6 ms·

For those who weren't alive at the time it's probably hard to understand what an inflection point Windows 95 was. Both in terms of the number of homes with com

For those who weren't alive at the time it's probably hard to understand what an inflection point Windows 95 was. Both in terms of the number of homes with computers in them and what those computers were able to do things skyrocketed. The software business went from primarily being targeted at businesses, schools, and hobbyists to being targeted at mainstream consumers in a once ever opportunity to establish a brand name with people who have literally never purchased anything in this class before. It was the most dramatic shift certainly that I've seen in my life with the adoption of the internet being second and the adoption of mobile phones being third. It's been more than a decade since we've seen anything like those shifts. The 2010s feel a lot like the 1980s to me. Lots of progress, lots of it incremental, but no inflection point. I do wonder if AI will be the next big paradigm shift like Windows 95, the internet, and the iPhone.

mistrial9 3y ago
Windows 95 was years behind the state-of-the-art on the day "Chicago" shipped. The technical choice of the backslash for file system paths, and hiding the real disk contents from the user view, caused years of headaches. The architectural design choices for extensibility ended up as a swiss-cheese architecture for malware. MSFT-chairman literally saw himself as the new savior. glad you see this as important?
- petemill 3y ago
  Important in terms of adoption.
- function_seven 3y ago
  None of your assessment matters regarding how big a deal it actually was. My mom didn’t give a damn about backslashes and my dad had zero use for seeing hidden files. The “state of the art” in 1995 was for nerds doing nerd stuff, Windows 95 was for regular people who couldn’t afford a Macintosh.
- hackzzz 3y ago
  [flagged]
- canucker2016 3y ago
  I fail to see how a minor choice such as what character to use as path separator has to do with being state of the art. https://www.os2museum.com/wp/why-does-windows-really-use-backslash-as-path-separator/ https://www.os2museum.com/wp/why-does-windows-really-use-bac... does a deep dive into the reasons for the choice, which seems more to do with backwards compatibility with DOS 1.0. Win95 wasn't built on a base that had security in mind. And when the Win95 feature set was created, the world wide web wasn't in that list. TCP/IP wasn't either iirc. Dialup access was the main onramp to the internet. MSN was supposed to be Microsoft's main way to get users on to the internet (to fight against AOL). If you don't have internet access, where is your malware coming from? Floppies? No wifi to attack your printers. Much easier to deal with a strange poisonous floppy the few times that you are given one than the 24/7 defenses needed when your box is ON the internet. Well, Win95 was hobbled with the MSDOS base which was mainly concerned with CP/M familiarity when first designed. That's why Microsoft was working on windowsNT.
axpy906 3y ago
I think AI finally is at point where it is. It’s peak hype right now but there is definitely a difference between knowledge workers that use it and one’s that don’t. It’s only going to grow wider in the coming years.
- packetlost 3y ago
  > there is definitely a difference between knowledge workers that use it and one’s that don’t [citation needed] I tried out Copilot for months and didn't get much value out of it. The majority of my time and effort is not writing code, which is about the only thing an LLM can generate semi-useful output for. It's not more useful than a tailored search engine experience and it doesn't replace deep dives into text books, code, and white papers. Where are you seeing major benefits?
  - kimixa 3y ago
    We've also done some initial experiments, and seen no improvements in productivity, and the comments from the people using it were rather negative. Maybe it's sector dependent? Maybe systems programming doesn't have enough reference materials for them to learn from? Certainly not the "Clearly obvious difference" some people seem to be claiming to see in some places online.
    - packetlost 3y ago
      The latency is distracting for me tbh. That's something I think could be fixed by running local models, but the quality of output is just not there. Maybe if you're slinging HTML and JS all day it helps more
    - pydry 3y ago
      I've watched people who claim it is a game changer try to use it and I can see routinely leading them down rabbit holes in real time which they struggle to get out of. Meanwhile, the stuff it is good at filling in - it was never that hard to google it and copy and paste it in the first place. I've seen this like 20 times in tech before. We're peak hype cycle for LLMs and the trough of disillusionment has yet to set in. During peak hype cycle for any tech a lot of people defer to the crowd's excitable opinion, disbelieve the evidence in front of their own eyes and express a level of optimism over future developments that is ludicrous.
georgeecollins 3y ago
Or, how hard it is to predict future markets. I remember when I started making games (on CD-ROMS!) and I met a guy who had a "multimedia" company. It sounds so funny now. He felt that soon their would be huge stores, like record stores(!) that had aisles and aisles of CD-ROMs for every need and interest. It didn't sound unreasonable at the time. And now I can't even explain to my kids what record store were like when I was a kid.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  He was right though, they just sold other stuff at Best Buy too.
  - PostOnce 3y ago
    "The App Store" is like a record store that extends for hundreds of miles in every direction. He was right about the concept; but the store is in cyberspace and the media is a file instead of a disc.
hollerith 3y ago
>The software business went from primarily being targeted at businesses, schools, and hobbyists to being targeted at mainstream consumers The way I remember it, personal computers (initially called home computers) always had a market among individuals with those individuals initially being hobbyists, but becoming more consumer-ish fairly soon, certainly by the early 1980s when the video-game market became a large part of the market for software for personal computers--maybe for a year the major part. Once individuals owned personal computers, they started bringing them in to work, usually against the wishes of the IT department, and the enterprise PC software and professional PC software segments grew faster than consumer PC software--until about 1990. Video and sound cards became popular around the same time as the CDROM drive, roughly starting in 1990, and the combination led to a "resurgence" in software for consumers--games certainly, but also things like Compton's Multimedia Encyclopedia (1989), The New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia (1992), Encarta (1993) and interactive fiction. San Francisco was the center of the companies trying to reach this "multimedia" software market, and some writers started referring to SOMA and the Financial District as "Multimedia Gulch". It boggles my mind that you think this "multimedia resurgence" I just described was anywhere as dramatic a shift as the Internet was! Microsoft's main tag line during the marketing of Windows 95 was, "This way to the Internet." I must have heard that phrase a thousand time in Microsoft's ads. I don't recall Microsoft making any pitches to consumers to the effect that Windows 95 will allow them to take full advantage of their new graphics cards, sound cards or CD drives. I kind of remember public interest in those things--and the"multimedia" software titles enabled by those things--having subsided by the time Windows 95 hit.

