
Is anybody still using Windows 95? - vishnuharidas
https://www.quora.com/Is-anybody-still-using-Windows-95-in-2019/answer/Thomas-Tydal?share=1
======
ajford
When I was still working at Arecibo Observatory, there was definitely a couple
systems running Win95 that were considered data critical. And they were still
running on ~486 hardware IIRC.

They hadn't been replaced as they were running some custom ISA interface
boards developed by a research group in the 90s, and the community was still
using the data output by the machine. And since it had been trucking along for
~20 years, convincing them they needed to develop a replacement was hard.

When I left, it was still there, chugging along. And once a day, a tech would
wander in with a floppy and copy some data off and wander back to the control
room where a USB floppy drive was attached to a workstation specifically to
read this floppy and let the tech copy the data files off to a network
location.

~~~
ColanR
Sounds like their system works. If that 486 hardware lasted 20 years already,
seems like there's a pretty good chance it'll outlast most of the modern stuff
it would be replaced with.

~~~
outworlder
> If that 486 hardware lasted 20 years already, seems like there's a pretty
> good chance it'll outlast most of the modern stuff it would be replaced
> with.

Unlikely. Good quality 'modern stuff' has far better quality than what was
available back then. Power supplies have gotten much better (and have more
protections), as did motherboards with solid state capacitors. Older
motherboards loved their electrolytic capacitors.

Processors had less protections. Thermal monitoring was at its infancy.

Memory sticks back then were very unreliable. As were hard drives.

Then there's just a matter of age. If it has lasted 20 years, chances are it
won't last much longer.

It has probably lasted 20 years because it wasn't being powered on and off
constantly. It most likely had stable power sources and - most important - a
climate controlled environment with low amounts of dust.

~~~
toast0
A 486 system was built before the capacitor plague. Quality electrolytics may
not last forever, but can last a long time. Also, built before RoHS and the
reduced longevity of poorly formulated or poorly applied lead-free solders
that were common for many years.

Processors had less protections, and thermal monitoring was at its infancy
because almost all the 486s wouldn't use enough power to cook themselves to
death, even with passive heatsinks.

I don't know about memory sticks and hard drives from that period. It's quite
possible they've replaced the hard drive with compact flash or something too,
which should be pretty reliable given they apparently only make a floppy
disk's worth of data every day.

~~~
brundolf
I'd love to hear more about what "the capacitor plague" is

~~~
devenblake
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague)

It's why computers from the 80s can last until now without needing any
recapping but computers from 2002 or so are ticking time bombs.

~~~
ajford
Um.... All electrolytics eventually go bad as the electrolyte solution dries
out eventually. Re-capping retro computers and radio gear from the 70s through
the 90s is very much a thing.

That being said, electrolytics were somewhat less common than they are now.
But the Capacitor Plague is not the only reason electronics are recapped,
especially older/vintage/retro electronics.

~~~
wink
Yeah, but the 70s-90s stuff may die /eventually/ but not pretty consistently
after 2-3y, that was the point.

------
merqurio
I help to maintain an isolated network of desktops running Windows 95. It's a
complex EHR system with multiple clients.

It's a family business, and the software works really well (a medical niche),
so the investment to update the stack doesn't make any sense. (And there's no
need to bother clinicians neither with things that don't add value) I have a
VM for tweaking and working with it. I have multiple ETL scripts that extract
the data to a modern ERP.

I don't have access to the source code, but I have tried to reverse engineer
it from multiple angles. Essentially it's a 16 Bits client written on Delphi
with a database (dBase) that doesn't support multiple readers or writers,
shared via a network drive. Clients read files from the shared drive and
create locks to avoid multiple clients working in the same data. That's the
main source of pain, but the clinicians adapt to it in a week or so.

I haven't seen yet a modern system as complete as this one. There are multiple
clinical centers in the area using the same software (25ish) and the 2-3 that
moved into newer systems regretted greatly.

The market is too small for any new developments. But the guy who built it in
the 90's maintains it and earns enough to live happily.

