OT: Teens react to windows 95

I skipped Win95, starting with WinNT, but I think that's the monitor I had... so heavy it took two of us to move it from its carton to the desk. ...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson | mens | | Analog Innovations | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

| 1962 | I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.

I had been running Linux with the X window system for more than 2.5 years when Windows 95 was first released. I would never have considered to spend the money on my 486 system if it could only have run DOS or Windows 3.11

Windows NT was actually released before Windows 95, somewhere in that timeframe.

I don't really remember anything but WinNT and then my wife got a PC with Win98... barf ;-) ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142     Skype: skypeanalog  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

That was a scream! I still have two ancient monitors like that. One is a Mag Innovision that I can't bear to throw away. They were soooo good at the time. It's in a box that my CRT type TV and VHS player use as a table. I can't throw away the VHS because it is the only way to connect a DVD player to the TV. lol

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Rick

On Tue, 08 Mar 2016 12:53:42 -0600, Joe Chisolm Gave us:

Quite funny to see just how oblivious folks are these days.

I think all kids should have to start out with an old DOS computer and a history course covering the advent of the computer from the BOMBE on up. THEN they get to become a user. Not before.

They do not need a cell phone for their parental unit to track them. They can all carry a GPS enabled pager.

And look how much bandwidth we would all get back.

Do you realize that part of the reason jobs got shipped OUT of this country is the MAJOR decline in manufacturing productivity?

I would not want to hire any of these dweebs, and my company would involve relinquishing one's cell phone at the door to the Mfg Lab.

The problem was that Microsoft did not want to sell its flagship OS at a price that a consumer could afford, and filled this price gap with a toy OS. Only starting at Windows XP those two lines were again merged and the consumer got access to a good OS.

Of course another problem was that the prices of memory and disk space were a lot higher and my 486 system with 16MB of RAM and 820MB of disk space was too expensive for a typical consumer as well.

(however, it ran an OS that did not have to be rebooted 3 times a day)

Had Win98 had NTFS, it would have been... better. Since the choice market they targeted after WFWG was Novell, I don't blame them.

FAT32 was just not ready for prime time. Too bad it's still so common.

Quite.

It wasn't *quite* that bad.

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Les Cargill

Wow, you had 16 MB of RAM, When I bought my Timex/Sinclar 1000, I splurged to get the 16k memory pack!

Mikek

Luxury. I used to have to share one bit with four others. But we were happy.

Cheers

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Syd

On Wed, 9 Mar 2016 15:48:17 +0000, Syd Rumpo Gave us:

My first machine with 16 MB RAM cost me $600 for the ram

Win3 might be better for that demo. Then DOS!

NT

I finally got a copy of NT when my Windows 95 half life reached an hour. Yes, it was "quite" that bad!

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Rick

I never saw anything that bad. That's deplorable. Of course it could have been anything - an application, probably.

Humorous story: I had crashy problems with a DAW program in Win98. After I got an XP machine, I downloaded the Sonar demo, which pops up a menu when a DAW plugin crashes. Turns out it was this one VST plugin doing all the crashing.

*Shudder*.

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Les Cargill

I think the problem with Win98 was buggy drivers, or so I've heard. NT was a *huge* improvement. I never looked back.

I remember using networking with NT based on info I got from a web site WOWN.com (world of windows networking). It had screen images of the various setup dialogs and was easy to follow even though networking was hard under NT. At some point the guy sold the site and it got trashed. I've not been able to do the same things with more recent versions of Windows even though many things are less complex, the overall process is still a mystery to me. Like sharing files between WinXP and Vista or Win8. Sounds simple but I can't seem to get it to work. I shared the entire drives between two NT machines or any portions. I saved disk space by keeping data sheets on one machine only.

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Rick

Back in the day, I think half the time I had to reboot because of stupid Adobe Reader 5.0.

"It may be possible to recover" was such a bizarre dialog. It was never possible!

If you're looking for it... is it on archive.org?

Well, first of all they need to be on the same network, and visible. Usually Windows for Workgroups style, no domain. One wrinkle between XP and 7+ is security: the older encryption/security method was deprecated and disabled by default. So, for example, you can remote-desktop from 7 into XP, but not the other way around. There's an administrative setting for that.

Same for file shares. I have a Win95 machine (mainly for historical purposes), the disk of which I can access via network from the other machines. But I can't access the other machines from '95. Backwards but not forwards compatibility.

The hardest part about M$ networking (or most things M$, really) is that so much stuff is hidden. Hmm, network is down.. why is it down? Because the little icon has a red 'x' on it!.. It takes work to access a usefully verbose listing of info. You'd probably have an easier time, if these things were apparent.

Tim

--
Seven Transistor Labs, LLC 
Electrical Engineering Consultation and Contract Design 
Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com

Of course I had systems with less RAM than that, but this was in 1992. My TRS-80 model I started out with 4KB, upgraded to 16KB and later to 64KB. And I had an Atari ST with 512KB upgraded to 1MB.

But when I read about this guy Linus who had written a Unix-compatible OS for the 386 PC and a local group who had compiled a distribution including X and networking, I put together that 486 system with 16MB.

In those days, that could run X with a 1024x768 screen and a couple of programs (including a browser like NCSA Mosaic). A few years later, it was also the requirement for running Windows 95. (8MB would probably boot but not really be useful)

In fact this is becoming worse and worse all the time! Probably they are proud that they are hiding all technical details from their users, but this makes it almost impossible to debug.

In my opinion, XP is still the best OS. Easy, fast, and functional. What has come after that loads the machine ever more, but when something is not working it keeps the cause and the expert panels to solve it hidden as much as possible.

Win 95 was a huge ripoff from a program called Desqview that was put out by a company called Quarterdeck.

Many years earlier I might add.

On Wed, 9 Mar 2016 18:30:52 -0800 (PST), snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com Gave us:

NOT!

DeskViewX was an X server capable desktop workstation OS, full GUI. DeskView was NOT.

DeskViewX (quarterdeck) had an agreement with Gates and MS to get the win32 api and be able to make a full windows app capable OS, but MS reneged on the deal and DeskViewX evaporated the very next year. OS/2 had the same agreement and also got screwed by MS.

It was quite a robust product and was the first consumer level workstation OS capable of doing 'distributed processing'. I could find an unused machine (Mary stayed home today) and run a CPU intensive app on that machine, passing only Keyboard and Mouse back to my workstation, keeping my machine fast and free to do other tasks locally.

Windows 95 was nowhere near that level. And DeskViewX was several Windows versions earlier, not just 95.