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Comment by hapnin | Hacker News Reader

The Chicago build of Windows 95 was one of the most stable OSes I've ever encountered. I had a machine that ran it 24/7 with zero issues into the early 2000s until the power supply fried.

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Windows 95 had a bug which could crash it after about 50 days of uptime:

https://www.cnet.com/news/windows-may-crash-after-49-7-days/

That was prob. introduced after the Chicago build.

For those wondering: the actual limit was 2³² milliseconds (and I remember it as would crash, not could crash)

I remember never having any system with Windows 9x stay up long enough to even come close to the required uptime to test the veracity of this bug report. We tried with a machine which didn't do anything at all but even that one crashed by itself in a week or two, probably due to some network traffic it didn't like. In that time I worked as editor in chief for some IT-related magazines so we had a lab full of machines to test and got invited to all the press conferences - including the one mentioned here with Gates and the Stones. I still think the later part of that Stones' song they used were a better fit than the 'You can start me up' line:

You make a grown man cry, You make a grown man cry

until the power supply fried

Interesting. Re stability, people bitched Windows 95 a lot, but I only encountered serious issues when 98 came out. XP was very stable... but don't get me started on Windows ME.

A lot of perceived stability issues in Windows 95/98 were actually driver issues. Back then, all drivers ran with full privilege and could bring down the entire OS if they had a hiccup. Crashes due to bugs in the graphics driver, sound driver, etc. were really common.

That is still why Apple shines today. They have full control on the Hardware's supply chain, and a billionth fewer drivers to support.

I do miss winnuke. For a brief period, it was a great way to shutdown spammers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinNuke

I miss BlackOrifice and the free internet access that came with it...

I miss Hacker's Paradise (later renamed Master's Paradise, in an attempt to switch to a legitimate use case, i.e. remote sys administration).

The author of that was kind enough to send me the Delphi source code and since then I was hooked on OOP.

Such interesting times.

I remember having a fair amount of stability issues with Win95 before the USB patch came out

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