Switch to Windows 95 | Hacker News Reader

Switch to Windows 95

blog.krnl386.com

131 pointsbeefhash105 comments

Confusingly there was also a windows 95/nt compatibility environment released for win 3.1 -- the win32s subsystem. Many, if not most, applications written for win95 or NT 3.x APIs could run on windows 3.1.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win32s

Microsoft has always been laser-focused on forwards- and backwards- compatibility, whether it makes sense to the rest of us or not.

My (possibly faulty) memory of win32s is that it was came out before Windows 95, and that it would not run most of the programs that were later released for Windows 95. I'd call it a 'Win32 API for Windows 3.1' rather than a compatibility environment for Windows 3.1.

Yea, old anti-trust exhibits mentioned so-called 32-bit Windows extenders, which had many limitations compared to say OS/2 2.0. For example, I think all Win32s apps ran in a single global address space, not to mention the lack of multi-threading etc.

Correct. Win32s was a brief stopgap between home/low-cost user support for 32-bit APIs and the release of Windows 95.

While this was part of it, I think the main reason it existed was more for smaller developers who couldn't use/afford windows NT (at the time really really expensive) a win32 development environment before win95 came out so there'd be more software (of the shareware variety) for it when it came out.

Yep, i recall trying to get a game demo going that required Win32s and WinG installed. Ended up taking up so much of the old HDD that i barely could get the game going, and it crawled.

Similar here - I think Battle Isle 3 was annoying being built on that api

I remember running Win32s with a shell that emulated the look of Windows 95 on 3.11. My 486 has some kind of Boot sector overwrite prompt to protect against viruses but it displayed on screen in text over the graphical UI of the Win95 installer and that froze the machine and I couldn’t continue.

Windows 3.11 for workgroups had the win32 subsystem

> Microsoft has always been laser-focused on forwards- and backwards- compatibility, whether it makes sense to the rest of us or not. Microsoft has always been laser-focused on forwards- and backwards- compatibility, whether it makes sense to the rest of us or not.

I, too, made this presumption about Microsoft. However in the switch from 2012 R2 to Server 2016 code that I run asserts often because it seems like the entire process tree model has changed.

So maybe MS is backing off of its forward/backward compatibility strictness.

Perhaps the closest thing to this remaining in 95 is that the setup lets you choose the “Windows 3.1” GUI, which means the old Program Manager is the shell instead of Explorer. Quite a different experience though.

The installer also uses a pared-down version of Windows 3.1. If you look carefully, you can notice the older Win 3.x window styles.

Yes, I think this remained the case up through Windows ME. It's interesting they didn't use a pared-down 95. Maybe they were worried about Protected Mode causing trouble?

Windows 3.1 always runs in some kind of protected mode, either in 16-bit PM on 286 or as a process inside 32b hypervisor-ish layer on 386 and up.

That was also used when compressing the drive with DoubleSpace or whatever it was called on 95. Windows would reboot into a mode where the windows had win3.11 style and perform the drive conversion.

DriveSpace. And yes, something similar to Windows 3.1 standard mode was used for both, often called mini-Windows.

If I remember correctly it was called DoubleSpace in Windows 3.1/DOS 6.2 and then due to some patent or licencing issue was renamed (and the compression algorithm modified) to DriveSpace in Windows for Workgroups 3.11/DOS 6.22.

AFAIK it is part of DOS not Windows.

Program Manager had quite the run. It was included in versions up to and including Vista. I took a quick look for progman.exe on Windows 10 but looks like they stopped shipping it.

I think they ditched it in XP SP2.

For anyone who ever needs to search for files on Windows, try one of my favorite utilities, Everything by voidtools:

http://www.voidtools.com/

I set it up with Ctrl+Shift+Space as a hotkey so it's easy to open. I have about two million files on my C: drive. When I open Everything it displays them all, and then as I start typing in the search box it filters the list as fast as I can type. Highly recommended!

