4 ms·

Seriously? Windows 95 and 98 were extremely prone to crashes and it took many years for Microsoft to get past a reputation for low quality. It took until Windo

by kanox 6y ago

Seriously? Windows 95 and 98 were extremely prone to crashes and it took many years for Microsoft to get past a reputation for low quality. It took until Windows XP to get a reasonably stable desktop OS.

userbinator 6y ago
As my other reply here notes, the thin (and permissive) virtualisation layer means that badly written applications could crash the system, but I blame that on the applications more than anything else; too bad that most people seemed to think MS was to blame, when DOS had even less protection. I used 98se as my daily OS until well into the Vista era (at which point I gradually switched into XP), and it was definitely not the "reboot multiple times a day" that some others have experienced, but then again, I also wasn't in the habit of running lots of low-quality applications either. Uptimes of over a month weren't uncommon, and were usually brought to an end more often than not due to myself doing something stupid with the application I was writing. (In fact, I've experienced far more trouble of various sorts with a recent new machine that runs Win10.)
- iso8859-1 6y ago
  Hmm, using Windows 98 in 2007? I had so many problems with Win98 compared to Win2k, I really have trouble understanding why you'd do this. Especially because you say you only ran high quality applications. High quality software got ported to NT relatively quickly IIRC.
  - jonathanlydall 6y ago
    While I also preferred Windows 2000 once available, most likely he was using Windows 98 SE, I remember it being quite reliable as Windows goes, especially compared to the nightmare that was ME. On install of Windows 98 SE I would always turn off Active Desktop and the fancy looking information left-hand side pane in Windows Explorer. Both used IE to work and would just make everything feel really slow and sluggish. It's also possible that them being disabled improved system stability.
    - userbinator 6y ago
      Yes, 98SE. I used lots of DOS applications that needed the direct hardware access (embedded programming systems etc.)
- eru 6y ago
  See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281932 > The original version of Sim City was written for windows 3.x and included a bug that read memory that had been freed to the system. It worked in windows 3.x, even though it shouldn't, because that particular range of memory wasn't being used for anything else until the program was terminated. > In beta versions of windows 95 Sim City didn't work because the operating system allocated memory differently, and Sim City would crash as expected because of the bug in the program. Amazingly, in the final version of Win95 the original Sim City worked. Microsoft engineers had actually tested backwards compatibility with Sim city, located the bug, and worked around it in their sourcecode.
  - simonh 6y ago
    Workarounds like that which detect a particular app running and enable a special mode are called a Shim, Microsoft created hundreds of them to ensure compatibility in new OS versions with popular apps.
eru 6y ago
Yes, they built the technology on shaky foundations. But that doesn't say anything about the user interface research and polishing they did.
forgotmypw17 6y ago
I personally did not experience much crashing with Windows 95 and 98, and I used both extensively. In all the labs I maintained at the time, the majority of crashes were due to faulty hardware or third-party software. Of course, on an OS with very little isolation, one faulty device driver or network card would take down the whole thing. With decent hardware (and I'm talking Packard Bell, nothing extraordinary) I achieved several-day uptimes, and rarely any crashes. Also, before Windows XP, 2000 was extremely stable, even the pre-Gold releases.

by kanox 6y ago

userbinator 6y ago

As my other reply here notes, the thin (and permissive) virtualisation layer means that badly written applications could crash the system, but I blame that on the applications more than anything else; too bad that most people seemed to think MS was to blame, when DOS had even less protection. I used 98se as my daily OS until well into the Vista era (at which point I gradually switched into XP), and it was definitely not the "reboot multiple times a day" that some others have experienced, but then again, I also wasn't in the habit of running lots of low-quality applications either. Uptimes of over a month weren't uncommon, and were usually brought to an end more often than not due to myself doing something stupid with the application I was writing. (In fact, I've experienced far more trouble of various sorts with a recent new machine that runs Win10.)

iso8859-1 6y ago
Hmm, using Windows 98 in 2007? I had so many problems with Win98 compared to Win2k, I really have trouble understanding why you'd do this. Especially because you say you only ran high quality applications. High quality software got ported to NT relatively quickly IIRC.
- jonathanlydall 6y ago
  While I also preferred Windows 2000 once available, most likely he was using Windows 98 SE, I remember it being quite reliable as Windows goes, especially compared to the nightmare that was ME. On install of Windows 98 SE I would always turn off Active Desktop and the fancy looking information left-hand side pane in Windows Explorer. Both used IE to work and would just make everything feel really slow and sluggish. It's also possible that them being disabled improved system stability.
  - userbinator 6y ago
    Yes, 98SE. I used lots of DOS applications that needed the direct hardware access (embedded programming systems etc.)
eru 6y ago
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281932 > The original version of Sim City was written for windows 3.x and included a bug that read memory that had been freed to the system. It worked in windows 3.x, even though it shouldn't, because that particular range of memory wasn't being used for anything else until the program was terminated. > In beta versions of windows 95 Sim City didn't work because the operating system allocated memory differently, and Sim City would crash as expected because of the bug in the program. Amazingly, in the final version of Win95 the original Sim City worked. Microsoft engineers had actually tested backwards compatibility with Sim city, located the bug, and worked around it in their sourcecode.
- simonh 6y ago
  Workarounds like that which detect a particular app running and enable a special mode are called a Shim, Microsoft created hundreds of them to ensure compatibility in new OS versions with popular apps.

eru 6y ago

Yes, they built the technology on shaky foundations. But that doesn't say anything about the user interface research and polishing they did.

forgotmypw17 6y ago

I personally did not experience much crashing with Windows 95 and 98, and I used both extensively. In all the labs I maintained at the time, the majority of crashes were due to faulty hardware or third-party software. Of course, on an OS with very little isolation, one faulty device driver or network card would take down the whole thing. With decent hardware (and I'm talking Packard Bell, nothing extraordinary) I achieved several-day uptimes, and rarely any crashes. Also, before Windows XP, 2000 was extremely stable, even the pre-Gold releases.