acknowledged her unpopularity. You can disable it easily in
| Windows. I went over my privacy settings with a fine-
| toothed comb. Haven't seen an ad or Candy Crush since the
| first few minutes of a new install. Uninstalled OneDrive
| since I don't use it and it's one of the bigger offenders
| for unwanted advertising.
|
| Many, if not most, of Windows annoyances can be blocked
| without 3rd party software. It follows the usual Windows
| tradition of first look for a well hidden setting in
| Control Panel / Settings. If it's not there, look in Group
| Policy. And as a last resort, there's always a registry
| edit that can be done.
|
| Telemetry is one of the annoyances which is trickier. I've
| seen methods which can be used without 3rd party software,
| but I personally just gave up since the most basic level
| doesn't send much data. And I use a Start Menu replacement
| since there's no other way of getting the old Start back.
| brundolf wrote:
| To each their own, but IMO it's the best desktop UI I've
| ever used. Better than macOS, better than Gnome.
|
| A sibling comment already covers how you can remove/disable
| nearly every preinstalled annoyance so I won't go into that
| darren_ wrote:
| Counterpoint: Boot time is basically irrelevant once you have a
| reliable sleep/hibernate/whatever mode. My PC only reboots for
| windows updates or if I'm troubleshooting some inexplicable
| behaviour.
|
| For the actual practical use case of sitting down at the
| computer and starting to use it, my PC wakes up essentially
| instantly. I simply don't care about boot time. My 2021
| experience is far, far better than my 1998 one (well, the
| computer bits at least).
| kiwijamo wrote:
| I remember when even a cold start would drop me into a
| working desktop within a few seconds. Thus was in the early
| 90's with RISC OS running on the early days of ARM chips.
| Respectfully I would argue hibernation and suspend are just a
| band-aid for the sorry state of hardware and software today.
| What if we didn't need hibernation or suspend?
| wazoox wrote:
| My Pop_OS laptop cold boots from button press to login in
| 8s.
| arendtio wrote:
| How much time of these 8s is spend in EFI?
|
| When I look at my PC it is so painful to see, that it
| actually spends more time with EFI than with the OS:
| $ systemd-analyze Startup finished in 7.859s
| (firmware) + 1.203s (loader) + 1.683s (kernel) + 1.356s
| (initrd) + 1.431s (userspace) = 13.534s
| executesorder66 wrote:
| Coreboot is the solution here, but it's just a shame so
| many hardware manufactures are so protective over their
| shitty firmware.
|
| Why can't they just open-source whatever they crapped
| out, and have professional developers maintain it for
| them for free?
| pwdisswordfish8 wrote:
| Planned obsolescence.
| molasses wrote:
| But it does play a part if you are forced through lengthy
| updates and reboots.
|
| I was stuck on a 1.3mbits/s link and waited a day for a dist
| update that never happened.
|
| I walked away from Windows then, and came back 6 years later.
| Win 10 on spinner and older hardware with 2gb ram. This
| originally was touted as a frugal os.
|
| Took a day and a half of updates on a faster connection.
|
| The machine then was so slow and CPU sucking when idle, I
| couldn't do anything with it. A browser would down it.
| Totally unusable.
|
| Gave in, had Debian on it within an hour and it is okay with
| chromium, but still 2gb limits it heavily. But at least it
| works.
|
| Casts mind back to win98 era, and same hardware would fly.
|
| So if stable, and no reboots don't care so much.
|
| They killed hibernate in Windows for a faster boot didn't
| they?
|
| I have vista on a ten year laptop, and that is quite fast to
| boot, but now unsupported and breaks.
| molasses wrote:
| I know this is vaguely off topic. But main point was that
| boot up times aren't bothersome for stable systems with
| long uptime. When boot loops feel almost mandatory to get
| anywhere, with pretty much a virgin OS, and it takes days
| to actually get anywhere - it is an issue.
| arendtio wrote:
| Actually, I liked the >1min boot times of old Linux
| distributions (thinking SuSE 9.0) far better than the 'you-
| never-know-if-you-actually-rebooted' state of modern Windows.
|
| I think the there have been a few really important changes
| over the years, that make the modern computing better (like
| better process scheduling, that keeps your mouse smooth even
| when the CPU is at 100%), but the mass adoption of hibernate
| is not part of what I value most.
