[HN Gopher] Watch Windows 95 crash live as it exceeds 49.7 days ...
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Watch Windows 95 crash live as it exceeds 49.7 days uptime
[livestream]
Author : exikyut
Score : 227 points
Date : 2021-08-28 18:04 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| herodoturtle wrote:
| Rickrolled the viewers like a boss.
| herodoturtle wrote:
| And their midi playlist is banging, gotta say.
| [deleted]
| eitland wrote:
| I remember applying the patch for this. First patch I can
| remember the contents of.
| vmception wrote:
| Computers having long uptime used to be considered a novelty,
| with counters shared on rudimentary websites and even magazines
|
| Now its not even a consideration as it is so commonplace
|
| At one point this was considered a hard problem
| Hamuko wrote:
| High uptime on a Windows machine is still a novelty.
| donohoe wrote:
| 15 minutes to go....
| neals wrote:
| 8 for me... weird?
| H8crilA wrote:
| 5 minutes boys!!!!!!111oneoneone
| [deleted]
| matheweis wrote:
| Microsoft Lync for Mac OS had a bug like this; if the system
| uptime was > 49.7 days, the user's presence would get stuck as
| "Away".
|
| Presumably it was using uptime as time clock for establishing
| presence and once it overflowed the comparison failed.
| hyperrail wrote:
| Here's a discussion of (at least one) original Windows 95 bug
| that causes the computer to freeze after 49 days, along with
| working download links to fixes:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20070223101651/https://support.m...
|
| News coverage at the time (2002 or earlier):
| https://www.cnet.com/news/windows-may-crash-after-49-7-days/
|
| (Feels like a bit of a silly Gotcha! to do it live now - did
| anyone run their personal computer for 49 days, even counting
| laptops which went to sleep/standby? But hey, do what you want.
| :)
| Joeri wrote:
| This wasn't a limitation anyone ran into in the real world. I
| was lucky to get the original windows 95 to run for a day, let
| alone 49. Windows 95 OSR2 on the other hand was very stable. My
| most stable desktop from that era (late 90's / early 00's) was
| a debian stable build, the uptime at one point was over two
| years.
| tssva wrote:
| In the late 90s to early 2000s I worked in the Network Planning &
| Design group for UUNET. They were phased out before I left but
| when I started Fore/Marconi ATM switches were used for
| interconnect within PoPs and to terminate the circuits between
| PoPs. For a while the NOC had to reboot them periodically at a
| scheduled time or else they would reboot themselves after a
| certain period of time. I believe it was 45 or 90 days.
| smoldesu wrote:
| IIRC, there was a long period of time where the max uptime on a
| Unix system was ~94 days. That makes a lot of sense.
| aurelian274 wrote:
| Long time lurker but I had to create an account to comment. My
| first job out of college was at Fore Systems/Marconi back in
| 2000 as a QA tester. One of my first assignments was to test
| bug fixes for several different uptime issues we had. My
| favorite was the PNNI 397 day uptime where it would flap a port
| causing the switch to relearn all its SPVCs.
|
| Fore/Marconi was a great place to work back then but the dotcom
| bust and the migration to pure IP/MPLS was a death knell to
| them. My entire division was laid off in Oct of 2001. I was
| lucky and had jumped ship only weeks earlier.
| tssva wrote:
| Now I feel guilty about my role in several migrations to pure
| IP/MPLS. If it helps at all a couple were off of Cisco
| Lightstream equipment.
| krylon wrote:
| Having used Windows 95 back in the day, I am deeply impressed
| someone managed to keep it from crashing for so long.
|
| I have seen a Windows NT 4.0 system with an uptime of more than
| five years, but with Windows 95, even a whole day of uptime was
| pretty close to a miracle.
| chungy wrote:
| It's probably pretty easy if you do literally nothing on it.
|
| Windows 95/98/Me had a very weak concept of protected memory.
| It was there, but it wasn't very hard for an application to go
| read and write into the virtual memory space of other
| processes. Even then, any semblance of protected memory only
| existed for Win32 applications. DOS and Win16 programs, both of
| which were very common at the time, would just have free reign
| over everything.
| ycom13__ wrote:
| I had Windows NT 4.0 with SQL Server 7.0 running for 6 years...
| never restarted (or patched)... This was our dev/qa server.
| Uptime from 1999 till October 2005.... then some fool shutdown
| the power to the whole dev cage....
|
| Still remember the credentials too... sa and password Nimda
|
| No issues ever... HP hardware....
| cyberge99 wrote:
| I saw a new in box copy of Windows NT Server 5 user today for
| $4.99. I wonder what it cost new.
| 0x0 wrote:
| Do you mean Windows 2000? I didn't think "NT 5" was ever used
| as a brand?
