10 ms·
Watch Windows 95 crash live as it exceeds 49.7 days uptime [video]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- paulpauper 5y agoLol value overflow errors.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y agoMillisecond timer stored to a 32bit unsigned.
- johnchristopher 5y agoAnd they say Bitcoin is a waste of resources and here we are watching this :]. /s How do they capture the screen output from the real CRT ?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- usmannk 5y agoThere is a huuuuge twitter thread with all the details. This tweet in the middle talks about a VGA to HDMI adapter https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1424242517243957250 https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1424242517243957250
- dredmorbius 5y agohttps://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1424242517243957250.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1424242517243957250.html
- johnchristopher 5y agoThat thread is gold :).
- chrisseaton 5y agoI guess they don't capture it from the CRT - they capture it from the video signal from the computer.
- kasperni 5y agoWasn't alive to watch the first moon landing. But I feel this must be up there with it.
- laurent92 5y agoFunny thing, programming the clocks in assembler at the time of the moon landing was extraordinarily hard, especially since they had to code the timestamps in negative.
- hyperrail 5y agoHere's a discussion of (at least one) original Windows 95 bug that causes the computer to freeze after 49 days, along with working download links to fixes: https://web.archive.org/web/20070223101651/https://support.microsoft.com/kb/216641 https://web.archive.org/web/20070223101651/https://support.m... News coverage at the time (2002 or earlier): https://www.cnet.com/news/windows-may-crash-after-49-7-days/ https://www.cnet.com/news/windows-may-crash-after-49-7-days/ (Feels like a bit of a silly Gotcha! to do it live now - did anyone run their personal computer for 49 days, even counting laptops which went to sleep/standby? But hey, do what you want. :)
- Joeri 5y agoThis wasn’t a limitation anyone ran into in the real world. I was lucky to get the original windows 95 to run for a day, let alone 49. Windows 95 OSR2 on the other hand was very stable. My most stable desktop from that era (late 90’s / early 00’s) was a debian stable build, the uptime at one point was over two years.
- tssva 5y agoIn the late 90s to early 2000s I worked in the Network Planning & Design group for UUNET. They were phased out before I left but when I started Fore/Marconi ATM switches were used for interconnect within PoPs and to terminate the circuits between PoPs. For a while the NOC had to reboot them periodically at a scheduled time or else they would reboot themselves after a certain period of time. I believe it was 45 or 90 days.
- aurelian274 5y agoLong time lurker but I had to create an account to comment. My first job out of college was at Fore Systems/Marconi back in 2000 as a QA tester. One of my first assignments was to test bug fixes for several different uptime issues we had. My favorite was the PNNI 397 day uptime where it would flap a port causing the switch to relearn all its SPVCs. Fore/Marconi was a great place to work back then but the dotcom bust and the migration to pure IP/MPLS was a death knell to them. My entire division was laid off in Oct of 2001. I was lucky and had jumped ship only weeks earlier.
- tssva 5y agoNow I feel guilty about my role in several migrations to pure IP/MPLS. If it helps at all a couple were off of Cisco Lightstream equipment.
- smoldesu 5y agoIIRC, there was a long period of time where the max uptime on a Unix system was ~94 days. That makes a lot of sense.
- krylon 5y agoHaving used Windows 95 back in the day, I am deeply impressed someone managed to keep it from crashing for so long. I have seen a Windows NT 4.0 system with an uptime of more than five years, but with Windows 95, even a whole day of uptime was pretty close to a miracle.
- cyberge99 5y agoI saw a new in box copy of Windows NT Server 5 user today for $4.99. I wonder what it cost new.
- 0x0 5y agoDo you mean Windows 2000? I didn't think "NT 5" was ever used as a brand?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bald 5y ago> 5 user I think he's referring to CAL
- floatingatoll 5y agoHuh?
- stan_rogers 5y agoIt's a 5-user Client Access License (CAL) package for Windows NT Server.
- Someone 5y agoIf so, that’s not a Windows NT license, but an add-on that allows five users (¿at a time?) to connect to a Windows NT system that requires its own license to run, isn’t it?
- ksec 5y agoI feel like a fool this somehow put a smile on my face :) And my memory may be hazy, but in those days Windows always crash every few days and we normally "shut down" our computer after usage. But the most interesting thing is a running Windows 95 in English version. May be screenshot [1] weren't hard to come by. And we are lucky nuke didn't happen in 2020. [1] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
- foepys 5y agoHow far we have come. Nowadays I usually let my notebook hibernate (not sleep) for the night and when I return the next morning, I often discover that I forgot to stop my debugger and it is still attached to my running program. Not even a hiccup when resuming.
