44 ms·

Windows 95 – How Does It Look Today?

447 points by hu3 6y ago

linkdd 6y ago
I miss the card games without ads.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  bonus point: no login
- Guest42 6y ago
  I liked how everything seemed intentionally rectangular. Perhaps made it easier to organize things mentally. It was also nice having full menus at the top of windows.
  - acdha 6y ago
    There was also a big technical reason for that: graphics subsystems sucked back then. Hardware acceleration ranged from non-existent to primitive and RAM was tight. If you have two objects (window, control, etc.) displayed and they're rectangular, you can update one of them without needing to involve the other one at all. Since your entire display was a single buffer in memory, each application would draw directly in its chunk of memory. When you did something which made things move you could use simple array math to move the previously-painted block of memory to the new location or, if you had a really fancy graphics card, call a BitBlt operation which would move x1,y2-x2,y2 to the new location. Then you had to tell whatever was now visible in the source location to repaint that region. Adding things like transparency or rounded corners breaks a lot of that — you need to know what's underneath to update the display — and that wasn't fast enough to use until you had enough RAM to store each object independently so you don't need to ask each application to repaint as things move around. Compositing window managers started early — I believe the Amiga had that — but the first mainstream OS was when Mac OS X shipped Quartz and it had performance drawbacks (i.e. tolerable but not great window dragging performance) until they shipped Quartz Extreme which used OpenGL to do the hard work. Microsoft caught up about 5 years later with Windows Vista, in part because they had more users to support with inadequate hardware.
    - Guest42 6y ago
      Thank you, I have had zero exposure to what goes on in those areas.
    - wruza 6y ago
      Apps could draw directly to DC, but it flickered a lot, and everyone quickly ended up with CreateCompatible{Bitmap,DC} and blitting into BeginPaint’s DC after drawing. After all, at win95 you had 4 to 8 megabytes or RAM - you definitely had the space. Not sure when it happened, but I can remember fighting with flicker circa 97. Also, rectangular controls were what you had in standard winapi, which was based on HWNDs, which were rectangular-only. I don’t think that unroundness was really forced by hardware constraints (transparency - yes), it was just a default simplest flavor of time. (And not that I like round/flat/text-only controls. What we called “flat” back then is pretty 3d-bordered in modern terms, and what we called “round”, today is border-radius:3px)
      - acdha 6y ago
        4-8MB wasn’t all that much if you were running more than one app at >640x480x256. It was certainly possible but fancy visual effects were going to exclude a lot of low-end hardware, which is what a LOT of mainstream users bought since hardware cost a good but more back then and the value proposition was less established. I agree that roundness wasn’t prohibitive in general. The rectangular nature of the APIs encouraged it but you certainly saw it in applications. What I was thinking about most was complex usage where there was overlap outside of the active context (e.g. dragging a window with the expectation of a lower layer showing around the curve, rather than either not having that or being able to assume a solid fill color) or interfering with hardware accelerated painting or later video decoding which only worked in rectangular regions.
- eterm 6y ago
  I miss an excel that loads fast* and doesn't want to know who I am. * For it's time. I'm sure it wasn't instant on a pentium 1 even if I remember it that way.
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    Excel and Word were blazingly fast on a first gen Pentium compared to a 486 like we had at school.
  - reader_mode 6y ago
    Fast but you had to save often as there was a possibility an app would take down the entire OS.
- boogies 6y ago
  Come to the Free side! We have Free card games! OpenBSD has canfield (solitaire), cribbage, [go]fish, mille [bornes], and even monop[oly] and bcd (format input as punch cards) out of the box (and way more! this is just a fraction of intro(6): http://man.openbsd.org/man6/intro.6 http://man.openbsd.org/man6/intro.6). Unfortunately I’m not aware of any GNU distros that do, but you can get them with a simple `sudo apt install bsdgames` on Debian (also emacs has tons of games of course https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryGames https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryGames).
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    > Unfortunately I’m not aware of any GNU distros that do Slackware does: https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware64-current/slackware64/y/bsd-games-2.17-x86_64-3.txt https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware64-current/...
  - linkdd 6y ago
    Debian in the WSL and Docker are plenty enough for work. I spent too many years installing/testing distros, and I'm tired of having to maintain my system (I was a Gentoo user for 2 years, and I built an LFS that I used for 8 months). Even Debian, if you're not careful, can become a mess. Windows is dumb enough that you don't need to be careful. Chocolatey was the last thing I missed from Linux/Unix distros. And I can still code my own card game if I really want to :) EDIT: seeing a sibling talking about slackware, it seems I missed the joke ^^
- Aloha 6y ago
  I still run the Windows XP version of solitare today, its literally my favorite game (if judged by number of games played).
- KindOne 6y ago
  You could always download the card games from early versions of Windows.
- hyakosm 6y ago
  PySol (https://pysolfc.sourceforge.io/ https://pysolfc.sourceforge.io/) is awesome and multiplatform.
userbinator 6y ago
The contrast and distinction between the different UI elements is immediately obvious. No mistaking a button for static text, and vice-versa. Also, no hidden scrollbars or other auto-hiding UI elements that are difficult to discover and irritating to use even once you know about them.
- tartoran 6y ago
  Even if it looks 'ugly' by today's standard those were good days UI/UX wise and things kept on improving. UIs were consistent and easy to use by mouse or keyboard and in my opinion things started going downhill ever since. I think good UI/UX will of course be rediscovered and the old ideas will be recycled into something new at some point.
  - pilsetnieks 6y ago
    To offer a counterpoint - back then everything in an interface had to be painfully obvious and usable in a myriad of ways because a significant portion of users were computer-illiterate first timers. As it is now, and forever will be, I think the balance between usability and ease of development will be those 20% of effort to make your app palatable to 80% of the users (barring some exceptions by people with underdeveloped moneymaking sense whose self-description might involve the word "artisanal".)
    - tartoran 6y ago
      Yes, you have a point. When IPads/Iphones first came out they were so usable that old people who never touched a computer or toddlers could use them without much direction, they were quite intuitive. They've messed up since then though, they've gone into a dubious direction. And the rest of the industry followed good and bad apple UI/UX decisions, some of them even poorly and we have a confusing mess, confusing and headache inducing at times even for the computer literate.
      - titzer 6y ago
        I find touch interfaces have infantilized computing, turning everything into scrolling and big, fat, ad-looking buttons, and there is no way to really become skilled at them.
HenryKissinger 6y ago
How vulnerable was Windows 95 to computer viruses?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- kristopolous 6y ago
  You gotta more carefully define "vulnerable" and "computer virus" here, otherwise answers can only have equal hand-waving vagueness. There's security related processor features that the CPUs at the time didn't have and the kind of complete sandboxing abstractions we take for granted came at a high cost (VT instruction sets were a decade off and minimum ram was 4MB, not GB, but MB ... for everything, the whole system, all of it). As far as encryption goes, it was slow. Transparent disk encryption was totally possible but the performance hit was significant. People could be forgiven for deciding they really didn't care that much. Home users weren't keeping the kinds of secrets on their home computer that people do on their cell phones these days. The world was less digitally integrated.
  - msla 6y ago
    Windows 95 never ran on anything less than an 80386, which could and did run reasonably secure OSes. That CPU didn't have support for hardware virtualization, but "sandboxing" is vague enough that you can reasonably say that 32-bit protected mode enforced secure sandboxing at the hardware level on those chips.
    - marcodiego 6y ago
      Yes, 80386 had memory protection but windows 95 did not enforce it. That is the reason I started using linux.
    - kristopolous 6y ago
      I was talking about things like Skylake's Memory Protection Extensions, Nehalems Safer Mode Extensions, Software Guard Extension, the virtualization extensions around 2005, page table virtualization with EPT, TXT, RDRAND for hardware entropy etc That's why it depends Things like AES and SHA are implemented in hardware these days. We can get into discussion on whether netware or xenix on a 386 is an unusable dog or not, I've got an actual 386 about 6 feet away from me as I write this. I could even give you login if you want to live the pain. Windows 95 made compromises, read barbarians led by Bill Gates for a good rundown. It was never intended to be their network line (NT), but instead for traditional home computers. Internet explorer was super last minute that's why it was just licensed code from spyglass mosaic. It was released the day after OEMs got windows 95. Gates didn't think there'd be a large demand for dialup modem based internet and that they had a few years to worry about it. He pivoted effectively a month or two before release. That's why MS pushed multiple patches out quickly after the release to get a competent networking stack outside of winsock. The people making windows 95 were competent and cared, they just had lots of conflicting priorities to attend to at once and people used it not as the manufacturers had intended. It's wasn't an easy job. Sure it has security vulnerabilities by 2021 standards. I'd venture to say every system in 1995 that could reasonably run on a typical 4 year old home computer did at the time. 386BSD 1.0, NetBSD 1.1, Linux 1.3, likely all riddled with issues by modern standards. And yes I'm obviously totally aware of the mainstream pop culture consensus of windows 95 sux or whatever. I mean duh, do you really think that's news to me? I know it could BSOD with some malformed packets and that its user security was totally fake. It was totally used in ways it wasn't designed for. Microsoft honestly thought serious stuff would be run on netware, MVS, sunos, os/2, hpux, nonstop os, tru64, os 2200, qnx, etc, certainly not windows 95. "Ah shit, here we go anyway" The curse of success
joejacket 6y ago
The release was painful even at the time: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lAkuJXGldrM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lAkuJXGldrM
- yellowapple 6y ago
  I'm convinced that the stark contrast between Bill Gates' awkward shuffle-clapping v. Steve Ballmer's cocaine-fueled mania is some kind of metaphor for the duality of man.
marcodiego 6y ago
Common opinion agrees that windows 95 was the culmination of good UI. We've been down hill since then.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  So written by a rodent user. What manner of masochism would inspire a man to waste his time “clicking” onto icons with a peripheral whose true function is video games? — it is as though one enter text by way of a video game controller manually selecting characters one by one from a grid.
- stephc_int13 6y ago
  Boring but consistent design and near perfect implementation of controls.
- toast0 6y ago
  Windows 2000 is, I think, windows 95 refined, and really the peak (although some may prefer XP in classic mode). If you tried hard, you could see bits and pieces of 3.1 interface in 95, but it was because you were running a fpga tool with an ancient file dialog, or you went out of your way to run progman, or an old installer launched progman for some reason (I think that sometimes happened, but could be misremembering 25 years ago). As opposed to newer windows where they change things, but not everything. I think 95 was the last time Microsoft did user research to figure out how to make UI that is appealing and useful. At least, it was the last time they published anything about it. Newer stuff may be more appealing, but seems to make things require more clicks or wait to load more often, meaning it takes users longer to do tasks, and is less useful.
