4 ms·

Crazy that this was only 2 years away from Windows 95.

livrem 3y ago
Yes, crazy that something this good could turn so bad in just two years. In hindsight I am happy their move to Windows pushed me to switch to Linux though.
- galangalalgol 3y ago
  Was it really ever good though? I came to dos after us having an amiga and it mostly seemed like garbage except that there was more software. Having to jave different autoexec.bat and config.sys files for every game I wanted to play, and laboriously solving the knapsack problem forneach one to get all the drivers I needed into ram.
  - livrem 3y ago
    In MS-DOS 5.0 and later at least you could make a menu at start-up to pick what to activate. I looked at my old config.sys and autoexec.bat recently and it was amazingly simple. 100% of system configuration in maybe 1-200 lines of text, in two files. Not so bad compared to hunting for were to configure something in any modern OS? DOS did what it had to do. For coding you could start up emacs (and ctrl-z somehow magically could drop you in a command.com shell that you could exit from to go back to emacs; I think there was a DOS interrupt to allow applications to start sub-shells like that?). And otherwise (i.e. most of the time for most of us) you just booted and started a game and then when you were done playing turned off the computer. Anyway I must admit, many years later, that many games (and some applications) around 1990 were definitely better on an Amiga. DOS games for some time were rarely the best ports. But I never used an Amiga enough to learn if I liked the operating system much. I did buy Amiga Forever some year ago and that comes with a few pre-configured disk images with AmigaOS and various applications, but I am barely able to use that at all since I have no idea how to use it. It would be fun to play with some day.
bluedino 3y ago
And 1 year after Windows 3.1 (which was Pretty Good)
- galangalalgol 3y ago
  For work maybe? As a gamer I never used 3.1 for anything. Even the gui apps I used were dos based. Seemingly a lot of them were ported from amiga. Trying to imagine a modern os with no window manager, just applications that all used gl or vulkan directly with some unmaskable keyboard combos to allow switching.
  - M95D 3y ago
    > Trying to imagine a modern os with no window manager, just applications that all used gl or vulkan directly with some unmaskable keyboard combos to allow switching. Can I have that? Please! Firefox won't open full-screen if started in X without a window manager.
    - btrettel 3y ago
      The easiest approach would be configuring Linux to do this. I have a Linux laptop without X or Wayland. It's mostly for CLI and TUI applications, but I do have some framebuffer applications like fbpdf. There are a lot of little annoyances, many of which could be fixed with a proper Linux configuration, though others require improvement to the applications. The framebuffer versions of graphical programs are unfortunately clunky compared against the conventional versions. And I'm disappointed that they don't work when called from tmux or Midnight Commander, or at least I haven't figured out how to make them work. Some key combinations don't seem to work and I haven't been able to figure out why for all of them yet. I miss having a unified clipboard. I've also become more adept at Midnight Commander and its built in editor, diff tool, and viewer. Though this exposes some issues, for example: If a file is edited with F4 configured to be mcedit, then I can switch between the editor and file manager with the screen list (Alt-`). But if I open mcedit from the command line or user menu, then the screen list will only be for that mcedit run and not include any other screens open. I rarely use the Midnight Commander screen list outside of this specific computer. (As for why I have this computer, it's to have a distraction-free setup. It works nicely for that purpose.)
mananaysiempre 3y ago
Not only that, it was a couple of months after the first usability testing sessions of the original UI of Windows 95[1] (the one with a literal "tray" under the "desktop"[2,3]). [1] https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_95_Usability_Testing_Builds https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_95_Usability_Testing_Build... [2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030910-00/?p=42583 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030910-00/?p=42... [3] http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20030910_053_why_do_some_people_call_the_taskbar_the_tray.htm http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20030910_053_...
- atombender 3y ago
  The image in links 2-3 doesn't load for me. Is there an archived copy somewhere?
  - cesarb 3y ago
    The trick is to know that the true address of that blog was at blogs.msdn.com. Here it is, complete with comments (which were lost when the blog was moved): https://web.archive.org/web/20050924221736/http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/09/10/54831.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20050924221736/http://blogs.msdn...
- accrual 3y ago
  > In early builds of Windows 95, the taskbar originally wasn't a taskbar; it was a folder window docked at the bottom of the screen that you could drag/drop things into/out of, sort of like the organizer tray in the top drawer of you desk. The image is really fascinating to me. The whole taskbar paradigm we're familiar with today started life as what sounds like a quick hack. Draw a bar that draws the contents of a folder in a narrow bar format. Later extend it to hold running applications instead.
mseepgood 3y ago
Time passed slower back then.
- accrual 3y ago
  A silly pet idea I have is that while time didn't literally pass slower, there was less overall entropy in the world back then. There were fewer people working on fewer things, so less new things happened overall. Today there are more people working on more things, so the rate of new things happening is higher, and thus the perception of time passing faster.
  - saulpw 3y ago
    And we are all connected, so there are not only twice as many people on the planet, and more people with computers, but also people in China, India, Brazil, and Russia are able to collaborate instead of being completely isolated in their own locales.
- dbsmith83 3y ago
  or the TPM role hadn't been invented yet
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    What's the issue with TPM? Do you hate security?
    - dbsmith83 3y ago
      Ah I wasn't talking about "Trusted Platform Module", I was talking about the technical product/project manager job, which tends to create meetings and various distractions for developers

