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Pshaw! Win95/98 was a masterpiece. Perhaps you forget that a 66mhz 486 has about 1/50th the compute power of a raspberry pi. Yet this 'horrible' software that v

Pshaw! Win95/98 was a masterpiece. Perhaps you forget that a 66mhz 486 has about 1/50th the compute power of a raspberry pi. Yet this 'horrible' software that vexed you so was able to run there, hosting web browsers, photoshop, a million PC games _and_ backwards compatibility with ~15 years of software ...all while playing mp3's in winamp. It's certainly not MSFT's fault that you ran some hokey memory compression garbage, that's just denial on your part. But rest easy! We all had to be newbs at some point ;)

axiolite 5y ago
NT 4.0 was a contemporary operating system to 95. It could run on a 60MHz Pentium with 16MB of RAM. There was no memory compression involved. RamBooster can be found here: https://www.freewarefiles.com/RamBooster-V_program_8893.html https://www.freewarefiles.com/RamBooster-V_program_8893.html
- retrac 5y ago
  That's quite a gap, though. Windows 95 could (but you wouldn't want to) run on a 386 with 4 MB of RAM. 8 MB was recommended. New PCs were still being sold in 1995 with less than 8 MB of RAM. Both NT 3.51 and 4.0 had a minimum requirement of 12 MB just to start. You'd want more to have breathing room. Few new machines could meet that in '96, let alone the large base of 486 and even 386 machines still kicking around. I figure that if Microsoft had released NT as a consumer OS that early (with 3.5 or 4.0) it would have been a disaster. There wasn't much of a market for a new OS that required twice the specs of the average new PC while having mediocre backwards compatibility. Even if it didn't crash much.
- nikau 5y ago
  "could run" is a very apt phrase - I remember installing office upgrades in that era, users would go to lunch when we started the upgrade and it would still be installing an hour later. Mostly it was just constant disk thrashing due to the lack of ram. Machines were usable otherwise as users mostly just ran word, outlook, and a bunch of telnet sessions. Most users took the NT option as windows 95 was so unstable.
  - hyperman1 5y ago
    Considering win95 was still being distributed on floppys, you had to be thankfull that you could leave the machine alone that long. I still have nightmares from the insert disk x of y message appearing, followed by 2 minutesh of grnsh grnsh grnsh floppy reading. On bad days, at x=y-1, some vengefull god would have corrupted a disk and you were stuck.
    - nikau 5y ago
      Thankfully it was on a corporate network with 10megabit ethernet to the desktops - the only stuff running 100meg were the FDDI fibre connected servers. Still better than floppies at least.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  I vividly remember watching a friend's father doing programming on a home workstation that ran NT4 and had 16 MB of memory. Listening to the disk thrashing from the endless swapping was pure torture to my ears. I couldn't fathom how anyone could bear working with something so glacially slow.

axiolite 5y ago

NT 4.0 was a contemporary operating system to 95. It could run on a 60MHz Pentium with 16MB of RAM. There was no memory compression involved. RamBooster can be found here: https://www.freewarefiles.com/RamBooster-V_program_8893.html https://www.freewarefiles.com/RamBooster-V_program_8893.html

retrac 5y ago
That's quite a gap, though. Windows 95 could (but you wouldn't want to) run on a 386 with 4 MB of RAM. 8 MB was recommended. New PCs were still being sold in 1995 with less than 8 MB of RAM. Both NT 3.51 and 4.0 had a minimum requirement of 12 MB just to start. You'd want more to have breathing room. Few new machines could meet that in '96, let alone the large base of 486 and even 386 machines still kicking around. I figure that if Microsoft had released NT as a consumer OS that early (with 3.5 or 4.0) it would have been a disaster. There wasn't much of a market for a new OS that required twice the specs of the average new PC while having mediocre backwards compatibility. Even if it didn't crash much.
nikau 5y ago
"could run" is a very apt phrase - I remember installing office upgrades in that era, users would go to lunch when we started the upgrade and it would still be installing an hour later. Mostly it was just constant disk thrashing due to the lack of ram. Machines were usable otherwise as users mostly just ran word, outlook, and a bunch of telnet sessions. Most users took the NT option as windows 95 was so unstable.
- hyperman1 5y ago
  Considering win95 was still being distributed on floppys, you had to be thankfull that you could leave the machine alone that long. I still have nightmares from the insert disk x of y message appearing, followed by 2 minutesh of grnsh grnsh grnsh floppy reading. On bad days, at x=y-1, some vengefull god would have corrupted a disk and you were stuck.
  - nikau 5y ago
    Thankfully it was on a corporate network with 10megabit ethernet to the desktops - the only stuff running 100meg were the FDDI fibre connected servers. Still better than floppies at least.
jiggawatts 5y ago
I vividly remember watching a friend's father doing programming on a home workstation that ran NT4 and had 16 MB of memory. Listening to the disk thrashing from the endless swapping was pure torture to my ears. I couldn't fathom how anyone could bear working with something so glacially slow.