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    > although some may prefer XP in classic mode XP was IMO the inflection point, where Windows started to get worse faster than it got better. And close to my heart, Windows XP was the first version of Windows that was too big to fit on my trusty Compaq Presario 1210 and its whopping 1.4GB hard drive. If Microsoft had "stopped" at Windows 2000 (like it has ostensibly "stopped" at Windows 10), and had focused on refining that piece of near-perfection, I'd probably still be a Windows user today, and happily so. My dissatisfaction with Windows - starting with XP/2003, but especially every version after - was the big reason why I looked into alternatives like Linux.
MomoXenosaga 6y ago
Ah the 90s when computers were cool!
jonplackett 6y ago
This brings back soooo many memories. Half good, half bad.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  Yeah, I'm fondly remembering spending many hours just waiting for the OS to install, with me having to check back on the computer every so often just to insert disk 7 of 13. But no question it was a historical event when Win95 launched. The right culmination of factors came together in the mid-90s where now everyone needed to own a personal computer. Ink jet printers were becoming decent. Digital cameras went mainstream. CD burning with an MP3 capable stereo receiver meant you could carry 100 songs with you on the go and kids would make bank selling custom mixes for $5-$10 a pop (not everyone had a burner yet, they were expensive at the time). And of course, that whole dot com craze that turned out to be an insignificant bubble...
  - jonplackett 6y ago
    Windows 95 was the first thing I got on CD, which was awesome for installing. But it also came with a music video from Weezer which played FULL SCREEN. And felt like full on witchcraft after the pixelly goodness of windows 3.11
OJFord 6y ago
Love or hate the UI, my basic reaction is 'recognisable'. What's changed, really? Superficial churn like flat, skeumorphic, minimalist, whatever, sure, but nothing like TUI to GUI, windows, or the mouse.
ianmcgowan 6y ago
The best thing about win95 was the built in drivers for common network cards, as well as TCP/IP support without jumping through a lot of hoops.
frompdx 6y ago
One of the most frustrating things for me about Windows 8/8.1/10 was the classic theme (Win95/NT style) was no longer a UI theme option without downloading something third party. It really is the thing that killed my interest in Windows after Windows 7. Good things don't need to change. I'm thankful my remaining reason for having a Windows OS available is becoming irrelevant due to progress in running games on Linux.
- gerdesj 6y ago
  "Windows 8/8.1/10 was the" Which bit of 95 did you fail to understand?
  - jfoutz 6y ago
    Microsoft's legendary backwards compatibility not being extended to support win95's look and feel. That part.
  - tomerv 6y ago
    You didn't even finish reading the first sentence.
  - LocalH 6y ago
    Did you just stop reading there?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- limeblack 6y ago
  If I recall UXTheme patcher unlocked the themes and let you download classic. This isn't pretty bad and yet annoying.
- techrat 6y ago
  I, too, always switched on Classic Theme after every Windows install. It was a large part of what drew me to XFCE/xUbuntu in the end. Numix and Adwaita-dark gets close enough to the Classic UI Windows the way I had it configured.
convery 6y ago
Recently I went through the attic and found an old laptop (120Mhz CPU, 32Mb RAM, low-RPM 810Mb HDD) with Win98 installed on in. To my amazement it could boot and start Excel and Word within 10sec. Compared to my workstation (20 cores + HT @ 2.5Ghz, 110Gb RAM, PCIe SSD) which takes upward of 40 sec to get to the desktop. Really makes one question the current state of software. Sure, Win7 has some more features, but imagine someone in 98 saying: "we have a great idea for a new OS, it'll have more features than Win98 and it'll only take 4 times longer to boot if you are running it on a cluster of supercomputers, but those new features are gonna be worth it" =P Sidenote on the hardware side: The laptop had a hinge for the keyboard so you could raise it to a 20 degree angle, the CD/Floppy drive had the same connector as the battery so you could swap the drive for another battery if going on a trip. There were two sliding switches for backlight and speaker-volume. Access to the internals via a simple latch. It may have been a brick but it had interesting ideas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ThinkPad_760 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ThinkPad_760
- Yhippa 6y ago
  When I was a kid I remember thinking that if it took 20 seconds to boot now, how fast would it be in 20 years when hardware got significantly better. Fast forward to now and I'll hit the power button, go do some stuff for a few minutes, and then finally use the damn thing.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    Otoh, linux used to take forever to boot compared to windows, now its speedier than windows.
    - theodric 6y ago
      In 2001 I could go from LILO to idling WindowMaker in 12 seconds, far faster than Win2k or XP or any of the earlier DOS-based Windowses
    - robryan 6y ago
      It really depends what is running. By default on Ubuntu at least it has a service that is blocking waiting for a network connection.
derefr 6y ago
> It was the time when almost everybody had a collection of MP3 files on the hard disk drive, and Winamp was one of the most downloadable Windows applications. Objection: nobody had a collection of MP3s in 1995. The computers of 1995 didn't have the power to decompress an audio encoding like MP3 in real-time without an accelerator card. People swapped MIDI arrangements of popular songs, and some folks ripped PCM audio directly to WAV files (where it then took up half their 1GB hard disk, so this was mostly a novelty—unless you were the proud owner of a $2000 1x CD burner to burn the PCM audio back onto.) MP3s became a big thing around 1999, with better computers and the release of Napster. WinAmp itself was released in 1997, but wasn't immediately popular because people didn't have music on their computers to play using it. It took off around 1999 as well (which is why everyone remembers Winamp 2, rather than Winamp 1.)
- chrisabrams 6y ago
  Thank you for clarifying that essentially it was Win 98 (maybe Second Edition) when those applications took off.
- frompdx 6y ago
  Indeed. But I definitely had a collection of MP3s on my Win95 machine as soon as Napster hit the scene. I was able to fit exactly one Blink 182 album on my 1GB hard drive. By the time my mom gave me her Pentium 2 Win95 machine when she upgraded Napster had already came and went. Kazaa was the next big thing for a while, but it was never as good. CD-R/W drives were a game changer for a while though. I was amazed by the ability to load multiple CDs to make a play list and then be prompted to load the each CD into the drive to burn the tracks I wanted.
  - adrianpike 6y ago
    > I was able to fit exactly one Blink 182 album on my 1GB hard drive. Dang, 1GB back in these days was pretty legit. A 128k MP3 was something like 3-4 megs per song - I'd fit a bunch on a 100 meg Zip disk back in the day and feel like a king.
    - 6y ago
spaetzleesser 6y ago
It's easy to forgot that the Widows 95 release was as hyped up as the iPhone release. It was a BIG event.
- mmcconnell1618 6y ago
  I worked the Egghead Software midnight release party. Yes, people lined up at midnight to get a physical, boxed copy of Windows 95. Queue the Rolling Stones "start me up" that cost BillG $3 million.
  - jrnichols 6y ago
    there were Windows 98 midnight launches as well. People lining up outside of CompUSA to buy their copies. 3 of us had our Apple t-shirts (from the Apple "Demo Days" program) and lined up at a Sacramento, CA location (I forgot what chain it was) that had an Apple "store in a store" - media (radio) was outside and interviewed us on air about it. We fired up all the Macs, and our friend crashed the big screen demo with the c:\con\con bug. good times.
- aluminussoma 6y ago
  I distinctly remember an interview on Win95 launch day where the local news was interviewing a guy in a computer shop about his thoughts. He was unimpressed. He said something like, "Mac* already does this and much better". When the iPhone launched, my reaction to it was essentially the same as the guy in the computer shop. Boy were we wrong about the impact both would have on the industry! (* Edit: can't remember if he said Mac or OS/2)
Black101 6y ago
Win95 was not as pretty as modern Windows, but it was much more functional and buggy. Windows 2000 was the #1 version of Windows. Win98 was much more stable then Win95 and as functional.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  Win98SE, you mean. The original Win98 was a dumpster fire stability-wise.
- sizeofchar 6y ago
  Win95 S/R2 worked pretty well.
  - mkup 6y ago
    Win95 OSR2
- etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
  I love the way you mention "but it was much more functional and buggy" as if buggy wasn't a bad attribute.
ekianjo 6y ago
> (Boot to DOS) This feature is not available more, but in Linux, the possibility to boot in a console mode still exists. That's not really how it works - there's no "console mode" in Linux. On Linux the Desktop environment is built on top of underlying OS interface - that's precisely why you can run it completely headless, or why you can completely switch desktop environments in a few seconds.
- bawolff 6y ago
  Win95 was kind of the intermediate between win 3.1 where it really worked that way, and later windows where its definitely not on top of a cosole based os. If you boot into dos mode on win95 its just stopping the boot process at the start windows step, which is not that different from booting linux but not starting x windows.
  - omnibrain 6y ago
    No, that‘s not exactly what happens, albeit a commen misconception. Win 95 (and earlier releases) were not just a GUI shell on top of DOS. They were Operating Systems (with their own functions and capabilities) that used DOS as part of their boot process and to provide compatibility for some things (oder drivers, etc.) If you executed a DOS program within Win 95/3.1 it did not run on the underlying DOS “layer” but in some sort of DOS virtual machine. So what happened when you booted into “dos mode”? You really booted into DOS like you said without the last step of loading Windows. But loading Windows was not just like startx but more a continuation of the boot process into the Windows Operating system.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  The Linux system console is implemented directly in the kernel and is not really "on top" of anything, so I'd say that Linux having a "console mode" is a rather on-point description. This isn't always a good thing, since it includes a whole terminal-standards-emulation component that's one of the kludgiest in Linux itself.
- ok123456 6y ago
  sure there is. telinit 1.
ekianjo 6y ago
> In 1996 the ICQ — the first so-called “instant messenger”, was released. Now it is standard to be always online and to have different chats in Slack or WhatsApp, but in 1996 it was a sort of new idea. What? IRC was well alive back then and you could have multiple chats in a single IRC client. This claim makes no sense. What ICQ brought was not the idea of multiple chats going on, but a single identifier to connect to people you knew (and that NOT a mobile phone number)
- H8crilA 6y ago
  It's about the popularity of the product. Yes, IRC is much older, but it was only for geeks. ICQ and the successors (including recent ones, such as WhatsApp) are for the masses.
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    The internet was still pretty much for geeks or professionals in 1995. Lets not pretend otherwise.
  - anthk 6y ago
    IRC had zillions of web interfaces everywhere, and it was used by everyone in Europe, at least in order to chat in public channels based either by theme or by regional locations.
- icedchai 6y ago
  IRC was too hard for most people to use. Also, "IRC" is not a single entity. Which network are you connecting to? What's your nick? Is it reserved? Are you running a bouncer, or can I only message you when you're online? Way too complicated. ICQ, and later AIM, made most of this stuff "easy" for the average person. Too bad AIM didn't evolve more... It could've been Slack 20 years earlier.
  - nikau 6y ago
    IRC could only compete with slack if they added a sleep(1000ms) between each channel change...
mortenjorck 6y ago
The biggest surprise for me in reading this was the complete lack of any SSL functionality in the original version of Internet Explorer, rendering most of the modern web not merely broken, but fully inaccessible. I wonder what the earliest version of Windows would be that can at least establish a connection to a 2020s website out of the box.
- toast0 6y ago
  SSL 2 and 3 wouldn't get you anywhere anyway.
- NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
  The IE in the screenshots is IE 3.x (I think - judging from the swirlies in the toolbar background), which does have SSL. The problem is it isn't going to have SSL versions or cipher suites that are compatible with the modern Internet so it's going to be pretty useless.
- Macha 6y ago
  Out of the box you're looking at probably Vista SP1, or maybe even 7. SNI support is basically mandatory now. You could install older versions of firefox or IE8 for XP, I guess.
  - Multicomp 6y ago
    Windows 7 RTM cannot install the chocolatey package manager OOTB due to TLS 1.2 expectations, necessitating some work to get Windows up to date with Powershell V3 and such[1]. So maybe Windows 7 SP1, or Windows 8? [1] https://blog.chocolatey.org/2020/01/remove-support-for-old-tls-versions/ https://blog.chocolatey.org/2020/01/remove-support-for-old-t...
