Windows 95 Turns 10

ColdGrits writes "It's hard to believe it, but 10 short years ago today saw the launch of Windows '95. Here is an archive of the Washington Post's story on the day. As part of the launch, Microsoft paid $12,000,000 for the rights to use the Rolling Stones' song "Start Me Up" (containing the prophetic line 'You make a grown man cry'). "

Ahh, nostalgia...

From TFA:

Analysts think this diligence will pay off. "The extraordinarily extensive testing they did makes a show-stopping bug a pretty unlikely occurrence," said Chuck Stegman, a vice president at Dataquest Inc., a high-tech market research firm in California. "Someone would have stumbled on it already."

This passage is especially amusing, since I gained most of my knowledge of Windows 95 through needing to reinstall it repeatedly on various systems.

Another gem from TFA:

But those customers expecting Windows 95 to be a great technological leap forward may be disappointed. International Business Machines Corp. and Apple Computer Inc. already have operating systems on the market that sport the features - greater memory management, the ability to perform several tasks at once and enhanced user-friendliness - now being hailed in Windows 95.

Big Blue has made some effort to counter Microsoft's media onslaught with ads that feature the names of companies that have relied on its OS/2 system for years. Yesterday, at corporate headquarters in Armonk, N.Y., IBM officials reiterated the virtues of its own time-tested product, and tried to ignore the festivities.

"Microsoft is delivering the same features we delivered seven years ago," said company spokesman Tim Breuer. "We're moving on business as usual here."

Yes...I vaguely recall IBM's OS/2...but Apple? No....I'm drawing a blank. ^_^

Precautions...

"But Microsoft is unlikely to suffer a similar fate because it took precautions, such as delaying its launch date and sending out a few hundred thousand copies to testers across the country."

These are called precautions? I'm going to tell my client that next time we're delayed on a release. And as far as testing, was that something that was new in software at the time?

But they didn't deliver; they provided a stop-gap.

Windows 95 still had a crappy FAT filesystem (even though Microsoft had developed HPFS years before) and it was still a pile of 32-bit DLLs (or VxDs) running on top of DOS instead of a compartmentalized 32-bit OS with a classic kernel/shell design.

Microsoft's older version of OS/2 was a 16-bit solution that wasn't all that competitive, but at least it had a real filesystem and an architecture that made a little bit of sense to someone with a comp sci background.

Besides, by the time Windows 95 was released, OS/2 had been an IBM product for over three years (OS/2 2.0, 2.1, and Warp 3.0 had already been released), and it had been almost completely rewritten by IBM during that time (new 32-bit kernel, new WPS desktop, new VDM subsystem, new WinOS2 subsystem, and new network stack).

NT was around then, as you say, and it had a good native 32-bit core, but it still used the Windows 3.1 desktop and had such poor support for DOS apps that many people couldn't use it effectively (at least for a few more years).

Re:But they didn't deliver; they provided a stop-g

The VxDs actually replaced nearly all of the DOS and BIOS calls with virtualized device drivers -- that's why you could run a bunch of separate DOS windows. IIRC, vmm32.vxd was the 32-bit kernel, and went in and patched up the interrupt table and redirected it to its own code. Otherwise there's no way it would work since the DOS code talked to the hardware directly and had no support for multitasking.

Check out Andrew Schulman's "Inside Windows 95" some time. But the "on top" makes it sound like DOS was still in charge under the covers, which it wasn't - it's pretty much a pile of dead code and thunks by the time vmm32.vxd got its tentacles inside.

They did a pretty good job of making it backwards-compatible enough so folks could still most of the DOS and Win16 apps they wanted.

Re:But they didn't deliver; they provided a stop-g

WOW SUCH A NEW AND INVENTIVE ORIGINAL JOKE! I've never heard that one before! Certainly not about 30,000 times a goddamned year between 1995 and 2005. And yet Slashdot moderators, obviously on crack, moderate it up regardless... maybe Slashdot does something to people to just suck their sense of humor out and replace it with hatred of RFID tags.

...the same features we delivered seven years ago

Fast forward 10 years and what has changed?

