Gives me PTSD-like flashbacks to the time when I was tasked with installing Windows 95 on 50+ computers on the local school.
For the young(er), Windows was on 14-ish 3.5" floppy disks, and I had to do some heavy calculation and logistics copying those discs while installing the OS to make my effort as efficient as possible.
IIRC, I managed to keep the installing cyclus going on 28 computers at a time, and finished the whole task during a very long Saturday and Sunday.
Back in those days re-formatting and re-installing Windows was a very common thing because usually the system would get into some kind of bad state after several months of usage (or at least mine did).
I believe I only had a Windows 98 'Upgrade' CD, which could not be used to install on a bare system. This meant I had to first install a previous copy Windows, which in my case was Windows 95 on floppy disks (and I feel like it was 20 disks, at least for my installation).
This worked fine until one re-install disk 15 decided to fail on me. I managed to hack it back together by copying the files that were still accessible to a different computer and then copying them to a blank floppy together with the missing files from the running system's Windows folder (I think it was a couple of dlls that were unreadable). I was surprised that it worked.
Windows 95/98 definitely decayed over time. Especially after installing stuff like AOL and RealPlayer, your system was like a disgusting cesspool of random trash. I distinctly remember nuking the entire thing would noticeably increase my frame rate in stuff like Homeworld lol
I stopped doing it around Windows 7 and have not really seen an issue. I have Windows 10 installations that date back to the original Windows 10 release (and have been updated with Windows Update all the way up to the current) and they are running perfectly fine.
That being said, I feel like I install much less software than I used to. They used to hand out CDs with computer magazines that were basically dumps of random quality freeware/shareware. The amount of registry items and other such crap that kind of software left lying around is probably a large reason why a re-format was required so often.
That being said, I think many people underestimated increased processing power over ages.
1gb of ram on win 7 equals 4 times of 256 mb win 98 era. With 8gb it's 32 times larger. That's just ram though, not to mention processing power between pentium 3-4 with multicore i series.
The difference in ram caching and cpu processing is big that some additional process won't give much problem.
I would say vista. Many programs would go out of their way to mess with the windows\system32 folder. MS locked most of that out. WinSxS fixed many of the issues where you needed to play around in system32. They also added in a huge chunk of 'compatibility' they would ship in the registry of programs they know are messed up with particular combinations of dlls. The downside of winsxs is cleanup. It was not until late in the lifecycle of win7 they added some way to purge old junk out of it.
Reinstalling Windows XP SP 2 on my computer growing up was one of the first things that got interested in what was going on at the operating system level. I found Windows XP Inside Out around the house, read it over so many times, and eventually re-installed it on my computer for fun.
I was floored to realize how much faster things were. No wait time for a Windows Explorer window to open. Everything was snappy, even after reinstalling games and antivirus. It blew my mind.
I still think it helps, but with a much longer tail on the frequency required. Windows XP definitely grew slow over time though, whether that was due to installing programs, caches I could’ve cleared with CClearner, or more incremental updating. We leave a lot on the OS over time.
I had the same experience with Windows XP growing up. Very few months I would reinstall my desktop computer that ran WinXP, and I did the same with the laptop I had after that which was also running WinXP. During that time I used to install a lot of random freeware and shareware and trial software and games and game demos. And probably those things were leaving stuff behind like you guys said.
The very first time I reinstalled WinXP was shortly after I got my first computer of my own for my 12th birthday. I was tinkering with some of the files, and discovered that I could open .cur cursor files in MS Paint. I edited one of the cursor files, saved it as a bmp and renamed the file to .cur under the assumption that this would work. Set my custom cur file as cursor and logged out. When I tried to log back in I couldn’t. Whoops. Freaked out for a second thinking I had broken everything. Remembered that there was a red floppy disk with an ambulance on it that came with the computer. Rebooted the machine with the red floppy disk and reinstalled Windows. Lost my files but had nothing valuable at the time anyways. Have lost more valuable data since then. And expect to lose more data in the future still :p
My most painful data loss was when I tried a Windows "alternative" called "Lindows" [0]. Touted as "Linux, but easy like Windows!."