| [deleted]
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| It wasn't used in branding, but I did test some drivers on
| Windows NT 5.0 beta builds back in the late 90s prior to
| the switch to "Windows 2000".
| bald wrote:
| > 5 user
|
| I think he's referring to CAL
| floatingatoll wrote:
| Huh?
| stan_rogers wrote:
| It's a 5-user Client Access License (CAL) package for
| Windows NT Server.
| Someone wrote:
| If so, that's not a Windows NT license, but an add-on
| that allows five users (?at a time?) to connect to a
| Windows NT system that requires its own license to run,
| isn't it?
| [deleted]
| exikyut wrote:
| EPILOGUE
|
| Here's the exact point of the crash (cued to 5 seconds prior):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdrRoSdBM5M&t=9778s
|
| The counter overflows/resets, everything wraps around, the system
| counts 6 more seconds, then Windows 95 freezes.
|
| The mouse cursor still seems to work, but the message pump seems
| to have frozen, to the extent that End Task itself is
| unresponsive, and a second CTRL-ALT-DEL is needed to reset the
| machine.
|
| ---
|
| This whole thing started back in July, over here (warning:
| megathread): https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1413694652822163459
| burnt_toast wrote:
| Semi-related but I recently bought a knock off windows 95 t-shirt
| because I wanted a shirt with something old that would be
| recognizable but not mistaken for nostalgia. Kinda like a "oh
| yeah that used to be big" feeling.
|
| It's weird how we can have things that are extremely well known /
| commonly used in our culture that suddenly disappear as soon as
| something better comes along never to be thought of again.
| 2ion wrote:
| Longest lived non embedded system I've worked with was a Linux
| server with an uptime from 2007 through 2019 serving as a L3
| router. Amazingly, after shutting it down, it turned on again :)
| laurent92 wrote:
| Yes. I forgot to maintain a Linux server after setting
| autoupdates, and it kept itself up for years. I'm ashamed of
| not monitoring the potential breaches on it.
| thiagocsf wrote:
| Completely off-topic but yesterday I upgraded my Debian 10 home
| server to 11 and it rebooted fine! It had a 132 day uptime on
| it.
|
| I run a unify controller on docker, pihole, influxdb, grafana
| and a bunch of other small scripts. I did need to upgrade my
| collectd Python modules to 3 but that was it.
| ksec wrote:
| I feel like a fool this somehow put a smile on my face :)
|
| And my memory may be hazy, but in those days Windows always crash
| every few days and we normally "shut down" our computer after
| usage.
|
| But the most interesting thing is a running Windows 95 in
| _English_ version. May be screenshot [1] weren 't hard to come
| by. And we are lucky nuke didn't happen in 2020.
|
| [1] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-
| death...
| foepys wrote:
| How far we have come.
|
| Nowadays I usually let my notebook hibernate (not sleep) for
| the night and when I return the next morning, I often discover
| that I forgot to stop my debugger and it is still attached to
| my running program. Not even a hiccup when resuming.
| progman32 wrote:
| Heh. In the meantime, here I am having to software-reset my
| network card after almost every resume. Thankfully, like
| beer, Linux is the answer to _and the cause of,_ all the
| world's problems.
|
| # echo 1 > /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000\:0b\:00.0/remove # echo
| 1 > /sys/bus/pci/rescan
| tus89 wrote:
| That was underwhelming.
| [deleted]
| yjamal2 wrote:
| And it just crashed
| _V_ wrote:
| Spoiler: It did indeed crash :-)
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Pretty wild, it rolled over, then made it +- 6000 msec post-
| rollover before crashing!
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Did they time the Terminator theme to play along with the
| crash? That was pretty funny.
| Shorel wrote:
| I got the stream when it was Crash Test Dummies.
|
| Yep, it was funny.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| For those coming along after:
|
| The counter rolled over, then the system hung at about 6800 ms
| after the rollover.
|
| The mouse responded and a ctrl-alt-del brought up the process-
| manager / restart dialogue, but the system didn't respond
| otherwise. It was restarted with a second ctrl-alt-del.
|
| Final song was Toto's "Africa", followed by the theme to
| _Terminator_.
|
| If the stream remains up, the next crash will occur on October
| 17, 2021.
| hyperrail wrote:
| Microsoft used to release a "checked" build for each version of
| Windows on MSDN/Visual Studio Subscription downloads. [1] This
| was a build with the same compiler optimization settings as the
| release build, but with debug-build-only assertions and checks
| included. In the checked build kernel, the system uptime had 49
| days artificially added to it [2], precisely to help developers
| find out problems like this.
|
| At one point when I was on the Windows team at Microsoft, there
| was an internal push for us to selfhost (dogfood) checked builds
| of Windows, since they theoretically provided better bug
| telemetry than "free" builds (release builds, which are free of
| debug-only code). "Slows your dev box down by _just_ half! " was
| the basic pitch of that campaign in a nutshell.
