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Pretty. :) Gives me PTSD-like flashbacks to the time when I was tasked with installing Windows 95 on 50+ computers on the local school. For the young(er), Win
by thatwasunusual 5y ago
Pretty. :)
Gives me PTSD-like flashbacks to the time when I was tasked with installing Windows 95 on 50+ computers on the local school.
For the young(er), Windows was on 14-ish 3.5" floppy disks, and I had to do some heavy calculation and logistics copying those discs while installing the OS to make my effort as efficient as possible.
IIRC, I managed to keep the installing cyclus going on 28 computers at a time, and finished the whole task during a very long Saturday and Sunday.
- qwerty456127 5y agoActually installing Windows 95 on every machine was never really necessary. You could just install it once, configure it and clone the hard drive. Even actual cloning was not necessary - you could just copy the hard drive contents with a reasonable file manager like Total Commander (which was called Windows Commander those days).
- MandieD 5y agoGood luck convincing the nervous principal of a semi-rural Texas high school in 1997 that he should let some teenage girl go at his expensive computer labs with a screwdriver… $6.50/hr rotating diskettes around computer rooms >>> $4.35/hr sweeping hair and cleaning toilets at a beauty shop
- kijin 5y agoI remember those floppies... The 8th disk was kinda finicky on older hardware. I think that's where the installer actually tried to switch from DOS to Windows mode. If it failed for whatever reason, you had to start again from the 1st disk.
- don-code 5y agoFunny.. my least favorite part of floppy installs of Debian is that it had exactly the opposite problem: reading floppies was hit-or-miss until _after_ disk 2 or 3.
- thatwasunusual 5y agoWhat happened the 2nd time you hit the 8th disk? I assume not much had changed, except the weather outside?
- kijin 5y agoThe weather might help, as well as the phase of the moon. But you could be a little more scientific and try different parameters once you went back to disk 1. Maybe also remove some of the more questionable drivers or memory-saving tweaks from your DOS configuration while you were at it. Or perhaps it was just a flaky floppy drive that randomly flipped a bit somewhere.
- luxuryballs 5y agoI like to think that if we tried installing Windows 10 entirely via floppy disks the floppy drive would fail somewhere around disk 5000.
- 10000truths 5y agoThe Windows 10 ISO is ~3.5 GB in size, and a standard 3.5 in. floppy could hold 1.44 MB. So you'd actually need almost 2500 floppies.
- consp 5y agoThe Windows install floppy disks almost always came on DMF formatted disks which hold 1.68mb of data. That saves you about 350 floppies. Fyi: that is as far as I know the reason for most oldy cab installation files being that size.
- jasomill 5y agoFor the sake of science: Microsoft historically used the 21 512 byte sector, 80 track, double-sided DMF format for 3 1/2" Windows installation media, yielding 1,720,320 bytes per floppy. Assuming this format, floppy requirements for the four Windows 10 21H1 variants currently on MSDN are x64 Consumer (Home/Pro): 3,398 floppies x64 Business (Enterprise/Education): 3,323 floppies x86 Consumer: 2,416 floppies x86 Business: 2,361 floppies Assuming the "1.44 MB" (18 512 byte sector, 80 track, double-sided) format, you'd need x64 Consumer: 3,965 floppies x64 Business: 3,876 floppies x86 Consumer: 2,819 floppies x86 Business: 2,755 floppies In this case, assuming the most popular (x64) platform, you'd actually need closer to 4,000 floppies. Assuming ideal 500 kbit/sec performance and two seconds per disk swap, reading 4,000 "1.44 MB" floppies (or DMF floppies with equivalent data) would take just under 28 1/2 hours. So you could easily install any Windows 10 21H1 version from floppies in the course of a single work week, with enough time left over, perhaps, to check Windows Update over a 56 kbps modem (though you'd probably need the weekend, at least, to actually download the updates).
- HPsquared 5y ago
- WaitWaitWha 5y agoI just want to quietly grumble, like an appropriately crotchety old man... '3.5" floppies? Bah! Try 8", and they were really floppy! Try installing AT&T Unix from those...'
