4 ms·
The 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 hu
by kristopolous 1y ago
The 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.
- icedchai 1y agoThis ISP was a bit earlier. They did move to T1 PRI eventually, but before that we had stacks of modems attached to Livingston Portmasters (I think?) There was basically an octopus of cables coming out of the wall, dozens of individual phone lines, then serial cables, power bricks, power strips three layers deep. It was also always like 100 degrees on one of the POPs. It looked like the plastic was melting on some of the modems.
- cbdevidal 1y agoI worked at an ISP in 1997 (the “You’ve got mail” one) and thankfully the software included a winsock. Our headaches were different; They had just come out with unlimited hours and busy signals were the cause of many complaints. After that got resolved, custom modem strings were really the only complicated bits.
- qwerty456127 1y ago> You had os/2 not doing that well, Amiga not doing great, NeXT hurting What was ever wrong with these? I never actually used them but everything I know about them sounds fantastic.
- rewgs 1y agoThey were great operating systems hampered by various business missteps.
- icedchai 1y agoI loved the Amiga, but it was basically dead by 1995. Commodore had gone bankrupt, the hardware had stagnated for years, and it was impossible to add modern features like memory protection to the OS.
- pjmlp 1y agoMemory protection was there on the last models, with the 68030. For example with a Cobra expansion card, https://amiga.resource.cx/exp/cobra https://amiga.resource.cx/exp/cobra
- fredoralive 1y agoThe CPU was capable, Amiga OS wasn't.
- bombcar 1y ago