- Izkata 6y ago
  The past couple years SSL has been disappearing completely, and TLS is now required. It didn't exist until at least 1999. So even with SSL support, you'd still be out of luck.
- 6y ago
ekianjo 6y ago
> But this connection is practically useless — web standards went so far ahead during the last 25 years, 99% of websites just cannot be opened. I can ping the website, and that is mostly the maximum I can do: You can still open http only websites fine, even in the original internet explorer : https://whynohttps.com/ https://whynohttps.com/
- sbierwagen 6y ago
  There are a couple HTTP proxies that will translate HTTPS and Host: headers for very old browsers that don't support them: https://github.com/atauenis/webone https://github.com/atauenis/webone or https://bitbucket.org/ValdikSS/oldssl-proxy/src/master/ https://bitbucket.org/ValdikSS/oldssl-proxy/src/master/
reader_mode 6y ago
One interesting thing I noticed (obviously IMO) is that even Office 95 looks better than LibreOffice.
worik 6y ago
"It’s a known issue that occurs on processors with a frequency higher than 2.1 GHz......in 1995 nobody was thinking that Windows will be running on a CPU with a so high frequency." The good old days. Earlier no body would ever need more than 640K main memory....
ekianjo 6y ago
> It was also interesting to see the beginning of the new era, the era of connected devices and online services, and to see what will happen with all these services after 10–20 years. This is something that is interesting to think about — will we be able to show our grandchildren how did old stuff work, or “Cannot connect to server” will be the only message that will be displayed? You can't compare the very beginning of the internet and what will come from where we are now in the next 10-20 years. Most likely a lot of things will still work in 10 years, because the underlying foundations of the protocols are now standardized and fixed for a while. Same thing with cars from 30 years ago: they can run just fine on the road and with regular gas, because its matured technology.
- bawolff 6y ago
  The very beginning of the internet was the 60s not the 90s. And honestly where protocols have changed its been very recent. There was a big lull between the 90s and last couple years. TLS 1.3, the most obvious example of something new, was very recent (1.0-1.2 were minor but important improvements to SSL 3, which until recently was still widely supported. TLS1.3 was the biggest change in a long time). Http/2 (and 3!) Are super new, and earlier versions of http which date to the 90s are still universally supported.
  - aflag 6y ago
    He probably meant web and not Internet. The IP protocol, which is arguably what is closest to what internet really means haven’t seen a change since the 80s. We are still struggling with moving to IPv6.
    - bawolff 6y ago
      But his point was that the foundations were fixed. You could say the same thing about the internet in the early 90s, and then http changed a bunch of things. Whose to say the same thing won't happen tommorow. It doesn't seem like HTTP is any more of a fixed foundation today than tcp/ip was in the 90s
hivacruz 6y ago
Still amazed by the border bottom on letters to show shortcuts to the users. So simple and convenient.
dkarras 6y ago
Anyone remember the "hipster winamp" Kjöfol? Also there was an application, I believe called "gooey" that would automatically create a chatroom for any site you visit. So when you visit a site, there would be a chat for that particular url and people would chat in it.
superkuh 6y ago
It looks better and more functional than my Gtk3 based desktop environment on linux today. It's amazing how much the desktop environments have regressed in linux over the last decade.
- Cloudef 6y ago
  Use something else than gnome. Gnome devs live in their own bubble
  - RedShift1 6y ago
    You're getting downvoted but this is absolutely true.
  - superkuh 6y ago
    I have used something other than GNOME for more than a decade. The GNOME devs still control Gtk3 and the Gtk3 file chooser is used by many DE and applications. Heck, I can't even get my KDE/Qt applications to use their native file chooser under Debian 10 w/MATE. So even using KDE applications is no escape.
doubleunplussed 6y ago
> Is 100 MB is the minimum program size in 2021? Last time, when I was downloading the drivers for my new Brother printer, it was about 250 MB, I still have no idea what they did include in the archive. When I see something that should be tiny being about 250MB, it's usually that they bundled Qt for the GUI. I suppose that's a cost of cross-platform tools. The 10kb executable the author made was using system GUI libraries, a dynamically linked executable on a system with Qt etc already installed would be similar.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  VLC "only" clocks at 38 Mo, and uses Qt. It's also pretty much today's Winamp.
  - doubleunplussed 6y ago
    They've probably only included the modules they're using, or maybe they're statically linked and so only including the specific code used. Bundling the whole set of shared libraries is what I've seen a lot of though! Often in the context of a Python program using PyQt.
enw 6y ago
Windows 95 might not be the prettiest, but seems beautifully consistent in both UX and UI.
- richardfey 6y ago
  "healthy": it did not try to surprise you at every turn and corner. Functionality over vanity
forgotmypw17 6y ago
It still looks and works great, better than most UIs today. I use it regularly for testing, and it's a great platform for writing and updating my blog (from within a VM)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
ilrwbwrkhv 6y ago
The greatest difference is how inefficient we have become. 10kb.
nahuel0x 6y ago
Open the Google Cloud Console (probably the most complex Material UI example), and imagine it in Win95 style. It will be so much better.
legends2k 6y ago
Thanks for this walk down the memory lane, quite nostalgic for me; Win 95 was my first OS; boyhood days.
burlesona 6y ago
Honestly it holds up pretty well. That UI isn’t quite as “pretty” as some modern UIs, but I like it better than most in terms of it just being clear, consistent, and unsurprising.
- nikau 6y ago
  The only thing missing is the application search feature where you can just type the app name to find it, that's about the only decent feature win7 onwards introduced.
  - phendrenad2 6y ago
    Back when the start menu +only+ showed programs, this wasn't necessary.
    - nikau 6y ago
      not sure I agree, back then you had mountains of app entries with uninstall and readme and other junk all mixed in, it was tedious finding an app. now you just wack windows key, type in part of the app name and press enter.
      - RedShift1 6y ago
        That only worked well on Windows 7. Today the start menu search is unreliable.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  One brave GUI toolkit continues to use the Windows 95 look. Personally I really like that look (or design language, as we're apparently meant to say these days). Clean, high-contrast, and it's clear which widgets are clickable. It has the added bonus that its drawing operations can easily be hard-coded for excellent performance. http://www.fox-toolkit.org/ http://www.fox-toolkit.org/
ralphc 6y ago
If you're thinking of doing something similar, either in a VM or on compatible hardware, I recommend Windows 98. You get FAT32 which gets you larger hard drives, where pre-OSR2 Windows 95 has FAT, where the max hard drive size is 2GB, you need to divide larger drives into multiple drive letters. Windows 98 also gives you easier third-party ways to turn on universal USB flash drive functionality. Without it you need a driver for each flash drive, good luck finding that today. Windows 98 is basically the pinnacle of DOS-based windows for gaming, Windows ME takes away some DOS functionality.
- Narishma 6y ago
  VMs tend to offer poor to non-existent support for anything pre-Windows XP. I recommend PCem instead.
  - rnd0 6y ago
    I'd recommend 86box over pcem, myself. It has support for a lot more machines, frequent releases (including snapshots) and a better UI. Plus you don't have to go on a wild goose chase hunting down roms.
    - Narishma 6y ago
      In my experience, 86box tends to require a lot more resources than PCem. For example, a standard PC XT configuration will peg a whole CPU core in 86box at 100% while PCem will use just 10% of a single core. I don't know if it's a bug but it makes using 86box on a laptop uncomfortable.
- jodrellblank 6y ago
  For a quick lookaround, launch one in a WebAssembly VM in your browser: http://copy.sh/v86/ http://copy.sh/v86/ or https://bellard.org/jslinux/ https://bellard.org/jslinux/ (faster, but only has Windows 2000)
- TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
  I would recommend Windows NT 4. Because it is NT-based it runs well on modern systems and VMs without special patching, and even has VirtualBox integration. Yet it has that lovely Windows 95 UI (though slightly different in a few places). If you prefer the Internet Explorer-infested 98 UI, you can install the Windows Desktop Update in NT 4. It can run most Windows 9x software, though games may be a problem. It has Pinball though!
sergiotapia 6y ago
What made Windows 95's UI have so much staying power? The right combination of people in the right room? Superstar stallions? Like Silent Hill 2, a group of people that were greater together than as individuals and can never be replicated? Where are they now? What are they building?
- tl 6y ago
  That decade had the right incentives for a good UI design to come together (Windows, Mac, Amiga, etc...). Windows 95 had, by far the largest marketing push (pointed out elsewhere, but Chicago had gen 1 iPhone hype levels) and install base (didn't need "Microsoft" hardware).
- hyakosm 6y ago
  David Plummer created the task manager and the pinball game (Space cadet). Search about him, he has explained and revealed a lot of interesting facts last year.
  - ddingus 6y ago
    That pinball game was excellent! Huge depth! Lots of replay value. I kind of want to give it a go now.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- ianetaylor 6y ago
  I wrote the '95 Start Menu among other bits and pieces. Mostly the team was just a bunch of regular devs but with a few crazy-smart types making the rest of us look good. RaymondC to name but one. Several of that original team are still at Microsoft, I currently work on HoloLens
  - sergiotapia 6y ago
    Your work was so influential! If you are working on hololens I have high hopes for that next step in computing interfaces.
Yuioup 6y ago
You can run Windows 95 in your browser, if you're curious: https://archive.org/details/win95_in_dosbox https://archive.org/details/win95_in_dosbox
29athrowaway 6y ago
Did you know that you can upgrade from Windows 1.0 all the way to Windows 10 if you go version-by-version? I found that amazing. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=windows+upgrade+1.0+to+10 https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=windows+upgrade...
hyakosm 6y ago
Windows 95 is probably the oldest OS easily usable by young people. It's fascinating because: - It has established strong foundations about Windows UI. The Menu/Toolbar couple, scrollbars with a relative size, 3D buttons, start menu, toolbar... - The gap between Windows 3.1 (1992) and Windows 95 is insane. - It was beautifully coherent. Today, Windows 10 seems like a mess with different UI pieces from different universes: Modern UI, Windows Vista/7 era utilities, Windows XP/2003 config things and some older gems. Fun thing: open a Word document from a pendrive and unplug the pendrive, MS Word will show an error box from Win95 era, asking to insert the floppy in the drive. - When booting a VM or an old computer with classic Windows I feel "at home". Our first family computer when I was a child was a Pentium II / Windows 98. I have strong reflexes with this kind of UI and I'm faster with classic window and menus compared to my phone or a tablet with modern touch interface.
- flowerlad 6y ago
  > It was beautifully coherent. And that's because it copied heavily from NeXTSTEP of the late 1980's. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_desktop.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_... That beveled look was invented by Steve Jobs's team, and copied by Microsoft. I would much rather use NeXTSTEP look & feel than Windows 10 or even OS X.
  - core-questions 6y ago
    I want to go to the alternate timeline where a major distro actually picked up the GNUstep ball and ran with it, and built out a full desktop based around WindowMaker. It's still faster and more fun than most modern desktops.
    - Lammy 6y ago
      > It's still faster and more fun than most modern desktops. And doesn't even look (too) dated when paired with a compositor: https://i.imgur.com/YJkDMjr.png https://i.imgur.com/YJkDMjr.png If Wayland could just give me this I'd switch to it in a heartbeat, versus possibly-never :(
rakoo 6y ago
I used to spend hours in those installers waiting for games to install. The look and feel with the background image and the distinctive "grain" on it, the font... nostalgia moments.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