|
| [1] I don't know if this was ever done for Windows 95. It was
| done for Windows XP up to Windows 10 version 1511, but it appears
| to have stopped since then, at least according to my quick
| search.
|
| [2]
| https://docs.microsoft.com/windows/win32/api/sysinfoapi/nf-s...
| KindOne wrote:
| What exactly do you search for? I've tried looking but I have
| no idea what to search for.
| SSLy wrote:
| https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=windows%20checked%20bu.
| ..
|
| EDIT: if you want to get the actual build, I can't help. I
| only remember it being available through MSDN AA back in the
| day.
| [deleted]
| kregasaurusrex wrote:
| Looks like the integer overflow had the system time try to start
| back over at zero, but that caused everything else to hang right
| after it did. Neat stream.
| bambax wrote:
| OT, but I still have one of those Roland Sound Canvas expanders.
| Works flawlessly.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Clock rollovers can be interesting.
|
| Some time back I did work at a devices startup processing data
| collected from trial runs. For some reason an earlier developer
| had chosen to use time-of-day, in seconds, rather than elapsed
| time, as the index for data recording. I'd registered this as a
| poor design decision, though it was difficult to articulate
| _why_.
|
| That argument became far easier after a field trial spanned
| midnight, and the data series iterated from 86,400 to 0.
|
| On the other hand, I've never had trouble remembering just how
| many seconds (or minutes) there are in a day, since.
| bogeholm wrote:
| The term 'clock rollover' reminds me of the 2007 incident where
| 6 F-22's crossed the date line:
|
| > "...At the international date line, whoops, all systems
| dumped and when I say all systems, I mean all systems, their
| navigation, part of their communications, their fuel systems."
|
| https://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/f22-squadron-shot-down-...
| dmurray wrote:
| > On the other hand, I've never had trouble remembering just
| how many seconds (or minutes) there are in a day, since.
|
| Not everyone is so fortunate:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7717414
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Ouch!
| [deleted]
| tored wrote:
| Typical vastgotaklimax.
| punnerud wrote:
| I gave my kid an old Toshiba with Win95 when he was 3 years. He
| is now 5 and still likes to use it. His favorite programs are
| Minesweeper, Word and MSPaint.
|
| Thinking about upgrading to Raspberry Pi Keyboard.
|
| Maybe we should try the 49.7 days overflow as an fun example in
| memory overflow.
| greenhatman wrote:
| So silly. I like it.
| andrew_ wrote:
| Back when we were writing alt shells for Windows 95/98/2000
| (geoShell, Litestep, etc) uptime plugins/modules were all the
| rage. Screenshotting and sharing were popular and came with
| bragging rights.
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| So, it looked like what happened was the system didn't
| immediately crash, but quickly degraded. It looked like the
| system was partially responsive, and Foone reported that the
| ctrl-alt-delete screen wouldn't kill the app. The uptime monitor
| app hung, although it's unclear where that failure originated
| from.
| 404mm wrote:
| Well that was anticlimactic :(
| paulpauper wrote:
| Lol value overflow errors.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Millisecond timer stored to a 32bit unsigned.
| emersonrsantos wrote:
| After the crash, the video author typed inside Notepad:
|
| "It hung! I ctrl-alt-deleted it, but it wouldn't respond so I
| rebooted it with another ctrl-alt-delete
|
| Thanks for watching.
|
| TRANS RIGHTS!"
|
| https://imgur.com/a/yoGyo6B
| johnchristopher wrote:
| And they say Bitcoin is a waste of resources and here we are
| watching this :]. /s
|
| How do they capture the screen output from the real CRT ?
| [deleted]
| usmannk wrote:
| There is a huuuuge twitter thread with all the details. This
| tweet in the middle talks about a VGA to HDMI adapter
| https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1424242517243957250
| dredmorbius wrote:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1424242517243957250.html
| johnchristopher wrote:
| That thread is gold :).
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I guess they don't capture it from the CRT - they capture it
| from the video signal from the computer.
| Huwyt_Nashi_064 wrote:
| Imagine being incapable of _not_ telling the world that you 're a
| transvestite. Keep it to yourself.
| tomxor wrote:
| I love this, and I don't understand why. Maybe it's the nostalgic
| combo of a physical midi synth with a physical pentium waiting
| for win95 to do what it's best known for.
| kasperni wrote:
| Wasn't alive to watch the first moon landing. But I feel this
| must be up there with it.
| laurent92 wrote:
| Funny thing, programming the clocks in assembler at the time of
| the moon landing was extraordinarily hard, especially since
| they had to code the timestamps in negative.
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(page generated 2021-08-28 23:01 UTC)