- progman32 5y agoHeh. In the meantime, here I am having to software-reset my network card after almost every resume. Thankfully, like beer, Linux is the answer to _and the cause of,_ all the world's problems. # echo 1 > /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000\:0b\:00.0/remove # echo 1 > /sys/bus/pci/rescan
- hyperrail 5y agoMicrosoft used to release a "checked" build for each version of Windows on MSDN/Visual Studio Subscription downloads. [1] This was a build with the same compiler optimization settings as the release build, but with debug-build-only assertions and checks included. In the checked build kernel, the system uptime had 49 days artificially added to it [2], precisely to help developers find out problems like this. At one point when I was on the Windows team at Microsoft, there was an internal push for us to selfhost (dogfood) checked builds of Windows, since they theoretically provided better bug telemetry than "free" builds (release builds, which are free of debug-only code). "Slows your dev box down by just half!" was the basic pitch of that campaign in a nutshell. [1] I don't know if this was ever done for Windows 95. It was done for Windows XP up to Windows 10 version 1511, but it appears to have stopped since then, at least according to my quick search. [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/windows/win32/api/sysinfoapi/nf-sysinfoapi-gettickcount https://docs.microsoft.com/windows/win32/api/sysinfoapi/nf-s...
- KindOne 5y agoWhat exactly do you search for? I've tried looking but I have no idea what to search for.
- SSLy 5y agohttps://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=windows%20checked%20build https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=windows%20checked%20bu... EDIT: if you want to get the actual build, I can't help. I only remember it being available through MSDN AA back in the day.
- hyperrail 5y agoIf you are a current Visual Studio subscriber with access to Windows downloads, chk builds are available on https://my.visualstudio.com/Downloads/Featured https://my.visualstudio.com/Downloads/Featured like regular builds. Search for "checked". I don't recommend chk builds for routine use by anyone outside the Windows teams because even if the regular Windows release still receives updates, the chk build typically doesn't. CDN disk space isn't cheap, and neither is CPU time on the build or test machines.
- dredmorbius 5y agoClock rollovers can be interesting. Some time back I did work at a devices startup processing data collected from trial runs. For some reason an earlier developer had chosen to use time-of-day, in seconds, rather than elapsed time, as the index for data recording. I'd registered this as a poor design decision, though it was difficult to articulate why. That argument became far easier after a field trial spanned midnight, and the data series iterated from 86,400 to 0. On the other hand, I've never had trouble remembering just how many seconds (or minutes) there are in a day, since.
- dmurray 5y ago> On the other hand, I've never had trouble remembering just how many seconds (or minutes) there are in a day, since. Not everyone is so fortunate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7717414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7717414
- dredmorbius 5y agoOuch!
- nicoburns 5y agoHuh, that's an old thread. Was quite confused when the "upcoming PHP 5.6 release" was mentioned!
- ed25519FUUU 5y agoThis is why it’s better to express time in seconds using multiplication. Easier to write, easier to review, and easier to change. (60 * 60 * 24) // 1 day (60 * 60 * 12) // 12 hours (60 * 5) // 5 minutes
- dredmorbius 5y agoIt's better yet to use a specific time or callendrical function if what you're accounting for is a specific clock or calendar interval. Not all days have precisely 86,400 seconds. For longer intervals, not all months have 28, 29, 30, 31, 30.43685, whatever, days. Not all years have 365 or 366 days, etc. Pull out your copy of "Myths Programmers Believe About Time" and read it, hard. It will bite.
- greenhatman 5y agoSo silly. I like it.
- andrew_ 5y agoBack when we were writing alt shells for Windows 95/98/2000 (geoShell, Litestep, etc) uptime plugins/modules were all the rage. Screenshotting and sharing were popular and came with bragging rights.
- tomxor 5y agoI love this, and I don't understand why. Maybe it's the nostalgic combo of a physical midi synth with a physical pentium waiting for win95 to do what it's best known for.
- herodoturtle 5y agoRickrolled the viewers like a boss.
- herodoturtle 5y agoAnd their midi playlist is banging, gotta say.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- eitland 5y agoI remember applying the patch for this. First patch I can remember the contents of.
- donohoe 5y ago15 minutes to go....
- burnt_toast 5y agoSemi-related but I recently bought a knock off windows 95 t-shirt because I wanted a shirt with something old that would be recognizable but not mistaken for nostalgia. Kinda like a "oh yeah that used to be big" feeling. It's weird how we can have things that are extremely well known / commonly used in our culture that suddenly disappear as soon as something better comes along never to be thought of again.
- 2ion 5y agoLongest lived non embedded system I've worked with was a Linux server with an uptime from 2007 through 2019 serving as a L3 router. Amazingly, after shutting it down, it turned on again :)
- laurent92 5y agoYes. I forgot to maintain a Linux server after setting autoupdates, and it kept itself up for years. I’m ashamed of not monitoring the potential breaches on it.
- thiagocsf 5y agoCompletely off-topic but yesterday I upgraded my Debian 10 home server to 11 and it rebooted fine! It had a 132 day uptime on it. I run a unify controller on docker, pihole, influxdb, grafana and a bunch of other small scripts. I did need to upgrade my collectd Python modules to 3 but that was it.
