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The Windows 96 Story

blog.racket.com

86 pointsmaguay44 comments

>Gates correctly recognized that browsers were the last app we’d learn how to use, that so much of the software to come would be browser-based SaaS.

Is it really the correct context for Gates' statement of "You just learn one thing, and that’s the browser"? I really don't think browser-run software was a thing for long while yet. I thought he meant the initial internet hype as the source of -information-.

Windows 98 was when they turned the whole file explorer into some kind of pseudo webview integrated with IE.

This was also when they were terrified of Java web applets making Windows as a platform obsolete so they were busy embrace and extending that (and pushing ActiveX in order to turn the web Windows proprietary).

So I think it very much sounds like the correct context.

Ah, yes, active desktop, crashy little bastard that it was.

When I was doing desktop support for 9x I got very good at enumerating the things active desktop theoretically did, checking users weren't using any of them, and turning the flipping thing off. This was infinitely less painful for everybody than trying to coax it into actually working.

(and before you say "but the users would just turn it back on again" ... yes, and then I'd turn it back off while explaining I'd warned them about that just loudly enough that the next time they turned it back on their colleagues would laugh at them before they got as far as contacting me and the problem then became self-solving)

When we were in high school we played around with IE5 web applications made with .hta files that were basically Electron apps 15 years before Electron.

And we used to screw with replacing the HTML of folders on shared drives in middle school with secret games and other stuff (the actual folder listing was some ActiveX you dropped into the page), until some folder war broke out and the sysadmins banned it.

Netscape was talking about making the browser the user's primary app platform even before Windows 98 came out. The irony was, their play in doing so was to make the Windows monopoly irrelevant. Same thing with Sun and Java. The glorious future was one in which applications were delivered to you from "the net" and ran without regard to CPU or OS platform, thus making Microsoft and Windows irrelevant. It was a last-ditch play from the Unix workstation vendors whose lunch was being eaten by Windows NT; Netscape was aboard because it was run by oldschool Unix people.

Happy that it failed. The critique against Microsoft of the 90s back then was in many ways correct, however I’m not convinced that net delivered applications with Netscape would be an improvement, even if it was executed by old school Unix people.

And if we look how the web has evolved it is nothing but a nightmare. Java applets would probably be an even larger attack vector. Not really encouraging that we in the end got the better solution of the "net delivered applications", but here we are.

Certainly back around 1996 when Frames became a thing on web pages, and Javascipt and Jaava were on the rise people in Microsoft were genuinely concerned that the broswer would eat the OS

Considering, that the objective was to reduce Windows to a poorly debugged set of device drivers (as said by Marc Andreessen), their concern was justified.

Whatever, browser-based apps still are apps, not necessarily easier than native apps. A browser essentially is a launcher with its own UI toolkit and discovery mechanism. Open GMail, Google Docs or whatever, hide the address bar and you essentially get an ordinary app you still have to learn.

There are significantly more constraints within the browser than inside a general os environment, though. It's becoming less of a difference, but there are important contexts and operations lost by browser apps.

An ordinary app with half the integration, third of features, twice the bugs and few supported formats.

Sure, but this is irrelevant to the context. Mr. Gates said the browser is the last app to learn. Saying it's the last operating system would make much more sense. Apps are still there and not going away.

Given how much MS was into developers I would say this was more about learning just one set of APIs.

Outlook Web Access was developed in 1995 and release with Exchange 5 in 1997. The invented XMLHttpRequest to do it and it later became the W3C standard and the cornerstone of AJAX.

Sadly Windows 96 in a browser is more responsive that Windows 10 on real hardware.

What kind of hardware do you run? Mechanical drive?

I have an ancient machine but with SSD, Windows 10 is still snappy.

I think Windows 10 is simply very I/O dependent, much more so than older Windows or Linux, so having that SSD or not would make or break your experience. I've had really new (8th gen Intel) laptops perform absolutely atrocious until I swapped in an SSD.

Ideally everyone should have an SSD in 2021, but that doesn't seem to have happened yet.