So I put the disk in, and it says something like "Do you want to install Lindows?" with no options, no warnings or anything. So I hit Yes/Okay/whatever the single button on the screen was, and without zero warning, it proceeded to wipe my entire hard drive.
Every once in a while since I switched back to windows a couple years ago I’m tempted to fresh install… then I remember my machine still runs perfectly fast
many things like low level gaming api wouldn't work, and FYI we talk about ages when virtualization was at its infancy at best (Windows 95 era there was none that I am aware of for consumer PCs, XP era still super basic, quirky and resource hungry)
People running VMs aren't trying to play games on them though, are they? Seems like the best reason for VMs and refreshing back to start each time is perfect for freedom fighters and others web surfers that don't want their host system polluted by bullshit developer's and their internet games.
I have to think that at least with modern phone OSes, apps are so compartmentalized, that there really isn’t an opportunity to pollute your entire phone.
But feel free to look at all the extensions and bullshit you have in your browsers and bash shell
If you moved the same installation between different motherboards, the decay happened alarmingly fast. After 2 or 3, you're lucky if it doesn't bluescreen every hour or two.
This is why I would create a c:\wininst folder and dump the CD worth of files. When I needed to do an OS reinstall, I'd boot to DOS mode, cd \wininst, and do the install from hard drive to hard drive. Much MUCH faster and much MUCH less painful.
Having the CD dump on the hard drive was a must in the Windows 9x days because every time you would want to add a device, a network protocol or whatever it would ask you to insert the CD. I rarely ever installed from the actual CD directly but always copied it to the hard drive first. Obviously there there were exceptions because some computers just had too little of HDD space so you had to save it for your user files and the apps to be installed (this also is the case with 120 GB MacBooks nowadays - I can't afford a Windows VM on it).
I don't think there any modern tech modern that can induce the stomach-turning horror of hearing hearing the pitiful, repetitive grinding of the floppy drive motor that presaged a "Cyclic Redundancy Check error"
it comes close, but it's not as visceral to me. I guess it doesn't happen often to me, and considering how cheap storage has become, I can always download what was on the HDD or recover from backups. The data I had on floppy disks were more often than not, the only copy I had access to.
I once had a CD shatter inside the drive, followed by sounding like a cross between an angle grinder against metal and a blender full of rocks. It was hideous.
I wonder if you could build a modern-ish browser on Windows 98 and use it as a minimalist daily driver? Give me a modern browser, bash shell (perhaps an old version of cygwin?), and a decent text editor and I probably could for the most part. I'd have to really get in the '90s spirit and break out the cassette deck though because running an obese Electron app like Tidal would probably be difficult.
I guess you're limited to 3.5 GB of memory too what with Windows 98 being a 32-bit operating system which might be a pain, and perhaps a bigger problem is that no drivers have been written for a couple of decades.
I’m only seeing one sealed Windows 95 floppy retail box on eBay at the moment, and even though it’s sealed it looks to be in poor condition. Plus I am skeptical that it’s even the original sealing. Could have been resealed. And they want about $200 for it plus shipping.
One time I wanted to tweak my graphics on Windows 3.1. Normal VGA with 640x480 was no problem to configure since it could use some kind of generic drivers. So eventually I choose one of the SVGA modes with 800x600 and after restarting the screen was just dark. Luckily I managed to undo the settings with the keyboard and a blank screen. IIRC the settings for that were quite exposed and it worked. However, countless times where I lost my system setup.
> usually the system would get into some kind of bad state after several months of usage (or at least mine did)
Sometimes some part of the bad state would go okay again for me after some more months of waiting. E.g. the system would only go past the Windows 95 loading screen after opening and closing the CD-ROM drive but at some point that problem would disappear.
