Windows 95 – How Does It Look Today?
dmitryelj.medium.com
dmitryelj.medium.com
- 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.
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.
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 :(
But your enthusiasm for NeXTSTEP really makes me think of this Steve Jobs anecdote:
https://twitter.com/imranchaudhri/status/1374934903188414467
https://infinitediaries.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/NeXTS...
OpenStep ran on a 486 without FPU.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiteStep
It was my favorite ui replacement on Win98/95 until Win2k come out.
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.
https://github.com/atauenis/webone
Also saw one recently that proxies to archive.org for that really nostalgic feel.
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.
gopher://sdf.org
gopher://hngopher.com
gopher://magical.fish
gopher://bitreich.org
gopher://i-logout.cz/1/software/PC/Software/]
https://winclassic.boards.net/thread/456/reversibly-enable-d...
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!
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?)
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.
I now have a Texas calculator on my desk.
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)
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.
Can't live without that one in $PATH.
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
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
At this point the linux desktops have become more useable.
It is our fault as an industry that this has happened and we are reaping what we've sewn.
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.
[1] Assessing our software deployments at customer sites
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.
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.
Apple really thought about those things a lot back then. In some ways, modern MacOS is a step backwards on details like this.
I hope you give 7.5.5 a try with Basilisk.
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.
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.
But in general you are right
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. :)
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.
FWIW, my first ever computer had Win95 installed, so I grew up believing that the start menu was always a given, and I thought DOS was just part of the computer start-up procedure.
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.
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.
I still long for the Rainy Day theme. I wish Windows 10 would allow us to use the classic shell.
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.
Interesting. What sorts of things did people struggle with?
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
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.
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.
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).
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...
I'll try that analyzer. But I don't think the boot is slowed down, it's just a bit slower than Windows. Shutdown takes minutes, though.
Not as bad as it used to be when the audio tape failed after 20 mins, but still.
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.
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
Here's a quick demo from a similar Tandy model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaSkda4XW3k
It's in ARM assembler.
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.
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
But then again it had a lot less in terms of hardware to deal with, memory to test and so on.
To be fair to PCs the DFS prompt was more like a boot-loader than an OS.
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.
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).
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.
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) = 13.534sWhy can't they just open-source whatever they crapped out, and have professional developers maintain it for them for free?
I had to enter my password 3 times to login, that's most of time spent here :) (8 to 10 seconds to the login banner).
I think you have an Intel machine. For some reason, Intel machines spend large amounts of time initializing their firmware. Xeon servers spend minutes at it, while Epyc ones spends only ten seconds or so. But even Intel laptops seems slower than Ryzen ones for some reason.
Edit : I had an update and rebooted (password entered once this time :)
Startup finished in 2.557s (firmware) + 799ms (loader) + 2.901s (kernel) + 5.103s (userspace) = 11.362s graphical.target reached after 5.093s in userspace
Login banner appeared a little less than 8s after boot.
Androids Activity-model provides a more modern solution to this (putting its lack of multitasking aside). Did you ever think of what happens when you swap app and did you ever care about shutting off old apps? There is no need, it automatically hibernates individual apps that were not used recently but you don't notice, next time you open it magically continues exactly where you left off. Assuming developer of the app cared about state-management.
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.
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.
I suspect configuration (software and hardware) has a massive impact which is being glossed over.
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.
IT closed the users ticket without action: As long as it boots in 15 minutes or less, there is no performance problem.
You should try Windows 10. They made dramatic improvements to the boot time and my (significantly less beefy) desktop cold-boots in <10s.
This is now my mental model for tricks like fast boot (which are obviously not applied to the full stack)
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.
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.
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)
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.
A sibling comment already covers how you can remove/disable nearly every preinstalled annoyance so I won't go into that
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.
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
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".
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.
The text mode loader would only ever appear when resuming from hibernate.
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".
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...
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.
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".)
- 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.
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....
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!
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.
No it does NOT. It's beautify because it's simple, yet consistent and clear.
Today's "standard"? That's the ugly one.
Win 10 brought their current start menu.
These days, dark mode on a black desktop background means you can't find where a window's surface ends.
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.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/05/tech/windows-10-redesign-...
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.
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.
You had to hover the mouse to know that it was clickable.
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.
To me, all three ways to scroll (scrollwheel, auto-scroll, dragging scroll bar manually) have their uses.
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 :/
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.
Which bit of 95 did you fail to understand?
That part.
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.)
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.
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!
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.
On "highly compatible", well, you could run mandrake and send drakconf and KDE to the trash.
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!
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.
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.
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.
I compiled it on an SGI Indigo running at 30Mhz and it would play up to 256kbps files using 90 percent of CPU.
But this program called "amp"... I'm very curious to see if it could be compiled to run on a recent machine.
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.
Edit: Fixed: add "frequency = frequency/2;" after the comment /* Set the output frequency */ in file audioIO_Linux.c
Does it still hold up?
Maybe I will build it just for grins myself. Thanks for the tips.
But yes, it uses very little cpu. Maybe less than dosamp.
Maybe I will play your track after the family activities. Edit: Except access denied, lol. No worries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinPlay3 was released in 1995 and requires "only" a 66MHz 486, available in 1992.
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.
The only way to play mp3s was in linux where I shutdown every possible daemon and ran the decoder at the highest priority.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I remember them being like 1.5-3 mb each. Not that bad of a download with a 56k
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
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.)
Ripping CDs and encoding was definitely a different story.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
telinit 1.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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".
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.
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.
Is it? That would explain why I find it confusing and moving buttons around randomly.
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.
[0] Functionally identical to Windows XP with the luna skin disabled, as well as Windows Server 2003.
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.
now you just wack windows key, type in part of the app name and press enter.
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.
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)
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...
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.
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.
* For it's time. I'm sure it wasn't instant on a pentium 1 even if I remember it that way.
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).
Slackware does: https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware64-current/...
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 ^^
* high contrast UI with clear controls: clear buttons, scroll bars
* consistent UI controls
* low latency input (clicking buttons, opening/closing windows).
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.
Superficial churn like flat, skeumorphic, minimalist, whatever, sure, but nothing like TUI to GUI, windows, or the mouse.
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?
I kind of want to give it a go now.
Several of that original team are still at Microsoft, I currently work on HoloLens
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!
Plus you don't have to go on a wild goose chase hunting down roms.
It can run most Windows 9x software, though games may be a problem. It has Pinball though!
> 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.
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.
Direct link: https://www.ghacks.net/download/132446
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Imho, that's the most important part of the article.
Imagine it with a new jolt of life for modern hardware. Office 97 on a 16 core CPU is the dream.
Complete graphical OS in ~200 MB. Miss those days.
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.
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).
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.
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.
You can still open http only websites fine, even in the original internet explorer : https://whynohttps.com/
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...
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.
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.
[1] https://blog.chocolatey.org/2020/01/remove-support-for-old-t...
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
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.
The good old days. Earlier no body would ever need more than 640K main memory....
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.
I use it regularly for testing, and it's a great platform for writing and updating my blog (from within a VM)
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=windows+upgrade...
Windows 2000 GUI any day. clear, concise and consistent.By extension one could day Windows 10 today still uses UI elements first introduced in Mac System 7.
Win95 holds up.
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.
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
Isn't this the hallmark of all truly revolutionary technologies?
Malware and AUTORUN.EXE: name a more iconic duo.
Many Win 95 computers had only sporadic net access or none at all.
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
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.
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.
Win98 was much more stable then Win95 and as functional.