18 ms·

It's hard to remember, but even though Windows 3.11 was extremely dominant at the time, it was by no means assured that Windows 95 would be the success that it

It's hard to remember, but even though Windows 3.11 was extremely dominant at the time, it was by no means assured that Windows 95 would be the success that it was. The very first version missed wildly in some big ways (MSN was a folder integrated into the desktop, for example, and no TCP/IP support [*Edit: yes there was - I misremembered.]), but the core, underlying redesign of the GUI was so profoundly good it propelled Microsoft into a new level of ubiquity. Compare it to other GUIs at the time, like CDE, IBM's Presentation Manager, or even Mac OS 8 and there's no comparison. Windows 95 solidified Microsoft's dominance, but could just as easily eroded it had they dropped the ball. Even though I've used a Mac daily for the past decade or so, I still miss the task bar, and window-oriented GUI of Windows. I still get frustrated on OSX when I minimize a window and have to hunt around for it. I wouldn't switch back because of the underlying crap that is the Windows OS and file system, but I still miss the interface. Edit: Found this fantastic PDF "Chicago Reviewers Guide" which goes over all the new stuff in Win95. So much stuff I had forgotten - TrueType fonts, Plug and Play, registry settings, right-click properties, long file names... Basically everything that makes Windows what it is today. http://tech-insider.org/windows/research/acrobat/940601.pdf http://tech-insider.org/windows/research/acrobat/940601.pdf