- deathanatos 5y agoI'm probably not old enough to qualify as "crotchety old man", but yeah, 3.5" are diskettes to me since they weren't really floppies. I raise your floppy disk install one OS/2 Warp install: https://twitter.com/jhegarty/status/1162326199445655552/photo/1 https://twitter.com/jhegarty/status/1162326199445655552/phot... I still feel that OS/2 Warp feels more valuable in ones hands, just because of the sheer weight of it… (compared to modern OSes that have no weight because I download them…)
- zwieback 5y agoThe research org where I was interning bought OS/2 1.2 for a project and I loved it. When 2.0 came out I called the local IBM site (this was in Stuttgart Germany) and they told me "we have a new beta program, just bring 20 3.5" floppies and you can copy it, no questions asked". I went there, did the deed and the guy told me. You want the SDK and C compiler as well? Come back with 20 more floppies. You can bet I was back the next day.
- niccl 5y agoin South Africa they were known as stiffies, which has a different meaning in some cultures
- Synaesthesia 5y agoSurely not just here, right?
- animal531 5y agoI was just about to reply with the same comment, but I see you beat me to it.
- 5y ago
- koyote 5y agoBack in those days re-formatting and re-installing Windows was a very common thing because usually the system would get into some kind of bad state after several months of usage (or at least mine did). I believe I only had a Windows 98 'Upgrade' CD, which could not be used to install on a bare system. This meant I had to first install a previous copy Windows, which in my case was Windows 95 on floppy disks (and I feel like it was 20 disks, at least for my installation). This worked fine until one re-install disk 15 decided to fail on me. I managed to hack it back together by copying the files that were still accessible to a different computer and then copying them to a blank floppy together with the missing files from the running system's Windows folder (I think it was a couple of dlls that were unreadable). I was surprised that it worked.
- jamal-kumar 5y agoI just looked it up -- Windows 98 was THIRTY EIGHT floppy disks hahahahaha
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- asd 5y agoI bet a sealed 38 floppy edition of Windows 98, in mint condition, would go for a million USD.
- nonamenoslogan 5y agoWhat’ll ya give me for an unopened copy of Win 3.1 on 5.25s?
- thatwasunusual 5y agoHow much do you need to keep it in its current state? :)
- simonh 5y agoYou can get Windows 95 on 15 discs on eBay here for £50.
- jamal-kumar 5y agoI learned computers because in 1996 I was completely ignorant and a little kid who decided to drag everything into the recycle bin because I thought it would be 'recycled' back into place but really it just destroyed windows enough that I had to learn how to reinstall from floppies created in DOS
- pjerem 5y agoI like how old OSes let you place anything in the recycle bin, or remove system files without permission (because the concept barely existed). Simplicity at the extreme. I miss those times where hacking and learning was as easy as breaking things and repairing them. But I think this also was a source of fear against computers for most people : if I click on the wrong place, it will break and cost money. Nowadays systems are nearly unbreakable, and that’s cool, but o boy when they break, good luck finding why.
- touggourt 5y agoThe concept of permissions existed far before Win95 launch. At least on Unix and WinNT. As a Unix and WinNT seller, Microsoft knows it perfectly. It was also not possible on Macos to through system files in the trash bin.
- jamal-kumar 5y agoHahaha yeah I was freaking out. My whole family was pretty pissed off at me. Good thing I had a copy of "PCs for Dummies" which told how to fix the catastrophe
- ycuser2 5y agoSame here: "Why there are so many files? I only need the .exe to start my game." After deleting the "unnecessary" files the game woudln't work.
- LadyCailin 5y agoI went through system32 and deleted all the files that we never used, to free up disk space. And that was the day I learned how to reinstall an OS.
- wdb 5y agoYeah, the Windows 95 beta on 3.5" floppy disks was good fun!
- mikewarot 5y agoI had a Backpack parallel printer port hard drive back then. I could boot my DOS floppy with the driver, and have full access to 300 megabytes of stuff. It made installing stuff so much easier. Yes, of course I had spare boot floppies. 8)
- bitexploder 5y agoFond memories of installing Slackware from floppies for me. Sure, USB dongles are better, and floppy disks corrupted if you looked at them funny, but inside of those floppies was magic for 15 year old me :) E: back when we had 28k and 56k dial up modems (think 2-6KB per second) the computer was more of its own universe. I learned Linux through info and man and internet resources for bigger concepts. O’Reilly books were great back then. I learned so much that is still with me today because it’s what I had available and it was still and expansive universe. How small and limiting it would feel by today’s standards.
- birbbarker 5y agoHaving flashbacks to installing Netware 3.12 from floppy. o_O
- kcplate 5y agoBeen there, 60+ computers in a call center over a weekend. Computers were PS/2 model 95s originally running OS/2 in Spanish, needed network card installs, windows 95 (in English), new US keyboards and a Netware client stack.