It just searches filenames, not content, but often that is enough.

"Everything" is an amazing utility. I have it setup on a windows server as well and can seamlessly search my desktop as well as everything on the server pretty much instantly. I'm at just under 4 million files with it.

I actually remember a few people using OS/2 because it felt easier integrating some Win 3.1 programs. And Warp generally being a better system than 95.

Although personally they both crashed on me a lot back then, which is why I bought one of these new-fangled "Linux" distributions back then.

I used OS/2 2.1 and 3 Warp extensively back in the day to develop DOS db software in Clipper. Turned out that two or more DOS windows opened on OS/2's desktop could perfectly emulate a DOS client-server situation with two or more machines on a LAN, speeding up development a lot. Attempting the same on Windows would not work, or was very crash prone.

Yep. I did this too, testing the network component of my Windows 3.1 game with virtual environments.

DOS based BBSes used OS/2 because it multitasked DOS Virtual machines better than Win 3.1 and 95.

I was hoping for updates from this guy: https://youtu.be/PH1BKPSGcxQ

One thing i liked about Win9x was that i could move the C drive between motherboards and things would boot just fine.

These days if it does not balk about missing drivers it will be some kind of DRM check that fails.

BTW, i could have sworn that at least the UI layer of Win3.x was found inside Win95 in the form of Progman.exe.

It was definitely in Win98. You could edit system.ini and change the shell from explorer to progman; I did this once when explorer got corrupted somehow and me and my brothers just wanted to play games while waiting for it to be fixed.

So what would happen if you run win31.exe on other Windows versions? OSR2? 98? ME? NT4? ...10 (32 bit)?

Patched version on Windows 7 x86 IE8 virtual machine from https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/v...:

    ---------------------------
    Application Error
    ---------------------------
    WIN31 caused a General Protection Fault in
    module WIN31.EXE at 0001:01FE.
    
    Choose close. WIN31 will close.
    ---------------------------
    Close   
    ---------------------------

The Windows 95 UI was innovative and trulky groundbreaking. People like to say it was a rip-off of one thing or another, but it really wasn't.

Imitation being the sincerest flattery, my present Arch/Xfce desktop is basically a somewhat enhanced version of that very classic interface.

> The Windows 95 UI was innovative and trulky groundbreaking. People like to say it was a rip-off of one thing or another, but it really wasn't.

Say what‽ I like this ad from Apple[0]:

         Introducing Windows 95

    It lets you use more than eight
     characters to name your files.

    It has a trash can you can open
     and take things out of again.

    It lets you drop files anywhere
        you want on the desktop.

             Imagine that.

The funny thing is that it's now 23 years later, and Windows is still not as usable as a circa-1995 Mac. It's a bit crazy!

[0] https://www.cultofmac.com/386189/how-apple-responded-to-the-...

To be fair, it's now 23 years later, and macOS is still not as usable as a circa-1995 Mac. It's a bit crazy!

I would say the Start menu and File Explorer were the biggest innovations. I don't know that Finder of the day was as useful, and in many ways, I think Finder in 10.12.x still falls short.

In default configuration Windows 95's and NT 4's File Explorer works in essentially same way as classic Finder (ie. what is called "spatial file manager" today). I think that popularity of various orthodox file manager is at least partially caused by how unusable that was in Windows with small displays of the day.

My wife switched to a Mac not that long ago, and her biggest complaint by far is that there's no start menu. There's no single source to visually scan through all programs and options and settings and menus available to her like there is on Windows. She's actually scared of using her computer sometimes in case she closes a window and doesn't know how to get it back.

It doesn't bother me as much since even on Windows I was used to hitting Win and typing my program name, but not everyone works that way.

Launchpad? I hate it and it’s the first thing I pull off the dock, but that’s the reason it’s there.