garblegarble 9y ago
>Even though I've used a Mac daily for the past decade or so, I still miss the task bar, and window-oriented GUI of Windows. I still get frustrated on OSX when I minimize a window and have to hunt around for it. I wouldn't switch back because of the underlying crap that is the Windows OS and file system, but I still miss the interface. OT but have you tried Witch[1] as a task switcher? It switches between windows, which made my life SO much easier [1] https://manytricks.com/witch https://manytricks.com/witch
- jvzr 9y ago
  I find Contexts (https://contexts.co/ https://contexts.co/) a better application to do exactly that
  - garblegarble 9y ago
    Looks neat, I'll take a look - thanks
  - lloydde 9y ago
    Wow, looks like a very polished Witch and then some. The addition to the search looks interesting. Any area or use case thst witch is better? Is it as snappy? I like that Witch is instant.
    - jvzr 9y ago
      I remember using Witch, but a very long time ago. I remember stopping using it, though the reason escapes me. I've been using Contexts for what feels a year, and I keep using it. It's that good.
einr 9y ago
There absolutely was TCP/IP support in Windows 95 from the very beginning. It was not installed by default but it was trivial to add via the Network applet in Control Panel. SLIP/PPP was also supported and you had basic utilities like Telnet and FTP included so you could connect to the Internet right out of the box. No web browser, though. Internet Explorer 1.0 shipped with the optional Plus! pack.
- russellbeattie 9y ago
  Yes, you're right. I misremembered it.
- smoyer 9y ago
  Since a large part of my work involved building networks of pre-DOCSIS cable modems at the time, I can tell you that the first Windows to support TCP/IP was Windows 3.11 (Windows for WorkGroups). This was carried into Windows 95 and by Windows 98 there was even Internet Explorer.
  - zwieback 9y ago
    ...and it had preemptively multitasking 32 bit drivers, we built a Mac (AppleTalk) server product on top of that with pretty good performance. 3.11 was a huge step forward.
  - dfox 9y ago
    But in windows 3.11 the TCP stack was not part of the installation or even on the installation media, it had to be installed separately together with win32s. In Windows 95 IIRC everything you needed for TCP/IP was on the installation media.
- narag 9y ago
  For some reason we used Trumpet stack. Could it be that OS stack didn't work very well at first?
  - da_chicken 9y ago
vadimberman 9y ago
> I still get frustrated on OSX when I minimize a window and have to hunt around for it Windows user here. Honest curiosity: does anyone know why the minimize / maximize works on the Mac the way it does? I mean, what's the rationale to design it like this?
- k__ 9y ago
  I have no idea... I'm came from ~18 of Windows & Linux usage and everyone always told me macOS is THE OS with the best usability. But I can't confirm this. Minimization of windows is shitty and maximization even more. When I maximize, often just the height is changed, when I go back to "normal" the height and the width is changed, so I always have to adjust the width manually. When I minimize a few windows, it's impossible to get back the right one without luck.
  - analogic 9y ago
    After using a mac for ~6 months now, I finally understand what happened to gnome3/unity, clearly designed by mac users. I mean it's perfectly usable once I got the basic gestures down and installed the app that let me independently set the track pad and mouse wheel scroll directions, but will go so far as to say that both xfce and MATE are objectively better at window management. Partly I think their hands were tied by the too late to change decision for the always there contextual top menu bar. Or this is just 25 years of using win95 clones talking and I'm set in my ways.
    - herbst 9y ago
      I wouldnt say Gnome is by or for mac users. In fact in many ways it is way more similiar to Metro than to OSX. Gnome 3 just broke the common Windows 95 workflow, however many others did before.
      - analogic 9y ago
        ya tbh i never tried using it for more than 10 minutes
smoyer 9y ago
I'm predominately a Linux user and I switched away from Mac OSX specifically because of the underlying file system. I'll admit that it was annoying finding windows sometimes but the case-preserving, case-insensitive file system made no sense.
- M_Bakhtiari 9y ago
  Why not just use it with a case-sensitive file system? Did it break some application you were relying on?
  - lloydde 9y ago
    I wondered the same thing, but then acknowledged that adds a first step of formatting the disk / re-installing.
    - M_Bakhtiari 9y ago
      Which switching to Linux entails as well. I can think of a lot of reasons to abandon Mac OS X, but this seems like a really odd one to me.
- lloydde 9y ago
  Case-preserving,case-insensitive is good for less sophisticated users: prevents accidentally misplacing or duplicating files with capitalization; and simplifies through this constraint media listing and sorting — no worrying about jpg vs JPG. What are the use cases that bother you?
  - Retra 9y ago
    When a file refuses to rename because the OS thinks it is the same name. When you have multiple files that differ in case, but they overwrite each other because the OS thinks they are the same. Really, the only place case-insensitive filenames makes sense is when you are searching. It makes no sense for any other reason.
rvanmil 9y ago
You’re using macOS wrong ;) I remember Windows 95 as a complete disaster of crashes, data loss, failing installations, incompatible applications, missing drivers and countless other problems which were only fixed with the release of Windows 98 (maybe even SE), which was much much better. I have memories of people sticking with DOS and 3.x, only having 95 as a nondefault boot option in case they wanted to watch the Buddy Holly video or launch the new Encarta cd-rom.
- ryanianian 9y ago
  Most of the above are talking about the UI which is arguably separate from the underlying OS. You can like a UI even if it's a UI to a system that crashes a lot :)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
sodapopcan 9y ago
The one thing I don't understand that Mac has never adopted is being able to use open and save dialogues as mini file explorers (move stuff around and rename, specifically). Having to switch to Finder to move or rename a file that has the same name as the file I'm trying to save is ridiculous. Of course I never need to do this anymore since I only work on text files under revision control, but it still seems odd to me it was never introduced. I really just miss Window Explorer A LOT since moving to Mac. I don't hate macOS, but Finder is a bit of a joke.
- jakecopp 9y ago
  I believe this has been possible for some time on macOS.
- ryanianian 9y ago
  You can use most open/save dialogues to do this - a right-click is all it takes in most places. But I definitely agree with your sentiment. Finder feels like a badly-designed toy. The latest things they've added - tabs and labels iirc - require more steps to do the same tasks in the new way versus the old way.
- rahoulb 9y ago
  OSX Finder is horrible. Classic MacOS Finder was far better - but still had open/save dialogs. RiscOS had it right - the Open dialog didn't exist - you would open the folder and double-click the file. And the Save dialog didn't exist - the document would reduce to an icon which you would then place into the correct folder. (You can sort of do this on the various versions of macOS by dragging the icon from the title bar but it's inconsistent)
  - ubermonkey 9y ago
    What do you find horrible? I prefer it by a wide margin over Windows Explorer.
    - rahoulb 9y ago
      I prefer it over Windows Explorer. I prefer the Classic Mac Finder to both. This article from 2003 lists the problems with the OSX Finder. Since it was written, it's only got worse. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/
