5 ms·

Ugh, talk about feature creep and planned obsolescence. From version 7.0c you need a 200 MB or larger drive for autobackup and Win95+ or later for mailing/FTPin

Ugh, talk about feature creep and planned obsolescence. From version 7.0c you need a 200 MB or larger drive for autobackup and Win95+ or later for mailing/FTPing autoreports. Now I need to replace my perfectly functional 386DX-40 with one of those fancy 486. Hopefully a Cyrix CX-486DRX2 will do and I can avoid the expense of a new motherboard... :^)

tssva 7y ago
There is not necessarily a need to upgrade your hardware. Minimum CPU requirement for Windows 95 is a 386DX.
- Zardoz84 7y ago
  a 386 at 40 MHz run Windows 95 perfectly
yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
I'm actually surprised at that; I know FTP was around in that era, and SMTP is a simple as throwing a simple text format over TCP.
- jeroenhd 7y ago
  Probably Winsock-related. Sockets required third party support in DOS and required an extension program on Win3.1x, but Win95 standardised them in the OS API. So, if you as a programmer want to do sockets programming without obscure old software that probably lacks documentation, Windows 95 is the way to go. You can read about the history of winsock here: https://tangentsoft.net/wskfaq/articles/history.html https://tangentsoft.net/wskfaq/articles/history.html
  - chungus_khan 7y ago
    Definitely. Networking on DOS was an absolute nightmare for so many reasons.
    - boomlinde 7y ago
      I set that up recently and found it refreshingly simple. Just load a packet driver (finding the right packet driver for your card is the biggest potential hurdle IMO), set up a system wide configuration file (to be fair, one for each network stack you'll be using; in my case mTCP and WATTCP), point to it with some environment variable in AUTOEXEC and run the network software. It brings a smile though that I occasionally have to renew my DHCP lease manually.
- boomlinde 7y ago
  You can't throw a simple text format over TCP if there's no TCP or IP or Ethernet to throw it over! It probably relies Windows because it provides a sane abstraction over a large set of network card drivers, and a system-wide TCP/IP stack.

tssva 7y ago

There is not necessarily a need to upgrade your hardware. Minimum CPU requirement for Windows 95 is a 386DX.

Zardoz84 7y ago
a 386 at 40 MHz run Windows 95 perfectly

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago

I'm actually surprised at that; I know FTP was around in that era, and SMTP is a simple as throwing a simple text format over TCP.

jeroenhd 7y ago
Probably Winsock-related. Sockets required third party support in DOS and required an extension program on Win3.1x, but Win95 standardised them in the OS API. So, if you as a programmer want to do sockets programming without obscure old software that probably lacks documentation, Windows 95 is the way to go. You can read about the history of winsock here: https://tangentsoft.net/wskfaq/articles/history.html https://tangentsoft.net/wskfaq/articles/history.html
- chungus_khan 7y ago
  Definitely. Networking on DOS was an absolute nightmare for so many reasons.
  - boomlinde 7y ago
    I set that up recently and found it refreshingly simple. Just load a packet driver (finding the right packet driver for your card is the biggest potential hurdle IMO), set up a system wide configuration file (to be fair, one for each network stack you'll be using; in my case mTCP and WATTCP), point to it with some environment variable in AUTOEXEC and run the network software. It brings a smile though that I occasionally have to renew my DHCP lease manually.
boomlinde 7y ago
You can't throw a simple text format over TCP if there's no TCP or IP or Ethernet to throw it over! It probably relies Windows because it provides a sane abstraction over a large set of network card drivers, and a system-wide TCP/IP stack.