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Comment by ardit33 | Hacker News Reader

You don't have to go even that far. The minimum hardware requirements for Microsoft Windows 95 were:

A personal computer with a 386DX, 20MHz or higher processor, 4MB of memory (8MB recommended) At least 70MB of available hard disk space for installation

A hard drive at the time, had 250-500MB space. Not even 1GB (that was a luxury), This not even 1/4000 of this small chip. So, you have stack 4000 of those Windows 95 PC Hard Drives, to match the capacity of this chip. Only super computers/clusters of the time had that capacity.

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Honestly, what I think is more amazing is how far we didn’t come given the enormous increase in processing power.

Windows 95 was pretty good for it’s time, but windows 11 isn’t essentially different.

Windows from 7 onwards is worse even for 1995.

> windows 11 isn’t essentially different

That's only if you ignore all of the differences! 8)

There are many big and small differences that people just gloss over, because they feel it doesn't apply to them, or they don't even realise it's there.

Windows 95 used to crash if you looked at it wrong. It was horrendously vulnerable to malware, even across the network. Its "maximums" were hilariously low due to many remaining 16-bit internals. Programming for it was a PITA, even in 32-bit mode. Its network capabilities were woeful. Multilingual? Yes, but only in some combinations at a time. No hope of mixing, say, Chinese and Hebrew in a single text box. Poor text input in general, poor accessibility, etc, etc, etc...

Yeah, but would you call all those framework improvements fundamentally different?

It’s more stable, secure, and drivers are plentiful (and included!), but those feel ancillary. Most people don’t need multiple languages in the same text box.

Obviously it’s fundamentally different in a ship of theseus way, in that pretty much all of what was Win 95 has been replaced.

But the way people use their PC is the same.

That's more a people problem than a technology problem. Many user interface paradigms have been tried over the decades. We've largely settled on what we have because it is what people were able to adapt to. Similar to how driving a car isn't that different from 40 years ago, or even 80 years ago. There's minor iterative changes with improved reliability and accessibility, but not fundamental changes.

Except for:

- Kernel was modularized in the MinWin project

- A C++ subset is now used in kernel as well (see WIL library), since Vista

- COM, and now WinRT, took over the role of Longhorn ideas, now done with C++ instead of .NET

- Virtualization is now used to protect key kernel areas (see kernel data protection)

- Focus on user space drivers

- The GUI stack has been rewritten multiple times

One can program Windows 11 like Windows 95, but there are plenty of APIs being missed, it just happens to work thanks to Microsoft's way of dealing with backwards compatibility

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