PhasmaFelis 9y ago
> The very first version missed wildly in some big ways (MSN was a folder integrated into the desktop, for example That would not have been my first pick for an example of Win95's failures. Perhaps the daily system crashes.
petercooper 9y ago
it was by no means assured that Windows 95 would be the success that it was I remember these times well. It was considered a huge break. People were whining about how stupid the Start menu was compared to just seeing your apps in front of you all the time :-D I love that we eventually came full circle to a Windows 3.1 Program Manager-esque approach with iOS nowadays!
- Momquist 9y ago
  Note that progman.exe was still shipped with the OS (it disappeared for good with Vista), and you could even set it as the default shell at boot. I don't remember anyone using this setup ever though. Maybe this was too obscure and technical for the users complaining.
ebbv 9y ago
> still get frustrated on OSX when I minimize a window and have to hunt around for it. Learn to use the dock? The taskbar on Win 95 was evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and the Dock from NeXT was one of the influences. Which is the same dock was have today in macOS. You can still have personal preference, of course. But if you have trouble using macOS to find minimized windows, that's because you haven't learned to use it not because it's not possible.
eadmund 9y ago
> Compare it to other GUIs at the time, like CDE, IBM's Presentation Manager, or even Mac OS 8 and there's no comparison. Well, I agree that there was no comparison with System 8, but not in the sense you mean. I think that the Mac back then was head-and-shoulders a better system than Windows. It might still be, but they're both so painful to use now that it's very difficult to pick a winner. The Macintosh system was very understandable, very clean. Extensions were an easy-to-understand way to extend one's system, and easy-to-disable too. The window system itself was better-thought-out and less-confusing than Windows's was. The Finder was much more straightforward than the Windows equivalent (was it called the File Explorer back then?). The way that the Mac associated programmes to files (with an application code & a file code) was much better than the extension-based naming of Windows. The way that the Mac used its files' resource fork was great. Programming a Mac back then was very clean & straightforward. I don't think there's anything today as nice, except maybe Cocoa, maybe. Certainly not the Windows 95 API!
- pavlov 9y ago
  I was using Macs back in the late '90s, and none of the things you say ring true. Extensions could easily bring down the entire system because there was no memory protection. Full OS crashes (what modern macOS calls kernel panics) were a daily occurrence for the typical Mac-using professional who ran complex software. The window system was often difficult to understand because apps tended to use a plethora of little panel windows that could overlap even from different apps. Windows preferred large windows that contained the entire app UI, and users typically maximized them. The Windows 95 Task Bar was much better for actually keeping track of your tasks than whatever the MacOS 8 thing was. File extensions were always a hack, but one that Apple adopted too for Mac OS X. The days of Mac's file-specific associations were numbered when the Internet happened, because Unix servers wouldn't keep track of that metadata, so you needed file extensions anyway. Besides, the file-specific associations were often super annoying because they were created by the editor app even for exported files. You saved a JPEG file from Photoshop, and it forever insisted on launching the full Photoshop when you double-clicked on it, instead of your preferred lightweight image viewer. This would happen even when you copied the file to someone else because the association was in the file metadata. Windows NT 4 and its next version Windows 2000 were just heads and shoulders above MacOS 8 and 9 in terms of performance, stability and usability. (And programming in Mac OS 8... Ugh. No memory protection, no multitasking, APIs originally designed in Pascal.)
beamatronic 9y ago
I am glad you mentioned right click. I remember being really pleased with the orthogonality aspect of being able to right click any object.
samstave 9y ago
You may not recall, but when win95 came out - there were lines blocks long awaiting to buy it, much like when the iPhone came out. I recently sold several windows 95 shrink wrapped original copies on eBay which was the OS on 32 3.5” floppy disks. As an original piece of computer history. Win 95 was monumental and great. Aside from outlook, and excel, the greatest product MS ever made.
cat199 9y ago
> I still get frustrated on OSX when I minimize a window and have to hunt around for it. OSX took the NextStep/OpenStep interface and dumbed it down to great detriment, then added new things back (spaces, zooming) which were inferior logically but required less 'thinking' of how one works and more 'shiny looking' to potential customers.. IMHO hands down the best mouse-oriented window management paradigm to exist to date is the NextStep/OpenStep style over and above windows and osx, though I will admit windows has improved things with their sort of hybrid 'classic' windows+'macish' updates, and some of the newer ui things (e.g. window thumbnails) haven't made it into the current flagship of that lineage which is the open source WindowMaker.. Since the 'official' lineages are dead, am hoping the WindowMaker people continue to innovate/move this paradigm forward as they have been doing subsequently for the last N years...
kllrnohj 9y ago
> I wouldn't switch back because of the underlying crap that is the Windows [...] file system You lost me. HFS+ is arguably one of the worst file systems around (yes I know that Apple finally switched to APFS but that was fairly recent). I'm really curious what you actually liked about Mac's file system vs. Windows?
- MBCook 9y ago
  Agreed. NTFS is one of the few things I missed. I’m still annoyed that APFS doesn’t have file level checksums.
- russellbeattie 9y ago
  Hmmm... You're right of course. I didn't describe that well. I meant Unix file names and way of working with files vs. Windows. In other words, forward slashes, symlinks, mounts, sane permissions, etc. I hate dealing with drive letters, etc. What's a good name for this?
  - kllrnohj 9y ago
    Oh, the UX of the file space layout. NTFS/Windows actually has all of that stuff you want, too. NTFS's permission system, for example, is extremely feature-full and integrates nicely with the user system (ACL support by default rather than an add-on, for example). The octal user-group-all permission you're probably used to is pretty crude by comparison. It's more likely just you're unfamiliar with it rather than it's actually missing anything. But if you want you can just pretend C:\ is equivalent to / and mount all your other drives at C:\mnt\whatever, that's completely doable (with a GUI to configure it if you want, even)
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
tinus_hn 9y ago
Not sure why you’d have to hunt for minimized windows because there is a separate area on the dock reserved for them, and the animation clearly shows the window moving towards it.
IronWolve 9y ago
And Win95b with opengl, proper win32 support, and a tcp-ip stack was much better compared to the addon for win31. I remember when unified USB support came out in Win95 2.5, it was big damn news at the time.
maxxxxx 9y ago
I still remember the Windows 95 hype. It was on the level of the excitement for the first iPhone releases.
rapind 9y ago
To each their own. To me Windows is bloatware. But I also make the OSX dock as small as possible and autohidden. I launch everything through spotlight though as I abhor unecessary point and click (synonymous with hitting the windows key and typing a couple letters of the application to launch.).

