But it was amazing for those of us used to black and white/green/amber screens in DOS. You could put an image as your background. And it stayed there, lurking behind your word processor or spreadsheet, to spring back into your vision whenever you finished up your work.
One of the very first things I always do in any OS is to set the desktop background to solid color, usually black. I almost never ever will see it, coz there's always going to be a window on top of it, except upon startup for some brief period of time or if I accidentally minimize everything.
I work with full screen windows. Always (tiny number of exceptional cases maybe). I switch between windows with Alt+Tab when necessary. I also have a relatively small screen, both for work and personal stuff (14" for at least 10 years now).
You do you of course.
I remember the launch parties for 95. I remember thinking to myself how strange it was to go to all of that expense to promote an OS.
There were OS improvements too, but I have forgot what. The real improvements came with Win2K - one of the best versions of Windows ever.
It also was the first version to remove the 8.3 limitation and give us long file names.
They weren't fake long file names. They were actual long files names but of course the operating system that didn't support long files names didn't know what to do with the (very real) long file names. It only knew the 8.3 file name that was also set for compatibility.
Of course it sucked if you looked at or worked with DOS based apps. But it was one of those things that was always good about Microsoft Windows: Backwards compatibility.
They literally would build in (bug-) compatibility layers for specific games, where if they detected you were running a particular game, they'd not use the fixed or optimized code paths, but the old ones / emulate / patch things as the game expected them to be. And that was not because Windows was buggy and the games were good. It was the other way around. Games used trickery and internal knowledge that they shouldn't and if/when MS would block those paths or change internals, those games would stop working or crash.
Kinda sorta but this misses context.
> we got long filenames
Consumers got long filenames. NT had been doing it for a couple of years. Win95 did it on FAT on a mass-market OS.
> a built-in network stack
No. Windows for Workgroups had offered that for several years. It talked NetBEUI, the Microsoft protocol, out of the box, and it also talked Novell IPX/SPX for talking to Netware, and DECnet, and HP-DLC...
But you hint at the important bit...
> no more Trumpet WinSock
Bingo. Win95 offered native 32-bit TCP/IP for the first time and it was over Ethernet.
WfWg had DOS-based 16-bit TCP/IP but only over Ethernet (or Token Ring!) It didn't have dialup networking -- at all. It couldn't talk TCP/IP over PPP, such as over a modem. WfWg 3.11 offered, only as an optional extra download, a 32-bit TCP/IP stack -- for network cards. And nobody had anything to download it over. ;-)
Internet Explorer 4 for Windows 3.x had an optional 16-bit dialup stack and optional 16-bit TCP/IP -- but that could not talk to a network card.
I know, it's prehistory, but in the late 1980s and early to mid 1990s, local-area networks were catching on like wildfire and by 1993 or so Microsoft noticed and made networking in Windows a standard feature.
What is overlooked today: it didn't use TCP/IP.
Nothing much did. Not even big iron or minicomputers like DEC VAX kit with VMS. TCP/IP was a Unix thing, and Unix cost $thousands just for the OS, plus $thousands more for the hardware. Even if you ran it on PCs, you needed $thousands worth of RAM. SCO Xenix was huge but for production it needed 2-4 MB of RAM, ideally 8+ MB, and in the DOS era, PCs came with 1 MB.
Hold up, there is no need for this revisionist history.
At the very least, Windows 95 introduced the ability to run 32-bit apps pre-emptively that was otherwise only available on Windows NT. You continued to maintain the ability to run 16-but apps that wouldn’t run on Win NT.
You also gained support for long filenames, and to the chagrin of many, plug-and-play.
These were foundational and set the tone for the next 30 years of computing.
Oh, that is _hilarious._ Mac started out strong and has always kept ahead of Windows in many if not most ways that GIUs are done.
Hell, every now and then I’ll fire up my 2002 Power Mac (dual 1.25Ghz G4, MDD) and just bask in the beauty that is OS 9.2.2. While it was lacking good multitasking and multi-user accounts, it is still an exquisitely gorgeous UI.
I still use it for various tasks, although it’s close to impossible to do decent Internet work on it, owing to no available modern web browsers.
They might have made better choices from the palette, but the limitations were severe.
If you really want to stab your eyes out, CGA had a mode with white, bright pink, light blue and black. I remember playing Keen on it. I've never seen that mode used for anything nice.
This is magenta/cyan mode is essentially the proto-cyberpunk aesthetic.
https://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/20...
...and here's the same screen viewed on a composite monitor:
https://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/20...
These images come from this page:
https://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/cga-composite-graphic...
If this isn't enough it seems to be possible to coax ~1000 colours out of these cards as well:
https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-...
But personally, I enjoyed NT 3.1 more. Built-in PPP so I could dial up to CompuServe and get on the Net. Not the web, which barely existed yet, but the Internet. Grab my email at the same time as I downloaded some files over FTP and grabbed the latest from my newsgroups.
At the same time, I had all of MS Office open, and a few command prompts, and a connection to the big office VAX watching that it was happy...
I enjoyed taunting Amiga owners about Real Multitasking on Windows. :-D I was about 25 at the time, in my defence.
Microsoft got back to the roots with Windows 10 and 11.
Cosmetically, it's all right, sometimes pretty. I like the Bing Wallpaper thing.
Functionally, 11 is a pile of organic fertiliser.