Why Windows 95 Was Tech's Last True Revolution | Hacker News Reader

Why Windows 95 Was Tech's Last True Revolution

comuniq.xyz

12 points01-_-22 comments

Windows 95 was definitely better for MS users, but it was really just patching a hole in a single company's product line. Macs were far more solid than Win 95/98/SE at the time, and things like Sun Sparc 5s were more solid than Macs. Before people were getting hit with security problems all the time, they used to go years without rebooting Unix servers.

It was more like one company with a stranglehold on the market was terrible. The intensity of that has waxed and waned, but that's been true from then all the way until now.

It depends what you mean by solid. System 7.5 was slower and less reliable than Windows 95 but its usability was slightly better.

Heck, for a lot of activities, NT 4.0 was better than Win 95. And while NT4 came out after 95, it was the same relative time period.

>they used to go years without rebooting Unix servers

A coworker was getting ready to do a RAM upgrade on a Solaris system that hadn't been rebooted in multiple years. I suggested to him: Before you do the RAM upgrade, try just rebooting the box to make sure it comes up WITHOUT the RAM upgrade. The day after the upgrade he came to me: "That was brilliant! We rebooted the box and it didn't come back up, it saved us time debugging why the RAM upgrade broke the system."

It was a great consumer product at the time but "last true revolution"?? Sorry, but you've missed a lot. ;)

No kidding, in that vain, I would say IBM throwing 2B USD at Linux started a revolution.

>it was probably the most absurd, loud marketing event the tech world has ever seen.

I remember watching TV with a friend during this and a Coke ad came on where this guy was shuffling from office to office asking for change for the Coke machine. I chuckled at it and he (a software engineer for like 20 years at that point) said "I don't get it, why was that funny? He was just looking for change." I replied: "That was Bill Gates."

Coke made a Bill Gates commercial for the release of Windows 95.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U5T0cR1aHJ4

Good grief, what a ridiculous claim.

Yep, and replete with inaccuracies.

"Before it, using a computer was synonymous with staring at the black MS-DOS screen. Want to play a game? You had to type annoying commands like cd C:\games\doom and pray the system wouldn't throw a conventional memory error."

Wrong, obviously, since Windows already existed. But then comes this odd statement:

"Windows 3.1, which came before, was just a shell on top of DOS. It was a messy pile of floating windows that easily got lost behind one another."

Also wrong. There wasn't anything fundamentally different about window management in 95. And Program Manager was a much better way to organize and access applications than the Start menu, which violated Microsoft's own guidelines for nested-menu depth.

The Start menu created a problem that has only gotten worse. Installers would create entire sub-menus by vendor name; so instead of looking for "TurboCAD," for example, you'd somehow be expected to look under "Imsi." Obnoxious.

For a while you could still put your applications into groups in the Start menu, if you knew where to go in the filesystem. So, get this, you could put your audio apps into one group, your dev tools in another, your graphics applications in another... INCREDIBLE, right? And some installers did the right thing and asked you where in the Start menu you wanted to app shortcut to be.

But today, organizing your apps is essentially impossible. Yeah, you can "pin" a limited number of them here and there, but still not in groups. The sad thing is that Apple has regressed on this too, with the deletion of Launchpad. Now you're wading through hundreds of applications.

I agree that Microsoft advanced the GUI more than anyone else in the '90s, but it has undone all of that and more by now. What a disaster the Windows UI is today.

Windows 95 was a shell on top of DOS. That didn’t change until Windows 2000 Desktop.

You're forgetting NT 3.1, 3.5, and 4.0.

I didn't say otherwise...

Neither Windows 3.1 nor Windows 95 were mere shells atop DOS. As early Windows 2.0 in 386 Enhanced Mode (Win/386), it was a virtual machine manager that took complete control of the machine and ran the Windows GUI and DOS in separate VMs.

You can still go to that same folder though, you just need a Start Menu replacement like OpenShell to get a sane Start Menu appearance.

Thanks. You used to be able to do it from the menu itself, though. I don't even remember the method...

And now the file system is just an irritating mess. Why are there mirrors of your home-directory structure, most of them "forbidden," littering the left pane? I waste so much time every hour of every day hunting down my most-used directories. Yes, I pinned some shortcuts on my desktop, but that means herding windows out of the way to get to them.

Finder blows, but somehow I navigate better with it now than I can with Explorer.

Agreed. From the article:

> Before August 1995, using a computer was an intimidating ordeal. You either knew how to handle black command lines or you were stuck with some pretty patched-up graphical interfaces.

Did the author just blank the entire Mac computer line-up from their memory? System 1 had a finder/menu/window management/etc. and came out all the way back in '84.

At the time 90% of people had never even touched a Mac.

Maybe so but that’s not the argument the article is making. The article is claiming that there was only one alternative way to use a computer, and that was through the use of obscure command-line semantics.

Anecdotal, but Macs weren’t as uncommon as you might think, since they were subsidized in scholastic environemtns. I remember using them as an elementary school kid.

Even the title of the article is absurd and ignores subsequent revolutions like Wi-fi, NT architecture, the page rank algorithm, cloud computing, etc.

Not sure about the "last true revolution" claim, but the release was a seminal moment in computing. Growing up in the 90s, for me it feels like the milestone achievements or turning points were:

- Windows 95

- Broadband Internet

- AI

Bait headline.

windows 2000 and os x snow leopard were peak windows and mac desktops.

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