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| Mostly agree. I will concede boot time is a bit slow on 10
| for me, but still faster than 95 was, and yes, it doesn't
| matter much because of the incredible uptime. 95 would often
| crash multiple times PER DAY. Meanwhile I just had my Win 10
| system do an honest to goodness hard blackscreen crash a few
| days ago, and it was probably the first in months.
|
| For what it's worth, I'm sure you could get the "boot" of a
| Win 10 machine down to almost nothing if you really wanted
| to. Mostly it's just not worth it.
| albertzeyer wrote:
| Well, my current workstation boots in about 5 seconds, and it
| is not so special (NVM SSD, Linux/Ubuntu).
|
| Maybe you misconfigured sth? I remember that I once had
| something bad in my systemd services, which caused a long hang
| waiting for nothing and then failing after 1 min timeout.
| https://askubuntu.com/questions/1234713/why-slow-startup-boo...
| distances wrote:
| Cold boot? My computer doesn't show even the first BIOS
| screen in first five seconds.
| qorrect wrote:
| Same, and Im running AMD Threadripper 3970x, 32gigs of RAM
| and an nVME. It takes almost 60 seconds to load.
| GordonS wrote:
| Hmm, that sounds quite a lot longer than I'm used to
| these days.
|
| I just checked, and I'm 17s from cold boot to Windows 10
| login prompt on my Ryzen 2600 desktop with NVMe boot
| drive. I also checked on one of my 5 year-old HP Zbook G3
| (Xeon E3, 64GB RAM, NVMe boot drive), and it was 23s -
| and that's a corporate machine, _loaded_ with crap.
| albertzeyer wrote:
| Yes, cold boot. There were some options in the BIOS (or
| EFI? I forgot) to skip some things, and to reduce this wait
| time for the BIOS hotkey.
| shortlived wrote:
| SSD + Xubuntu + refurbished Dell optiplex FTW!
| ABS wrote:
| I found my old 1999 T20 last year and it took around 30 seconds
| to boot into Win95.
|
| I've got a video:
| https://twitter.com/capotribu/status/1262021068690259968
|
| Pentium III 547 Mhz, 256 MB RAM, 12GB disk
|
| Sadly don't remember if this video is from cold start or from
| hibernation
| rubatuga wrote:
| definitely hibernation
| ABS wrote:
| I think so considering the message on screen
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| That looks like Windows XP based on the desktop icons and I'm
| quite sure that Windows 95 didn't support hibernation, it
| only arrived with Windows 2000 if I recall correctly.
|
| Windows XP only came out in 2001, so if the laptop was from
| 1999 then it must have been upgraded to Windows XP at some
| point.
|
| That text based progress bar shows exclusively for resume
| from hibernate, hence rubatuga saying it's "definitely
| hibernation".
| Narishma wrote:
| I think it's Windows 2000. Unless Windows XP has that same
| text mode loading screen, which I don't remember.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| That is XP. Seriously, just look at the icons....
|
| And yes, XP has exactly the same boot screen. It just
| goes significantly faster than on 2k, which means most of
| the time you didn't get to see it.
| ABS wrote:
| indeed it looks like I posted the wrong one!
| enw wrote:
| Windows 95 might not be the prettiest, but seems beautifully
| consistent in both UX and UI.
| richardfey wrote:
| "healthy": it did not try to surprise you at every turn and
| corner. Functionality over vanity
| derefr wrote:
| > It was the time when almost everybody had a collection of MP3
| files on the hard disk drive, and Winamp was one of the most
| downloadable Windows applications.
|
| Objection: nobody had a collection of MP3s in 1995. The computers
| of 1995 didn't have the power to decompress an audio encoding
| like MP3 in real-time without an accelerator card. People swapped
| MIDI arrangements of popular songs, and some folks ripped PCM
| audio directly to WAV files (where it then took up half their 1GB
| hard disk, so this was mostly a novelty--unless you were the
| proud owner of a $2000 1x CD burner to burn the PCM audio back
| onto.)
