4 ms·

> This makes me feel old. I look at those desktops (particularly the Windows 95 one) and think they look clean and neat, with few distractions. I also know that

> This makes me feel old. I look at those desktops (particularly the Windows 95 one) and think they look clean and neat, with few distractions. I also know that they ran speedily on rubbish hardware. Are you kidding? It was nightmare to do anything on Windows 98. There were so many things that could result in "dead" state and only solution was to restart and not to mention those frequent BSOD. There was a reason why we were advised that we should save our work often because the whole thing was so damn unreliable.

72deluxe 11y ago
Haha yes true. Windows 95 second release wasn't so bad. But as you said, 98 was bad. It was better with service packs. You realised what junk it was when you looked at 98's task manager compared to NT's and XP's.
jcadam 11y ago
If you thought Win98 was bad, you need to try WinME :) Windows 2000, however, was the pinnacle of MS Operating Systems. It has been downhill ever since.
- 72deluxe 11y ago
  Oddly, there has been a stream of APIs since then too, yet you can get by writing in the old ones no problem!
  - krylon 11y ago
    As a software user, I appreciate that. But having worked on a Win32 application for two years, I am glad I will never again have to touch that pile of poo. At the time it was created, Win32 might have been a nice API, given the underpowered machines it was designed to run on. But compared to building GUIs on a POSIX-ish system using Gtk+, it was an incredible pain. I can understand why many Windows developers were so happy to embrace .Net; one might like it or dislike it, but it is a huge improvement on Win32. (As for MFC/AFX, I only had the most fleeting contact with it, so I cannot say for sure.)
    - 72deluxe 11y ago
      Yes I can understand why .Net was so embraced by developers. Underneath it calls Win32 for you anyway I presume, so it's a nicer wrapper. Kind of like using wxWidgets on Windows is nicer than writing Win32 calls! I have done some MFC and did not enjoy it, despite similarities in my mind to wxWidgets. I see C++ jobs here in the UK want MFC experience, which saddens me as it means that desktop development for Windows in C++ is either MFC or Borland's rotting VCL. I can really see why C# and .Net took off in the face of that.
rsync 11y ago
"Are you kidding? It was nightmare to do anything on Windows 98. There were so many things that could result in "dead" state and only solution was to restart and not to mention those frequent BSOD. There was a reason why we were advised that we should save our work often because the whole thing was so damn unreliable." This is all true, but those are problems with the OS, not the UI. The OS was terrible. The UI (NT4/XP/w2k) was pretty decent.
- asveikau 11y ago
  You're quoting a criticism of Win98, then saying that "the OS" (nt/2k/xp) was the bad part. I don't think it's fair to lump in NT with 9x in that way. The criticisms of Windows 98 and the criticisms of NT are going to have a lot in the former category that isn't in the latter. I feel like these days Windows has the opposite problem as you describe. The kernel is OK but explorer.exe sucks at copying directories.

72deluxe 11y ago

Haha yes true. Windows 95 second release wasn't so bad. But as you said, 98 was bad. It was better with service packs. You realised what junk it was when you looked at 98's task manager compared to NT's and XP's.

jcadam 11y ago

If you thought Win98 was bad, you need to try WinME :) Windows 2000, however, was the pinnacle of MS Operating Systems. It has been downhill ever since.

72deluxe 11y ago
Oddly, there has been a stream of APIs since then too, yet you can get by writing in the old ones no problem!
- krylon 11y ago
  As a software user, I appreciate that. But having worked on a Win32 application for two years, I am glad I will never again have to touch that pile of poo. At the time it was created, Win32 might have been a nice API, given the underpowered machines it was designed to run on. But compared to building GUIs on a POSIX-ish system using Gtk+, it was an incredible pain. I can understand why many Windows developers were so happy to embrace .Net; one might like it or dislike it, but it is a huge improvement on Win32. (As for MFC/AFX, I only had the most fleeting contact with it, so I cannot say for sure.)
  - 72deluxe 11y ago
    Yes I can understand why .Net was so embraced by developers. Underneath it calls Win32 for you anyway I presume, so it's a nicer wrapper. Kind of like using wxWidgets on Windows is nicer than writing Win32 calls! I have done some MFC and did not enjoy it, despite similarities in my mind to wxWidgets. I see C++ jobs here in the UK want MFC experience, which saddens me as it means that desktop development for Windows in C++ is either MFC or Borland's rotting VCL. I can really see why C# and .Net took off in the face of that.

rsync 11y ago

"Are you kidding? It was nightmare to do anything on Windows 98. There were so many things that could result in "dead" state and only solution was to restart and not to mention those frequent BSOD. There was a reason why we were advised that we should save our work often because the whole thing was so damn unreliable." This is all true, but those are problems with the OS, not the UI. The OS was terrible. The UI (NT4/XP/w2k) was pretty decent.

asveikau 11y ago
You're quoting a criticism of Win98, then saying that "the OS" (nt/2k/xp) was the bad part. I don't think it's fair to lump in NT with 9x in that way. The criticisms of Windows 98 and the criticisms of NT are going to have a lot in the former category that isn't in the latter. I feel like these days Windows has the opposite problem as you describe. The kernel is OK but explorer.exe sucks at copying directories.