Sadly, what I really want is to be able to boot Win98/SE in a virtual machine with DirectX 9 or better support. I have a ton of old Win98 games that were fun (if pixelly) and while I've got the DirectX install files (often from old PC Gamer CDs (remember when Microsoft shipped them on those disks?) I haven't found a virtual machine video driver that is DirectX compatible.
- Narishma 6y ago
  Have you tried PCem?
  - ChuckMcM 6y ago
    I have not but I will, it seems to have the emulations that I can use.
haddr 6y ago
"it is interesting to see, that physically, Windows 95 can be connected to the internet. But this connection is practically useless" It could be also quite unpleasant. The TCP/IP stack that Win95 was using had plenty of bugs (e.g. ping of death) that could allow someone to remotely freeze Win95 box. Although, today no one would exploit win95 machines in the wild...
- vidanay 6y ago
  I still have winsock PTSD
juliend2 6y ago
I'm wondering if some people here are still using it for real work. Like writing novels. Stuff like that.
pentagrama 6y ago
Windows 95 nailed it from the start with the UX, I believe it was heavily researched and thought. A bold vision for a new era. Here is an interesting Windows 95 usability case study from Microsoft at the time, I love the attention to detail and how many not-visual design things are considered https://archive.is/Uj71F https://archive.is/Uj71F (original link now broken) The nostalgia factor is heavy here too, not only with contemporaneous (Gen X and Gen Y), some of Gen Z discover the aesthetic as a internet trend who peak around 2012, is called Vaporwave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporwave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporwave Sorry if my English is not the best :/
- sim_card_map 6y ago
  that's a great study!
- TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
  Microsoft putting a lot of effort into usability research, especially for first-time users, is clearly why Windows 95's UI came out so good. Imagine if they'd done the same for later versions: Windows 8 and 10 would never have happened.
isodev 6y ago
It would be nice to read a post comparing Windows 95 to Mac System 7, the OS it used for “inspiration”. By extension one could day Windows 10 today still uses UI elements first introduced in Mac System 7.
gbraad 6y ago
Boot to console still exists in Linux? What a comparison ... :-/
- gbraad 6y ago
  ... it's on Medium, so shouldn't expect too much.
molasses 6y ago
I have a friend that has run blackbox style desktop for an age. He still prefers it over native win 10.
molasses 6y ago
We ran a small drop in cafe and we're excited to run win 2k and xp on something like 600mhz Pentiums. Someone donated an old pc. We turned it on and it had win 3.1 on and it booted in a blip. We looked at each other in amazement. It's odd what you forget. And at the time I preferred the 3.1 style to 95, though tooling was pretty horrible. Changing video modes for example. Win 95 also didn't originally come with TCP/IP from what I remember. Pre internet os, that you wrestled with to get internet support on. Later service pack version came bundled with the web client stuff. Networking was very hit and miss back then.
- richardfey 6y ago
  It didn't come with USB, you needed the B version for that.
- TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
  Windows 95 had TCP/IP from the very first version, inherited and enhanced from Windows for Workgroups. The original retail gold package didn't have Internet Explorer included, so it only had the TCP/IP stack if you chose it in the install process. Every OEM version had mandatory TCP/IP and Internet Explorer however (the OEM RTM came out a bit later and so there was time to squeeze IE in).
  - molasses 6y ago
    So many versions. I just remember wrestling with floppies getting dial up networking on a wIn 95 laptop.
stiray 6y ago
It is interesting that with 3d buttons in GUI I can immediately focus on the presable elements while I often struggle today with latest and the greatest flat designs - or rather say, my eyes are scanning for the button more time.
kstenerud 6y ago
Windows 95/2000 was as close to the perfect UI look & feel as we've ever gotten. No crazy eye candy, good contrast, easily recognizable and consistent UI components, decent amount of information available on the desktop, and an overall UI that just gets out of your way. MacOS and AmigaOS came close, but they had more warts overall. The only thing Windows did poorly (besides stability) was the amount of drilling down you needed to do to access some parts of the 80% use cases, but that can be fixed easily enough. Today I use Mate desktop with the Redmond tweak, because once again it gives good feature coverage, good screen real-estate, low overhead, and generally gets out of your way.
jl6 6y ago
Aside from it not being a UNIX, my main complaint about Windows 10 - and the thing I miss most from 90s computing - is the UI inconsistency, even across Microsoft’s own applications, let alone the sprawling disconnected ecosystem of 3rd-party applications. Of course I recognise that Win10 is trying to operate in a far more complex environment than Win95 ever did, but that doesn’t stop me reading every set of Win10 release notes with disinterest and disappointment, finding out that they are focusing on minor feature churn and not doing anything about the core UI issues. I often struggle to explain to my non-technical family how to do things using Windows 10 because it’s all so arbitrary. Win95 was buggy and crap in other ways, but at least it had a manual that explained how to use it!
arendtio 6y ago
What I like most about Win 95 when I started it a few years ago on the original hardware (some 133MHz PC), was the speed. Sure the old harddrive was quite slow, but if the harddrive is not involved the OS is actually pretty fast.
dusted 6y ago
putting them side by side like that leaves no doubt that 95 looks a lot nicer and cleaner than 10.
app4soft 6y ago
> But DOSBox officially does not support Windows, in theory, it can be possible but it’s much easier to use a fully-fledged virtual machine. I’ve used Oracle VirtualBox, which is free and can be installed on any modern PC. JFTR, Win3.1 & Win95 could be installed even on Symbian 9.x smartphones (e.g. Nokia N95, N82, E63) via DOSBox.[0] Win95 works and some apps could be launched under Symbian 9.x, but not so usable as Win3.1, the last one works mostly well. [0] https://www.instructables.com/How-to-install-Windows-31-on-Symbian-S60/ https://www.instructables.com/How-to-install-Windows-31-on-S...
HeckFeck 6y ago
I hold out a hopeless wish that the source code for Windows 95 and Windows 98 will someday make it to GitHub under a MIT licence, like the File Manager, DOS 1.0 and the Windows Console did. Imagine it with a new jolt of life for modern hardware. Office 97 on a 16 core CPU is the dream.
- techrat 6y ago
  I'd love to see Win NT4 sourced. Rock solid and minimal compared to Win95 and Win98. I loved using it... until I realised how much slower everything felt because drivers were optimised/accelerated for the other Windows OSes instead. Complete graphical OS in ~200 MB. Miss those days.
DanielBMarkham 6y ago
If you want to learn useful Human-Machine Interfaces, look at old tech, even imaginary tech in old sci-fi. Why? Because almost as quickly as we started implementing UI/UX, we started running telemetry on them. At first we did a lot of user workshops. Later we got much more sophisticated. The problem is that people use interfaces to solve problems they have, perform work they need to do, and to otherwise help them and others reach common goals. When the character "Mr. Sulu" on the ancient Star Trek TOS has that little viewer thing come up, it's apparent to both the audience and the other fictional characters in that universe what Sulu is doing and why. Perhaps a few lines later one of the other characters in that universe might comment on Sulu's goals, after all, they all can both observe him and how he's solving a problem. Sulu is as much a UI for the crew as that cool little scope is. The focus is on goals, plot movement. Why is that important? Because all of that watching people and collecting data is not able to understand any of that. Instead, all we can really tell is whether or not a set of user interface tools are used a lot or not, and if so, how they're used. We've got a lot of "how" but no "why" So we optimize around getting people to use the tools more. After all, that's all we've got. UI/UX tools become much more about working the human than they are about the human working the tool. Windows 95 is very close to the inflection point of this story. We knew just enough to make things cooler and cooler, yet there was an overarching concern that computers do something useful. If you watch old commercials for tech, the emphasis is all about how useful it is: it teaches your kids, it predicts the stock market, and so on. Steve Jobs realized that while that remains a wonderful rationale, it was all bullshit as far as making and selling hardware. So he began emphasizing the coolness and disruptive nature of the UI. Buy it because it's freaking cool as hell and looks like the best video game you've ever seen. If anybody gives you a hard time, fall back to the old "But I've got a worldwide information system in my pocket" stuff. It has the benefit of being true without being especially relevant. I miss the pinball game.
- JorgeGT 6y ago
  3D pinball space cadet? No need to miss it when it's freely available for modern Windows: https://www.ghacks.net/2017/04/21/play-3d-pinball-space-cadet-on-modern-windows-pcs/ https://www.ghacks.net/2017/04/21/play-3d-pinball-space-cade... Direct link: https://www.ghacks.net/download/132446 https://www.ghacks.net/download/132446
lmarcos 6y ago
> This problem, by the way, is even more important today. Now, most of the services are on the web and in the cloud, and I can guess that all “smart” devices, we are using today, will not be able to start at all 25 years later. Imho, that's the most important part of the article.
timonoko 6y ago
Remarkably un-Fascinating, because Win31 was the last one ever needed. In 1995 Slackware was already running directly from CDROM surpassing Windows on o'so many levels. When Android came about, it was also remarkably un-fascinating, but it was better with rooting and those tools needed pirating Windows XP. So I have XP on some bootmenus.
gxqoz 6y ago
Huh, had no idea Control + Esc loaded the start menu. Of course, not really needed these days with keyboards with a Windows key.
baal80spam 6y ago
For those interested in the history of Windows OS, this is hands down the best resource: https://www.winhistory.de/index.php https://www.winhistory.de/index.php
Causality1 6y ago
I remember being so excited every time a new Windows came out. These days I just dread what the next update is going to break.
voidfunc 6y ago
I really miss this era of computing... everything was so fresh and new feeling back then and there was a lack of polish to everything. It was a lot of fun as a kid learning to use all of this stuff. I remember being fascinated by network apps and stuff that let you send messages and data between computers... that's how I really got interested in programming because I wanted to figure out how to build something like ICQ/AIM.
shp0ngle 6y ago
People forget how generally buggy and unstable 95 was, though. I remember as a kid, it somehow always got into a state when it always showed “restore from backup and restart”, and that window never got away after reboot. After a while, me and my father learned to drag that error window to a bottom right corner and proceed with normal work as if it was never there. (There was no internet, and 7 year old me was more experienced with PCs than my father was.) So annoying. And all the BSODs. Ugh 98 and later XP were so much more stable.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hobo_mark 6y ago
Surprised that nobody mentioned Serenity yet... > SerenityOS is a love letter to '90s user interfaces with a custom Unix-like core. It flatters with sincerity by stealing beautiful ideas from various other systems. > Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user accessibility of late-2000s *nix. This is a system by us, for us, based on the things we like. https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity
williesleg 6y ago
Aah, all the crashes, incompatibilities, slowness, and all the dos shit under it. That's when I switched.
collsni 6y ago
I'm excited for all of the bricked iot in 5 to 10 years let alone 25 lol. Talk about wasteful. I try to only buy things I can host and control myself.
desktopninja 6y ago
Personally: Windows 2000 GUI any day. clear, concise and consistent.
nayuki 6y ago
UI tip: In any window, double-click on the icon at the top left to close the window. This has existed since Windows 3 and persisted through 95, XP, 10, etc., but not many people know about it. App windows that have custom chrome like Chrome, Firefox, etc. cannot use this trick, however.
tonymet 6y ago
In terms of usability, the design is light years ahead of modern desktop OS' (Windows 10 or MacOS) * high contrast UI with clear controls: clear buttons, scroll bars * consistent UI controls * low latency input (clicking buttons, opening/closing windows). I want my OS to be a tool that gets out of the way. It should be responsive & obvious. I think the web has conditioned people to expect 400-800ms latency on every interaction & bloated design. Let's bring back Windows 95 and NT 4.0. IMO , Windows 2k was the pinnacle desktop OS.
mvkel 6y ago
A perfect example of design being something that is easy to use, not necessarily something that looks beautiful. Win95 holds up.