|
| MP3s became a big thing around 1999, with better computers and
| the release of Napster.
|
| WinAmp itself was released in 1997, but wasn't immediately
| popular because people didn't have music _on_ their computers to
| play using it. It took off around 1999 as well (which is why
| everyone remembers Winamp 2, rather than Winamp 1.)
| chrisabrams wrote:
| Thank you for clarifying that essentially it was Win 98 (maybe
| Second Edition) when those applications took off.
| cbhl wrote:
| I do remember using my 1997-era computer (Pentium II, 233 MHz,
| 32 MB RAM, 3 GB disk) to listen to audio even though I didn't
| have a collection of MP3s. Many computers at that time shipped
| with a CD-ROM (if not a CD-R or CD-RW) drive, and so could play
| back audio off of CDs.
|
| I also remember waiting a few minutes to download Winamp, ICQ,
| and the like. (A dial-up modem would get 4 KB/s down on a good
| day, so 146 KB was not insignificant for an application.)
| frompdx wrote:
| Indeed. But I definitely had a collection of MP3s on my Win95
| machine as soon as Napster hit the scene. I was able to fit
| exactly one Blink 182 album on my 1GB hard drive. By the time
| my mom gave me her Pentium 2 Win95 machine when she upgraded
| Napster had already came and went. Kazaa was the next big thing
| for a while, but it was never as good. CD-R/W drives were a
| game changer for a while though. I was amazed by the ability to
| load multiple CDs to make a play list and then be prompted to
| load the each CD into the drive to burn the tracks I wanted.
| adrianpike wrote:
| > I was able to fit exactly one Blink 182 album on my 1GB
| hard drive.
|
| Dang, 1GB back in these days was pretty legit. A 128k MP3 was
| something like 3-4 megs per song - I'd fit a bunch on a 100
| meg Zip disk back in the day and feel like a king.
| frompdx wrote:
| Yep, it was an aftermarket HD. The original was about half
| the size.
| jedberg wrote:
| I entered college in 1995. I downloaded my first MP3 in summer
| of 1996 (Savage Garden -- Chicken Cherry Cola). By the end of
| 1997 (which is when the OP is talking about, when Winamp
| dropped) I had hundreds of MP3.
|
| Scour was released in November 1997, and it was released to
| solve the problem of a whole bunch of college students having
| their MP3 libraries available via Windows shares, but it was
| hard to find what you were looking for. Scour fixed that.
|
| So maybe not the general public, but in 1997 someone released a
| search engine specific to finding MP3s, because people already
| had large collections.
| incanus77 wrote:
| > I downloaded my first MP3 in summer of 1996 (Savage Garden
| -- Chicken Cherry Cola).
|
| LOL, I know exactly what song you mean, but it was called I
| Want You. We did it in my a cappella group in 1997.
| jedberg wrote:
| Oh I know, but the MP3 was called Chicken Cherry Cola. :)
| rconti wrote:
| Ah yes, the days of mis-titled MP3 files, incorrect
| metadata, and other artifacts. Sometimes an MP3 of a song
| you liked had a click in a certain spot, or occasionally
| some kind of sound like an AIM message coming through.
|
| I ran my company's (unofficial) MP3 server in '99, and I
| spent a LOT of time managing files.
|
| I ultimately went back to college in 2002 which was the
| right time to catch Apple's first attempt at Home Sharing
| in iTunes (I forget what it was called), where basically
| every single Mac on the campus network was running an
| HTTP server advertising all of its music for download.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| > So maybe not the general public, but in 1997 someone
| released a search engine specific to finding MP3s, because
| people already had large collections.
|
| I was the author of MP3 Fiend around this time.
|
| It was a desktop metasearch engine for MP3s that worked in
| conjunction with multiple download clients.
|
| It was very successful at the time, only for Napster to come
| along and eat my lunch.
|
| It got ... called out a lot by the press.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/0hnIG5Y.jpg
| jedberg wrote:
| Hey it's not your fault! It's like trying to complain that
| UPS aids drug dealers.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| I love nerd-peen measuring contests threads like this.