The IE dev teams blogs (nay, boasts!) about tabbed browsing in IE7 -- saying nothing of the fact that tabs are years old.

MS brags and boasts about Monad, which is still vaporware, but it sure will be the best shell ever -- saying nothing of the fact that this has been available forever in *nix.

I'm sure we can come up with more. In the end, MS is very good at marketing. People just love their koolaid.

Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a

MS is still trying to match the functionality of having a system that is composed of small scriptable programs that interoperate using human readable text interfaces, connected by pipes and redirected IO.

Their solution is to have the shell make a huge tree of objects that call each other. The objects aren't text, you can't load them in notepad, and you can't pipe them like you can with UNIX. Instead you've got a pile of goddamn API's. Plus, these fucking things are objects, so you can call them and they execute code. The good guys will use them to dig out information that they want. The bad guys will examine them for buffer overflows.

What do Microsoft developers drive? Easy - a Pontiac Aztek. They love ugly cars just as much as they love ugly operating systems. "But you can go camping in it!" is their reply when you criticise their ride. I agree. All the bugs make you feel like you're stuck in the fucking woods without any toilet paper.

Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a

Oh come one. Sure, there are lots and lots of problems with Windows, but scripting objects is not one of them.

Ever try to work with filenames containing spaces? Ever need to manipulate data that represents a graph or tree (other than a directory tree)? Ever need to manipulate a bunch of spreadsheets (including layout)?

I've done each of those in bash and in WSH and I infinitely prefer the latter.

Using plaintext when possible is a great idea that I support 100%, but for some things it just plain sucks. And as soon as piping objects is made easy (as MS claims to be doing with Monad), objects will become more desirable still.

Honestly, the *nix world is rediculously smug when it comes to these things. For ages scripting was way better under *nix, but in the past years it seems that MS is where all the progress is being made. They're still not entirely there, but they're gaining ground fast.

Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a

I can never understand how Linux zealots are so enamoured with cryptic command-line tools.

The *ix command line is what I miss most when I use Windows systems (which is most of the time, currently).

It takes a little getting used to, but it lets you do all the things you *think* you should be able to.

For example, using tr I can replace characters or strings in a file or text stream as part of a batch process. On Windows I'd have to write a script or a program to do that.

Another *huge* benefit is that you can do massive batch processes without depending on a GUI app supporting it. If I have a command line tool that converts TIFF -> PNG or whatever, I can do tiff2png *.tiff *.png and be done with it. Some GUI apps like Photoshop might be able to do the same thing, but it would take more time to set up, and I may not have an app with that capability.


Man pages are pretty-much opaque, and require a Man page themselves to understand.


That I'll agree with you on. I've never been fond of man pages, even though I can usually dig out what I'm after eventually.

There are a lot of situations where a GUI is preferable, but a powerful command line is a great tool to have at your disposal.

Another example: For a personal hobby project, I needed to make some tools to help me figure out how some text was encoded. I wrote some command-line tools using .NET that did things like statistical analysis of characters in large text files, because the input was minimal and it took less time than making a GUI. For the analysis of the actual encrypted text though, I wanted a GUI because it let me make changes in the decryption options and see the changes update across the screen, rather than comparing two text files of output from a command line tool.

I ended up doing a quick and dirty solution in Excel (quick and dirty being relative since I had to implement binary XOR in VBA =P), but if this were something I'd be using frequently I'd make a proper GUI app out of it.

Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a

MS brags and boasts about Monad, which is still vaporware, but it sure will be the best shell ever -- saying nothing of the fact that this has been available forever in *nix.

Oh really? Perhaps you should go get a clue about Monad [wikipedia.org]. If you have trouble reading, you can even watch a pretty moving picture [msdn.com].

Monad turns the command line into an object oriented environment where instead of having to do error prone parsing through text piped though app after app, you treat the output from one app as one or more .NET objects on which you can execute methods, examine properties, and pass them to other applications for further processing.

This is, in fact, far ahead of anything currently available on Unix or Windows. In fact, it's so far ahead of what is currently available it will take quite a long time to get all parts of the OS and the apps that run on top of it to fully support the concepts Monad introduces. It's pretty damn innovative, if you ask me.

