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Comment by ramijames | Hacker News Reader

I remember being 15, that August. We were excited for this release. My dorky friends and I went to a local computer store and tried to get the clerk to show us what Windows 95 was like. He had a pre-release version installed on one of their computers. I don't even remember how we knew.

The clerk refused to show us. I'm still irritated about it.

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Funny to think of W95 like some kind of luxury that a shopkeeper has to keep teenagers out, as if you were trying to test drive a Mercedes, or trying out guitars like that scene from Wayne's World (1992)

Or maybe the PC was in the back of the shop, in some non-public area that a bunch of random, inquisitive people (regardless of age) weren't welcome to visit.

Maybe the area was just trashed or otherwise unseemly, and would leave a bad impression. Maybe the shopkeeper smoked weed back there and didn't want to expose kids to Bertha, his prized six-foot bong. Who knows.

When I've worked in shops that sold electronics with a retail storefront, we tried to keep the showroom looking very nice and uncluttered. The back rooms where we repaired stuff and tinkered around with gear were very different: These were utilitarian spaces that regular customers weren't often invited to see.

Nothing particularly untoward ever went on back there, but still: There's reasons why shops (of all sizes) have interior walls. :)

Ya, I'm sure the guy had his reasons. We were just kids. It's not like we were going to be buying a $4k computer. We were just a nuisance.

i'd hand over one of those novelty Bill Gates dollars to show the shopkeeper i'm serious

I tried a beta and was unimpressed. I tried to talk my dad out of buying it because it sucked... He went to the store and bought it with 4x4M EDO RAM DIMMs.

The clerk might've been afraid showing it would put people off.

Ya, could be. We didn't get a copy at home for a while. Mostly, I remember when we got a new 486, which did have Windows 95. It was a multimedia machine with a CD-ROM and a fancy new copy of Myst. I remember being totally blown away.

It's hard to imagine not being impressed by the step up from 3.1

My 486 only had 4MB of RAM and I couldn't afford the $400-$500 to take it to 16GB so I actually switched to Linux in August of 95, amusingly enough.

Yeah, Windows 95 was an incredible step up. We had a Mac at home at the time, and 95 was when Windows went from an absolute joke to pretty fricken comparable to what the Mac could do.

How was Linux in 1995? Must have been relatively early in its development

I remember reading about it those magazines, but got a love cd much much later

In some part it was more advanced, I think windos 95 lacked TCP/IP in its first version, as microsoft tried to do a "Novell" on the LAN. To connect to the Internet there were 3rd party applications like trumpetsomething.

At that time there was the Xfree X11 implementation, before the Xorg coming, and you had to create your configuration for your GPU and monitor combination, using scripts or from scratch, the famous Xconfig. I recall the scary warning in the documentation to not mess with your monitor modelines as you could literally burn your CRTs; monitors at that time were already equipped with builtin protections, so wrong config would only result in a black screen, but every time it happened I held my breath.

There were already at that time a lot of different window managers, like FVWM, TWM and at least one or two desktop environments. I think CDE was already available for Linux in 95...

I used Trumpet WinSock with Win 3.1, but with most ISPs you had to use an emulated SLIP/PPP connection anyway. Otherwise you'd be dialing in to a shell so the advantage of the GUI was mostly lost (from the perspective of being able to use Mosaic or whatever, that is).

I think the first release of Windows 95 did include TCP/IP networking support. I remember using it. But I think it wasn't installed by default, so you had to go and install it separately via the control panel.

One of my earlier memories of it back then was that _every single time I recompiled my kernel_ (which was frequent), my LILO bootloader ended up corrupted. There was just a totally broken default in whatever version that was.

SO MANY rescue boots.

Related, it took 8h to compile a kernel with 4MB of RAM. I didn't realize that was slow, honestly. I just thought that's how long it took. When I finally did get more RAM, and the system stopped swapping, and it took 12 minutes to recompile, it blew me away.

Anyway, it was fine. Well more than fine, great. Running a dozen virtual consoles (alt-f1 thru alt-f12) gave me everything i needed; interactive sessions, sessions I left logged into IRC clients, PINE for email, etc.

I didn't have enough RAM to run X Windows until later but once I did, that was a revelation as well. Remote X servers was so much more advanced than stuff we got in Windows/Mac until much much later.

What was the fix? You did rerun lilo for every new kernel, right? Make install on the Linux source tree used to copy the built kernel image and run lilo.

Lots of Xf86config and make config

I adopted Linux in 1998 (Slackware). It was super rough around the edges as a desktop, but absolutely an upgrade for a server. Especially since the alternative was Windows NT, which for an 18 year old, using shitty hardware, was out of my price range.

We couldn't afford to upgrade our 4MB 486 either (well, more like I wasn't allowed to) so I was stuck with Win 3.11 all the way till 1999, skipping 95 completely, skipping color (monochrome monitor).

But by '99 I was old enough to build my own PC, so I built a fancy PIII-450 box, with one of the first nVidia GPUs (RIVA TNT) with 16MB RAM (later upgraded to 32) and finally stepped into the world of fancy color graphics (new color monitor, yay), Win 98, and the world of multi-booting with Linux, QNX, BeOS and of course DOS. I had this fancy GUI boot manager (with mouse support too!), can't recall what it was called but it was so much more advanced than anything else at the time, it had a built-in partition manager and could also get past the 4-partition limit. Man, those were the days, so much cool shit to play around with.

> $400-$500 to take it to 16GB

Perhaps you meant 16MB, because an 80486 processor didn't have a snowball's chance of addressing 16GB of real memory?

Windows 95 was a big step up, at least for PC users. What, if anything, impressed you more at the time?

It was full of bugs, slower, took more screen real estate, had a very long boot time, took an insane amount of disk space, even had to wait for effin shutdown.

I could not see the improvement in that. The frequent BSODs proved it was horribly unstable.

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