| [deleted]
| anthk wrote:
| People were still using Windows 95 in 1999.
| amyjess wrote:
| Also, some of us had sizeable RealAudio collections.
|
| Sure, the quality is shit by modern standards, but it could
| easily be played by ordinary computers of the time and took up
| very little space.
| everdrive wrote:
| Thank you sir. My windows 95 machine could not play an MP3, and
| I could hardly download one in my dialup connection. My entire
| hard drive was 500mb, and I couldn't have saved many MP3s even
| if I'd wanted. I did have about 1000 MIDI files, though.
| virtue3 wrote:
| They were compressed to shit back then. Like 96kbps bitrate
| or something. (way before variable bitrate was a thing).
|
| I remember them being like 1.5-3 mb each. Not that bad of a
| download with a 56k
| everdrive wrote:
| I had a 56k modem, but in practice, I could seldom get
| 3kbps. Just a bit too rural. 2 - 2.5 was usually what I
| got.
| Edman274 wrote:
| I have a hunch that you're mixing up bits and bytes in
| that memory, because I very distinctly remember seeing
| the internet explorer 4 download progress indicator
| telling me that I was getting 4.5 "KBPS" down on a 48K
| link, which makes sense when you convert kilobits per
| second to kilobytes per second. Internet Explorer would
| give download speeds in kilobytes per second. If you were
| getting 3 kilobytes per second, then that's equivalent to
| ~28.8 kilobits per second, which my buddy who lived out
| in the middle of nowhere would get. He would come to my
| house in town so he could get better performance in
| Runescape. This was in 2003. I am not joking.
| everdrive wrote:
| You have the right idea -- I wasn't mixing them up, but
| as you note, I expected to be able to get more than 3KBPS
| on a 56.6k link. I still managed to download about 3,000
| songs on that link, though! I was very dedicated. I
| couldn't actually browse the internet while downloading,
| so I had to queue up webpages, or just find something
| else to do while I downloaded a single song.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Ah yes, I remember when a 1MB download took 30 minutes to 1
| hour to complete.
|
| Now I don't even blink over hitting a webpage with multiple
| megs of assets.
|
| The hacker news favicon is bigger than most webpages of the
| time :D
| cma wrote:
| In I think Winplay 3 there were options to play them in mono
| for weaker CPUs (386 or at least 486).
| unixhero wrote:
| Yes they did. Straight otta Fraunhofer! We used Winplay3 and
| mpg123 to get mp3playback. Winamp was a godsend when it came,
| due to many quality of life improvements.
| thangalin wrote:
| The Commodore 64 was introduced in January, 1982. Here's the
| C64 decoding and playing an MP3 in real-time:
|
| https://youtu.be/0mF9kXZAjsI?t=17
| max1984_2 wrote:
| Someone always pulls out a C64 demo. This is using a bunch of
| tricks to do it and it is massively compressed.
|
| It generally isn't doable. My Amiga 600 without the Vampire
| or a Prisma Megamix cannot play MP3s of decent quality and
| the Amiga was far more capable than C64.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I have to disagree. A pentium at 100mhz was enough to run
| winamp and play 128kbps mp3 without any hiccups. Doing more
| than that at once was complicated, but not impossible.
| gh-throw wrote:
| I used a 100mhz Pentium with 64MB or memory and, later, a
| 166mhz Pentium with 128MB. Win98 (people are correct that
| midis were way more common in the '95 days, as even a 2MB mp3
| would take forever to download on dial-up and hard drives
| were small) and my experience was than any OS was fine if you
| were _only_ playing mp3s, but on anything but BeOS or QNX
| you'd get bad pops and UI lag if you did anything else while
| a song way playing. Linux was actually worse about this than
| Windows, in fact, but both were bad.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I had a pentium mmx 200mhz with 32mb ram running windows in
| 1997. I could run winamp or realplayer, and at the same
| time I could download using get right, chat on mIRC, browse
| the internet using netscape and still had a file manager
| window open. All at the same time.
|
| Changing from one window to another allowed me to see
| widgets been drawn. It wasn't snappy, but it wasn't a
| crawl. I could still open a dos window and run qbasic or
| turboC. I had to be careful: drunk pointers risked
| stability of the system.