447 points by hu3 6y ago

linkdd 6y ago

I miss the card games without ads.

agumonkey 6y ago
bonus point: no login
Guest42 6y ago
I liked how everything seemed intentionally rectangular. Perhaps made it easier to organize things mentally. It was also nice having full menus at the top of windows.
- acdha 6y ago
  There was also a big technical reason for that: graphics subsystems sucked back then. Hardware acceleration ranged from non-existent to primitive and RAM was tight. If you have two objects (window, control, etc.) displayed and they're rectangular, you can update one of them without needing to involve the other one at all. Since your entire display was a single buffer in memory, each application would draw directly in its chunk of memory. When you did something which made things move you could use simple array math to move the previously-painted block of memory to the new location or, if you had a really fancy graphics card, call a BitBlt operation which would move x1,y2-x2,y2 to the new location. Then you had to tell whatever was now visible in the source location to repaint that region. Adding things like transparency or rounded corners breaks a lot of that — you need to know what's underneath to update the display — and that wasn't fast enough to use until you had enough RAM to store each object independently so you don't need to ask each application to repaint as things move around. Compositing window managers started early — I believe the Amiga had that — but the first mainstream OS was when Mac OS X shipped Quartz and it had performance drawbacks (i.e. tolerable but not great window dragging performance) until they shipped Quartz Extreme which used OpenGL to do the hard work. Microsoft caught up about 5 years later with Windows Vista, in part because they had more users to support with inadequate hardware.
  - Guest42 6y ago
    Thank you, I have had zero exposure to what goes on in those areas.
  - wruza 6y ago
    Apps could draw directly to DC, but it flickered a lot, and everyone quickly ended up with CreateCompatible{Bitmap,DC} and blitting into BeginPaint’s DC after drawing. After all, at win95 you had 4 to 8 megabytes or RAM - you definitely had the space. Not sure when it happened, but I can remember fighting with flicker circa 97. Also, rectangular controls were what you had in standard winapi, which was based on HWNDs, which were rectangular-only. I don’t think that unroundness was really forced by hardware constraints (transparency - yes), it was just a default simplest flavor of time. (And not that I like round/flat/text-only controls. What we called “flat” back then is pretty 3d-bordered in modern terms, and what we called “round”, today is border-radius:3px)
    - acdha 6y ago
      4-8MB wasn’t all that much if you were running more than one app at >640x480x256. It was certainly possible but fancy visual effects were going to exclude a lot of low-end hardware, which is what a LOT of mainstream users bought since hardware cost a good but more back then and the value proposition was less established. I agree that roundness wasn’t prohibitive in general. The rectangular nature of the APIs encouraged it but you certainly saw it in applications. What I was thinking about most was complex usage where there was overlap outside of the active context (e.g. dragging a window with the expectation of a lower layer showing around the curve, rather than either not having that or being able to assume a solid fill color) or interfering with hardware accelerated painting or later video decoding which only worked in rectangular regions.
eterm 6y ago
I miss an excel that loads fast* and doesn't want to know who I am. * For it's time. I'm sure it wasn't instant on a pentium 1 even if I remember it that way.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  Excel and Word were blazingly fast on a first gen Pentium compared to a 486 like we had at school.
- reader_mode 6y ago
  Fast but you had to save often as there was a possibility an app would take down the entire OS.
boogies 6y ago
Come to the Free side! We have Free card games! OpenBSD has canfield (solitaire), cribbage, [go]fish, mille [bornes], and even monop[oly] and bcd (format input as punch cards) out of the box (and way more! this is just a fraction of intro(6): http://man.openbsd.org/man6/intro.6 http://man.openbsd.org/man6/intro.6). Unfortunately I’m not aware of any GNU distros that do, but you can get them with a simple `sudo apt install bsdgames` on Debian (also emacs has tons of games of course https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryGames https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryGames).
- yellowapple 6y ago
  > Unfortunately I’m not aware of any GNU distros that do Slackware does: https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware64-current/slackware64/y/bsd-games-2.17-x86_64-3.txt https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware64-current/...
- linkdd 6y ago
  Debian in the WSL and Docker are plenty enough for work. I spent too many years installing/testing distros, and I'm tired of having to maintain my system (I was a Gentoo user for 2 years, and I built an LFS that I used for 8 months). Even Debian, if you're not careful, can become a mess. Windows is dumb enough that you don't need to be careful. Chocolatey was the last thing I missed from Linux/Unix distros. And I can still code my own card game if I really want to :) EDIT: seeing a sibling talking about slackware, it seems I missed the joke ^^
Aloha 6y ago
I still run the Windows XP version of solitare today, its literally my favorite game (if judged by number of games played).
KindOne 6y ago
You could always download the card games from early versions of Windows.
hyakosm 6y ago
PySol (https://pysolfc.sourceforge.io/ https://pysolfc.sourceforge.io/) is awesome and multiplatform.

userbinator 6y ago

The contrast and distinction between the different UI elements is immediately obvious. No mistaking a button for static text, and vice-versa. Also, no hidden scrollbars or other auto-hiding UI elements that are difficult to discover and irritating to use even once you know about them.

tartoran 6y ago
Even if it looks 'ugly' by today's standard those were good days UI/UX wise and things kept on improving. UIs were consistent and easy to use by mouse or keyboard and in my opinion things started going downhill ever since. I think good UI/UX will of course be rediscovered and the old ideas will be recycled into something new at some point.
- pilsetnieks 6y ago
  To offer a counterpoint - back then everything in an interface had to be painfully obvious and usable in a myriad of ways because a significant portion of users were computer-illiterate first timers. As it is now, and forever will be, I think the balance between usability and ease of development will be those 20% of effort to make your app palatable to 80% of the users (barring some exceptions by people with underdeveloped moneymaking sense whose self-description might involve the word "artisanal".)
  - tartoran 6y ago
    Yes, you have a point. When IPads/Iphones first came out they were so usable that old people who never touched a computer or toddlers could use them without much direction, they were quite intuitive. They've messed up since then though, they've gone into a dubious direction. And the rest of the industry followed good and bad apple UI/UX decisions, some of them even poorly and we have a confusing mess, confusing and headache inducing at times even for the computer literate.
    - titzer 6y ago
      I find touch interfaces have infantilized computing, turning everything into scrolling and big, fat, ad-looking buttons, and there is no way to really become skilled at them.

HenryKissinger 6y ago

How vulnerable was Windows 95 to computer viruses?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kristopolous 6y ago
You gotta more carefully define "vulnerable" and "computer virus" here, otherwise answers can only have equal hand-waving vagueness. There's security related processor features that the CPUs at the time didn't have and the kind of complete sandboxing abstractions we take for granted came at a high cost (VT instruction sets were a decade off and minimum ram was 4MB, not GB, but MB ... for everything, the whole system, all of it). As far as encryption goes, it was slow. Transparent disk encryption was totally possible but the performance hit was significant. People could be forgiven for deciding they really didn't care that much. Home users weren't keeping the kinds of secrets on their home computer that people do on their cell phones these days. The world was less digitally integrated.
- msla 6y ago
  Windows 95 never ran on anything less than an 80386, which could and did run reasonably secure OSes. That CPU didn't have support for hardware virtualization, but "sandboxing" is vague enough that you can reasonably say that 32-bit protected mode enforced secure sandboxing at the hardware level on those chips.
  - marcodiego 6y ago
    Yes, 80386 had memory protection but windows 95 did not enforce it. That is the reason I started using linux.
  - kristopolous 6y ago
    I was talking about things like Skylake's Memory Protection Extensions, Nehalems Safer Mode Extensions, Software Guard Extension, the virtualization extensions around 2005, page table virtualization with EPT, TXT, RDRAND for hardware entropy etc That's why it depends Things like AES and SHA are implemented in hardware these days. We can get into discussion on whether netware or xenix on a 386 is an unusable dog or not, I've got an actual 386 about 6 feet away from me as I write this. I could even give you login if you want to live the pain. Windows 95 made compromises, read barbarians led by Bill Gates for a good rundown. It was never intended to be their network line (NT), but instead for traditional home computers. Internet explorer was super last minute that's why it was just licensed code from spyglass mosaic. It was released the day after OEMs got windows 95. Gates didn't think there'd be a large demand for dialup modem based internet and that they had a few years to worry about it. He pivoted effectively a month or two before release. That's why MS pushed multiple patches out quickly after the release to get a competent networking stack outside of winsock. The people making windows 95 were competent and cared, they just had lots of conflicting priorities to attend to at once and people used it not as the manufacturers had intended. It's wasn't an easy job. Sure it has security vulnerabilities by 2021 standards. I'd venture to say every system in 1995 that could reasonably run on a typical 4 year old home computer did at the time. 386BSD 1.0, NetBSD 1.1, Linux 1.3, likely all riddled with issues by modern standards. And yes I'm obviously totally aware of the mainstream pop culture consensus of windows 95 sux or whatever. I mean duh, do you really think that's news to me? I know it could BSOD with some malformed packets and that its user security was totally fake. It was totally used in ways it wasn't designed for. Microsoft honestly thought serious stuff would be run on netware, MVS, sunos, os/2, hpux, nonstop os, tru64, os 2200, qnx, etc, certainly not windows 95. "Ah shit, here we go anyway" The curse of success

joejacket 6y ago

The release was painful even at the time: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lAkuJXGldrM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lAkuJXGldrM

yellowapple 6y ago
I'm convinced that the stark contrast between Bill Gates' awkward shuffle-clapping v. Steve Ballmer's cocaine-fueled mania is some kind of metaphor for the duality of man.

marcodiego 6y ago

Common opinion agrees that windows 95 was the culmination of good UI. We've been down hill since then.

Blikkentrekker 6y ago
So written by a rodent user. What manner of masochism would inspire a man to waste his time “clicking” onto icons with a peripheral whose true function is video games? — it is as though one enter text by way of a video game controller manually selecting characters one by one from a grid.
stephc_int13 6y ago
Boring but consistent design and near perfect implementation of controls.
toast0 6y ago
Windows 2000 is, I think, windows 95 refined, and really the peak (although some may prefer XP in classic mode). If you tried hard, you could see bits and pieces of 3.1 interface in 95, but it was because you were running a fpga tool with an ancient file dialog, or you went out of your way to run progman, or an old installer launched progman for some reason (I think that sometimes happened, but could be misremembering 25 years ago). As opposed to newer windows where they change things, but not everything. I think 95 was the last time Microsoft did user research to figure out how to make UI that is appealing and useful. At least, it was the last time they published anything about it. Newer stuff may be more appealing, but seems to make things require more clicks or wait to load more often, meaning it takes users longer to do tasks, and is less useful.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  > although some may prefer XP in classic mode XP was IMO the inflection point, where Windows started to get worse faster than it got better. And close to my heart, Windows XP was the first version of Windows that was too big to fit on my trusty Compaq Presario 1210 and its whopping 1.4GB hard drive. If Microsoft had "stopped" at Windows 2000 (like it has ostensibly "stopped" at Windows 10), and had focused on refining that piece of near-perfection, I'd probably still be a Windows user today, and happily so. My dissatisfaction with Windows - starting with XP/2003, but especially every version after - was the big reason why I looked into alternatives like Linux.