Oh, and it runs quite well for vaporware. I've been running it for a couple of months now (in beta form) and it's pretty damn cool.

I'm sure we can come up with more. In the end, MS is very good at marketing. People just love their koolaid.

Ya, when you're making shit up you can pump it out like a champ.

Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a

Sounds a bit overcomplicated to me, really. At least with the error prone parsing through text piped through app after app, I'm at any point able to thow a tee in the script and send the output somewhere that I can visibly read it and interpret it. I can also take that output and modify it slightly and send it manually back through the next step in the chain to do some additional testing. I'm not sure that simply examining the properties of the .NET object affords me the flexibility.

I'd also point out that I personally disagree with a lot of this obsession over object oriented code in everything these days. In a short script with a defined start and end, there's no need for the obfuscation of object orientation. I hate it when I see a huge generic class included by default on every page of a web application, even though some pages may only use 1 (or even NONE) of the functions within that class. At that point it's just a bunch of uneccessary overhead. It begins to seem like developers get use to that style of $this->crap and they can't get out of it

Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a

At least with the error prone parsing through text piped through app after app, I'm at any point able to thow a tee in the script and send the output somewhere that I can visibly read it and interpret it.

You can do this with Monad as well. I can simply send the output of any monad command directly to the console window, just like you would if it were text, and it will output it using a default text output mode.

I can also take that output and modify it slightly and send it manually back through the next step in the chain to do some additional testing

You can do the same with Monad. You can easily serialize the output from a Monad command, do with it as you will, and feed it back in... but usually it's not necessary.

I'm not sure that simply examining the properties of the .NET object affords me the flexibility.

As far as I can tell, anything you can do with a text-based command line app can just as easily be done with Monad. Monad supports all the ideas behind text based interaction, but adds the ability to work with the output as objects as well.

I'd also point out that I personally disagree with a lot of this obsession over object oriented code in everything these days. In a short script with a defined start and end, there's no need for the obfuscation of object orientation.

I agree, and with Monad you don't *have* to take advantage of the object-based interactions. If you want just text, you've got it.

Re:Ahh, nostalgia...

Apple... IIRC a beleaguered Cupertino company. Didn't NeXT buy them out?

Re:Ahh, nostalgia...

...it was Apple under Jobs' stewardship who bought out NeXT.

Actually, it was Apple under Amelio who bought NeXT. Along with the purchase came a certain Steve Jobs who served Amelio in an advisory role. Amelio stepped down from CEO in spring of 97 and Jobs stepped into the Interim CEO position (iCEO). After a bit of that he signed on full time.

Re:Ahh, nostalgia...

This was modded as funny, but is actually more true than you know.

When I was at Apple, the phrase I heard often was "We didn't buy NeXT, we paid them to take over."

Re:Ahh, nostalgia...

and Apple Computer Inc. already have operating systems on the market that sport the features - greater memory management

While Windows 95 may have reduced the GDI resources problem of Windows 3.x, I hardly think anyone could credibly claim that Mac OS had good memory management before OS X.

Re:Ahh, nostalgia...

Actually it was 49.7 days [com.com]. Which lead to a lot of people wondering: how on earth did someone manage to keep a Windows system up that long?

Blue Screen of Death

'You make a grown man cry'

How true... If those poor saps had only know what lie ahead.

10 sort years?

"10 sort years ago "

Maybe i am new here, but what other kind of year is there other than sort years

Windowsz?

That's a new one...
I wonder when we'll see Lindowsz....

yadda yadda

The Slashdot Project was our last, best hope for unbiased news.

It failed.

But in the year of the Linux War, it became something greater: our last, best hope - for blinding stupidity.

Grow up Taco...Windowsz?

Re:yadda yadda

Speaking as someone who started reading in the Chips & Dips days, I'm vexed by the continued presence of naive posters that imagine that objectivity was ever a property, or intended property, of slashdot content. WTF color is the sky in your world, AC? I started reading this site because back then it was hard to find a tech news source that wasn't Just Another Bill Gates Pole Smoker, and was very upfront about it. I was refreshing then. I'll grant that it's not refreshing now, but please respect its history.