Paired with Spotlight/Alfred that's pretty much everything. That said, Launchpad kind of looks like just another app, as opposed to the centralized launcher that the Start button is

Luckily, “there’s a button for that...” as someone might have said. F4, or fn F4 if the system control buttons/function keys have been flipped.

Holy shit I've been using a Mac for how many years and never knew this feature existed. Thank you, friend.

Most users on HN probably ignore the existence of it as well as power-users in general who are more likely to use spotlight or Alfred (or just opening up /Applications for that matter), so I can’t say I’m surprised.

It was added in what I consider the dark days of OS X Lion when they were pushing iOS-ification pretty hard, hence the similarity to Springboard on iOS.

Still, useful for making less experienced users a little more comfortable - so I’m glad the option is there.

Though, in order to shut down the computer, you first had to click start. Not a real problem, or notice by most people, but when you sit down and think about it...

If you want to shut down, you have to start somewhere :)

Isn't the same true of every OS? That you have multiple clicks to get to shutdown? (other than hardware power button)

He was talking about the issue with the naming. "Start".

I agree. The Windows 95 UI (which also shipped in Windows NT 4) was an example of Microsoft at the top of their game in creating mainstream, affordable products with well-researched usability.

Except that the Windows 95 UI was a rip-off of system 7, which was a rip-off from Xerox Parc.

The UI is a watered-down version of OS/2 (see screenshots[1]), which Microsoft was working on earlier in collaboration with IBM. And most of the "classic interface" we know today (in Windows, GTK+, Qt, etc.) was specified much earlier by IBM in their Common User Access[2] standard.

They did come up with the start menu and taskbar, though, I think. Which was then copied by OS/2, GNOME, KDE, Xfce and others. And ruined in subsequent Windows versions.

[1] https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/os221

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

> https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/os221

Is... Is that a version of Notepad with _tabs_?

I found a p3 box with win95 on it. Booting on a 64M of ram I missed nothing. I seriously thought, with a security layer and a lisp editor (and driver isolation I know) I'd use that everyday.

Until you need to do anything modern that is

lisp is modern

So are its compilers and toolchains, would they fit in that amount of memory/disk?

People used lisp to do AI on Ataris, I think it'll do just fine.

The lisp that runs on an Atari is hardly modern. And considering the AI Winter, I'm not sure you're selling us what you think you're selling us, regarding AI or lisp.

I read a thesis using CLISP on an average Atari, it already had a MOP IIRC.

Of course in 2018 "modern" means a text editor that takes 1.5GB of RAM

Yeah, I was tounge in cheek referencing this. But seriously, I doubt you could find many development tools written in the last 10-15 years that would work correctly on 64mb of RAM.

Maybe vim/emacs, but would gcc? What about a huge git project?

In case this is not showing, I'm the kind of guy who cherish Chuck Moore and Forth.

Yeah, compilers might struggle, but I think for most developers, the browser would be the issue. (Back then I was doing a lot of ColdFusion and ASP development; I was able to run a dev server and editor and get work done somehow)

A quick peek at Chrome's Task Manager shows the tab I'm writing this comment in is taking 225 MB.

You can't have tham on these machines. That said, Dillo with a dozen of tabs (wikipedia pages) uses 0 cpu and about 35MB.

Wait, only 1.5GB? What kind of optimizations did you have to make to get it down that low? Mine is typically at 3-4GB...

Like walk into a water fountain while staring at a mobile device.

Back in 1995 or so, I was siting in a friend's office fooling around with a 486 box running Linux. I fired up XFig and was working on a logo for his startup business. The machine was behaving very crisply with everything I was doing on it and I was like, wow, how much RAM do you have in this thing? I type free and see it has 6 Mb of RAM in total.

A few years before that, I had an account on a machine shared by three or four remotely logged in users; a FreeBSD box with 8 Mb of RAM.

I have seen a Linux image with XWindow usefully running on a 386 with 4 Mb of RAM.