garblegarble 9y ago

>Even though I've used a Mac daily for the past decade or so, I still miss the task bar, and window-oriented GUI of Windows. I still get frustrated on OSX when I minimize a window and have to hunt around for it. I wouldn't switch back because of the underlying crap that is the Windows OS and file system, but I still miss the interface. OT but have you tried Witch[1] as a task switcher? It switches between windows, which made my life SO much easier [1] https://manytricks.com/witch https://manytricks.com/witch

jvzr 9y ago
I find Contexts (https://contexts.co/ https://contexts.co/) a better application to do exactly that
- garblegarble 9y ago
  Looks neat, I'll take a look - thanks
- lloydde 9y ago
  Wow, looks like a very polished Witch and then some. The addition to the search looks interesting. Any area or use case thst witch is better? Is it as snappy? I like that Witch is instant.
  - jvzr 9y ago
    I remember using Witch, but a very long time ago. I remember stopping using it, though the reason escapes me. I've been using Contexts for what feels a year, and I keep using it. It's that good.

einr 9y ago

There absolutely was TCP/IP support in Windows 95 from the very beginning. It was not installed by default but it was trivial to add via the Network applet in Control Panel. SLIP/PPP was also supported and you had basic utilities like Telnet and FTP included so you could connect to the Internet right out of the box. No web browser, though. Internet Explorer 1.0 shipped with the optional Plus! pack.

