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> Windows 95 is probably the oldest OS easily usable by young people. I grew up in DOS days, and a lot of kids back then were using it just fine. You learned s
by megous 6y ago
> Windows 95 is probably the oldest OS easily usable by young people.
I grew up in DOS days, and a lot of kids back then were using it just fine. You learned some dual pane commander, how to navigate/copy dirs/files around on floppies, a:, c:, what files are runnable and you could run and share games and programs.
It was not that incoherent either. Norton/Volkov/M602 commander was the main interface, had popup menus for most functions (so everything was quite discoverable), and the rest was just about running random executables you got from someone on a floppy. There was barely any multitasking. At most you got to run some resident programs (mouse driver or various cheats for games :)). It was conceptually simpler than what you get these days.
And having a file manager as a primary interface kind of invited you to explore what's on your computer.
People who still like to use two pane file managers probably come from those days. :)
- Bluecobra 6y ago> I grew up in DOS days, and a lot of kids back then were using it just fine. My first PC when I was a kid came with Win95, but all the good games were still on DOS. Some games like Ultima VII had their own extended memory system and was a pain to get working right, especially on a newer PC running Win95. It took a lot of trial and error to get the right boot disk/config.sys to get the game to work. It was like a game in itself. Needless to say, I got DOS-savvy pretty quickly since playing cool games was my motivation.
- oceliker 6y agoI thought they meant "oldest OS easily usable by young people of today", but I might be wrong.
- megous 6y agoYes, I understood that. I just assume that young people today are no different from young people 25 years ago, other than maybe having the (dis)advantage of preexisting knowledge of today's computing. Which may be the parent's point, I guess?
- oceliker 6y agoYes, I interpreted that to be the point, considering a lot of the UI elements of Windows today first debuted with 95. It's a lot more difficult to convince young users to spend time to learn a console environment when a "modern" GUI is already available -- kids in early 90s did not have that choice. FWIW, my first ever computer had Win95 installed, so I grew up believing that the start menu was always a given, and I thought DOS was just part of the computer start-up procedure.
- hyakosm 6y agoYes! I meant "by young people of today used to modern Windows"