OT;W98 popularity

Can someone tell me why people on Ebay are bidding over $50 USD for Windows

98SE? (Besides the usual auction fever.) Why are people willing to pay so much for a really old op system?
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Jim Yanik
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Reply to
Jim Yanik
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Perhaps to save money on retail copies of the OS. For example, the full version of XP Pro is something like $300 retail, but the upgrade version is allot less (more than $50 less, but I don't know the exact amount).

Reply to
Anthony Fremont

Jim Yanik wrote in news:Xns9999ABEF44866jyanikkuanet@64.209.0.84:

It does qualify for an XP OS upgrade original OS.

I do keep an old 98 machine running myself, I got specifically to run older apps and games, and do DOS/IO stuff. Plus this machine (a mid sized uATX desktop Celeron-500) leaves a smaller power "footprint" than my full desktop systems.

Reply to
Gary Tait

Ya might as well run Knoppix Linux then...

I had the (dis)pleasure of trying to use a Flash disk to retrieve files from a Win98 laptop. Couldn't find drivers on the '98 disk...

*eventually* got the thing to work by using my Creative .mp3 player and installing Creative's .mp3 drivers on the drive. All this in a third-world country, where I had to run to an internet cafe to download Creative's drivers...

Michael

Reply to
mrdarrett

There's a lot of stuff out there ( comms apps, printer port apps using JTAG, programmers and other hardware) that will just not run on XP. It's even worse if you try Vista.... Plus modern machines are now lacking the printer port and often even don't have a com port. Totally crap for hardware engineers. OK if you want to look at pictures from your camera :(

Reply to
TT_Man

Only for hack engineers. USB, PCI, etc. are far better general-purpose busses than "the parallel port." If you need general purpose I/O on a PC today, a PCI or USB box is far better than trying to press the parallel port into service.

RS-232 (a comm port) is a perfectly reasonable interfaces, albeit slow and not plug and play. USB is generally much better, except in some nichey cases that require very low latency (in which case running a modern OS such as Windows probably isn't a good idea anyway).

I guess what I'm really saying is that... parallel ports and comm ports and writing directly to the hardware made sense when DOS was the OS of choice. They don't make nearly as much sense with any modern OS... Windows, Linux, or the Mac OS.

Reply to
Joel Kolstad

I use Win98SE a lot. For one thing, the DOS box is real not some faux thing that doesn't work well. And I still use DOS tools for a variety of work. Another is that DOS and Win98SE actually run pretty well on some small-resourced embedded x86 boxes. Handy to maintain some familiarity with that. Since I do embedded work, a lot of old products require old tools, too. To support them, I need the O/S they relied upon.

But probably the main reason (not DOS per se but using Win98SE itself) for still using Win98SE here is that my business model has me swapping out hard disks. I keep all disks in drawers and each project comes with it's own disk and all of the associated software installed, as needed. This means that if one project screws up and writes all over all disks on the machine, the only damage is to that project and to no other projects. No partitions or other disks exposed to risk. It also means the same machine can be used for linux, FreeBSD, Win98SE, etc. I just slap in the disk and boot.

If I were to try this with WinXP, for example, I'd have to get a seperate license for each and every configuration. Doesn't fit my work model here. A serious mismatch.

Of course, I don't need to buy Win98SE, as I purchased by license and copy a very long time ago and still have that and other incarnations going all the way back to Win286 and Win386, the first even slightly useful versions of Windows.

Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan

You could always keep one "OS" hard drive installed and swap out the "Data" drives.

This is perhaps not quite as clean in that you still need to keep, e.g., all the drivers for all the projects you're working on installed at once, but on the other hand you don't have to apply security patches to, e.g., 10 different project hard drives either.

I don't know the particulars of Windows licensing, but it's hard to imagine that Bill Gates truly thinks you're ripping him off if you're just swapping hard drives in the same machine all day (but only have one physical PC), regardless of the OS in use.

Reply to
Joel Kolstad

It's not at all clean. There are many complexities to that arrangement. Been there, tried it many times, have the scars.

What works very well is having everything stored on a single disk that is also the boot disk. Used to be, disks were expensive. Today, I can flash drives with more space on them than I ever had available under Win98 for about $20. Hard drives, when you can find the small ones that aren't selling all that well, are dirt cheap too. Even the big ones aren't all that bad, these days.