MomoXenosaga 6y ago

Ah the 90s when computers were cool!

jonplackett 6y ago

This brings back soooo many memories. Half good, half bad.

chrisco255 6y ago
Yeah, I'm fondly remembering spending many hours just waiting for the OS to install, with me having to check back on the computer every so often just to insert disk 7 of 13. But no question it was a historical event when Win95 launched. The right culmination of factors came together in the mid-90s where now everyone needed to own a personal computer. Ink jet printers were becoming decent. Digital cameras went mainstream. CD burning with an MP3 capable stereo receiver meant you could carry 100 songs with you on the go and kids would make bank selling custom mixes for $5-$10 a pop (not everyone had a burner yet, they were expensive at the time). And of course, that whole dot com craze that turned out to be an insignificant bubble...
- jonplackett 6y ago
  Windows 95 was the first thing I got on CD, which was awesome for installing. But it also came with a music video from Weezer which played FULL SCREEN. And felt like full on witchcraft after the pixelly goodness of windows 3.11

OJFord 6y ago

Love or hate the UI, my basic reaction is 'recognisable'. What's changed, really? Superficial churn like flat, skeumorphic, minimalist, whatever, sure, but nothing like TUI to GUI, windows, or the mouse.

ianmcgowan 6y ago

The best thing about win95 was the built in drivers for common network cards, as well as TCP/IP support without jumping through a lot of hoops.

frompdx 6y ago

One of the most frustrating things for me about Windows 8/8.1/10 was the classic theme (Win95/NT style) was no longer a UI theme option without downloading something third party. It really is the thing that killed my interest in Windows after Windows 7. Good things don't need to change. I'm thankful my remaining reason for having a Windows OS available is becoming irrelevant due to progress in running games on Linux.

gerdesj 6y ago
"Windows 8/8.1/10 was the" Which bit of 95 did you fail to understand?
- jfoutz 6y ago
  Microsoft's legendary backwards compatibility not being extended to support win95's look and feel. That part.
- tomerv 6y ago
  You didn't even finish reading the first sentence.
- LocalH 6y ago
  Did you just stop reading there?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
limeblack 6y ago
If I recall UXTheme patcher unlocked the themes and let you download classic. This isn't pretty bad and yet annoying.
techrat 6y ago
I, too, always switched on Classic Theme after every Windows install. It was a large part of what drew me to XFCE/xUbuntu in the end. Numix and Adwaita-dark gets close enough to the Classic UI Windows the way I had it configured.

convery 6y ago

Recently I went through the attic and found an old laptop (120Mhz CPU, 32Mb RAM, low-RPM 810Mb HDD) with Win98 installed on in. To my amazement it could boot and start Excel and Word within 10sec. Compared to my workstation (20 cores + HT @ 2.5Ghz, 110Gb RAM, PCIe SSD) which takes upward of 40 sec to get to the desktop. Really makes one question the current state of software. Sure, Win7 has some more features, but imagine someone in 98 saying: "we have a great idea for a new OS, it'll have more features than Win98 and it'll only take 4 times longer to boot if you are running it on a cluster of supercomputers, but those new features are gonna be worth it" =P Sidenote on the hardware side: The laptop had a hinge for the keyboard so you could raise it to a 20 degree angle, the CD/Floppy drive had the same connector as the battery so you could swap the drive for another battery if going on a trip. There were two sliding switches for backlight and speaker-volume. Access to the internals via a simple latch. It may have been a brick but it had interesting ideas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ThinkPad_760 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ThinkPad_760

Yhippa 6y ago
When I was a kid I remember thinking that if it took 20 seconds to boot now, how fast would it be in 20 years when hardware got significantly better. Fast forward to now and I'll hit the power button, go do some stuff for a few minutes, and then finally use the damn thing.
- bawolff 6y ago
  Otoh, linux used to take forever to boot compared to windows, now its speedier than windows.
  - theodric 6y ago
    In 2001 I could go from LILO to idling WindowMaker in 12 seconds, far faster than Win2k or XP or any of the earlier DOS-based Windowses
  - robryan 6y ago
    It really depends what is running. By default on Ubuntu at least it has a service that is blocking waiting for a network connection.

derefr 6y ago

> It was the time when almost everybody had a collection of MP3 files on the hard disk drive, and Winamp was one of the most downloadable Windows applications. Objection: nobody had a collection of MP3s in 1995. The computers of 1995 didn't have the power to decompress an audio encoding like MP3 in real-time without an accelerator card. People swapped MIDI arrangements of popular songs, and some folks ripped PCM audio directly to WAV files (where it then took up half their 1GB hard disk, so this was mostly a novelty—unless you were the proud owner of a $2000 1x CD burner to burn the PCM audio back onto.) MP3s became a big thing around 1999, with better computers and the release of Napster. WinAmp itself was released in 1997, but wasn't immediately popular because people didn't have music on their computers to play using it. It took off around 1999 as well (which is why everyone remembers Winamp 2, rather than Winamp 1.)

chrisabrams 6y ago
Thank you for clarifying that essentially it was Win 98 (maybe Second Edition) when those applications took off.
frompdx 6y ago
Indeed. But I definitely had a collection of MP3s on my Win95 machine as soon as Napster hit the scene. I was able to fit exactly one Blink 182 album on my 1GB hard drive. By the time my mom gave me her Pentium 2 Win95 machine when she upgraded Napster had already came and went. Kazaa was the next big thing for a while, but it was never as good. CD-R/W drives were a game changer for a while though. I was amazed by the ability to load multiple CDs to make a play list and then be prompted to load the each CD into the drive to burn the tracks I wanted.
- adrianpike 6y ago
  > I was able to fit exactly one Blink 182 album on my 1GB hard drive. Dang, 1GB back in these days was pretty legit. A 128k MP3 was something like 3-4 megs per song - I'd fit a bunch on a 100 meg Zip disk back in the day and feel like a king.
  - 6y ago

spaetzleesser 6y ago

It's easy to forgot that the Widows 95 release was as hyped up as the iPhone release. It was a BIG event.

mmcconnell1618 6y ago
I worked the Egghead Software midnight release party. Yes, people lined up at midnight to get a physical, boxed copy of Windows 95. Queue the Rolling Stones "start me up" that cost BillG $3 million.
- jrnichols 6y ago
  there were Windows 98 midnight launches as well. People lining up outside of CompUSA to buy their copies. 3 of us had our Apple t-shirts (from the Apple "Demo Days" program) and lined up at a Sacramento, CA location (I forgot what chain it was) that had an Apple "store in a store" - media (radio) was outside and interviewed us on air about it. We fired up all the Macs, and our friend crashed the big screen demo with the c:\con\con bug. good times.
aluminussoma 6y ago
I distinctly remember an interview on Win95 launch day where the local news was interviewing a guy in a computer shop about his thoughts. He was unimpressed. He said something like, "Mac* already does this and much better". When the iPhone launched, my reaction to it was essentially the same as the guy in the computer shop. Boy were we wrong about the impact both would have on the industry! (* Edit: can't remember if he said Mac or OS/2)

Black101 6y ago

Win95 was not as pretty as modern Windows, but it was much more functional and buggy. Windows 2000 was the #1 version of Windows. Win98 was much more stable then Win95 and as functional.

yellowapple 6y ago
Win98SE, you mean. The original Win98 was a dumpster fire stability-wise.
sizeofchar 6y ago
Win95 S/R2 worked pretty well.
- mkup 6y ago
  Win95 OSR2
etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
I love the way you mention "but it was much more functional and buggy" as if buggy wasn't a bad attribute.

ekianjo 6y ago

> (Boot to DOS) This feature is not available more, but in Linux, the possibility to boot in a console mode still exists. That's not really how it works - there's no "console mode" in Linux. On Linux the Desktop environment is built on top of underlying OS interface - that's precisely why you can run it completely headless, or why you can completely switch desktop environments in a few seconds.

bawolff 6y ago
Win95 was kind of the intermediate between win 3.1 where it really worked that way, and later windows where its definitely not on top of a cosole based os. If you boot into dos mode on win95 its just stopping the boot process at the start windows step, which is not that different from booting linux but not starting x windows.
- omnibrain 6y ago
  No, that‘s not exactly what happens, albeit a commen misconception. Win 95 (and earlier releases) were not just a GUI shell on top of DOS. They were Operating Systems (with their own functions and capabilities) that used DOS as part of their boot process and to provide compatibility for some things (oder drivers, etc.) If you executed a DOS program within Win 95/3.1 it did not run on the underlying DOS “layer” but in some sort of DOS virtual machine. So what happened when you booted into “dos mode”? You really booted into DOS like you said without the last step of loading Windows. But loading Windows was not just like startx but more a continuation of the boot process into the Windows Operating system.
zozbot234 6y ago
The Linux system console is implemented directly in the kernel and is not really "on top" of anything, so I'd say that Linux having a "console mode" is a rather on-point description. This isn't always a good thing, since it includes a whole terminal-standards-emulation component that's one of the kludgiest in Linux itself.
ok123456 6y ago
sure there is. telinit 1.

ekianjo 6y ago

> In 1996 the ICQ — the first so-called “instant messenger”, was released. Now it is standard to be always online and to have different chats in Slack or WhatsApp, but in 1996 it was a sort of new idea. What? IRC was well alive back then and you could have multiple chats in a single IRC client. This claim makes no sense. What ICQ brought was not the idea of multiple chats going on, but a single identifier to connect to people you knew (and that NOT a mobile phone number)

H8crilA 6y ago
It's about the popularity of the product. Yes, IRC is much older, but it was only for geeks. ICQ and the successors (including recent ones, such as WhatsApp) are for the masses.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  The internet was still pretty much for geeks or professionals in 1995. Lets not pretend otherwise.
- anthk 6y ago
  IRC had zillions of web interfaces everywhere, and it was used by everyone in Europe, at least in order to chat in public channels based either by theme or by regional locations.
icedchai 6y ago
IRC was too hard for most people to use. Also, "IRC" is not a single entity. Which network are you connecting to? What's your nick? Is it reserved? Are you running a bouncer, or can I only message you when you're online? Way too complicated. ICQ, and later AIM, made most of this stuff "easy" for the average person. Too bad AIM didn't evolve more... It could've been Slack 20 years earlier.
- nikau 6y ago
  IRC could only compete with slack if they added a sleep(1000ms) between each channel change...

mortenjorck 6y ago

The biggest surprise for me in reading this was the complete lack of any SSL functionality in the original version of Internet Explorer, rendering most of the modern web not merely broken, but fully inaccessible. I wonder what the earliest version of Windows would be that can at least establish a connection to a 2020s website out of the box.

toast0 6y ago
SSL 2 and 3 wouldn't get you anywhere anyway.
NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
The IE in the screenshots is IE 3.x (I think - judging from the swirlies in the toolbar background), which does have SSL. The problem is it isn't going to have SSL versions or cipher suites that are compatible with the modern Internet so it's going to be pretty useless.
Macha 6y ago
Out of the box you're looking at probably Vista SP1, or maybe even 7. SNI support is basically mandatory now. You could install older versions of firefox or IE8 for XP, I guess.
- Multicomp 6y ago
  Windows 7 RTM cannot install the chocolatey package manager OOTB due to TLS 1.2 expectations, necessitating some work to get Windows up to date with Powershell V3 and such[1]. So maybe Windows 7 SP1, or Windows 8? [1] https://blog.chocolatey.org/2020/01/remove-support-for-old-tls-versions/ https://blog.chocolatey.org/2020/01/remove-support-for-old-t...
Izkata 6y ago
The past couple years SSL has been disappearing completely, and TLS is now required. It didn't exist until at least 1999. So even with SSL support, you'd still be out of luck.
6y ago

ekianjo 6y ago

> But this connection is practically useless — web standards went so far ahead during the last 25 years, 99% of websites just cannot be opened. I can ping the website, and that is mostly the maximum I can do: You can still open http only websites fine, even in the original internet explorer : https://whynohttps.com/ https://whynohttps.com/

sbierwagen 6y ago
There are a couple HTTP proxies that will translate HTTPS and Host: headers for very old browsers that don't support them: https://github.com/atauenis/webone https://github.com/atauenis/webone or https://bitbucket.org/ValdikSS/oldssl-proxy/src/master/ https://bitbucket.org/ValdikSS/oldssl-proxy/src/master/

reader_mode 6y ago

One interesting thing I noticed (obviously IMO) is that even Office 95 looks better than LibreOffice.