I remember the same eventual "system got into broken state" issue on a laptop with XP. After reinstalling everything the third time (including wireless network drivers from a USB drive and at least a billion service packs shudder) I figured out how to take a disk image with a linux live-cd and save a clean iso of a fresh install with updates and my preferred programs pre-installed onto a separate partition where I also carefully mapped all my user data directories. If windows started being screwy I'd pop in the LiveCD, run some commands to format the OS partition and reimage it from the iso on the data partition, and after applying a couple of patches I'd be up and running again. I think I got the whole process down to like 30 minutes at one point.
After several months of use? One summer around that time I used to remember my w95 serial key by heart :) It was not only that windows would eventually get in some kind of bad state, it was also me: a young kid learning on his sole computing capable device (ie no spare laptop/smartphone) with no internet connection to search google/youtube/so/etc for solutions to problems
> Back in those days re-formatting and re-installing Windows was a very common thing because usually the system would get into some kind of bad state after several months of usage (or at least mine did).
I actually still do that with Windows 10, about once a year I start over. I have a chocolatey command to re-install 90% of my software.
>I believe I only had a Windows 98 'Upgrade' CD, which could not be used to install on a bare system.
As I recall it, there was actually a minimal set of files needed to trigger the CD to install and you didn't actually need a full 95 install. I worked at a shop at the time and remember doing a lot of reinstalls from those upgrade disks and we definitely didn't spend the time to reinstall both OSs.
I tried searching and the closest I could find was that win95 upgrade would do a full install if you told it to find the old win3.1 on the win3.1 install floppy. I vaguely remember doing something similar, so either it was those versions (unlikely, but possible) or later versions had the same trick.
We definitely did a lot of full windows installs from the upgrade disks without installing the full previous OS first.
22 floppies if I remember correctly. I was in charge of our high school lab, and the floppies were old. No 14 was prone to the dreaded: retry, abort, ignore dialog box
I babied mine extremely hard, and didn't re-install for some years. But then I needed to and I could no longer install my sound card drivers (at which point I was forced to migrate to XP)
I learned computers because in 1996 I was completely ignorant and a little kid who decided to drag everything into the recycle bin because I thought it would be 'recycled' back into place but really it just destroyed windows enough that I had to learn how to reinstall from floppies created in DOS
I like how old OSes let you place anything in the recycle bin, or remove system files without permission (because the concept barely existed).
Simplicity at the extreme. I miss those times where hacking and learning was as easy as breaking things and repairing them. But I think this also was a source of fear against computers for most people : if I click on the wrong place, it will break and cost money.
Nowadays systems are nearly unbreakable, and that’s cool, but o boy when they break, good luck finding why.
The concept of permissions existed far before Win95 launch. At least on Unix and WinNT. As a Unix and WinNT seller, Microsoft knows it perfectly. It was also not possible on Macos to through system files in the trash bin.
Hahahaha.. same thing I did. I didn't realise there is a thing called hidden files.. I went to a folder in system32 and it seemed empty to me.. I was like let's delete it.. I deleted some 10-20 folders like these and when I try to restart the OS.. it wouldn't load.
Microsoft historically used the 21 512 byte sector, 80 track, double-sided DMF format for 3 1/2" Windows installation media, yielding 1,720,320 bytes per floppy.
Assuming this format, floppy requirements for the four Windows 10 21H1 variants currently on MSDN are
x64 Consumer (Home/Pro): 3,398 floppies
x64 Business (Enterprise/Education): 3,323 floppies
x86 Consumer: 2,416 floppies
x86 Business: 2,361 floppies
Assuming the "1.44 MB" (18 512 byte sector, 80 track, double-sided) format, you'd need
x64 Consumer: 3,965 floppies
x64 Business: 3,876 floppies
x86 Consumer: 2,819 floppies
x86 Business: 2,755 floppies
In this case, assuming the most popular (x64) platform, you'd actually need closer to 4,000 floppies.
Assuming ideal 500 kbit/sec performance and two seconds per disk swap, reading 4,000 "1.44 MB" floppies (or DMF floppies with equivalent data) would take just under 28 1/2 hours.