Another propethic line

"You make a grown man cry."

Well, if it could make a "dead man come" [lyricsfreak.com], that would be really special.

Re:Another propethic line

"Well, if it could make a "dead man come", that would be really special."

That's reserved for Windows Vista: Keith Richards Edition.

Obligatory

...and in further news, windows 2000 is now 5 years old.

Re:Obligatory

But I thought ME was 5 years old...So confused...

Re:Obligatory

You can type pretty well for a five year old. Needs work on the grammar though.

Windows 95.

While I'm sure many people here will make jokes about Windows 95, it was quite a leap in stability and usablility from windows 3.1. I don't think windows has had such an upgrade since then, nor do I think Vista will be that much of an improvment over XP/2000.

Re:Windows 95.

Actually, for me windows 3.1 was pretty stable and usable. Win95 was unstable and I pretty much had to fix it as much as use it. However, WinXP actually works well most of the time, doesn't easily break, and I can do pretty much all of the same things on it as I can on any other modern OS.

Re:Windows 95.

While I'm sure many people here will make jokes about Windows 95, it was quite a leap in stability and usablility from windows 3.1. I don't think windows has had such an upgrade since then, nor do I think Vista will be that much of an improvment over XP/2000.

Well, pointed out. In terms of feature change as seen by a user (not developer) I think it must be:

1. 3.1 to 95
2. 95 to 2000
3. 2000 to XP
4. 95 to 98

Mind you, having looked at that now, I'm not sure whether 3 and 4 are the right way around. I never saw versions of windows less than 3.0 to be able to comment.

Anyone else care to fill in the rest/correct me? How would it look if you just concentrated on functionality for developers rather than users?

Re:Windows 95.

I'm not sure how you would classify the "3.1 to Bob" feature change though.....

Re:Windows 95.

I never saw versions of windows less than 3.0 to be able to comment.

I saw freakin' Windows 2.0 and I'm still aching. Imagine twm on a 4-colour CGA screen. But with bugs.

Man, the real revolution was the 2.0->3.0 transition.

The appearance of Windows 3.0 (of which 3.1 was a minor modification) essentially changed the very meaning of home computing. It was the first usable GUI system widely available for DOS-based PC. It was still significantly inferior to the Mac, but it looked quite pretty - especially compared to the indescriptible ugliness of 2.0. So people flocked from DOS, and discovered all that GUI goodness. Graphical applications ! Icons ! Multitasking ! Word and Excel for Windows ! Hell, WYSIWYG editors !

People (myself included) like to diss out Microsoft, but I do have some respect for what Windows 3.0 represents : Gates had the balls to bet the whole damn company on Windows, even though DOS and text-based apps were doing pretty well. It worked, but it could have failed miserably, and early versions of Windows were no encouragement.

Of course, as an added bonus to The Bilg, it killed off Geoworks Ensemble [wikipedia.org] and similar projects.

Thomas-

Re:Windows 95.

Usability, maybe, the Win3.x UI, with the strange Program Manager / File Manager duality, wasn't anything to be proud of.

Stability, though? It wasn't my experience that Win95 was stable at all. In fact, where Win3.x was at least learnably-unstable (you would learn that certain applications or actions were likely to crash or to crash Windows) Win95 was randomly-unstable, crashing in non-repeatable, unexplainable ways.

Windows Workstation NT 4.0 was the first Microsoft OS I used that could function as a desktop system for weeks at a time without crashing. I think that was the big leap forward in stability.

the nightmares are coming back...

Can't believe it's been 10 years since I attempted to do a seamless upgrade on my p90... Ah yes. I must truly thank M$ for releasing it though, because without w95 I would have never sought out linux.

Re:the nightmares are coming back...

Hmm yes, 1995 was also my year of conversion to Linux. Never assumed it was anything to do with the release of Windows 95, more like all the tools I needed to work on my PhD were UNIX based, and I wanted practice.