|
| At the time I never had the same thrashing problems I have
| today running linux. That is why I'm so hopeful about
| systemd-oomd.
|
| I could keep the machine like this for almost a whole day.
| A windows 9x machine rarely passed 24 hours uptime with
| heavy usage without a bluescreen.
|
| I later upgraded the machine to 64mb ram, 2 harddisks, 2
| floopy drives and both cd drive bay became occupied: one
| with a cdrom drive and the other with a cd burner. I then
| replaced the winmodem with a network card. It was a good
| machine. The only thing that barred me from using linux on
| it was the soundcard (AZT-R2316) that had no linux driver.
| It 2mb s3 video card worked better with linux. By the time
| the sound drivers arrived it was 2007 and I already had a
| new linux-only 2006 machine.
| anthk wrote:
| With Linux, FVWM which was damn lightweight (and still is),
| and some "nice" sttings I was able to do it better than
| W98. Rxvt was far lighter than XTerm. Most software was for
| the cli after all.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Fluxbox/blackbox was even lighter. I think lightweight
| linux distributions, like damm small linux, could run
| faster than windows 9x. Unfortunately, easy to use,
| highly compatible, lightweight linux distros only became
| popular after the win9x era.
| anthk wrote:
| Actually, FVWM was lighter than even Blackbox, check it
| up.
|
| On "highly compatible", well, you could run mandrake and
| send drakconf and KDE to the trash.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Mandrake was slow to boot on a 90's class machine
| compared to damn small linux. Also "run mandrake and send
| drakconf and KDE to the trash" doesn't ticks the "easy to
| use" box.
| ddingus wrote:
| At that time I was running IRIX. Had none of those
| problems.
| HappyJoy wrote:
| Being possible != being practical
| marcodiego wrote:
| It was possible, practical and happened. Collections were
| smaller because drives were smaller. MP3 became more
| popular by the end of the 90's, but a good 1995 machine,
| 100mhz pentium with 8mb of ram and 512mb harddisk, was 100%
| practical for playing mp3.
| christoph wrote:
| I still have bootable Cyrix 133MHz that has MP3's on the hard
| drive, they wouldn't be there if it couldn't play them.
| herf wrote:
| Winamp was 1997.
|
| I remember there was one software decoder that was fast
| enough in 1995, so I plugged in my Pentium/100 laptop to
| decode music and pass it uncompressed to my desktop
| Pentium/90 (which was too slow) over 10base-T!
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _but wasn 't immediately popular because people didn't have
| music on their computers to play using it_
|
| I think Audiograbber was the first popular program to rip MP3's
| from your CD collection. Best I can tell, it was first released
| as v1.41 in Feb 1997. Winamp came out a couple months later.
|
| And then young people were absolutely listening to their CD's
| as MP3's on their computers by the summer of 1997 -- I know I
| was, it was just so much more convenient. And you definitely
| didn't need to wait for Napster if you were on a college campus
| with dorms -- you'd find _tons_ of "anonymous" network shares
| filled with thousands and thousands of tracks in the fall of
| 1997 for sure.
|
| And the Diamond Rio player came out at the end of 1998... I
| remember that was _huge_... all of a sudden your MP3 's were
| portable!
| grayfaced wrote:
| That's the gap between a computer enthusiast and average
| population. Most people weren't on a campus with a LAN. Many
| people were relying on 33.6K dial-up with metered a metered
| ISP, often on their phone line they needed to receive calls.
| For most people MP3s were just too hard to transfer.
|
| Cheap CDRs were the other big breakthrough. Now people had a
| reason to download music so they could burn it to listen in
| their car. But that's well after Win95.
| rangibaby wrote:
| I downloaded plenty of music on shitty dialup. It's not
| like there were any other options. The hard part was
| finding them until Napster etc
| rconti wrote:
| Audiogalaxy stands out more in my mind for some reason. I
| never used Napster much.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _between a computer enthusiast and average population_
|
| Not computer enthusiasts -- just college students.
