Better than Windows 11 in many aspects:
32 bit
But yes, rebooting for everything, including changing monitor resolution was a pain
This might come as a shock to you, but Windows 95 isn't even an operating system. It's a GUI shell that runs on DOS, which is a 16 bit operating system. There is no Windows 95 kernel.
It’s a bit more complex than that. Intel CPUs (to this day) boot in real mode, which is what DOS is using. In this mode, the system only has access to 640k of RAM. Windows 95 and later switch the processor to protected mode, where the system gets access to all of the RAM and also to memory protection features, so processes can’t real and write each other’s memory. However, in this mode it’s impossible to run real mode code, such as the one provided by DOS.
DOS games had a trick where they briefly switched back to real mode to execute DOS functions (mostly reading and writing to disk) and then back to protected mode, but I don’t think that Windows 95 did that.
32 bit hacked and kludged onto a 16 bit system that was still MS-DOS at the core. It was a mess. A highly unstable "wonder how it's even working" mess. The "lol Windows always bluescreens" memes came from this era because of this. The switch to NT and pure 32 bit from boot to desktop for consumer OSes with Windows XP made the stability issues mostly a thing of history unless you had bad drivers or hardware.
A horse is better than a car in many aspects:
Cave art dramatically outperforms television:
• no streaming/subscription fees
• no ads
• rocks have very wide adoption rates
• cave art can last thousands of years without power
• content is auto-saved without a dvr
• cave art programming is tangible, tv programming is not
naturally low maintenance
I see you have never had to care for a horse before.
NI! (natural intelligence). The best unsupervised learning in existence
Runs on 4 MB of RAM
Lol, Win95 became crash prone when you hit the memory limit.
Most OSes do.
Buddy Holly and chips challenge
Well. 4 MB was a bit of a stretch. I remember buying a RAM upgrade to 8 MB to get it to run decently. Cost me 200 DM on top of the 200 for the Windows upgrade. It was a huge leap compared to Windows 3.1, though. And this stuff just was a lot more expensive back in the day.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Seriously though, this is the first properly good UI for a desktop computer. Mac OS (or I guess Macintosh OS at the time) was okay, but reliant on the global menu and weird drop-downs. Windows kept everything self-contained. Even multi-window programs tended to use the "multiple document interface," i.e., windows inside windows. Tabs weren't really a thing yet.
It also crashed if you looked at it funny and had the antivirus capabilities of warm cheese. But there's damn good reasons Windows 7 was the same experience, extended, rather than replaced. It's more-or-less what I style Linux to look like. And in light of that I'm kinda pissed off any OS ever struggles to remain responsive, when this relic ran smoothly on one stick of RAM that's smaller than my CPU's cache.
Mac OS (…) was okay, but reliant on the global menu and weird drop-downs.
See Fitt’s law for why the Mac’s menu bar is the way it is.
Thoroughly familiar with it; don't care. The global menu has always been goofy because of the invisible relation to some open window. Usually a small window floating out in middle of the desktop, because Mac OS took forever to adopt any concept of "maximize." I'm still not sure they do it right.
Nowadays macOS maximises like Windows does. Whether that’s “doing it right” is something else entirely.
In its basic form, Fitts's law says that targets a user has to hit should be as big as possible.
Dear god, my biggest beef with using a smart phone is that UI designers 1) love to have tiny buttons for shit, and 2) the tappable areas for those buttons are almost never made larger than their tiny graphics, so it's a bitch to actually tap them.
I used to be a mobile app developer, and when I wrote apps by myself I would always expand the tappable areas so they were easy to hit with fat fingers. My last job was working for a huge cable company (maybe the name rhymes with "bombast") and whenever I expanded the tappable area of a tiny button the UI designers would pitch a fit and insist that that not be done. Management would agree with them on the grounds that expanding the tappable area would require too much time to implement - and then they'd order me to spend even more time un-implementing it.
I find this problem to be especially pronounced in the exit buttons on in game ads.
Something that irritates me in desktop design is, there's a clickable icon. There's no box around it to represent a button, just the icon on a blank background. You move your mouse towards the icon. When you get close to the icon, a box appears around it. You take this to mean "this object will be interacted with when you click the mouse." You click the mouse. Nothing is achieved. You have to move the mouse into the actual borders of the icon, it's just that now icons get visibly excited that you might pick them.
Certainly windows took inspiration from the apple button in the upper left, but changed a few things so they wouldn't get caught copying.
I think they actually tried to take MS to court, but lost since they had stolen the ideas from Xerox in the first place.
The movie Pirates of Silicon Valley does a great job at illustrating the basics of the story.
There's only so many corners.
It really was a game changer. I remember the excitement of getting it for the first time after using windows 3.1.
I remember the install CD had the Weezer “Buddy Holly” video on it. It felt pretty fancy
And "Good Times" by Edie Brickell, but for some reason nobody ever remembers that lol
Yeah, that was so cool. Watching a whole music video on a PC. Truly revolutionary.
I remember the stack of floppy disks for Windows 95 installation.
As someone who was working in IT support at the time - YAY! NO MORE FUCKING TRUMPET WINSOCK!
Oh god quit bringing up the pain!
IRQ conflicts when trying to install a modem and a soundcard!
I was configuring COM ports just last week. Turns out the software is so old that it only supports COM1.
I remember installing it on my PC using a large stack of 3.5" floppy disks. It was great - a big upgrade from Windows 3.11.
I still have my Windows 95 "Start me up" Pogs!
You mean those little discs that you throw a bigger, heaver disc on top of? You've gotta share a pic sometime
And this marked the very first and last time I felt a sense of genuine excitement about an OS upgrade.
You weren't stoked for XP? XP is the OS that got me into computing. Before XP computers were a novelty to me. When XP came out they finally seemed powerful enough to accomplish cool things with.
Launch of Windows 7 was pretty exciting too. Felt very modern, especially with the updated Aero UI.
My dad barely knew how to run things in windows 3.1 but he still regrets the day he installed windows 95 because it was all downhill from there when it came to him knowing what was going on.
I had to upgrade for the warcraft 2 level editor what a time to be alive!
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