As I recall Linux wasn't *particularly* easy to install at the time ;) Those were the days where I knew the figures for my hard drive geometry off the top of my head, now I couldn't even tell you which manufacturer made them. The difference 10 years makes!

Tonight on Action News!

Our top story: 1995 was ten years ago! Also, 2+2=4. Details at 11.

Re:Tonight on Action News!

Our top story: 1995 was ten years ago! Also, 2+2=4. Details at 11.

Of course, I read this as "Details at 0x03".

Re:Tonight on Action News!

Our top story: 1995 was ten years ago! Also, 2+2=4. Details at 11.

You must be fun at birthday parties.

Re:launch song for longhorn

Didn't the lead singer for Coldplay die once he realized he was just an even wussier version of Radiohead's Thom Yorke?

Here's every Coldplay song, ever:

I HOPE SOME GIRL WILL LOVE ME, BECAUSE I'M A HUGE PANSY

If Windows95 made you cry

you weren't tough enough to handle Slackware's 50-floppy installation.

Its older than that

I was running Windows 95 Beta (And Alpha's) for a year and half before its release, and running them EXCLUSIVLEY.

I have one of the Alpha disks around ( one that was distributed within MS that I am 90% sure dates to 93, and I have one that dates to 1/1/94, I always will remeber that one because I thought shit these guys are working on NEW YEARS ????

14 1.44 floppy's (for the upgrade if I remeber right (maybe 13). The sad part was the last RC I got was SUBSTANTIALLY more stable than the Initial release was

I actually reverted to it until it expired
It was explaine to me by a buddy at MS (the one who got me the Alpha's and the Beta's , it was driver issues, that I wouldnt doubt, but it sure beat the HELL out of Windows 3.1

Job ads

Back when that dinosaur OS was the current thing, I used to see want ads in the information systems section of newspapers demanding ten years of experience in Windows 95. Back then, they had not dont their math, but now, there are a few people who can actually answer that ad!

Re:Job ads

I have a good IT job, but earlier this year applied for another at a different company (looking for more $/benefits). I spoke only to the HR people (typical) who, among other things, wanted someone with at least 5 years experience with Windows2003 server and 10 years with Exchange 2000. My explanations regarding their criteria left them silent and unimpressed. They also didn't find my migration of 5000 users at a $3 billion corporation from Lotus Notes to Exchange (utilizing Sendmail for routing) a worthy enough credential to make up for only having some 2 years experience with E2K....

And 10 years of...

...lost productivity from Solitaire and Minesweeper. Yeah, it was in earlier versions, but Windows 95 made it even easier...

Speaking of the Stones...

Rumour has it they've been tapped again for the Windows Vista launch. The new theme song?

"Under My Thumb".

*ba-dump-bump-ting!*

$0.12 a copy

So, if you consider that Microsoft shipped 100 million copies [asiaweek.com] of Windows 95 in its first three years, that works out to $0.12 per copy for the song rights. Of course you could argue that the 12 cents could have been better-directed towards bug fixes, but it's not a lot of cash in the whole scheme of things.

Mock it if you will, but...

...Windows 95, despite all it's many flaws, was a lot of fun. It was stupidity to use it in a situation requiring stability, but as a gaming platform and all around PC OS, it was great to have at the time. Especially with the freeware that became rapidly available, it was a big laboratory for computer users. Remember, MS didn't have an app for everything back then, so if you needed one, you bought it or sought it out on the freeware sites. Though I'd used Unix in school, my first exposure to IRC was on Win 95, and I relied on the freeware IRC clients to learn. Same with the utilities and such.

I'd never owned an Apple, so I can't speak to what it was like to use one back then (were they using, what, system 6 at the time? I don't remember...), but while XP is more reliable, and I get a tremedous sense of "do it yourself" satisfaction with Linux (my primary laptop OS), I don't think I'll ever have as much pure fun as I did playing around with Win 95 when it first came out, warts and all.

I'll mock away.

You seem to have pretty rose coloured glasses for Win95. You talk about it like you used it in 1999, not 1995. Let me refresh your memory!