|
| I remember being pretty surprised, it wasn't the CS
| students who had all the ripped music. It was the party
| kids. The "killer app" for MP3's was the ability to put
| together all-day and all-night music mixes that could be
| shuffled instantly. For the first time you could DJ
| effortlessly.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I think Audiograbber was the first downloadable software I
| ever paid for that did not come in a box.
| walshemj wrote:
| I still have my Diamond Rio player just need to find a
| paralell port to see if I can get it wroking.
| antod wrote:
| _> and some folks ripped PCM audio directly to WAV files_
|
| yup, that was me. I had to be very selective about what songs I
| wanted off a small number of CDs.
|
| I seem to remember doing that before ripping and faster CD
| drives too - instead capturing audio output. That was painful.
| InvertedRhodium wrote:
| I seem to recall a MP3 player that worked directly from DOS
| during that era. My computer couldn't play them in Windows, but
| could using the DOS based player around that time.
| bentcorner wrote:
| > People swapped MIDI arrangements of popular songs
|
| I recall downloading MOD files back in the day from various
| BBSs. This is probably pre-95 by a few years. MIDI files were
| good but you needed a good sound card to play them. I recall
| drooling over ads of the Gravis Ultrasound (I had a SB Pro).
| jghn wrote:
| FWIW, F97/S98 was when MP3s started to take off on my college
| campus at the time.
| jepler wrote:
| I'm relatively confident I had MP3 decoding software running on
| a 486 circa 1994/5. Even today, mpg123's website states "Plays
| Layer 3 in stereo on an AMD-486-120Mhz or (of course) a faster
| machine." and of course 48MHz ARM M4 microcontrollers can also
| play back MP3s.
|
| cdda2wav seems to have existed by 1996.
|
| the "quantum bigfoot" 1GB-and-up HDDs also in 1996 could hold
| several albums, especially if you ripped at lower rates like
| 64kBit/s.
|
| I also recall exchanging MP3s on IRC with /dcc send, and am
| reasonably confident this was 1998 or earlier.
|
| On the other hand, "On July 14, 1995, Karlheinz Brandenburg
| sent an e-mail announcing the .mp3 file extension had won a
| poll and announced that the old .bit file extension should no
| longer be used."
|
| So while literally 1995 is early for people to have a
| "collection" MP3s on their home machines, the time before
| everyone had moved on _from_ Windows 95 sure overlapped with
| the mp3 era, especially for early adopters.
| klipklop wrote:
| I recall a friend having a pentium 1 at 100mhz and could only
| play 64-128 kbps mp3's if he did literally nothing else. The
| song would skip from time to time and would immediately start
| skipping if you moved the mouse. From what I remember this
| was with winamp.
| username91 wrote:
| My first machine was a 100mhz Pentium; Winamp used about
| 25% CPU to play MP3s - I did it all the time while coding
| and hanging out on IRC. Can't think why your friend's
| machine would struggle with the same setup. Maybe older
| versions of Winamp were underoptimized.
|
| I used Sonique for a while because it looked amazing -
| slightly poorer performance, but felt worth it. Later on,
| Sonique "optimized" for later Pentium releases and it
| became much too slow on the P100, so I switched back to
| Winamp.
|
| Also, it still boots. :)
| nikau wrote:
| He was lucky he had a legit pentium, I had one of those
| cyrix CPUS that claimed pentium speeds, except the floating
| point unit was rubbish.
|
| The only way to play mp3s was in linux where I shutdown
| every possible daemon and ran the decoder at the highest
| priority.
| ChickeNES wrote:
| Here's a modern demonstration of decoding MP3's on various
| 486-class machines:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0zZpzxHSeM
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Early mp3 decoders depended on floating point. Using modern
| fixed point code will let you run on less capable hardware.
| abrowne wrote:
| I remember our family's Mac, with a 68LC040 CPU, which
| was a 68040 without a dedicated floating point unit,
| could only play back mp _2_ files in realtime.
| ddingus wrote:
| There was a program called "amp" that used fast integer
| math.
|
| I compiled it on an SGI Indigo running at 30Mhz and it
| would play up to 256kbps files using 90 percent of CPU.
