8 ms·
Windows 95 had a bunch of stuff from 3.1 built in too. You could use progman as the default shell, it had file manager, etc.
by pram 1y ago
Windows 95 had a bunch of stuff from 3.1 built in too. You could use progman as the default shell, it had file manager, etc.
- ranger_danger 1y agoYep it was even an option during the initial setup.
- dblohm7 1y agoWindows 95's USER and GDI implementation was essentially an enhanced version of Win 3.1's. user32.dll and gdi32.dll were just thunking layers. The 16-bit components were guarded by a mutex named "Win16Mutex" to ensure serialized access to them from the 32-bit side.
- cyberax 1y agoThis mutex also protected a lot of other stuff. For example, if you wanted to access a DirectDraw surface, you needed to lock it in RAM, and this acquired the Win16 mutex. So if you then called a GDI function to draw something, it deadlocked the machine.
- dcrazy 1y agoReminds me of how even well into the PowerPC era, much of Mac OS was still written in 68000 assembler, including QuickDraw (the equivalent of GDI).
- kristopolous 1y agoThe pressure to not fuck up windows 95 was immense. You have to appreciate the landscape then. You had os/2 not doing that well, Amiga not doing great, NeXT hurting, riscos kinda floundering and the failures of Windows 1 and 2. The risk of it not slapping was immensely high. A huge amount of the company was bet on it. They were risk adverse all over the place with the design, it's clear to see when you do a deep dive. And even then, people balked at things like the 8MB ram "recommendation", which was seen as expensive at the time. Even after the release and into 1996, large vendors were still shipping some computers with windows 3.1 - it was an option. It was really both a risky product and had to be done.
- icedchai 1y agoWindows 95 was a game changer, especially for Internet connectivity. The built-in "dial up networking" / PPP was huge. I was working at an ISP at the time, and remember how difficult it was to get customers to download Trumpet winsock and set it up for Windows 3.x. It could take hours with a difficult customer.
- Lammy 1y agoI recall the original Windows 95 release shipping with TCP/IP but the protocol having to be manually added in the Network CPL: https://eml.berkeley.edu/wp/win95/isp.html https://eml.berkeley.edu/wp/win95/isp.html
- icedchai 1y agoYes! This was still much easier than talking someone through downloading a Trumpet Winsock Zip with a comm program.
- toast0 1y agoI did support for a tiny ISP in 1999 [1], we had to have people remove and reinstall that from time to time. Many people could just do it, but I remember one customer I spent maybe two hours on the phone walking her through it. Would put her on hold when another call came in, and then check back with her. Eventually got it all settled. [1] we had one T1 for internet and one T1 PRI for the modem pool, and outsourced to MegaPath for out of area dialup, and then shunted all the customers to that when the PRI stopped working
- nicholasbraker 1y agoOw wow, worked ISP support in 1997 - 1999 and indeed recalled having to reinstall TCP/IP stack and tweaking setting to make stuff work. Next to that, gruesome installation of ISDN drivers (which technically were out of support for us) for a specific brand of ISDN modems the incumbent telco provided to customers.