Win95 was terrible for games. None of my games worked with it. None! Not until DirectX 5 and 6 could DirectX be said to have matured enough for general use. Nothing really good came out until then, either. Quake was still something you'd "Exit into DOS mode" for.

As for the Freeware, most of it was dreesed up Win32s apps or NT apps now able to be run (thanks to Win95 implementing full Win32). The MS Plus pack was a good example of the sillyness of the era: IE 1.0 came with it. That thing sucked. People were desperate for uninstallers that wouldn't hose the system (cleansweep, etc, came out around then). And the memory managers for DOS still sucked -- keeping QEMM 7 around was much better than using DOS 7's emm386/himem.sys!

If you had 16mb of RAM, Win95 was noticably bitchy compared to Win3.1. You needed at least 32mb of RAM, and at least a Pentium 120 to really have it go decently. That was a top-of-the-line computer until fall 1996.

Thankfully, Netscape 1.x was available and 32-bit then. Plus you could run it just as easily on an Indy or DECStation or Linux :)

The best thing about Win95 was that it included its own 32-bit Winsock implementation.

PS: System 7 came out in 1990! By the time Win95 was out, it'd been updated to 7.5ish (7.5.1 came out in March, 1995; 7.5.2 in August, 1995). This was a pretty decent OS for not having real guts to it -- Quicktime, Applescript, PowerPC support (for the "new" PowerPC CPUs), Powertalk, and easy to add/remove TTFs. Windows just barely got the TTF part with Win95. Windows Media Player in Win95 didn't come close to Quicktime!

Mock mock mock mock mock mock mock :-D

Re:it's not dead.. it's a pity

I'm still administrating several 95er machines of people who didn't make it to a machine which could run win2k or XP.

Seriously, check out nLite [nliteos.com], and also at the nLite forum, especially [msfn.org] this FAQ [msfn.org]. This is a free Win2k and XP customisable installer. You can use this to get a seriously stripped down install that should run on your old dogs. Worth checking out other parts of this site if you've got to admin Windows.

I never ran Windows 95

I never did. My 486 computer (with 8MB RAM) came with Win3.11 and DOS6.2, and most of the time I had Windows turned off. It was just distasteful how much resources it wasted to make the thing "pretty".

When Win95 was launched it heralded an age of "user-friendliness", which to me sounded too much like "dumb-downness". And besides, the system boasted features that were useless to me (Autoplay? Who cares! I know how to run things in my CDROM).

I boycotted Windows95. I never ran it. Of course I had to give in at one point, when most software required the new Win32. But that was in 2000, when I started using...Win98. And Linux. And finding that I spend more time in Linux day by day.

Now I use Linux as my primary OS, with a Win98 partition which I still keep around for games (works well enough for that - I think of it as a massive shared library required for games). But then again, I don't even play games that much any more.

Win 95

But those customers expecting Windows 95 to be a great technological leap forward may be disappointed. International Business Machines Corp. and Apple Computer Inc. already have operating systems on the market that sport the features - greater memory management, the ability to perform several tasks at once and enhanced user-friendliness - now being hailed in Windows 95.

This is same as today. Windows 95 came, all the features that were there were all available in Apple's OS. Today, Vista will be released soon, Vista's features are already available in Apple's OS. But who do you think will make the money?

Re:Win 95

Windows 95 came, all the features that were there were all available in Apple's OS.

No, this isn't true. I was a Mac user at the time, running System 7.5 on a LC, and whilst a lot of the UI was better on the Mac some of the internals weren't.

Examples? Well, two major ones spring to mind.

• Pre-emptive multitasking. The Mac used co-operative multitasking, ie. relying on the frontmost app to nicely make calls to yield().
• Application memory management. On System 7.5, you had to manually set how much memory an application was supposed to get. If you guessed wrong, tough - the app would die with an 'out of memory error', regardless of how much physical or even virtual RAM was still available.

I actually switched away from System 7.5 to a PC running Win95. I refused to go earlier, because Win3.11 was so utterly poor. It's fair to say I missed things from my Mac's UI. It's equally fair to say I think my Windows bax at that time was a better computer.

