Windows 96 (opens in new tab)

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

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.

I just looked it up -- Windows 98 was THIRTY EIGHT floppy disks hahahahaha

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

:)

You mean ppl don't still reformat the computer every couple of months?

> 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 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.

Same here: "Why there are so many files? I only need the .exe to start my game." After deleting the "unnecessary" files the game woudln't work.

I remember some japanese person did this for windows 8 for a laugh

https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-2c5cd026959b010ad57e34...

The Windows 10 ISO is ~3.5 GB in size, and a standard 3.5 in. floppy could hold 1.44 MB. So you'd actually need almost 2500 floppies.

I'm probably not old enough to qualify as "crotchety old man", but yeah, 3.5" are diskettes to me since they weren't really floppies.

I raise your floppy disk install one OS/2 Warp install: https://twitter.com/jhegarty/status/1162326199445655552/phot...

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 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'm only (...) old enough to have experienced 3.5" and 5.25" disks/floppies. But, damn, did I experience them! :)

Just in case:

https://tinyapps.org/blog/200702250700_why_in_my_day.html

When I was a kid you had to grease your own hard drives! But kids these days, they got no appreciation!

Actually if you had the tape it was easier than disks. That was a regression

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

And if you could boot from the CD you also needed floppies with the correct device drivers to actually do the installation.

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.

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.

What happened the 2nd time you hit the 8th disk? I assume not much had changed, except the weather outside?

It looks for a WIN.INF file on disk 1, you could make a blank WIN.INF and it would still work.

Wasn't it Norton Ghost?, you could replicate drives.

> Mobile devices needed a new kind of UI, something suitable for small touch screens. People tried things...

Exactly this.

The flat "Metro" UI style was initially modeled and developed on Windows Phone 7, and for what it did, it was (imho) a great way to use a phone.

Then the rest of microsoft took what that group was doing and made it one-size-fits-all UI for everything windows.

> Such small software shops like Microsoft unfortunately cannot afford to hire designers to do multiple sets of icons.

I had to chuckle. I remember back in the Windows 3.11 days, there used be a separate monochrome set of icons for all Windows (and Microsoft) programs.

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).

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.

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."

Exactly the argument that people are used to all this and hence buttons don't need to be like buttons is such a bad argument.

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

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.

> 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.

Yep Windows 10 where you better remember the exact name of the app you installed or you’ll never find it again!

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).

The worst of both worlds. (I’d prefer Windows with a classic Unix interface.)

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.

Looking forward to Windows 15 looking like DOS Shell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Shell), once we've done a 720 in circles.

I don’t know how (voice commands to “AI” chatbots, maybe), but I expect it to get worse. At least in the mainstream.

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 been 25, and we haven’t.

Go crazy: https://milkytracker.org

This is also still alive: https://openmpt.org/

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)).

Here's a modern tracker that's really impressive: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=54515

Sure, they are still around and you can play them with VLC.

The guy who made the page is a talented musician...

Thanks for the bug ids.

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.

And Half-Life

Then people found out how to embed images and it was suddenly ruined by porn :(

I was Elon Musk lol. Whats up airstrike

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

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 :]

That's a bit like saying Vista was snappy. Ya, maybe if you had the ram, but every off the shelf computer that shipped with it was a slug.

If you had enough RAM

Ah thanks—I hadn't noticed it.

Just having a third major mobile ecosystem attempted by a large tech company again would be significant.

I gave it a good try, trying phrases from the Windows 95 launch video, named Start Me Up [1], and from the Rolling Stones [2]. No dice.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0AJM6HMYjM

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGyOaCXr8Lw

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 :(

absolutely brilliant

thank you for that, it made my day :)

Parody art

Cool! (Nice newsusername. Would have picked "QuickCForever". :)

It all went downhill IMHO after Windows 2000.