10th anniversary of Windows 95 (wow)

[DereX888]

Well, its not a news per se, since no one at microsoft seems to celebrate it (or at least I didn't found any news on the subject), but this August marks the round 10th anniversary of Windows 95 release.

I know, I know, most of you hated it, it was buggy like hell, but let me remind you one positive aspect of this crappy OS: it was the first DOS GUI really easy enough for average Joe to use
If it wasn't for Win95 (and 98 later) we wouldn't have the PCs in every house and every freaking where, as it is nowadays...

For all the bad Gates' company did throughout the years this was one good thing.

[AlecWest]

My kid still runs it on his system, hehe. I've offered to switch him to Win98SE but he's a bit like me ... a believer in the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" philosophy. Win95 does the things he wants a computer for ... allows him to access the net, allows him to do MP3s, allows him to do online banking, and allows him to use "everyday" utilities like word processors, spreadsheets, and databases.

One drawback to his system, though. If his hard drive crashes and he needs to reinstall Win95 on a new hard drive, it will really be a chore. When he first bought the OS, there were two versions of it ... one on CD, one on floppies. He opted for the one on floppies (grin) ... I think 24 of them, hehe. I did do him one favor, though. When Win98SE was out and the next big thing (WinME) was due for release, I went online and downloaded all the Win95 driver files for all the utilities/hardware he uses ... burning them to a CD. Nowadays, some of those drivers are impossible to find.

[NightWing]

i think the old trick of copying all to the HD and install from there would work. Have not tried it in quite a few years. Use to do that with other ffloppy based software. Even do that now with install CD!

[DereX888]

Well, I wouldn't do it with install CD (whats the point), but certainly it pays in alot of saved time to have all the floppies on the hdd instead of loading them one by one...

AlecWest - your son never considered making a CD out of them all floppies, or (even better yet) just copying original Win95 CD from someone else?
After all he bought it, didn't he?, therefore having it on a different medium (on a CD instead of floppies) would not be any piracy but strictly a backup on a more convenient format...


old $chicago$ code ruled 10 years ago LOL

[MOVIEGEEK]

I remember when 95 was released,people were lined up at MicroCenter to buy it at midnight.My PC at the time had a P1 166MHz,16MB of RAM and a 2GB HDD...I thought I had a rad machine.

[DereX888]

hehehe
I didnt have any my own pc yet, but I was already proficient enoufg to write some short crap in Basic on my bro's or my dad's ancient Amiga
My bro got Win95 back then on a floppies too (but he had 2x CD-ROM already AFAIR), and installed it on his Pentium 133MHz/8MB RAM (EDO? lol) which was the envy of all his friends

I found very great videoclip on canadian CBC archives.
This guy's predictions (Nov/1994) actually all came true with the release of Win95/98 within 2-3 years...
check it out, its ~10min long, but it is really interesting

http://ms.radio-canada.ca/archives/2005/en/wmv/internet19941114et1.wmv

[Prot]

He better hope his hard drive doesn't crash. He won't be able to bring his Win 95 back up to where it was before. Microsoft doesn't support it anymore, so I doubt he'll be able to update it to where it is now.

[MOVIEGEEK]

hehehe
I didnt have any my own pc yet, but I was already proficient enoufg to write some short crap in Basic on my bro's or my dad's ancient Amiga

The Amiga was cool(for the time).
I used to write Basic on a crappy Timex Sinclair TS-1000,I made a few simple games that I had to backup to a cassette tape(which took forever to load):

[DereX888]

He better hope his hard drive doesn't crash. He won't be able to bring his Win 95 back up to where it was before. Microsoft doesn't support it anymore, so I doubt he'll be able to update it to where it is now.

MSoft doesn't suppoort it - thats true.
But its not a big problem. You can download basically all previously released updates up until about 2002 released patch, and you just need to play with Win98's patches released afterwards.

Basically updating it with all the Y2K/security patches, adding add-ons (USB/AGP etc) and an IE5.5SP2 (last IE available for Win95) essentially turns it to really stable (for a DOS) OS... Throw-in Mozilla or Opera or Netscape and some basic firewall like ZoneAlarm and you have very efficient yet very lean OS able to work on any x86 machine.
I was truly very surprised how *fast* was internet browsing on ancient PentiumMMX with IE5 on Win95 compared to my 3ghz machine with Firefox on Win2K or WinXP, really

Well, it was then. Simplicity and easiness way more efficient than the bloat of WinXP (not mentioning the Longhorn, aka Vista). But of course not that I'd want to go back to DOS OS ever again


@MOVIEGEEK
that old piece of crap is soooo coool
I wish my family was smarter and had kept all those old computers they had when I was a baby :/ My father's first was Commodore 16, then some Tandy, but he also had Apple Lisa and few more... too bad they threw them away before I could lay my hands on those lol

[yoda313]

Hi,

Wow that is scary that 95 is 10 years old. Whew thats ages ago in pc time.

95 was the step in the right direction. For all its faults it was a firm foundation to build on.

Kevin

[Prot]

One other point relating to the hard drive crashing.
Win 95 only supports FAT16, and that limits the partition size to 2.1 gig. I doubt you can find a new hard drive under 20 gig, and that means having to partition it into 18 diff logical drives...unless you just want all that extra space leftover to go to waste.
I doubt his BIOS would even support the drive, tho.

[Forum Troll]

One other point relating to the hard drive crashing.
Win 95 only supports FAT16, and that limits the partition size to 2.1 gig. I doubt you can find a new hard drive under 20 gig, and that means having to partition it into 18 diff logical drives...unless you just want all that extra space leftover to go to waste.
I doubt his BIOS would even support the drive, tho.

Actually, OSR-2 and higher versions of Windows 95 supported FAT32.

[DereX888]

One other point relating to the hard drive crashing.
Win 95 only supports FAT16, and that limits the partition size to 2.1 gig. I doubt you can find a new hard drive under 20 gig, and that means having to partition it into 18 diff logical drives...unless you just want all that extra space leftover to go to waste.
I doubt his BIOS would even support the drive, tho.

Win95B (released 1996) and later supported hdd up to 32GB (IIRC), RAM up to 192MB, FAT32, AGP1x/2x (or up to 4x?), USB 1.0/1.1, plays DVDs too etc etc... no difference from Win98, and since Win98 actually was an all-in-one updates for Win95 (I used to call it Win95D ) then it shouldn't surprise you at all...
Standard BIOS of the computer motherboards build and sold in 1995 supported up to 8GB hard disks, however there were already available hard drive overlay programs like "e-z drive' from Maxtor (every manufacturer had its own) working on a low-level to allow users to overcome any motherboard's hdd size limitations.
I had Maxtor 13GB hdd in 1997 on a computer with motherboard's limit of 4GB, and believe me - I was using every byte of this hdd up to its 13.3GB end, and in a single partition too (with E-Z Drive's help ofcoz)

Anyway - I never had any problems related to hdd or its size.
The main grief and source of BSOD problems on Win95 were usually crappy programs overwriting registry or drivers as they pleased, or in other words lack of system file's protection (as it was finally added in last reincarnation of Win95 - WinME).