I'm a Mac user again now, having re-taken the plunge at OS X 10.2 (Jaguar). Now the tables are turned, and the Mac is a drastically better box than the Windows machines I have to use. But had Apple continued down the MacOS route, I would never have gone back to them.

Cheers,
Ian

O the horror

I remember there were stories about people buying Win 95 who didn't even have a computer. Unbelievable. How can people not have a computer?

More to come...

2008: 10 year anniversary of Windows 98
2010: 10 year anniversary of Windows Me
2011: 10 year anniversary of Windows XP
1015: 20 year anniversary of Windows 95
2020: 20 year anniversary of Windows Me
....

Start me Up

If you start me up
If you start me up I'll never stop
If you start me up
If you start me up I'll never stop
I've been running hot
You got me ticking gonna blow my top
If you start me up
If you start me up I'll never stop

You make a grown man cry
Spread out the oil, the gasoline
I walk smooth, ride in a mean, mean machine
Start it up

If you start it up
Kick on the starter give it all you got, you got,
you got I can't compete with the riders in the other heats If you rough it up
If you like it you can slide it up, slide it up

Don't make a grown man cry
My eyes dilate, my lips go green
My hands are greasy
She's a mean, mean machine
Start it up

If start me up
Give it all you got
You got to never, never, never stop
Never, never
Slide it up

You make a grown man cry
Ride like the wind at double speed
I'll take you places that you've never, never seen
Start it up
Love the day when we will never stop, never stop
Never stop, never stop
Tough me up
Never stop, never stop, never stop

You, you, you make a grown man cry
You, you make a dead man come
You, you make a dead man come


Can anyone figure out what the hell Microsoft Marketing was thinking when they selected this song?

Windows 95 lyrics

Well I bought it up
Brought Windows home and tried to boot it up

But when I load it up
It says my memory is not enough ...

I've been running out
I need Some Extra RAM to fix me up ...

I have to cough it up
Open my wallet up, it never stops, never stops, never stops, never stops

Its Windows 95
It's sucking up my drive
It makes a Pentium fly

But my PC is obsolete
I'll have to buy myself a brand new machine .... (ring it up)

Just stick me up
You suck me in then you got me hooked .... you got me, you got me

There's so much stuff to buy
I need a new hard drive

I'ts gonna suck me dry
My 386, Don't have the speed
It takes an hour just to bring up the screen ...

Oh no ... I 'm making software buys.
Woow ... It's making Bill Gates come...
Yo Yo ... your making a rich man come....

Those mentioning OS/2 in a positive light...

...are either truly inexperienced with OS/2 or they are demented or both. I supported OS/2 2.1 and Warp 3 on a Token Ring LAN and there was nothing more excrutiating in my desktop/software support years than that. The ONLY things it excelled at were inflicting mental distress and running multiple DOS sessions without crashing. Whoopie-frigging-do. If I wasn't being paid to jump in the line of fire, you'd not have been able to force me at gunpoint to do it.

Windows 95 for all its issues was not as bad as people have made it out to be. First, MS did warn people that a fresh install rather than upgrade over Win3.x was advised. Second, the vendors like IBM did their level best to act like it was still the days of DOS/Win3.x or has it been forgotten that their Craptivas tended to use every freaking IRQ there was knowing that IRQ sharing was not remotely ready in that first release? Compaq, et al, had their own dufus-level driver and build issues.

Major corporations actually using it daily and not being able to take major efficiency disruptions did yeoman work bughunting and suggesting workarounds and fixes to Microsoft and some actually paid serious cash to Redmond for code access to work their own builds of it. Meanwhile people threw stones at those big corporations heedless of how much of their Windows headache was steadily being addressed by those corporations. To this day people still don't get it and still have a "tail wags the dog" mindset that the home and school are the real influence.

Nope. Business, where we all work, is where the PC market is guided along more than at home and the NT/2K touches in XP Home bear that out. I don't use a glitzy ego booster for Jobs at work, I use an OS that all things taken into account, is the best choice for my work. It offers things that our proprietary app writers find get their job done better than any other platform.