So you could easily install any Windows 10 21H1 version from floppies in the course of a single work week, with enough time left over, perhaps, to check Windows Update over a 56 kbps modem (though you'd probably need the weekend, at least, to actually download the updates).
I just want to quietly grumble, like an appropriately crotchety old man... '3.5" floppies? Bah! Try 8", and they were really floppy! Try installing AT&T Unix from those...'
I still feel that OS/2 Warp feels more valuable in ones hands, just because of the sheer weight of it… (compared to modern OSes that have no weight because I download them…)
The research org where I was interning bought OS/2 1.2 for a project and I loved it. When 2.0 came out I called the local IBM site (this was in Stuttgart Germany) and they told me "we have a new beta program, just bring 20 3.5" floppies and you can copy it, no questions asked". I went there, did the deed and the guy told me. You want the SDK and C compiler as well? Come back with 20 more floppies. You can bet I was back the next day.
In middle school I was taught that 5.25" diskettes were "floppies", and 3.5" diskettes were "hard disks", because of the hard plastic case. It was awesome.
It's been so long since I've seen the word "diskette" that upon seeing it, I just had a crazy a-ha moment: could it be that the convention of "disk=magnetic, disc=optical" is based on the fact that they were all originally discs but the c was changed to k for magnetic media in order to facilitate the spelling of diskette (since discette with a c doesn't really work)? Or put another way, disk is just an abbreviated version of diskette which is a small disc, and therefore a tiny optical disc might also be rightfully called a disk?
I prefer your explanation, but I suspect it's also a chain of events from "Edison Disc Record" to "Compact Disc". The link is "Audio", absent from both product names.
Maybe it will just be called an "audio" someday! "Hey, I have an audio of that new band Named!" Hooray, it works in a sentence. Sold.
The CMX video editor I learned to edit on used these. By the time I was learning on it in '92, it was already an old system but still the top system. All it held was text based EDLs, so it didn't need a lot of space. Once the smaller hub based tapes like 30min BCSP/Digibeta were available, the floppy holding the EDL was bigger than the tape holding the image data. I kinda miss the old tape based edit rooms.
I do not recall greasing HDDs (the 70's Control Data drives, the ones that looked like top loading washing mashing inserts, yes you had to lube those), but the Seagate 40MB HDDs (to me the first real consumer HDD) had a bearing lubricant problem, where it would get too thin over time and mess up timing.
The solution was to put it in the fridge for a few minutes, read as much as possible off before the lube got thin again.
The tribal knowledge why we put very specific HDDs in the fridge got lost, but people still stick failing HDDs into fridges... go figure.
Fond memories of installing Slackware from floppies for me. Sure, USB dongles are better, and floppy disks corrupted if you looked at them funny, but inside of those floppies was magic for 15 year old me :)
E: back when we had 28k and 56k dial up modems (think 2-6KB per second) the computer was more of its own universe. I learned Linux through info and man and internet resources for bigger concepts. O’Reilly books were great back then. I learned so much that is still with me today because it’s what I had available and it was still and expansive universe. How small and limiting it would feel by today’s standards.
I was thinking about how we did things back then, and Norton Ghost came up - allowing you to create and restore system images, for either easy recovery or installation. But it was only made in 1995 and only bought and distributed by Norton in 1998, so a bit later than the Windows 95 era.
Still, a godsend for multi installs and undoing the abuse from the youth.
Actually installing Windows 95 on every machine was never really necessary. You could just install it once, configure it and clone the hard drive. Even actual cloning was not necessary - you could just copy the hard drive contents with a reasonable file manager like Total Commander (which was called Windows Commander those days).
Good luck convincing the nervous principal of a semi-rural Texas high school in 1997 that he should let some teenage girl go at his expensive computer labs with a screwdriver…
$6.50/hr rotating diskettes around computer rooms >>> $4.35/hr sweeping hair and cleaning toilets at a beauty shop
Our copy of Windows 95 was on a CD, but it still needed a floppy boot disk (I don't think CD booting was a thing for another few years). I hated using floppy disks and hated booted from them the most. I always had the feeling it just wasn't going to work and now I had no way to boot my computer at all.