russellbeattie 9y ago
Yes, you're right. I misremembered it.
smoyer 9y ago
Since a large part of my work involved building networks of pre-DOCSIS cable modems at the time, I can tell you that the first Windows to support TCP/IP was Windows 3.11 (Windows for WorkGroups). This was carried into Windows 95 and by Windows 98 there was even Internet Explorer.
- zwieback 9y ago
  ...and it had preemptively multitasking 32 bit drivers, we built a Mac (AppleTalk) server product on top of that with pretty good performance. 3.11 was a huge step forward.
- dfox 9y ago
  But in windows 3.11 the TCP stack was not part of the installation or even on the installation media, it had to be installed separately together with win32s. In Windows 95 IIRC everything you needed for TCP/IP was on the installation media.
narag 9y ago
For some reason we used Trumpet stack. Could it be that OS stack didn't work very well at first?
- da_chicken 9y ago

vadimberman 9y ago

> I still get frustrated on OSX when I minimize a window and have to hunt around for it Windows user here. Honest curiosity: does anyone know why the minimize / maximize works on the Mac the way it does? I mean, what's the rationale to design it like this?

k__ 9y ago
I have no idea... I'm came from ~18 of Windows & Linux usage and everyone always told me macOS is THE OS with the best usability. But I can't confirm this. Minimization of windows is shitty and maximization even more. When I maximize, often just the height is changed, when I go back to "normal" the height and the width is changed, so I always have to adjust the width manually. When I minimize a few windows, it's impossible to get back the right one without luck.
- analogic 9y ago
  After using a mac for ~6 months now, I finally understand what happened to gnome3/unity, clearly designed by mac users. I mean it's perfectly usable once I got the basic gestures down and installed the app that let me independently set the track pad and mouse wheel scroll directions, but will go so far as to say that both xfce and MATE are objectively better at window management. Partly I think their hands were tied by the too late to change decision for the always there contextual top menu bar. Or this is just 25 years of using win95 clones talking and I'm set in my ways.
  - herbst 9y ago
    I wouldnt say Gnome is by or for mac users. In fact in many ways it is way more similiar to Metro than to OSX. Gnome 3 just broke the common Windows 95 workflow, however many others did before.
    - analogic 9y ago
      ya tbh i never tried using it for more than 10 minutes

smoyer 9y ago

I'm predominately a Linux user and I switched away from Mac OSX specifically because of the underlying file system. I'll admit that it was annoying finding windows sometimes but the case-preserving, case-insensitive file system made no sense.

M_Bakhtiari 9y ago
Why not just use it with a case-sensitive file system? Did it break some application you were relying on?
- lloydde 9y ago
  I wondered the same thing, but then acknowledged that adds a first step of formatting the disk / re-installing.
  - M_Bakhtiari 9y ago
    Which switching to Linux entails as well. I can think of a lot of reasons to abandon Mac OS X, but this seems like a really odd one to me.
lloydde 9y ago
Case-preserving,case-insensitive is good for less sophisticated users: prevents accidentally misplacing or duplicating files with capitalization; and simplifies through this constraint media listing and sorting — no worrying about jpg vs JPG. What are the use cases that bother you?
- Retra 9y ago
  When a file refuses to rename because the OS thinks it is the same name. When you have multiple files that differ in case, but they overwrite each other because the OS thinks they are the same. Really, the only place case-insensitive filenames makes sense is when you are searching. It makes no sense for any other reason.

rvanmil 9y ago

You’re using macOS wrong ;) I remember Windows 95 as a complete disaster of crashes, data loss, failing installations, incompatible applications, missing drivers and countless other problems which were only fixed with the release of Windows 98 (maybe even SE), which was much much better. I have memories of people sticking with DOS and 3.x, only having 95 as a nondefault boot option in case they wanted to watch the Buddy Holly video or launch the new Encarta cd-rom.