- raffraffraff 5y agoI'm scared to even think about the NAS in my attic. It's running firmware based on a long dead version of Debian. I have no idea how long it's been running without a reboot but I'm guessing 2+ years.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- yjamal2 5y agoAnd it just crashed
- _V_ 5y agoSpoiler: It did indeed crash :-)
- isoprophlex 5y agoPretty wild, it rolled over, then made it +- 6000 msec post-rollover before crashing!
- themodelplumber 5y agoDid they time the Terminator theme to play along with the crash? That was pretty funny.
- Shorel 5y agoI got the stream when it was Crash Test Dummies. Yep, it was funny.
- dredmorbius 5y agoFor those coming along after: The counter rolled over, then the system hung at about 6800 ms after the rollover. The mouse responded and a ctrl-alt-del brought up the process-manager / restart dialogue, but the system didn't respond otherwise. It was restarted with a second ctrl-alt-del. Final song was Toto's "Africa", followed by the theme to Terminator. If the stream remains up, the next crash will occur on October 17, 2021.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kregasaurusrex 5y agoLooks like the integer overflow had the system time try to start back over at zero, but that caused everything else to hang right after it did. Neat stream.
- bambax 5y agoOT, but I still have one of those Roland Sound Canvas expanders. Works flawlessly.
- tored 5y agoTypical västgötaklimax.
- CGamesPlay 5y agoSo, it looked like what happened was the system didn't immediately crash, but quickly degraded. It looked like the system was partially responsive, and Foone reported that the ctrl-alt-delete screen wouldn't kill the app. The uptime monitor app hung, although it's unclear where that failure originated from.
- 404mm 5y agoWell that was anticlimactic :(
- emersonrsantos 5y agoAfter the crash, the video author typed inside Notepad: "It hung! I ctrl-alt-deleted it, but it wouldn't respond so I rebooted it with another ctrl-alt-delete Thanks for watching. TRANS RIGHTS!" https://imgur.com/a/yoGyo6B https://imgur.com/a/yoGyo6B
- NewAcc1234 5y agoI like it how the trans community uses a professional setup to make aware of their private matters. I will include my fetisch after thanking the audience nicely in some of my future correspondence (I will not say which one). Thank you for your big tits.
- Huwyt_Nashi_064 5y agoImagine being incapable of not telling the world that you're a transvestite. Keep it to yourself.
- vmception 5y agoComputers having long uptime used to be considered a novelty, with counters shared on rudimentary websites and even magazines Now its not even a consideration as it is so commonplace At one point this was considered a hard problem
- Hamuko 5y agoHigh uptime on a Windows machine is still a novelty.
- exikyut 5y agoEPILOGUE Here's the exact point of the crash (cued to 5 seconds prior): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdrRoSdBM5M&t=9778s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdrRoSdBM5M&t=9778s The counter overflows/resets, everything wraps around, the system counts 6 more seconds, then Windows 95 freezes. The mouse cursor still seems to work, but the message pump seems to have frozen, to the extent that End Task itself is unresponsive, and a second CTRL-ALT-DEL is needed to reset the machine. --- This whole thing started back in July, over here (warning: megathread): https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1413694652822163459 https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1413694652822163459
- exikyut 5y agoInteresting addition: the machine angrily beeps at you from the internal PC speaker if you move the mouse after it's hung: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1431711101624852482 https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1431711101624852482
- tus89 5y agoThat was underwhelming.
- punnerud 5y agoI gave my kid an old Toshiba with Win95 when he was 3 years. He is now 5 and still likes to use it. His favorite programs are Minesweeper, Word and MSPaint. Thinking about upgrading to Raspberry Pi Keyboard. Maybe we should try the 49.7 days overflow as an fun example in memory overflow.
- matheweis 5y agoMicrosoft Lync for Mac OS had a bug like this; if the system uptime was > 49.7 days, the user’s presence would get stuck as “Away”. Presumably it was using uptime as time clock for establishing presence and once it overflowed the comparison failed.
- userbinator 5y agoI'm curious what actually causes these effects. The counter rolls over --- so what? The maths still works fine over a wraparound modulo 2^32, and the tick counter is definitely treated as unsigned by the relevant code, or the symptoms would've appeared in half the time at 2^31. Unless there were some misguided/overly-paranoid attempts at overflow checking? As someone who has written Win3.x/9x drivers for much newer hardware just to see if it could be done, I'd love to read an in-depth analysis of this bug, like https://www.os2museum.com/wp/those-win9x-crashes-on-fast-machines/ https://www.os2museum.com/wp/those-win9x-crashes-on-fast-mac... --- if I had more time I might get around to doing it myself, and ultimately coming up with a patch to fix it.
- aasasd 5y agoWindows is one thing, but I heard that Warcraft 1 or 2 had a patch to fix a crash that occurred after the game ran for three weeks. The mystery, to me, is how the hell did someone discover the problem.
- drekipus 5y agoI'm a little annoyed at how anti climatic it was. I had a windows 95 machine (chunky IBM laptop) when I was 12, there's plenty of ways the crash could've been shown off a little more. System freezing all of a sudden was a daily occurrence, not much to write home about.