Yes, crazy that something this good could turn so bad in just two years. In hindsight I am happy their move to Windows pushed me to switch to Linux though.

galangalalgol 3y ago
Was it really ever good though? I came to dos after us having an amiga and it mostly seemed like garbage except that there was more software. Having to jave different autoexec.bat and config.sys files for every game I wanted to play, and laboriously solving the knapsack problem forneach one to get all the drivers I needed into ram.
- livrem 3y ago
  In MS-DOS 5.0 and later at least you could make a menu at start-up to pick what to activate. I looked at my old config.sys and autoexec.bat recently and it was amazingly simple. 100% of system configuration in maybe 1-200 lines of text, in two files. Not so bad compared to hunting for were to configure something in any modern OS? DOS did what it had to do. For coding you could start up emacs (and ctrl-z somehow magically could drop you in a command.com shell that you could exit from to go back to emacs; I think there was a DOS interrupt to allow applications to start sub-shells like that?). And otherwise (i.e. most of the time for most of us) you just booted and started a game and then when you were done playing turned off the computer. Anyway I must admit, many years later, that many games (and some applications) around 1990 were definitely better on an Amiga. DOS games for some time were rarely the best ports. But I never used an Amiga enough to learn if I liked the operating system much. I did buy Amiga Forever some year ago and that comes with a few pre-configured disk images with AmigaOS and various applications, but I am barely able to use that at all since I have no idea how to use it. It would be fun to play with some day.

bluedino 3y ago

And 1 year after Windows 3.1 (which was Pretty Good)

galangalalgol 3y ago
For work maybe? As a gamer I never used 3.1 for anything. Even the gui apps I used were dos based. Seemingly a lot of them were ported from amiga. Trying to imagine a modern os with no window manager, just applications that all used gl or vulkan directly with some unmaskable keyboard combos to allow switching.
- M95D 3y ago
  > Trying to imagine a modern os with no window manager, just applications that all used gl or vulkan directly with some unmaskable keyboard combos to allow switching. Can I have that? Please! Firefox won't open full-screen if started in X without a window manager.
  - btrettel 3y ago
    The easiest approach would be configuring Linux to do this. I have a Linux laptop without X or Wayland. It's mostly for CLI and TUI applications, but I do have some framebuffer applications like fbpdf. There are a lot of little annoyances, many of which could be fixed with a proper Linux configuration, though others require improvement to the applications. The framebuffer versions of graphical programs are unfortunately clunky compared against the conventional versions. And I'm disappointed that they don't work when called from tmux or Midnight Commander, or at least I haven't figured out how to make them work. Some key combinations don't seem to work and I haven't been able to figure out why for all of them yet. I miss having a unified clipboard. I've also become more adept at Midnight Commander and its built in editor, diff tool, and viewer. Though this exposes some issues, for example: If a file is edited with F4 configured to be mcedit, then I can switch between the editor and file manager with the screen list (Alt-`). But if I open mcedit from the command line or user menu, then the screen list will only be for that mcedit run and not include any other screens open. I rarely use the Midnight Commander screen list outside of this specific computer. (As for why I have this computer, it's to have a distraction-free setup. It works nicely for that purpose.)

mananaysiempre 3y ago

Not only that, it was a couple of months after the first usability testing sessions of the original UI of Windows 95[1] (the one with a literal "tray" under the "desktop"[2,3]). [1] https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_95_Usability_Testing_Builds https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_95_Usability_Testing_Build... [2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030910-00/?p=42583 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030910-00/?p=42... [3] http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20030910_053_why_do_some_people_call_the_taskbar_the_tray.htm http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20030910_053_...

atombender 3y ago
The image in links 2-3 doesn't load for me. Is there an archived copy somewhere?
- cesarb 3y ago
  The trick is to know that the true address of that blog was at blogs.msdn.com. Here it is, complete with comments (which were lost when the blog was moved): https://web.archive.org/web/20050924221736/http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/09/10/54831.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20050924221736/http://blogs.msdn...
accrual 3y ago
> In early builds of Windows 95, the taskbar originally wasn't a taskbar; it was a folder window docked at the bottom of the screen that you could drag/drop things into/out of, sort of like the organizer tray in the top drawer of you desk. The image is really fascinating to me. The whole taskbar paradigm we're familiar with today started life as what sounds like a quick hack. Draw a bar that draws the contents of a folder in a narrow bar format. Later extend it to hold running applications instead.

mseepgood 3y ago

Time passed slower back then.

accrual 3y ago
A silly pet idea I have is that while time didn't literally pass slower, there was less overall entropy in the world back then. There were fewer people working on fewer things, so less new things happened overall. Today there are more people working on more things, so the rate of new things happening is higher, and thus the perception of time passing faster.
- saulpw 3y ago
  And we are all connected, so there are not only twice as many people on the planet, and more people with computers, but also people in China, India, Brazil, and Russia are able to collaborate instead of being completely isolated in their own locales.
dbsmith83 3y ago
or the TPM role hadn't been invented yet
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  What's the issue with TPM? Do you hate security?
  - dbsmith83 3y ago
    Ah I wasn't talking about "Trusted Platform Module", I was talking about the technical product/project manager job, which tends to create meetings and various distractions for developers