| marcodiego wrote:
| MIPS at 30Mhz is comparable to contemporary pentiums at
| much higher frequency of the era. The Indigo probably had
| faster memory, io and bigger caches than pc's mere
| mortals could buy. The comparison is simply not fair.
|
| But this program called "amp"... I'm very curious to see
| if it could be compiled to run on a recent machine.
| anthk wrote:
| Slackware still has amp.
| ddingus wrote:
| What version?
| anthk wrote:
| Slackware? 14.2
| ddingus wrote:
| Let me see if I can track it down...
|
| I agree with you, but 30Mhz! That is a very low clock for
| 256kbps decode.
|
| MIPS did very significantly outperform Intel at that
| time.
|
| http://www.mp3-tech.org/programmer/sources/amp-0_7_6.tgz
|
| Found it.
|
| An Indigo sat in the office for a time playing tunes from
| an NFS share we would populate. I eventually took it home
| to do the same thing. I forget how I parted ways with
| that old box.
|
| I am not inclined to build it at the moment, though it
| may well make for a great micro controller project one
| day.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Nice! Still compiles with a minor modification: added a
| break on the default case of a switch. Time signature is
| wrong when playing though.
|
| Edit: Fixed: add "frequency = frequency/2;" after the
| comment /* Set the output frequency */ in file
| audioIO_Linux.c
| ddingus wrote:
| Cool! I liked the quality output of that player at the
| time. Highs were clean.
|
| Does it still hold up?
|
| Maybe I will build it just for grins myself. Thanks for
| the tips.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I can't critically evaluate the quality since I have no
| high quality mp3 nor Hi-Fi audio devices. An old
| recording of mine
| http://marcodiegomesquita.tripod.com/rda.mp3 sounded with
| very unsaturated bass; which is good, I think I
| recorded/mastered it wrongly or the software I used at
| the time decoded it like amp decodes it. It actually
| sounds really good with amp.
|
| But yes, it uses very little cpu. Maybe less than dosamp.
| ddingus wrote:
| I had similar experiences. Yeah, I need to build it now.
| Have a few tracks that often have watery highs, just not
| crisp. Amp played them great.
|
| Maybe I will play your track after the family activities.
| Edit: Except access denied, lol. No worries.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Hugh of death likely. I can download it correctly from
| here: https://marcodiegomesquita.tripod.com/
| userbinator wrote:
| The reference implementation is floating-point, for
| accuracy, but you can bet they were using fixed-point
| back then, as DSPs and such would be fixed-point only.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinPlay3 was released in
| 1995 and requires "only" a 66MHz 486, available in 1992.
| ChickeNES wrote:
| I totally forgot about that one! I'm also unsure why I'm
| being downvoted for sharing software that dates back to
| '98
| dehrmann wrote:
| Looks like they're all DX CPUs.
|
| What's up with the socket? It looks like there aren't
| enough pins on the CPU, but they're used for the Pentium
| Overdrive.
| johnwalkr wrote:
| I recall 1997 being when every IRC-type person had mp3s and a
| cd burner. One was lucky to have a hard drive large enough to
| convert mp3s to wav files before burning. Otherwise you had
| to decompress "on the fly" and hope for the best. Could be
| done at 0.5x for higher chance of success, if I recall
| correctly.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| I remember when the first burners came out that were
| capable of automatically resyncing and restarting after an
| error. I've forgotten the brand now, but there was one
| company that shipped it first, and instantly everyone in
| the LAN party scene bought it. Ricoh maybe? Burning
| anything was such a pain before that. Even if you took
| every precaution in the world, you couldn't stop a big
| truck from driving by and turning your burn into a coaster.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I graduated from high school in 1996, and everyone in college
| dorms were exchanging music files with point to point sharing
| in the dorms. It was early adopter era, but the computers could
| handle it.
|
| Ripping CDs and encoding was definitely a different story.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| You are mistaken. It took a lot of cpu but definitely worked. I
| can't remember the name of it, but I used some quirky mp3
| player for a couple years before winamp came out.
|
| I do remember being impressed how mod / tracker based music was
| so much more efficient on our P5 120Mhz. It was something like
| 10% of cpu vs 50% for mp3.
| hobo_mark wrote:
| Surprised that nobody mentioned Serenity yet...