Yes, Windows 10 is very I/O dependent, it will not be a pleasant experience with a mechanical drive. Not sure if Windows 8 was too, I didn't use Windows 8 much (we all know why).

If you can't afford a SSD drive, I recommend buy an older used one. Just as my machine is ancient, my SSD's are ancient too. My main drive is a Intel 530 180GB that started production in late of 2013.

It was too, when you stayed in the new .NET UI, with additional bugs. Note that shell itself is one of those applications.

The problem there I think it's that all the CLR VMs are not free, specifically the libraries in them are loaded from disk, sizable and not shared across processes, and lazy loaded.

Same problem as if you ran a lot of JVM applications.

I switched a while back to Linux and like my setup much better than what I can do on windows but I think a lot of the "windows is slow" stuff is overblown. I temporarily had windows installed the other day and it was just fine in terms of being "snappy".

Agreed. I run macOS and Windows via Bootcamp and Windows 10 feels snappier than macOS most days. The same might not be said for a new laptop loaded down with junkware, mind.

A fresh install is fast for the first couple days, you say...

Opening context menu of task bar items takes about 500 ms here with SDD and i7.

That is an operation I never do. I guess slowness can be attributed to that the menu is application aware, customizable menu options per application. But there is also a slow animation when opening the menu.

And on top of that as soon as you hover above an item in the taskbar it wants to show a thumbnail preview of that window.

All combined the user interaction feels a bit weird.

I turned off "Animations in the taskbar" and I think the context menu got somewhat faster.

Do you have many shell extensions installed? Try disabling some items on the context menu.

RAM matters too. I never had much trouble running Windows 7 with 2, 3, or 4GB but since upgrading our office machines I've noticed they feel sluggish with anything under 8.

I'd dare to say it is as snappy as i remembered win95 to be

Having used win98 back on a Pentium 200 I was flabbergasted by how sluggish and prone to delay it was. Coming from AmigaOS there were jarring delays everywhere, even for something as simple as opening the Start Menu. God forbid I set an jpg wallpaper, Active Desktop murdered performance.

One of the jokes at the time was: What is Windows? An i386 emulator for Pentium.

10$ bet: nobody was disappointed by win95 latency when booting their old 586 era machine

I would argue that Sleep and Hibernation came about because booting Windows took so long.

last time i booted a win95 machine I was happy waiting during the splash screen :D

I guess you have a point, I was mostly remembering the desktop part, I was surprised how the limited GUI felt snappier than my latest laptop with xfce and didn't lack much important features

I can't remember the last time I booted Win95 but I remember the first. I had installed a Cyrix 586 overdrive chip in my Lazer 486sx 33mhz system that was maxed out with 32mb of RAM. It took forever and I wasn't sure if it would work.

win95 ushered in the 686 era, and people with 586 machines certainly were complaining that win31 had been faster.

> win95 ushered in the 686 era, and people with 586 machines certainly were complaining that win31 had been faster.

Win95 debuted into an era when 486 was still the most common processor and 586 (aka Pentium) was just building steam.

Windows 3.11 was faster on a 486 than Windows 95, so I’m guessing you mistakenly advanced processor generations in your comment.

I remember Win98 opening the start menu instantly, but taking annoyingly long to open the "all programs" menu. Considering that this distinction is removed in Win10, Win10 on a 500GB SSD is snappier in that regard than Win98 was on a 3GB HDD.

Snappier, even. And it boots up faster. I remember Windows 98 taking 3-5 minutes to boot up.

I agree!

Related discussion from 5 days back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27978463

Given the poster's history, this definitely is a subtle way of promoting their latest blogging platform.

totally thought this was a dev blog for the Racket language. Was tying to figure out why the devs of Racket would be blogging about Windows 96 in the browser....

Although not full operating systems, since at least 2005 there were also some solid systems using similar concepts (not Windows though), like eyeOS [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EyeOS

If they manage to get some working software that runs in Kiosk mode, they might actually get a lot of people using it, not just as a novelty

Windows93 and Windows96 work best in a fullscreen Window. Press F11 to enjoy them properly.

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