I can't speak for Microsoft on this. Their policies and the legal environment itself have grown almost to the point where a team of lawyers is required to know in detail where all this stands. What I observe, though, is that I must call Microsoft to convince them each time. Their only "normal" excuse here is that I'm swapping out a disk because it broke down. They don't expect this to happen often, so when I start calling in bursts of 10-fold, telling them I'm copying over an existing project to a new disk to make sure it is preserved well or else setting up a new project... they have problems with the idea. It's not a well worn path for them. Also, it puts me behind the 8-ball, in that I have to call and get permission, at all.

In the case of Win98SE none of that occurs. It's entirely in my own power, I need hold to no one, and I can do as I please independently of anyone else's "mood of the day" about it.

Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan

1) There's the **used to it** factor. 2) They can't find XP drivers for their old hardware and don't want to shell out for new hardware. 3) They don't know about BitTorrent. 4) Some folks are assimilated
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and turn to face Redmond whenever they hear "software". (The upgrade path has been mentioned.)
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5) No hassles with licensing / Product Activation (WPA/WGA). 8-( 6) Some folks don't know they can get an OS gratis

--delivered to their door (still gratis):

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*-*-*-weeks+consider.downloading+request.CDs&strip=1 ...and it's completely legit (unlike those back-alley "free" OSes).

...or (for really underpowered gear):

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Reply to
JeffM

J>I can't speak for Microsoft on this. Their policies and the legal

It's an old story by now. I thought everyone had heard it.

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$65000+*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-treats-us-poorly+$35000+evening-news Corps jumping thru hoops for the Borg is so 20th Century.

Reply to
JeffM

Not that I'm particularly interested in switching to XP , but I read that page as saying that this compatibility matrix simply means whether or not a "retail upgrade package of Windows XP Professional" will allow itself to upgrade the system. Nothing more. I'm curious about the "gratis" comment. Can you expand on that?

thanks, Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan

I already bit the bullet there, too.

Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan

"Better" except for the fact that you have to junk your old kit and buy new stuff.

Or some nichey cases that require interfacing to something which has an RS-232 port but doesn't have a USB port. USB-to-serial converters have an annoying tendency not to work with anything other than mass-market products.

Win95/98/ME is just DOS, plus a bundled copy of a DOS program which looks a bit like Windows.

Very little in computing "makes sense" unless you consider the (much) larger picture.

If the industry is so determined to get rid of legacy baggage, maybe they should start with some of the more harmful baggage, e.g. 3+GHz, 64-bit CPUs which are hamstrung by the requirement for 8086 compatibility.

Reply to
Nobody

Boy are YOU stupid.

The OEM version can be had a LOT cheaper!

Reply to
RoyLFuchs

You're not too bright... either then.

The Knoppix 5.1.1 DVD was ALL you needed for all of the above.

Fuck a bunch of "cafe" horseshit!

Reply to
ChairmanOfTheBored

Vista returned to us the DOS VDM, and it is better than it ever was!

Then, there is DOSBox, which is ALSO AWESOME! Imagine your 640x480 legacy OrCAD schematic capture app running in a 1280x1024 OpenGL upscaled FS or window! TANGO PCB ALSO! Fuck a bunch of low res driver jaggies! This shit WORKS!

VISTA Ultimate FOREVER! (on a 32" display!) Bwuahhahahahaha.. All you nay sayers can eat shit... and CRY!

Billy came through this time. I won't be upgrading my Vista Ultimate, OR my OFFICE PRO 2007 for at least a decade! Both are sweet, and the Office product is MILES above it's predecessor!

All you wait and see dopes don't know what you are missing!

Reply to
ChairmanOfTheBored

Damn... you got one right!

One could, however, write an app that hits the port directly, and bypasses the OS handling slowdowns... Happens everyday.

Good example: LabView.

Reply to
ChairmanOfTheBored

Linux and MAC OS X+ hit the ports in fine... short order.

Reply to
ChairmanOfTheBored

If you have to "junk your old kit" to run Vista... you needed to junk your old kit to begin with. You'll thank yourself for adding that 320MB vid card one day, dumbass.

Reply to
RoyLFuchs

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