ryanianian 9y ago
Most of the above are talking about the UI which is arguably separate from the underlying OS. You can like a UI even if it's a UI to a system that crashes a lot :)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

sodapopcan 9y ago

The one thing I don't understand that Mac has never adopted is being able to use open and save dialogues as mini file explorers (move stuff around and rename, specifically). Having to switch to Finder to move or rename a file that has the same name as the file I'm trying to save is ridiculous. Of course I never need to do this anymore since I only work on text files under revision control, but it still seems odd to me it was never introduced. I really just miss Window Explorer A LOT since moving to Mac. I don't hate macOS, but Finder is a bit of a joke.

jakecopp 9y ago
I believe this has been possible for some time on macOS.
ryanianian 9y ago
You can use most open/save dialogues to do this - a right-click is all it takes in most places. But I definitely agree with your sentiment. Finder feels like a badly-designed toy. The latest things they've added - tabs and labels iirc - require more steps to do the same tasks in the new way versus the old way.
rahoulb 9y ago
OSX Finder is horrible. Classic MacOS Finder was far better - but still had open/save dialogs. RiscOS had it right - the Open dialog didn't exist - you would open the folder and double-click the file. And the Save dialog didn't exist - the document would reduce to an icon which you would then place into the correct folder. (You can sort of do this on the various versions of macOS by dragging the icon from the title bar but it's inconsistent)
- ubermonkey 9y ago
  What do you find horrible? I prefer it by a wide margin over Windows Explorer.
  - rahoulb 9y ago
    I prefer it over Windows Explorer. I prefer the Classic Mac Finder to both. This article from 2003 lists the problems with the OSX Finder. Since it was written, it's only got worse. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/

PhasmaFelis 9y ago

> The very first version missed wildly in some big ways (MSN was a folder integrated into the desktop, for example That would not have been my first pick for an example of Win95's failures. Perhaps the daily system crashes.

petercooper 9y ago

it was by no means assured that Windows 95 would be the success that it was I remember these times well. It was considered a huge break. People were whining about how stupid the Start menu was compared to just seeing your apps in front of you all the time :-D I love that we eventually came full circle to a Windows 3.1 Program Manager-esque approach with iOS nowadays!

Momquist 9y ago
Note that progman.exe was still shipped with the OS (it disappeared for good with Vista), and you could even set it as the default shell at boot. I don't remember anyone using this setup ever though. Maybe this was too obscure and technical for the users complaining.

ebbv 9y ago

> still get frustrated on OSX when I minimize a window and have to hunt around for it. Learn to use the dock? The taskbar on Win 95 was evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and the Dock from NeXT was one of the influences. Which is the same dock was have today in macOS. You can still have personal preference, of course. But if you have trouble using macOS to find minimized windows, that's because you haven't learned to use it not because it's not possible.

eadmund 9y ago

> Compare it to other GUIs at the time, like CDE, IBM's Presentation Manager, or even Mac OS 8 and there's no comparison. Well, I agree that there was no comparison with System 8, but not in the sense you mean. I think that the Mac back then was head-and-shoulders a better system than Windows. It might still be, but they're both so painful to use now that it's very difficult to pick a winner. The Macintosh system was very understandable, very clean. Extensions were an easy-to-understand way to extend one's system, and easy-to-disable too. The window system itself was better-thought-out and less-confusing than Windows's was. The Finder was much more straightforward than the Windows equivalent (was it called the File Explorer back then?). The way that the Mac associated programmes to files (with an application code & a file code) was much better than the extension-based naming of Windows. The way that the Mac used its files' resource fork was great. Programming a Mac back then was very clean & straightforward. I don't think there's anything today as nice, except maybe Cocoa, maybe. Certainly not the Windows 95 API!