worik 6y ago

"It’s a known issue that occurs on processors with a frequency higher than 2.1 GHz......in 1995 nobody was thinking that Windows will be running on a CPU with a so high frequency." The good old days. Earlier no body would ever need more than 640K main memory....

ekianjo 6y ago

> It was also interesting to see the beginning of the new era, the era of connected devices and online services, and to see what will happen with all these services after 10–20 years. This is something that is interesting to think about — will we be able to show our grandchildren how did old stuff work, or “Cannot connect to server” will be the only message that will be displayed? You can't compare the very beginning of the internet and what will come from where we are now in the next 10-20 years. Most likely a lot of things will still work in 10 years, because the underlying foundations of the protocols are now standardized and fixed for a while. Same thing with cars from 30 years ago: they can run just fine on the road and with regular gas, because its matured technology.

bawolff 6y ago
The very beginning of the internet was the 60s not the 90s. And honestly where protocols have changed its been very recent. There was a big lull between the 90s and last couple years. TLS 1.3, the most obvious example of something new, was very recent (1.0-1.2 were minor but important improvements to SSL 3, which until recently was still widely supported. TLS1.3 was the biggest change in a long time). Http/2 (and 3!) Are super new, and earlier versions of http which date to the 90s are still universally supported.
- aflag 6y ago
  He probably meant web and not Internet. The IP protocol, which is arguably what is closest to what internet really means haven’t seen a change since the 80s. We are still struggling with moving to IPv6.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    But his point was that the foundations were fixed. You could say the same thing about the internet in the early 90s, and then http changed a bunch of things. Whose to say the same thing won't happen tommorow. It doesn't seem like HTTP is any more of a fixed foundation today than tcp/ip was in the 90s

hivacruz 6y ago

Still amazed by the border bottom on letters to show shortcuts to the users. So simple and convenient.

dkarras 6y ago

Anyone remember the "hipster winamp" Kjöfol? Also there was an application, I believe called "gooey" that would automatically create a chatroom for any site you visit. So when you visit a site, there would be a chat for that particular url and people would chat in it.

superkuh 6y ago

It looks better and more functional than my Gtk3 based desktop environment on linux today. It's amazing how much the desktop environments have regressed in linux over the last decade.

Cloudef 6y ago
Use something else than gnome. Gnome devs live in their own bubble
- RedShift1 6y ago
  You're getting downvoted but this is absolutely true.
- superkuh 6y ago
  I have used something other than GNOME for more than a decade. The GNOME devs still control Gtk3 and the Gtk3 file chooser is used by many DE and applications. Heck, I can't even get my KDE/Qt applications to use their native file chooser under Debian 10 w/MATE. So even using KDE applications is no escape.

doubleunplussed 6y ago

> Is 100 MB is the minimum program size in 2021? Last time, when I was downloading the drivers for my new Brother printer, it was about 250 MB, I still have no idea what they did include in the archive. When I see something that should be tiny being about 250MB, it's usually that they bundled Qt for the GUI. I suppose that's a cost of cross-platform tools. The 10kb executable the author made was using system GUI libraries, a dynamically linked executable on a system with Qt etc already installed would be similar.

BlueTemplar 6y ago
VLC "only" clocks at 38 Mo, and uses Qt. It's also pretty much today's Winamp.
- doubleunplussed 6y ago
  They've probably only included the modules they're using, or maybe they're statically linked and so only including the specific code used. Bundling the whole set of shared libraries is what I've seen a lot of though! Often in the context of a Python program using PyQt.

enw 6y ago

Windows 95 might not be the prettiest, but seems beautifully consistent in both UX and UI.

richardfey 6y ago
"healthy": it did not try to surprise you at every turn and corner. Functionality over vanity

forgotmypw17 6y ago

It still looks and works great, better than most UIs today. I use it regularly for testing, and it's a great platform for writing and updating my blog (from within a VM)

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

ilrwbwrkhv 6y ago

The greatest difference is how inefficient we have become. 10kb.

nahuel0x 6y ago

Open the Google Cloud Console (probably the most complex Material UI example), and imagine it in Win95 style. It will be so much better.

legends2k 6y ago

Thanks for this walk down the memory lane, quite nostalgic for me; Win 95 was my first OS; boyhood days.

burlesona 6y ago

Honestly it holds up pretty well. That UI isn’t quite as “pretty” as some modern UIs, but I like it better than most in terms of it just being clear, consistent, and unsurprising.

nikau 6y ago
The only thing missing is the application search feature where you can just type the app name to find it, that's about the only decent feature win7 onwards introduced.
- phendrenad2 6y ago
  Back when the start menu +only+ showed programs, this wasn't necessary.
  - nikau 6y ago
    not sure I agree, back then you had mountains of app entries with uninstall and readme and other junk all mixed in, it was tedious finding an app. now you just wack windows key, type in part of the app name and press enter.
    - RedShift1 6y ago
      That only worked well on Windows 7. Today the start menu search is unreliable.
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
One brave GUI toolkit continues to use the Windows 95 look. Personally I really like that look (or design language, as we're apparently meant to say these days). Clean, high-contrast, and it's clear which widgets are clickable. It has the added bonus that its drawing operations can easily be hard-coded for excellent performance. http://www.fox-toolkit.org/ http://www.fox-toolkit.org/

ralphc 6y ago

If you're thinking of doing something similar, either in a VM or on compatible hardware, I recommend Windows 98. You get FAT32 which gets you larger hard drives, where pre-OSR2 Windows 95 has FAT, where the max hard drive size is 2GB, you need to divide larger drives into multiple drive letters. Windows 98 also gives you easier third-party ways to turn on universal USB flash drive functionality. Without it you need a driver for each flash drive, good luck finding that today. Windows 98 is basically the pinnacle of DOS-based windows for gaming, Windows ME takes away some DOS functionality.

Narishma 6y ago
VMs tend to offer poor to non-existent support for anything pre-Windows XP. I recommend PCem instead.
- rnd0 6y ago
  I'd recommend 86box over pcem, myself. It has support for a lot more machines, frequent releases (including snapshots) and a better UI. Plus you don't have to go on a wild goose chase hunting down roms.
  - Narishma 6y ago
    In my experience, 86box tends to require a lot more resources than PCem. For example, a standard PC XT configuration will peg a whole CPU core in 86box at 100% while PCem will use just 10% of a single core. I don't know if it's a bug but it makes using 86box on a laptop uncomfortable.
jodrellblank 6y ago
For a quick lookaround, launch one in a WebAssembly VM in your browser: http://copy.sh/v86/ http://copy.sh/v86/ or https://bellard.org/jslinux/ https://bellard.org/jslinux/ (faster, but only has Windows 2000)
TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
I would recommend Windows NT 4. Because it is NT-based it runs well on modern systems and VMs without special patching, and even has VirtualBox integration. Yet it has that lovely Windows 95 UI (though slightly different in a few places). If you prefer the Internet Explorer-infested 98 UI, you can install the Windows Desktop Update in NT 4. It can run most Windows 9x software, though games may be a problem. It has Pinball though!

sergiotapia 6y ago

What made Windows 95's UI have so much staying power? The right combination of people in the right room? Superstar stallions? Like Silent Hill 2, a group of people that were greater together than as individuals and can never be replicated? Where are they now? What are they building?

tl 6y ago
That decade had the right incentives for a good UI design to come together (Windows, Mac, Amiga, etc...). Windows 95 had, by far the largest marketing push (pointed out elsewhere, but Chicago had gen 1 iPhone hype levels) and install base (didn't need "Microsoft" hardware).
hyakosm 6y ago
David Plummer created the task manager and the pinball game (Space cadet). Search about him, he has explained and revealed a lot of interesting facts last year.
- ddingus 6y ago
  That pinball game was excellent! Huge depth! Lots of replay value. I kind of want to give it a go now.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
ianetaylor 6y ago
I wrote the '95 Start Menu among other bits and pieces. Mostly the team was just a bunch of regular devs but with a few crazy-smart types making the rest of us look good. RaymondC to name but one. Several of that original team are still at Microsoft, I currently work on HoloLens
- sergiotapia 6y ago
  Your work was so influential! If you are working on hololens I have high hopes for that next step in computing interfaces.

Yuioup 6y ago

You can run Windows 95 in your browser, if you're curious: https://archive.org/details/win95_in_dosbox https://archive.org/details/win95_in_dosbox

29athrowaway 6y ago

Did you know that you can upgrade from Windows 1.0 all the way to Windows 10 if you go version-by-version? I found that amazing. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=windows+upgrade+1.0+to+10 https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=windows+upgrade...

hyakosm 6y ago

Windows 95 is probably the oldest OS easily usable by young people. It's fascinating because: - It has established strong foundations about Windows UI. The Menu/Toolbar couple, scrollbars with a relative size, 3D buttons, start menu, toolbar... - The gap between Windows 3.1 (1992) and Windows 95 is insane. - It was beautifully coherent. Today, Windows 10 seems like a mess with different UI pieces from different universes: Modern UI, Windows Vista/7 era utilities, Windows XP/2003 config things and some older gems. Fun thing: open a Word document from a pendrive and unplug the pendrive, MS Word will show an error box from Win95 era, asking to insert the floppy in the drive. - When booting a VM or an old computer with classic Windows I feel "at home". Our first family computer when I was a child was a Pentium II / Windows 98. I have strong reflexes with this kind of UI and I'm faster with classic window and menus compared to my phone or a tablet with modern touch interface.

flowerlad 6y ago
> It was beautifully coherent. And that's because it copied heavily from NeXTSTEP of the late 1980's. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_desktop.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_... That beveled look was invented by Steve Jobs's team, and copied by Microsoft. I would much rather use NeXTSTEP look & feel than Windows 10 or even OS X.
- core-questions 6y ago
  I want to go to the alternate timeline where a major distro actually picked up the GNUstep ball and ran with it, and built out a full desktop based around WindowMaker. It's still faster and more fun than most modern desktops.
  - Lammy 6y ago
    > It's still faster and more fun than most modern desktops. And doesn't even look (too) dated when paired with a compositor: https://i.imgur.com/YJkDMjr.png https://i.imgur.com/YJkDMjr.png If Wayland could just give me this I'd switch to it in a heartbeat, versus possibly-never :(

rakoo 6y ago

I used to spend hours in those installers waiting for games to install. The look and feel with the background image and the distinctive "grain" on it, the font... nostalgia moments.

ChuckMcM 6y ago

Sadly, what I really want is to be able to boot Win98/SE in a virtual machine with DirectX 9 or better support. I have a ton of old Win98 games that were fun (if pixelly) and while I've got the DirectX install files (often from old PC Gamer CDs (remember when Microsoft shipped them on those disks?) I haven't found a virtual machine video driver that is DirectX compatible.