Yeah, I needed to do that even with XP because I had an early SATA computer.
Later I learnt you could customise the Windows CD, burn it yourself and include service packs, drivers etc. on it. That saved a lot of time (because back then, reinstalling every few months was a thing).
Off topic but it's funny to me how seemingly everyone in this writes "floppy disk" correctly with a "k" but writes "discs" (when still talking about the floppy disks) incorrectly with a "c". Must be a habit when not adding floppy in front!
It is funny. I looked it up and apparently the spelling of the general work "disc" (meaning, thin circular thing) is disc in British and disk in American. But universally it's disk for floppy disks and hard disks and disc for compact discs, DVDs etc. My theory is "disc" looks a bit more "modern" for some reason, hence using it for the newer media. For me (a British speaker), it seems totally natural to use "disk" for floppies and hard disks, but disc otherwise.
I remember those floppies... The 8th disk was kinda finicky on older hardware. I think that's where the installer actually tried to switch from DOS to Windows mode. If it failed for whatever reason, you had to start again from the 1st disk.
Funny.. my least favorite part of floppy installs of Debian is that it had exactly the opposite problem: reading floppies was hit-or-miss until _after_ disk 2 or 3.
The weather might help, as well as the phase of the moon.
But you could be a little more scientific and try different parameters once you went back to disk 1. Maybe also remove some of the more questionable drivers or memory-saving tweaks from your DOS configuration while you were at it. Or perhaps it was just a flaky floppy drive that randomly flipped a bit somewhere.
I had the install disks copied to a Novell server and then xcopied them to c:\install\win95\ and then ran setup in that directory. It went faster than swapping floppies.
The CD version would have saved you a bunch of time, too. It was also fun to have the CD around even after the installs because it had a couple of bonuses (given all the extra space it had) like the "classic" videogame Hover! [1] and the music video of Weezer's Buddy Holly.
I give a little prayer to people like you when I add a few more numbers to my “matrix” field in GitHub actions and spin up 4 more machines in parallel.
I still remember the excitement when the second grade me copied _all_ applications from my school computer and they fitted in a single floppy disk and the frustration when I couldn't launch any of them on my home computer. It took me a week to realize that what I copied were desktop shortcuts and that's different from the software.
My school got students to do the work of maintaining these computers! But they bribed us with our own room in the library with a handful of computers with admin access, so we could play games. And we had Norton Ghost, so re-imaging was a breeze.
Been there, 60+ computers in a call center over a weekend. Computers were PS/2 model 95s originally running OS/2 in Spanish, needed network card installs, windows 95 (in English), new US keyboards and a Netware client stack.
I had a Backpack parallel printer port hard drive back then. I could boot my DOS floppy with the driver, and have full access to 300 megabytes of stuff. It made installing stuff so much easier.
I don't think it is nostalgia, I'd say that Windows 2000 was the peak when it comes to usability, and XP, Vista and 7 made it prettier, taking advantage of improved graphics hardware. And then Windows 8 arrived and broke everything.
It is easy to find the culprit: tablets, and mobile devices in general, and to a lesser extent, web apps.
Mobile devices needed a new kind of UI, something suitable for small touch screens. People tried things, apparently they are still trying, because it is a mess.
But now, we have another problem. Desktop UIs and Mobile UIs are very different. And this, in itself, is a bad thing. Mobile and desktop computers do a lot of the same thing, you shouldn't have to learn how to do it twice. So they tried to unify, and in the process, lost decades of UI refinement.
The next issue is portability. We have web apps, Desktop UIs, Mobile UIs, different OSes, etc... Developers don't want to make a different UI for every system, and users want consistency. The least common denominator is the web browser, so designers use that, but the web is made for documents, it is terrible for apps, but clever devs make do.
So as you see, we now have a lot of hard problems to solve at the same time, and the desktop UI became part of it.