mistrial9 3y ago

Windows 95 was years behind the state-of-the-art on the day "Chicago" shipped. The technical choice of the backslash for file system paths, and hiding the real disk contents from the user view, caused years of headaches. The architectural design choices for extensibility ended up as a swiss-cheese architecture for malware. MSFT-chairman literally saw himself as the new savior. glad you see this as important?

petemill 3y ago
Important in terms of adoption.
function_seven 3y ago
None of your assessment matters regarding how big a deal it actually was. My mom didn’t give a damn about backslashes and my dad had zero use for seeing hidden files. The “state of the art” in 1995 was for nerds doing nerd stuff, Windows 95 was for regular people who couldn’t afford a Macintosh.
hackzzz 3y ago
[flagged]
canucker2016 3y ago
I fail to see how a minor choice such as what character to use as path separator has to do with being state of the art. https://www.os2museum.com/wp/why-does-windows-really-use-backslash-as-path-separator/ https://www.os2museum.com/wp/why-does-windows-really-use-bac... does a deep dive into the reasons for the choice, which seems more to do with backwards compatibility with DOS 1.0. Win95 wasn't built on a base that had security in mind. And when the Win95 feature set was created, the world wide web wasn't in that list. TCP/IP wasn't either iirc. Dialup access was the main onramp to the internet. MSN was supposed to be Microsoft's main way to get users on to the internet (to fight against AOL). If you don't have internet access, where is your malware coming from? Floppies? No wifi to attack your printers. Much easier to deal with a strange poisonous floppy the few times that you are given one than the 24/7 defenses needed when your box is ON the internet. Well, Win95 was hobbled with the MSDOS base which was mainly concerned with CP/M familiarity when first designed. That's why Microsoft was working on windowsNT.