Narishma 6y ago
Have you tried PCem?
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  I have not but I will, it seems to have the emulations that I can use.

haddr 6y ago

"it is interesting to see, that physically, Windows 95 can be connected to the internet. But this connection is practically useless" It could be also quite unpleasant. The TCP/IP stack that Win95 was using had plenty of bugs (e.g. ping of death) that could allow someone to remotely freeze Win95 box. Although, today no one would exploit win95 machines in the wild...

vidanay 6y ago
I still have winsock PTSD

juliend2 6y ago

I'm wondering if some people here are still using it for real work. Like writing novels. Stuff like that.

pentagrama 6y ago

Windows 95 nailed it from the start with the UX, I believe it was heavily researched and thought. A bold vision for a new era. Here is an interesting Windows 95 usability case study from Microsoft at the time, I love the attention to detail and how many not-visual design things are considered https://archive.is/Uj71F https://archive.is/Uj71F (original link now broken) The nostalgia factor is heavy here too, not only with contemporaneous (Gen X and Gen Y), some of Gen Z discover the aesthetic as a internet trend who peak around 2012, is called Vaporwave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporwave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporwave Sorry if my English is not the best :/

sim_card_map 6y ago
that's a great study!
TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
Microsoft putting a lot of effort into usability research, especially for first-time users, is clearly why Windows 95's UI came out so good. Imagine if they'd done the same for later versions: Windows 8 and 10 would never have happened.

isodev 6y ago

It would be nice to read a post comparing Windows 95 to Mac System 7, the OS it used for “inspiration”. By extension one could day Windows 10 today still uses UI elements first introduced in Mac System 7.

gbraad 6y ago

Boot to console still exists in Linux? What a comparison ... :-/

gbraad 6y ago
... it's on Medium, so shouldn't expect too much.

molasses 6y ago

I have a friend that has run blackbox style desktop for an age. He still prefers it over native win 10.

molasses 6y ago

We ran a small drop in cafe and we're excited to run win 2k and xp on something like 600mhz Pentiums. Someone donated an old pc. We turned it on and it had win 3.1 on and it booted in a blip. We looked at each other in amazement. It's odd what you forget. And at the time I preferred the 3.1 style to 95, though tooling was pretty horrible. Changing video modes for example. Win 95 also didn't originally come with TCP/IP from what I remember. Pre internet os, that you wrestled with to get internet support on. Later service pack version came bundled with the web client stuff. Networking was very hit and miss back then.

richardfey 6y ago
It didn't come with USB, you needed the B version for that.
TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
Windows 95 had TCP/IP from the very first version, inherited and enhanced from Windows for Workgroups. The original retail gold package didn't have Internet Explorer included, so it only had the TCP/IP stack if you chose it in the install process. Every OEM version had mandatory TCP/IP and Internet Explorer however (the OEM RTM came out a bit later and so there was time to squeeze IE in).
- molasses 6y ago
  So many versions. I just remember wrestling with floppies getting dial up networking on a wIn 95 laptop.

stiray 6y ago

It is interesting that with 3d buttons in GUI I can immediately focus on the presable elements while I often struggle today with latest and the greatest flat designs - or rather say, my eyes are scanning for the button more time.

kstenerud 6y ago

Windows 95/2000 was as close to the perfect UI look & feel as we've ever gotten. No crazy eye candy, good contrast, easily recognizable and consistent UI components, decent amount of information available on the desktop, and an overall UI that just gets out of your way. MacOS and AmigaOS came close, but they had more warts overall. The only thing Windows did poorly (besides stability) was the amount of drilling down you needed to do to access some parts of the 80% use cases, but that can be fixed easily enough. Today I use Mate desktop with the Redmond tweak, because once again it gives good feature coverage, good screen real-estate, low overhead, and generally gets out of your way.

jl6 6y ago

Aside from it not being a UNIX, my main complaint about Windows 10 - and the thing I miss most from 90s computing - is the UI inconsistency, even across Microsoft’s own applications, let alone the sprawling disconnected ecosystem of 3rd-party applications. Of course I recognise that Win10 is trying to operate in a far more complex environment than Win95 ever did, but that doesn’t stop me reading every set of Win10 release notes with disinterest and disappointment, finding out that they are focusing on minor feature churn and not doing anything about the core UI issues. I often struggle to explain to my non-technical family how to do things using Windows 10 because it’s all so arbitrary. Win95 was buggy and crap in other ways, but at least it had a manual that explained how to use it!

arendtio 6y ago

What I like most about Win 95 when I started it a few years ago on the original hardware (some 133MHz PC), was the speed. Sure the old harddrive was quite slow, but if the harddrive is not involved the OS is actually pretty fast.

dusted 6y ago

putting them side by side like that leaves no doubt that 95 looks a lot nicer and cleaner than 10.

app4soft 6y ago

> But DOSBox officially does not support Windows, in theory, it can be possible but it’s much easier to use a fully-fledged virtual machine. I’ve used Oracle VirtualBox, which is free and can be installed on any modern PC. JFTR, Win3.1 & Win95 could be installed even on Symbian 9.x smartphones (e.g. Nokia N95, N82, E63) via DOSBox.[0] Win95 works and some apps could be launched under Symbian 9.x, but not so usable as Win3.1, the last one works mostly well. [0] https://www.instructables.com/How-to-install-Windows-31-on-Symbian-S60/ https://www.instructables.com/How-to-install-Windows-31-on-S...

HeckFeck 6y ago

I hold out a hopeless wish that the source code for Windows 95 and Windows 98 will someday make it to GitHub under a MIT licence, like the File Manager, DOS 1.0 and the Windows Console did. Imagine it with a new jolt of life for modern hardware. Office 97 on a 16 core CPU is the dream.

techrat 6y ago
I'd love to see Win NT4 sourced. Rock solid and minimal compared to Win95 and Win98. I loved using it... until I realised how much slower everything felt because drivers were optimised/accelerated for the other Windows OSes instead. Complete graphical OS in ~200 MB. Miss those days.

DanielBMarkham 6y ago

If you want to learn useful Human-Machine Interfaces, look at old tech, even imaginary tech in old sci-fi. Why? Because almost as quickly as we started implementing UI/UX, we started running telemetry on them. At first we did a lot of user workshops. Later we got much more sophisticated. The problem is that people use interfaces to solve problems they have, perform work they need to do, and to otherwise help them and others reach common goals. When the character "Mr. Sulu" on the ancient Star Trek TOS has that little viewer thing come up, it's apparent to both the audience and the other fictional characters in that universe what Sulu is doing and why. Perhaps a few lines later one of the other characters in that universe might comment on Sulu's goals, after all, they all can both observe him and how he's solving a problem. Sulu is as much a UI for the crew as that cool little scope is. The focus is on goals, plot movement. Why is that important? Because all of that watching people and collecting data is not able to understand any of that. Instead, all we can really tell is whether or not a set of user interface tools are used a lot or not, and if so, how they're used. We've got a lot of "how" but no "why" So we optimize around getting people to use the tools more. After all, that's all we've got. UI/UX tools become much more about working the human than they are about the human working the tool. Windows 95 is very close to the inflection point of this story. We knew just enough to make things cooler and cooler, yet there was an overarching concern that computers do something useful. If you watch old commercials for tech, the emphasis is all about how useful it is: it teaches your kids, it predicts the stock market, and so on. Steve Jobs realized that while that remains a wonderful rationale, it was all bullshit as far as making and selling hardware. So he began emphasizing the coolness and disruptive nature of the UI. Buy it because it's freaking cool as hell and looks like the best video game you've ever seen. If anybody gives you a hard time, fall back to the old "But I've got a worldwide information system in my pocket" stuff. It has the benefit of being true without being especially relevant. I miss the pinball game.

JorgeGT 6y ago
3D pinball space cadet? No need to miss it when it's freely available for modern Windows: https://www.ghacks.net/2017/04/21/play-3d-pinball-space-cadet-on-modern-windows-pcs/ https://www.ghacks.net/2017/04/21/play-3d-pinball-space-cade... Direct link: https://www.ghacks.net/download/132446 https://www.ghacks.net/download/132446

lmarcos 6y ago

> This problem, by the way, is even more important today. Now, most of the services are on the web and in the cloud, and I can guess that all “smart” devices, we are using today, will not be able to start at all 25 years later. Imho, that's the most important part of the article.

timonoko 6y ago

Remarkably un-Fascinating, because Win31 was the last one ever needed. In 1995 Slackware was already running directly from CDROM surpassing Windows on o'so many levels. When Android came about, it was also remarkably un-fascinating, but it was better with rooting and those tools needed pirating Windows XP. So I have XP on some bootmenus.

gxqoz 6y ago

Huh, had no idea Control + Esc loaded the start menu. Of course, not really needed these days with keyboards with a Windows key.

baal80spam 6y ago

For those interested in the history of Windows OS, this is hands down the best resource: https://www.winhistory.de/index.php https://www.winhistory.de/index.php

Causality1 6y ago

I remember being so excited every time a new Windows came out. These days I just dread what the next update is going to break.

voidfunc 6y ago

I really miss this era of computing... everything was so fresh and new feeling back then and there was a lack of polish to everything. It was a lot of fun as a kid learning to use all of this stuff. I remember being fascinated by network apps and stuff that let you send messages and data between computers... that's how I really got interested in programming because I wanted to figure out how to build something like ICQ/AIM.

shp0ngle 6y ago

People forget how generally buggy and unstable 95 was, though. I remember as a kid, it somehow always got into a state when it always showed “restore from backup and restart”, and that window never got away after reboot. After a while, me and my father learned to drag that error window to a bottom right corner and proceed with normal work as if it was never there. (There was no internet, and 7 year old me was more experienced with PCs than my father was.) So annoying. And all the BSODs. Ugh 98 and later XP were so much more stable.

deleted 6y ago

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hobo_mark 6y ago

Surprised that nobody mentioned Serenity yet... > SerenityOS is a love letter to '90s user interfaces with a custom Unix-like core. It flatters with sincerity by stealing beautiful ideas from various other systems. > Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user accessibility of late-2000s *nix. This is a system by us, for us, based on the things we like. https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity

williesleg 6y ago

Aah, all the crashes, incompatibilities, slowness, and all the dos shit under it. That's when I switched.

collsni 6y ago

I'm excited for all of the bricked iot in 5 to 10 years let alone 25 lol. Talk about wasteful. I try to only buy things I can host and control myself.

desktopninja 6y ago

Personally: Windows 2000 GUI any day. clear, concise and consistent.

nayuki 6y ago

UI tip: In any window, double-click on the icon at the top left to close the window. This has existed since Windows 3 and persisted through 95, XP, 10, etc., but not many people know about it. App windows that have custom chrome like Chrome, Firefox, etc. cannot use this trick, however.

tonymet 6y ago

In terms of usability, the design is light years ahead of modern desktop OS' (Windows 10 or MacOS) * high contrast UI with clear controls: clear buttons, scroll bars * consistent UI controls * low latency input (clicking buttons, opening/closing windows). I want my OS to be a tool that gets out of the way. It should be responsive & obvious. I think the web has conditioned people to expect 400-800ms latency on every interaction & bloated design. Let's bring back Windows 95 and NT 4.0. IMO , Windows 2k was the pinnacle desktop OS.

mvkel 6y ago

A perfect example of design being something that is easy to use, not necessarily something that looks beautiful. Win95 holds up.