So in addition to hoisting a cold one to MS for a job well done in the end and congratulating them on ten years out from Windows 95, I also salute the corporations that adopted it in droves so long ago and all the work they and my fellow techs and coders did to fix things up. I was not and am still not happy about their basically selling beta code as finished product rushing it to market, but it did set the stage for a much easier desktop experience that only encouraged rapid personal computer adoption after years of doldrums and facilitated widespread Internet usage adoption to boot. If Apple or IBM had their way, never mind the Unix geeks, we'd have had personal computers that remained as inaccessible to the average user as what went before and not seen the renaisance that we did.

You make a grown man cry

My memories of Windows 95 are hardly fond. My worst one involves getting Windows 95 OS/R2 installed and configured on some VP's IBM ThinkPad 600. Not even IBM could get it to work properly! Eventually, I got it to work, but only after having spent over a month, including two all-nighters at the office, installing the damned thing over and over and over again. There were so many devices crammed into that laptop, each one wanting its own interrupt, that Windows 95 could hardly handle it.

Eventually, I got it to work, although I'm not sure how, so I made an image backup just in case. The VP received his laptop, but then complained bitterly that it would crash on him every few hours. Yeah, well duh: it's Windows! What did he expect? Join the club. Ungrateful bastard.

To top it all off, some other VP, having heard of my success with the ThinkPad 600, came by later to have me fix his. Great. Well, at least I had that image backup, right? Wrong. It didn't work, even though his laptop was exactly the same model and revision number. I still have no explanation for this. I'd start it up after copying the image to it and it would have exactly the same device and registry problems that I had before getting it right. This kind of thing was never a problem on the Compaq and Toshiba laptops -- just on the IBM ThinkPad 600. I swore never to use an IBM ThinkPad again.

Fast forward to the present. Guess what kind of a laptop I have now? An IBM ThinkPad A21m. And I'm actually happy with it. So, what changed my mind? Simple:

Linux.

I just booted an old Pentium 100 laptop with 95..

last week to use a legacy program on it and was surprised at how quickly it booted up. I also noted with some interest that the 1 Gig HD was only half used, even with some applications installed. As I navigated around the HD with Windows Explorer and moved some files, I further noticed that it didn't really feel any different than using XP. Then I loaded Firefox and connected to the Internet via the Linksys Pcmcia ethernet card and found that browsing didn't feel much different either. Somebody want to explain again how far we've come in the past 10 years with Windows? Sure there are some conveniences and minor improvements, but at what cost in bloat and memory requirements?

I just checked the stats on my relatively busy web site and saw that of the 16,640 Windows machines that visited last week 94 of them were using Win95. Just below that was NT with 42 visits and WIN32s with 10 visits. Oh, I even saw one single OS/2 visit..

"Windows 95 - It sucks less" T- shirt

Microsoft distributed "Windows 95 - It sucks less" T-shirts to Macintosh developers during the run-up to Windows 95.

Mac button

I was working at CompUSA when Windows 95 came out. One of the Mac guys gave me a button, that I still have. I still find it to be accurate.

Windows 95 = MacIntosh 88

IT nostalgia

Well, one question I asked myself while struggling with Win95 in 1995 was "Will I feel the same nostalgia for this in ten years that I feel for homecomputers from the 1980s?"

I can finally say: "Not a single bit! I am glad it's dead. And I am looking forward for it's brothers to die too."

C:\NGRATLNS.W95

(with apologies to Apple)

What I find interesting about Windows 95...

...is the fact the basic interface design pioneered by that OS has not really changed dramatically even with the release of Windows XP. After all, Windows XP's Luna interface has the majority of the look and feel of Windows 95, especially the Taskbar with its Start button on the left side, a tray area showing all active programs, and a right side area showing a list of running accillary programs.

This is why everyone will be very interested in seeing how Windows Vista runs, because I think Microsoft will come up with a totally new look and feel for Windows XP's successor.

Re:Ah yes...

I was the same... when games started to be written for win95, I was like "WTF?! Games *IN* Windows? Why not stick them in DOS for more speed. My 4MB can't handle this shiz!" I also upgraded to 8MB shortly afterwards.