I guess if you use standardized hardware protocols, you cut free of many drivers, you don't get flashy graphics but you get some GUI. For me it's often enough. I have zero love (no hate, just no love) for html5 levels of flexibility.

Windows 3.1 shell and software run under OS/2 as a user-mode system inside a virtual DOS machine (VDM).

Also the Windows 3.1 shell is "Flat 2.0" in the 90's.

If I was going to switch to anything that old it would be Intuition (Amiga)

Huge Amiga fan here! It was my favorite early 90's platform. By the time Windows 95 was out, it felt pretty long in the tooth.

Also, you probably just mean AmigaOS. Intuition was the high level UI and library, not the whole OS.

I think you're missing the point of the article. The article is a demonstration of a less known feature in windows95 that let you run windows 3.1, but offered a button to "switch to windows95" at runtime (i.e. switch to something newer, not to something older).

I bet Windows 95 runs like a beast with the memory we have these days.

Windows 95 actually had a soft limit of 512MB of RAM, but if you modified some config files you could get it to recognize up to 2GB in some cases... but it would cause pretty significant system instability.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/304943/computer-may...

And it wouldn't run at all if you had more than 1 CPU. I remember disabling one core in a Pentium D processor to keep running Windows 98.

Does anyone read the damn article any more??? A lot of the comments here are arguing about weather or not it's a good idea to literally switch to Windows 95 as your main OS in 2018. Hint, that's NOT what the article is about, despite the title.

I wonder if many comments these days are bots just trying to farm karma, so they can sell astroturfing campaigns later. They all take turns upvoting themselves.. Or maybe I'm paranoid

That happens on Reddit already, so no surprise it would happen here sooner or later.

Just take a look at /new with showdead on. There are spam bots on there offering “free serial key” sprinkled with some Unicode characters.

I’m sure dang and the mod team have some automated way of detecting bots and voting rings.

Why would they do that? Karma is not visible on posts and you don't gain any extra rights apart from downvoting. You could just use new accounts for this.

Doesn't having negative karma result in one's comments being more easily killed? Or am I remembering wrong?

Landing pages feel so heavy, involved. Usually I comments only to try to extract the "educated gist" of what's going on + discussion. If this happens successfully I feel like I've won time and experience.

There's a lot of outlier scenario here, for me. Bottom line problem is I'm avoiding images+videos etc.even just made a personal log entry about how my internet consumption would feel improved if text only...

These posts are fun, but they are in jest right? Does win95 have true advantages over any modern OS? ( I currently use debian for most of the day )

A lack of feature bloat. It would probably be fast as lightning on modern hardware.

Though I don't use Windows regularly anymore, I always liked Windows 2000. It was stable, but only slightly more bloated than '95 from a GUI standpoint.

I have more nostalgia for Windows 2000 than practically anything else from that era. I use mostly Mac and Linux these days but wow do I feel something for win2k.

Windows 2000 is far and away my favorite Microsoft operating system of all time.

Same here. I wish I could still run it today.

As a desktop, it was awesome: separate user accounts, much more stable than previous versions, etc. I stayed with Win2K Professional as long as I could, holding out until the very end, only switching to XP when I had to.

On the server side, Win2K introduced many new features, including, of course, Active Directory, which was amazing (at the time). Windows 2003 Server brought with it some cool new stuff as well, but (just like with my desktops) I had Win2K Server machines that I held onto as long as possible.

I really did miss it. The stability (compared to its predecessors) was simply amazing. I've still got the ISO images around here somewhere.

For me it's XP. That thing was perfect - and would be even today if it had 64bit and 4K support - and of course modern apps and drivers.

There was a 64bit version of XP. The tiny little whispers on a 4k were unworkable, though.

Besides, if an app can't run on 64bit XP, what's the point of running it, anyway?

It has the one genuine advantage over any current consumer-oriented OS that it is not tracking your actions in any way and reporting them back to the vendor. Even Ubuntu includes some basic tracking of its users.