|
| > SerenityOS is a love letter to '90s user interfaces with a
| custom Unix-like core. It flatters with sincerity by stealing
| beautiful ideas from various other systems.
|
| > Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic
| of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user
| accessibility of late-2000s *nix. This is a system by us, for us,
| based on the things we like.
|
| https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| It's easy to forgot that the Widows 95 release was as hyped up as
| the iPhone release. It was a BIG event.
| mmcconnell1618 wrote:
| I worked the Egghead Software midnight release party. Yes,
| people lined up at midnight to get a physical, boxed copy of
| Windows 95. Queue the Rolling Stones "start me up" that cost
| BillG $3 million.
| jrnichols wrote:
| there were Windows 98 midnight launches as well. People
| lining up outside of CompUSA to buy their copies.
|
| 3 of us had our Apple t-shirts (from the Apple "Demo Days"
| program) and lined up at a Sacramento, CA location (I forgot
| what chain it was) that had an Apple "store in a store" -
| media (radio) was outside and interviewed us on air about it.
| We fired up all the Macs, and our friend crashed the big
| screen demo with the c:\con\con bug.
|
| good times.
| aluminussoma wrote:
| I distinctly remember an interview on Win95 launch day where
| the local news was interviewing a guy in a computer shop about
| his thoughts. He was unimpressed. He said something like, "Mac*
| already does this and much better".
|
| When the iPhone launched, my reaction to it was essentially the
| same as the guy in the computer shop. Boy were we wrong about
| the impact both would have on the industry!
|
| (* Edit: can't remember if he said Mac or OS/2)
| sergiotapia wrote:
| What made Windows 95's UI have so much staying power? The right
| combination of people in the right room? Superstar stallions?
|
| Like Silent Hill 2, a group of people that were greater together
| than as individuals and can never be replicated?
|
| Where are they now? What are they building?
| tl wrote:
| That decade had the right incentives for a good UI design to
| come together (Windows, Mac, Amiga, etc...). Windows 95 had, by
| far the largest marketing push (pointed out elsewhere, but
| Chicago had gen 1 iPhone hype levels) and install base (didn't
| need "Microsoft" hardware).
| hyakosm wrote:
| David Plummer created the task manager and the pinball game
| (Space cadet). Search about him, he has explained and revealed
| a lot of interesting facts last year.
| ddingus wrote:
| That pinball game was excellent! Huge depth! Lots of replay
| value.
|
| I kind of want to give it a go now.
| wvenable wrote:
| They did heavy user research when building the Win95 UI. They
| experimented and then had real users come in and try to do
| stuff. When the users couldn't figure something out they went
| back and fixed it.
|
| Originally what was the start menu was just a single icon
| button just like it is now. But people looking a fresh Windows
| desktop didn't know what to do. So that's why they put the word
| "start" on it and it became the start menu. Users looking at
| the desktop would then immediately click there and find all the
| applications. Just imagine that same process for everything.
|
| These days I don't think nearly as much effort goes into it --
| and maybe for good reason -- end users might just re-invent the
| Windows 95 UI!
| ianetaylor wrote:
| I wrote the '95 Start Menu among other bits and pieces. Mostly
| the team was just a bunch of regular devs but with a few crazy-
| smart types making the rest of us look good. RaymondC to name
| but one.
|
| Several of that original team are still at Microsoft, I
| currently work on HoloLens
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Your work was so influential! If you are working on hololens
| I have high hopes for that next step in computing interfaces.
| williesleg wrote:
| Aah, all the crashes, incompatibilities, slowness, and all the
| dos shit under it. That's when I switched.
| Black101 wrote:
| Win95 was not as pretty as modern Windows, but it was much more
| functional and buggy. Windows 2000 was the #1 version of Windows.
|
| Win98 was much more stable then Win95 and as functional.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Win98SE, you mean. The original Win98 was a dumpster fire
| stability-wise.
| sizeofchar wrote:
| Win95 S/R2 worked pretty well.
| mkup wrote:
| Win95 OSR2
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| I love the way you mention "but it was much more functional and
| buggy" as if buggy wasn't a bad attribute.
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