axpy906 3y ago

I think AI finally is at point where it is. It’s peak hype right now but there is definitely a difference between knowledge workers that use it and one’s that don’t. It’s only going to grow wider in the coming years.

packetlost 3y ago
> there is definitely a difference between knowledge workers that use it and one’s that don’t [citation needed] I tried out Copilot for months and didn't get much value out of it. The majority of my time and effort is not writing code, which is about the only thing an LLM can generate semi-useful output for. It's not more useful than a tailored search engine experience and it doesn't replace deep dives into text books, code, and white papers. Where are you seeing major benefits?
- kimixa 3y ago
  We've also done some initial experiments, and seen no improvements in productivity, and the comments from the people using it were rather negative. Maybe it's sector dependent? Maybe systems programming doesn't have enough reference materials for them to learn from? Certainly not the "Clearly obvious difference" some people seem to be claiming to see in some places online.
  - packetlost 3y ago
    The latency is distracting for me tbh. That's something I think could be fixed by running local models, but the quality of output is just not there. Maybe if you're slinging HTML and JS all day it helps more
  - pydry 3y ago
    I've watched people who claim it is a game changer try to use it and I can see routinely leading them down rabbit holes in real time which they struggle to get out of. Meanwhile, the stuff it is good at filling in - it was never that hard to google it and copy and paste it in the first place. I've seen this like 20 times in tech before. We're peak hype cycle for LLMs and the trough of disillusionment has yet to set in. During peak hype cycle for any tech a lot of people defer to the crowd's excitable opinion, disbelieve the evidence in front of their own eyes and express a level of optimism over future developments that is ludicrous.

georgeecollins 3y ago

Or, how hard it is to predict future markets. I remember when I started making games (on CD-ROMS!) and I met a guy who had a "multimedia" company. It sounds so funny now. He felt that soon their would be huge stores, like record stores(!) that had aisles and aisles of CD-ROMs for every need and interest. It didn't sound unreasonable at the time. And now I can't even explain to my kids what record store were like when I was a kid.

whatshisface 3y ago
He was right though, they just sold other stuff at Best Buy too.
- PostOnce 3y ago
  "The App Store" is like a record store that extends for hundreds of miles in every direction. He was right about the concept; but the store is in cyberspace and the media is a file instead of a disc.

hollerith 3y ago

>The software business went from primarily being targeted at businesses, schools, and hobbyists to being targeted at mainstream consumers The way I remember it, personal computers (initially called home computers) always had a market among individuals with those individuals initially being hobbyists, but becoming more consumer-ish fairly soon, certainly by the early 1980s when the video-game market became a large part of the market for software for personal computers--maybe for a year the major part. Once individuals owned personal computers, they started bringing them in to work, usually against the wishes of the IT department, and the enterprise PC software and professional PC software segments grew faster than consumer PC software--until about 1990. Video and sound cards became popular around the same time as the CDROM drive, roughly starting in 1990, and the combination led to a "resurgence" in software for consumers--games certainly, but also things like Compton's Multimedia Encyclopedia (1989), The New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia (1992), Encarta (1993) and interactive fiction. San Francisco was the center of the companies trying to reach this "multimedia" software market, and some writers started referring to SOMA and the Financial District as "Multimedia Gulch". It boggles my mind that you think this "multimedia resurgence" I just described was anywhere as dramatic a shift as the Internet was! Microsoft's main tag line during the marketing of Windows 95 was, "This way to the Internet." I must have heard that phrase a thousand time in Microsoft's ads. I don't recall Microsoft making any pitches to consumers to the effect that Windows 95 will allow them to take full advantage of their new graphics cards, sound cards or CD drives. I kind of remember public interest in those things--and the"multimedia" software titles enabled by those things--having subsided by the time Windows 95 hit.