Perhaps check out TrueOS, the desktop-oriented distribution of FreeBSD.

There are many consumer-oriented Linux distributions that do not track the user.

I'm also pretty sure that Ubuntu does not. You might be thinking of the so-called "Search Lenses", which sent your search terms from the system search to Canonical's server, then they proxied that to prominently Amazon by default, optionally to others as well, to gather product results for your search term.

Their privacy policy was perfectly straightforward that they do not store the search results or use them for anything else and it's disabled by default since Ubuntu 16.04, and is effectively unavailable from Ubuntu 17.10 onwards, as they switched to GNOME for the desktop environment, which does not support this.

I'm aware that almost all *nix distros don't track, but they might be for us, but they certainly aren't for 99.9% of consumers.

Neither is Windows 95, because essentially the only feature that makes an OS "for [most] consumers" is that it comes pre-installed on the appliances at Best Buy.

> There are many consumer-oriented Linux distributions that do not track the user.

Can you name one?

I haven't actually checked network requests on all or even most of them, if this is what you're asking, but given how (positively) anal the Linux community is about tracking and how I've not actually heard about anything other than the technological feasibility of Canonical spying on users, I'm rather confident to say that none of the popular ones do.

So, to throw about a few names: Debian, openSUSE, Trisquel, Ubuntu, Fedora, Slackware etc.

Or to put it differently, the distros of which I'm aware that they track users: Android and Red Star OS.

Certainly there's no point in using Windows 95 today. These posts are more like software archeology.

If you want to use a Microsoft OS from that era, Windows NT 4.0 is much more solid.

Windows 2000 is the best Microsoft OS I've ever used. Perfect blend of consumer-oriented convenience (and compatibility) on a truly stable core.

I like it a lot but for me Windows 7 (ultimate edition) is the pinnacle of Windows. It just works and it pleasant to use.

After three service packs, and all this time to get the drivers in place, be disappointing if it didn't.

In many ways I agree, and I very much liked Windows 2000, although there's no denying it was shot through with security holes. Granted much of that fault probably lies with IE6 but, regardless, those were bad times.

The first NT that included potentially volatile graphics drivers into kernel-space?

I'm not 100% sure if I understand you correctly, but I think you're asking about the title? As far as I can tell, the title is called that way because there was an icon literally called "Switch to Chicago"[1] in the Windows 3.x "emulation" feature of a Windows Chicago (95 beta) build. The OP is a follow-up that ports the feature to a newer build of Windows 95, repeating part of the title.

[1] https://blog.krnl386.com/index.php?post/2017/11/19/Switch-to...

Thank you. The article is exactly as you say, and it certainly isn't advocating that anyone should run Windows 95 on their computer today. It's much more interesting than that.

I don't know if I would call it a Windows 3.1 emulation, it was actually running a standard build of Windows 3.1 in a Chicago/Win95 window by using some special drivers.

Interestingly, the "port" consisted mostly of removing a version test in WIN31.EXE that checked that it was running under Windows 4.0. As described in the Raymond Chen post the article links to, Chicago originally reported itself as Windows 4.0 in the GetVersion() API, but this was rolled back to 3.95 before the Win95 release because many apps had bad version checks.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040213-00/?p=...

It's more trustworthy than Windows 10 and it's much smaller than any modern OS. I wouldn't use it on anything newer than 2004 though :)

I suppose some would consider the inability to run any recent software an advantage because it reduces distraction, much like some writers continue to use a DOS text editor.

Having used 98SE daily, well into the XP and even Vista era, I can say that despite the reputation for the 9x series being unstable is almost completely due to the other software you run on it; since it has minimal memory protection, badly written apps will eventually crash the OS, but good ones will work continuously.

> These posts are fun, but they are in jest right? Does win95 have true advantages over any modern OS? ( I currently use debian for most of the day )

The author wasn't recommending the use of Windows 95 in 2018.

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