> The flat "Metro" UI style was initially modeled and developed on Windows Phone 7,
Originally it was for Zune, which inspired Windows Phone 7, and then it was horrifically mangled for Windows 8.
WP7 Metro had a ton of affordances to make the phone easy to use, things like scrollable pages of content should always show a peek of content that is below the current view, so users know there is more content down below.
and it had its merits (from a phone-centric view) but the (crappy) UI remained even when there was not any more need for it (and a Windows 2000/Windows 7 like one would be much more suitable to laptos/desktops or anyway for no-touch devices).
The old design makes easier to grasp things at a glance, especially in Control Panel. Each icon has a distinct shape and color, in contrast with Windows 10 Settings app that has much more abstract monochrome icons that are difficult to tell apart.
Monochrome vector icons make things like dark mode easier to implement. Such small software shops like Microsoft unfortunately cannot afford to hire designers to do multiple sets of icons.
The new Windows 11 Settings icons are pretty fantastic— full color and lots of distinctive shapes.
Unfortunately, we’ll probably be at Windows 20 before the last of the Windows 8-style monochrome icons finally finds its way out of Windows, because that’s how things go at Microsoft. (It’s harder than it used to be, but I’m pretty sure you can still find a few Windows 95-era icons hanging around, and there are definitely still some 2000 icons in there).
moricons.dll (and a lot of the stuff you'll find in shell32.dll and elsewhere) is a compatibility relic; those icons are no longer used by Windows itself. There are still some lingering old icons in the UI, though.
Also, many of the DOS applications with icons in moricons.dll probably still run in 32-bit Windows 10. NTVDM and DOS application support don't exist in 64-bit Windows, but they're still alive and well in 32-bit Windows (albeit an optional install, because MS would really rather people not still be using DOS applications in 2021).
excellent! I've been looking for a thorough examination of this for awhile. I'm glad it specifically showed moricons.dll, which I remember finding as far back as Windows 98 when looking for icons
And yet Windows 95 (and all Windows from 3.1 to Vista) let the user set up global color schemes that were inherited by all applications. I set up a "dark" mode in the early '90s and used it until Microsoft inexplicably REMOVED the entire color-scheme editor... just as everyone started to realize how dumb inverse (black text on white) color schemes are.
The mere presence of buttons that look like buttons, and static text that looks like static text, is innumerably better than the "ambiguous text and icons floating in a sea of flat white/blackspace" that UIs today seem to mostly consist of.
I feel this way about interactions on mobile. I grew up using Android and still have my phone on 3 buttons mode because it seems obvious. Have been using iDevices for work and some of the tap and swipe gestures are so unintuitive, along with the flat text as buttons. It feels like Apple decided "people that use our devices know this already."
There’s an accessibility option to display buttons with an outline. I have enabled that for some relatives as they are also confused by the (lack of) design. All hail flat design, sigh.
A lot of that (dis)credit historically goes to Jonny Ive. Every UI mostly just copied the flat, glassy look. KDE had flatter icons - but not in such disruptive way. They were still skeumorphic
You can scan an interface of this fashion and be almost certain about what is a button, what is a scroll bar, what is a text input, etcetera.
While with Windows 8+ the flat UI lets a huge space for ambiguity and causes a bigger cognitive load to the user, who is forced to tell things between flat rectangles and lines.
Consistency is boring, and HTML makes it entirely too easy to do entirely your own thing. The result is most modern designers are trying to make a design that wows people at a glance, which is often at odds with actual usability and discoverability. UI design is basically fashion now, with passing fads and everything. Conforming to any kind of standard makes you look dated.
I wish we could somehow force people to use a standard toolkit again, but I think the cat is out of the bag.
I remember back in the 90's, when Apple and Microsoft bragged about having big UI labs where they tried to take a scientific approach to UI design where they'd try out minor UI tweaks on users and observe what worked and what didn't.
Looking at the designs coming out of both companies now (but mostly Apple) it's extremely clear they they are designed just to look "fresh" and "pretty" with no real justification behind it.