- nvader 5y agoMy school got students to do the work of maintaining these computers! But they bribed us with our own room in the library with a handful of computers with admin access, so we could play games. And we had Norton Ghost, so re-imaging was a breeze.
- _the_inflator 5y agoI had a Windows 95 Update CD and had to insert a Win 3.11 install disc every time to verify valid installation...
- cable2600 5y agoIt looks for a WIN.INF file on disk 1, you could make a blank WIN.INF and it would still work.
- cable2600 5y agoI had the install disks copied to a Novell server and then xcopied them to c:\install\win95\ and then ran setup in that directory. It went faster than swapping floppies.
- user3939382 5y agoI had the same task in 2002 for a computer lab. I used Norton Ghost. I was really impressed by the tool at the time.
- _tik_ 5y agoWe used some Norton tools to do this. We swapped the hard disk between the machines.
- whizzzkid 5y agoWasn't it Norton Ghost?, you could replicate drives.
- midasuni 5y agoAnd then office, which made windows 95 look like a cakewalk. I remember installing offie 4.3 and windows 95 from floppies - I assume office 95 at some point too. Dozens of floppies.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoI was thinking about how we did things back then, and Norton Ghost came up - allowing you to create and restore system images, for either easy recovery or installation. But it was only made in 1995 and only bought and distributed by Norton in 1998, so a bit later than the Windows 95 era. Still, a godsend for multi installs and undoing the abuse from the youth.
- jaclaz 5y agoIf you have some spare time, you can re-feel the pain in real time, JFYI, the "full" set was 21, 22 or 29 floppies, though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IBsTvWItY0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IBsTvWItY0 There is also Windows 98 install in real time from 39 disks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWuJxKtF3gk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWuJxKtF3gk
- hkt 5y agoI don't want to make a weird boast but I have a mint condition Windows 95 CD (and manual etc) from my first PC. Could've saved you some time, maybe..
- dclowd9901 5y agoI give a little prayer to people like you when I add a few more numbers to my “matrix” field in GitHub actions and spin up 4 more machines in parallel.
- kwanbix 5y agoI had to do the same, but we used imaging software. It was called Ghost. Symantec later bought them.
- ddnb 5y agoOff topic but it's funny to me how seemingly everyone in this writes "floppy disk" correctly with a "k" but writes "discs" (when still talking about the floppy disks) incorrectly with a "c". Must be a habit when not adding floppy in front!
- globular-toast 5y agoIt is funny. I looked it up and apparently the spelling of the general work "disc" (meaning, thin circular thing) is disc in British and disk in American. But universally it's disk for floppy disks and hard disks and disc for compact discs, DVDs etc. My theory is "disc" looks a bit more "modern" for some reason, hence using it for the newer media. For me (a British speaker), it seems totally natural to use "disk" for floppies and hard disks, but disc otherwise.
- theandrewbailey 5y agoWhen I looked it up, "disc" meant the recording medium itself without any casing or I/O mechanism. Anything else was a "disk".
- spinny 5y agoyour comment reminded me of installing ms office 97 from floppies. all 45 of them.
- globular-toast 5y agoOur copy of Windows 95 was on a CD, but it still needed a floppy boot disk (I don't think CD booting was a thing for another few years). I hated using floppy disks and hated booted from them the most. I always had the feeling it just wasn't going to work and now I had no way to boot my computer at all.
- dagw 5y agoAnd if you could boot from the CD you also needed floppies with the correct device drivers to actually do the installation.
- globular-toast 5y agoYeah, I needed to do that even with XP because I had an early SATA computer. Later I learnt you could customise the Windows CD, burn it yourself and include service packs, drivers etc. on it. That saved a lot of time (because back then, reinstalling every few months was a thing).
- WorldMaker 5y agoThe CD version would have saved you a bunch of time, too. It was also fun to have the CD around even after the installs because it had a couple of bonuses (given all the extra space it had) like the "classic" videogame Hover! [1] and the music video of Weezer's Buddy Holly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hover!
- firexcy 5y agoI still remember the excitement when the second grade me copied _all_ applications from my school computer and they fitted in a single floppy disk and the frustration when I couldn't launch any of them on my home computer. It took me a week to realize that what I copied were desktop shortcuts and that's different from the software.