pavlov 9y ago
I was using Macs back in the late '90s, and none of the things you say ring true. Extensions could easily bring down the entire system because there was no memory protection. Full OS crashes (what modern macOS calls kernel panics) were a daily occurrence for the typical Mac-using professional who ran complex software. The window system was often difficult to understand because apps tended to use a plethora of little panel windows that could overlap even from different apps. Windows preferred large windows that contained the entire app UI, and users typically maximized them. The Windows 95 Task Bar was much better for actually keeping track of your tasks than whatever the MacOS 8 thing was. File extensions were always a hack, but one that Apple adopted too for Mac OS X. The days of Mac's file-specific associations were numbered when the Internet happened, because Unix servers wouldn't keep track of that metadata, so you needed file extensions anyway. Besides, the file-specific associations were often super annoying because they were created by the editor app even for exported files. You saved a JPEG file from Photoshop, and it forever insisted on launching the full Photoshop when you double-clicked on it, instead of your preferred lightweight image viewer. This would happen even when you copied the file to someone else because the association was in the file metadata. Windows NT 4 and its next version Windows 2000 were just heads and shoulders above MacOS 8 and 9 in terms of performance, stability and usability. (And programming in Mac OS 8... Ugh. No memory protection, no multitasking, APIs originally designed in Pascal.)

beamatronic 9y ago

I am glad you mentioned right click. I remember being really pleased with the orthogonality aspect of being able to right click any object.

samstave 9y ago

You may not recall, but when win95 came out - there were lines blocks long awaiting to buy it, much like when the iPhone came out. I recently sold several windows 95 shrink wrapped original copies on eBay which was the OS on 32 3.5” floppy disks. As an original piece of computer history. Win 95 was monumental and great. Aside from outlook, and excel, the greatest product MS ever made.

cat199 9y ago

> I still get frustrated on OSX when I minimize a window and have to hunt around for it. OSX took the NextStep/OpenStep interface and dumbed it down to great detriment, then added new things back (spaces, zooming) which were inferior logically but required less 'thinking' of how one works and more 'shiny looking' to potential customers.. IMHO hands down the best mouse-oriented window management paradigm to exist to date is the NextStep/OpenStep style over and above windows and osx, though I will admit windows has improved things with their sort of hybrid 'classic' windows+'macish' updates, and some of the newer ui things (e.g. window thumbnails) haven't made it into the current flagship of that lineage which is the open source WindowMaker.. Since the 'official' lineages are dead, am hoping the WindowMaker people continue to innovate/move this paradigm forward as they have been doing subsequently for the last N years...

kllrnohj 9y ago

> I wouldn't switch back because of the underlying crap that is the Windows [...] file system You lost me. HFS+ is arguably one of the worst file systems around (yes I know that Apple finally switched to APFS but that was fairly recent). I'm really curious what you actually liked about Mac's file system vs. Windows?

MBCook 9y ago
Agreed. NTFS is one of the few things I missed. I’m still annoyed that APFS doesn’t have file level checksums.
russellbeattie 9y ago
Hmmm... You're right of course. I didn't describe that well. I meant Unix file names and way of working with files vs. Windows. In other words, forward slashes, symlinks, mounts, sane permissions, etc. I hate dealing with drive letters, etc. What's a good name for this?
- kllrnohj 9y ago
  Oh, the UX of the file space layout. NTFS/Windows actually has all of that stuff you want, too. NTFS's permission system, for example, is extremely feature-full and integrates nicely with the user system (ACL support by default rather than an add-on, for example). The octal user-group-all permission you're probably used to is pretty crude by comparison. It's more likely just you're unfamiliar with it rather than it's actually missing anything. But if you want you can just pretend C:\ is equivalent to / and mount all your other drives at C:\mnt\whatever, that's completely doable (with a GUI to configure it if you want, even)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

tinus_hn 9y ago

Not sure why you’d have to hunt for minimized windows because there is a separate area on the dock reserved for them, and the animation clearly shows the window moving towards it.

IronWolve 9y ago

And Win95b with opengl, proper win32 support, and a tcp-ip stack was much better compared to the addon for win31. I remember when unified USB support came out in Win95 2.5, it was big damn news at the time.

maxxxxx 9y ago

I still remember the Windows 95 hype. It was on the level of the excitement for the first iPhone releases.

rapind 9y ago

To each their own. To me Windows is bloatware. But I also make the OSX dock as small as possible and autohidden. I launch everything through spotlight though as I abhor unecessary point and click (synonymous with hitting the windows key and typing a couple letters of the application to launch.).