> I wish we could somehow force people to use a standard toolkit again
To be fair, in the 90's, there were plenty of crazily themed programs. Basically any media playing app seemed required to have some insane theme (WinAmp is fondly remembered but that was also a non-standard UI, which was so poorly-designed they needed a button to double the size of it so you could hit some buttons easier). Every PC sound card came with a suite of programs that tried to mimic the appearance of a home Hi-Fi system complete with 7-segment displays and fake cassette tape reels.
I can't imagine Microsoft designers doing the mockups for Windows in HTML/CSS, but you bring an interesting point - how the web, which afaik at its very beginning was intended for text (and multimedia), eventually brought UIs.
And yes, on text you'd want a minimal UI. You don't see books with flashy things everywhere competing for your attention, maybe excepting kids' books.
My guess is that, as someone already pointed about design doing a full circle again in a few years, it already has happened in the web several times - plain text and 'brutalist' design, then the native UI controls that had to be used within web interfaces, then skeumorphic design to compensate for the native UI controls, then you could style those UI controls as you wished, then flattening all the design again because most of web is text.
> You can scan an interface of this fashion and be almost certain about what is a button, what is a scroll bar, what is a text input, etcetera.
Bingo. This is exactly it for me, right here. Being able to tell what I can click on and expect it to do something, at a glance and without having to guess is the killer feature, IMO. How did we lose our way so badly that "can I click on this thing?" even became a reasonable question to ask of a modern UI?
I feel like we got so close with windows phone 7, which used the flat UI but had an utterly merciless and unforgiving level of standardization. Colored rectangle meant button. White rectangle meant textbox. You don't get to put your personal brand on this.
You might like XFCE and Xubuntu, it gives me a big Windows 95 feel after making a few tweaks like moving the taskbar to bottom. You can even go wild and go full Windows 95 theme: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 It's kind of fun to have the retro looks and a bleeding edge Linux kernel.
To be fair the start button at the time was _huge_ and had never been seen before by most PC users. I remember a ton of the Windows 95 advertising, and every single getting started guide spent a ton of time explaining that you just had to click the start button to start doing anything. If you plopped win 95 in front of someone with very little computer experience at the time they'd be pretty confused and try to open all the stuff on the desktop (like how macs worked at the time).
There's definitely something alluring about "outdated" interfaces.
When a product manager asks me to make something look more "modern" these days that usually ends up being code for flattening the UI by eliminating signifiers/affordances like button borders, link indicators, scroll bars, etc. I thought skeuomorphism was garish, but at least it provided the occasional helpful metaphor.
Gotta give it up to the creator of this - the UI is very snappy. Well done!
I don't remember my experiences on an old Pentium-class processor being the same (except for that old work machine with a dual-proc. NT on a dualie was quite nice for the late 90s)
I like my Windows 10 UI. I'd miss a lot of things if I were using an earlier Windows. That said, I prefer Linux UX, since I can (and do) make it what I want (and it turns out nothing like Win 10).
Tech does a lot of circles. I'm convinced it's some combination of short memory and attention span in industry, industry management, or consumers. Sometimes it's about reapproaching old problems with similar approaches where something is slightly different or new. A lot of times it's just as if people forgot or don't check the history.
I forget are we thin or thick clients these days? I guess you have a thick thin client - you need decent specs to run a browser, but then you just show whatever the mainframe serves up.
It’s the lack of thinly veiled, or even outright advertisements. UIs are no longer designed for usability, but for manipulation and greater conversions
Not sure, but I definitely preferred the way windows older UIs made sure to register each keypress. Nowadays when windows has a performance hiccough I need to wait a few seconds to find out which part of my input it actually got. This is especially bad with input fields that are supposed to appear when you type.
Include other OSes UIs as well. I think those older UI look better because they are ergonomic. To me this quality is way more important than aesthetics.
I think this is the nicest one of these I've seen—seems to actually work in a non-superficial way, from the package manager, shell, system settings, chat app, "p3" ("pseudo peer-to-peer"), system backup (downloads filesystem contents as zip), to running Half-life Uplink or Doom.
