Yes and yes (Windows NT, specifically).
4 Likes
We use Linux at work, my main machine at home is Windows 10, and there’s a Mac Mini hidden on my desk somewhere. Each of them hates me in its own way.
4 Likes
Some Windows 95 anecdotes from the inimitable Raymond Chen:
5 Likes
The other fun part about the placement of the button is that the “shut down” command was placed at the bottom of the list, which expanded from the bottom. That meant a lot of people were hitting it by mistake. This was because Windows kept the Xerox/Apple arrangement of commands, but moved the Start button to the bottom of the screen to not be too obvious in how they were copying Macintosh, the Amiga Workbench, the Atari GEM, which all had the mein menu at the top of the screen. Fitt’s Law meant that the “shutdown” command would then be the furthest from the menu, not the closest. But if Microsoft followed that rule, then the shutdown command would be at the top, thus the most prominent.
Me, I was a Mac user even then, and was amused by the way most Windows users had to still turn off the power themselves. I was using System 7 at the time, the version of Mac OS that had multitasking built in (System 6 had multitasking, but only with the aid of MultiFinder). Windows 95 felt like suffering a death by a thousand paper cuts: each only irritating, but on the whole it was a miserable experience in comparison.
5 Likes
“You make a grown man cry”
–best example of Microsoft’s attention to detail, even in marketing.
4 Likes
Oh you mean like Ubuntu? The OS that broke its own ability to display graphics during an update, forcing me to fuck around with X config files?
The suck’s a lot more evenly distributed these days.
(In the case of that particular fault, very evenly distributed, but that’s another story.)
4 Likes
Am I remembering this correctly?
I’m pretty sure a printer or a mouse could never be attached (and be recognized by Windows) while the OS was running. They had to be attached before you turned the machine on. And woe betide you if you were so foolish to accidentally remove one of those: you’d have to reboot. If you had wanted a system that catered to the weak, you might shoulda bought your computer machine from those fellers from Cupertino.
2 Likes
Microsoft has many factions inside it. One of them is incredibly conservative.[1] For example you still can’t use CON, AUX, COM[1-9], LPT[1-9] and NUL as a filename, for compatibility reasons.
These are needed for redirecting IO to/from these devices in scripts or at command line even if you don’t care about backwards compatibility. If you had a file named CON, how would the operating system know whether you want to read input from console or from a file named CON?
Granted, CON and NUL are probably much more useful than the rest, but these devices have to be called something.
1 Like
IIRC this was the case with most devices before USB, though with the Macintosh the issue was that the ports had current on them. You could damage the chips if you plugged anything into the ADB or SCSI ports while the computer was unter power. But you are correct in that System 7 didn’t really mind.
1 Like
I don’t have experience with newer Windows versions, but when I worked as a sysadmin at university there was an Active Directory domain server running Windows 2000 which served a few classrooms. Its reliability was seriously impressive, I’ve never experienced any problems with it with months of uptime at a time, except when the capacitors on motherboard had to be replaced.
2 Likes
“All of it” wouldn’t come a a surprise.
As an old MS-DOS hand, I’ve been using them for that for years! But that doesn’t make it any less of an unpleasant surprise for some newer users.
I’m pretty sure I’ve written scripts in the past year or so that have used NUL. Out of all of them, that will be the one that’s hardest to get rid of. The old trick for determining if a path exists - not a file, just a path - was to append \NUL to it and open it. If you get no error it’s fine, otherwise you have a problem.
I suspect that trick is used in a lot of codebases. Probably without people even thinking of it - Bob wrote “PathExistsCheck” years ago, and it got into the company’s utility libraries. Nobody cares how it works, just that it works. And from there it finds its way into all kinds of nooks and crannies in the codebase…
If you got rid of the LPT, COM, PRN and AUX filenames I don’t think much would fail. Get rid of CON, it’ll probably mostly be install scripts that will die. But getting rid of NUL? I think at least 25% of Windows software would be affected by that.
(Luckily there’s not much reason to get rid of it. So we’re not likely to find out how close my figure is to the truth.)
2 Likes
The best thing about Windows 95, to me, was the support for long filenames. Since Win95 still ran on top of MS-DOS, implementing it was a bit of a hack. (As I’m sure you all recall, MS-DOS used 8-character filenames with a 3-character extension (e.g. “DOCUMENT.DOC”), and Windows 3.0 and 3.1, which were also DOS shells, also used them. Ugh.)
At the time Win95 came out, I was logging into my ISP via a modem, and since he ran some version of BSD I could download stuff at high speed while connected to his computer, then download it at crappy modem speeds to my computer – but at least I didn’t need to change the filenames to accommodate Windows. Finally.
3 Likes
Sounds like the machine shop that I did some troubleshooting and support for. The proprietor had all sorts of old gear calculation programs, most of which ran on GW-BASIC, and was on an old Windows ME laptop, of all things.
I managed to port the BASIC stuff to FreeBASIC, so it could run on modern versions of Windows without resorting to VMs.
On the other hand, my dad has been using Lotus Agenda since the mid-1980s, when he first brought home a Compaq luggable from work. When he upgraded to a laptop with 64-bit Windows, I had to set up DOSbox to get Agenda to work.
5 Likes
Also, the first edition of Bill Gates’ The Road Ahead barely mentioned the Internet. Microsoft was banking on MSN (at that time just a Prodigy/CompuServe/AOL-type service) taking over the world.
2 Likes
I think I read Bill’s book out of the library. I have a memory of thinking about the contents, but no longer remember anything in the book.
A few years ago I did buy a used copy for a dollar, it even has the CDROM inside, I don’t think the seal is broken.
Maybe I’ll read it.
2 Likes
I remember you from when I was a help desk technician!
3 Likes
Start Me Up: 25 years ago this week, Windows 95 launched and, for a brief moment, Microsoft was almost cool
3 Likes
I spent the early 90s dialing into BBSes, which bore little resemblance to this BBS, on my parents’ 2400-baud modem.
Over the 1995 summer, I worked for the Systems Librarian at the library of the small liberal-arts college I attended, doing some very basic web design. At that point, we still used a Vax as our email server, Gopher was still pretty current, and Netscape felt pretty cutting-edge.
I spent the 1995-96 academic year studying abroad in Scotland. When I came back, the biggest difference I noticed in the U.S. was that web addresses had popped up everywhere, including on billboards and in other advertising. It was pretty jarring.
5 Likes
My dad - tech savvy, computer guy from the 80 onward, has hit a point and just decided to jump off of the technology train. He is REFUSING to upgrade from Windows 7. It’s so weird. Same problem with OSX (he low-key thinks it’s a ‘liberal’ os), and thinks Linux is too fiddly.
I feel twinges of this when I refuse to use TikTok etc as a millenial (I literally had to google how to spell that).
6 Likes
