Hacker News Reader

Comment by chungy | Hacker News Reader

It's probably pretty easy if you do literally nothing on it.

Windows 95/98/Me had a very weak concept of protected memory. It was there, but it wasn't very hard for an application to go read and write into the virtual memory space of other processes. Even then, any semblance of protected memory only existed for Win32 applications. DOS and Win16 programs, both of which were very common at the time, would just have free reign over everything.

View on HN

I used 98se for a long time, well into the Vista era --- and indeed the lack of protection affects stability, but that also means the stability is directly related to what software you run; and indeed if you regularly used the mass quantities of sub-par "shovelware" that was prevalent in those days, it would definitely make it seem like the OS was crashing constantly, when it was actually the software you added on top that caused it.

On the other hand, I didn't have much of a problem maintaining multi-week uptimes simply due to the fact that I kept the system relatively "clean" and wasn't trying out new apps every day.

I had once a Win 98SE PC as a second system, mostly used for testing MSIE and accessing the company Outlook. (My production machine was a Mac running System 7.x. and System 8.) But it was also used by interns for production, running Photoshop, etc. I actually do not remember it crashing once. But this is probably quite averse to the common experience. However, it does seem to second your assumptions, as it had only a few "quality" applications installed.

It's long bothered me that Windows got a reputation of being an unstable OS when the issues were caused by poorly written software. Things got better when they moved over to the NT kernel, but drivers were still a frequent cause of BSODs since they ran in ring 0. A combination of WHQL certification and getting drivers to run in user mode instead of kernel mode has helped significantly with stability.

To be fair, not crashing under poorly written programs is a fundamental part of OS stability. Windows at the time had no resiliency against a CS101 student messing up on an assignment, it was unstable.

Windows ME had a very weak concept of being usable too. The thing crashed so much 98se was an upgrade...

I only ever used Windows ME for a while after starting to use Linux as my main desktop, so I could watch DVDs - CPUs back then were not quite fast enough to decode DVDs in software, and my MPEG decoder card was not supported on Linux.

It never gave me any trouble, but I admit this is not a representative use case. ;-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com