Seems like if you were a deeply unusual person you could actually do some computing in here :) main thing missing is a browser.
What I liked most about .mod files is that you could actually open them directly in the editors and see how they were made, quite fun to do that with old games that still used this format (Death Rally, DX-ball 2, Unreal (Tournament)).
Cute messages are ok sometimes, they’re easy to make aggravating though.
Like on Smugmug, which is generally a great product, when you try to delete a photo it has a message like “Do you really want to say good bye to … .jpg”
Imagine if that was a photo of your dead grandma or worse
That's not what I meant, but I knew a guy whose brother couldn't attend their grandma's open casket funeral due to being overseas and took photos there to show him.
For example, if you took a photo of her while she was alive and still want to keep it in an offline backup, but don't want it in your face every time you open up the website.
Please no. For me it's fun once, then it starts to get annoying and feels iditoic. I've grown to like my error messages as clear and unambiguous as possible (What is 'damn' going to do? Is it 'ok'? Is it 'cancel'? Is it 'reboot'?). Luckily that one is not a real application. 'guru meditation error' is though. Haha, such fun :]
Turns out that while hardware has become several orders of magnitude more powerful, software has degraded to the point that it makes no real difference.
It is way snappier than it was on any hardware back then, windows movements animate much better etc. Those were the times without any GPU help, running it all on some anemic 486 with maybe 16 MB of RAM and super slow and noisy HDDs which swapped constantly.
Nicely done! I'm kinda obsessed with these "Web Desktops" or whatever you wanna call them.
I've attempted something similar a few times. Currently working on a year long side project to do something with tons of features that looks like Windows 10.
hi, this is from someone who has access to this prompt and contact with the site devs, this is actually for testing of prerelease versions of this "WebOS", it's actually something compiled and we test new versions before releasing to the main site
Doom worked for me in that I could select the menus, start a new game and move the character around. But it seems the “shoot” button is not working. From googling it seems “shoot” is mapped to the ctrl button which then I assume is not passed through the browser to the emulator :(
Minesweeper and freecell are basic system functionality. Putting these available only via a store^W package manager makes as much sense as replacing the UI with a flat interface suited for tablets and phones.
Actually I didn't notice the package manager. It's a bit slow to install, and after installing I get ZIP file error when trying to run dosbox. There are a billion minesweeper clones that likely are trivial to integrate.
But it's not a clone of Windows 95; it's its own thing, which I think is kind of the point. Whether or not to include a Minesweeper clone is totally up to the author.
The fact that you can run an actual copy of Windows 95 inside it and run Minesweeper there is way more impressive to me (and it worked fine for me, for what it's worth).
The entire design and name is retro. Without it, I don't think the HN crowd would have been so enthusiastic. The only really new thing is the package manager, which is another step in running an OS under a browser.
* There are existing examples of JS x86 emulation or compiling stuff to WebAssembly, e.g. [0] let you run Windows 2000 in a browser over a decade ago.
Kitboga is a scam baiter (a guy who messes with phone scammers) on YouTube. He once set Windows RG to fullscreen in a VM and had a Windows tech support scammer connect to it and try to go through his scam script in the Windows RG flash app.
To see some ASCII art (I think that's Ballmer!) type "cat w:/dearCommunity.txt" in the terminal. If you open the file in the file manager the output is garbled.
Man this album gave me the courage to ask my crush out right before I graduated High School. It made me feel calm enough to give her my number. Turns out she felt the same way! Now I have someone I would never imagine love me so much and it feels wonderful. Thank you Windows96 lol. Much love man
Gives me PTSD-like flashbacks to the time when I was tasked with installing Windows 95 on 50+ computers on the local school.
For the young(er), Windows was on 14-ish 3.5" floppy disks, and I had to do some heavy calculation and logistics copying those discs while installing the OS to make my effort as efficient as possible.
IIRC, I managed to keep the installing cyclus going on 28 computers at a time, and finished the whole task during a very long Saturday and Sunday.