~~~
tenuousemphasis
How do you deal with operating system security?

~~~
merqurio
An isolated LAN and no USB peripherals. There's a wireless network with
internet but no device has access to both.

------
mediaman
I have industrial machines that run the user interface on Windows 3.1.

There was a fad for a while of not using PLCs, and instead using 'regular
computers', at least for a portion of the system (usually a PLC still handled
the most performance sensitive parts).

When you have a production line that's 100 feet of steel, motors, ovens, and
other equipment, and the cost of redoing all the control systems is quoted at
hundreds of thousands of dollars, then why change it? It still works.

~~~
phendrenad2
How do you find parts?

~~~
giantrobot
There's literally millions of old computers sitting around in warehouses and
storage closets all over the place. That's besides mounts of new old stock
sitting around.

If you're looking for replacement parts for old PC equipment, you don't need a
million units, you just need a couple units. Finding a handful of units for
replacement parts is pretty easy.

~~~
mindfulhack
And it's also environmentally friendly, to keep old parts going instead of
straight to the dump.

------
danfritz
Reminds me of George RR Martin (author of the Game of Thrones books) who uses
DOS for writing books.

[1]
[https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27407502](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27407502)

~~~
taviso
I use WordPerfect 6.2 for DOS, not for any nostalgia or legacy reasons, just
because it's a full-featured and highly configurable word processor that I can
use in a terminal. I only use it for writing letters and so on, nothing too
serious, but I prefer to stay in the terminal if I can.

It works beautifully under dosemu2, which has a terminal mode that can
translate various VGA modes into S-Lang calls (S-Lang is like ncurses, so no
X11 required). I find this technically impressive and makes a lot of old DOS
software indistinguishable from native linux software; stdin/stdout,
parameters, host filesystem access, etc all work transparently.

Here's a screenshot:
[https://twitter.com/taviso/status/1272670107043368960/photo/...](https://twitter.com/taviso/status/1272670107043368960/photo/1)

It can import TTF fonts and print to PostScript, which I just pipe into ps2pdf
and then handle on the host.

I'm not aware of any other full-featured modern word processor that can run in
an xterm. I know about wordgrinder but it's very very basic. You could use a
text editor, but it's not ideal for layout because it doesn't understand
things like proportional font geometries - you need that to know how
lines/glyphs will fit on the physical page when it's printed. You could write
it in some form of markup, html, TeX, markdown, whatever, but if I'm just
trying to format a document I prefer a word processor.

(Note: dosemu2 doesn't require virtual 8086 mode, so it works fine on x86-64)

~~~
drpixie
Brilliant - I've long observed that almost everything we are doing with our
GHz computers, we were doing previously with old MHz systems. We have more
pixels (but use them for the same result), more memory (but everything has
grown to fill it), more bandwidth (but websites packed with junk bytes).

The only "new" thing enabled by our bigger systems is "big data", which is
largely a process of finding patterns that will fool the
user/purchaser/customer.

~~~
abraxas
Well that and high quality video. One and only one tangible benefit of this
new web is better quality video. Everything else sucks as much or worse than
in the days of Altavista and punch the monkey ads.

~~~
nl
And browsers that don't crash all the time.

~~~
narwally
And search is good now.

But apart from the HD video, the search, the aqueducts, the roads, the
education, the browsers that don't crash all the time, and the wine... what
have the Romans ever done for us?

~~~
abraxas
I never once had a browser crash on me in the nineties.

~~~
btilly
I used Netscape on a Mac in the 90s.

I lost track of how many times I saw the spinning beachball of doom. The only
solution for which was the power off and on again.

~~~
nl
Remember "popup spam" and then how enough windows would open that none would
respond?

I'm guessing anyone who didn't get browser crashes in the 90s was only
browsing a couple of sites or something. Certainly anything before IE5.5 was
crash city - in particular Netscape 2.0!

------
Funes-
I remember the first computer we had at home. I was five, and Windows 95
actually looked kind of beautiful in all its square and right-angle glory. The
first time we interacted with it was to print some Disney character's
portraits meant to be filled in with color. I also remember playing Rally
Championship on that, as well as the first Tomb Raider (1996), which looked
_incredibly_ immersive; we were mesmerized by it, and frightened! Entering
that ominous cave at the beginning was scary as hell. There's nothing that
evokes that kind of feelings for me anymore.

~~~
blastro
+1 for printing Disney coloring pages... Lion King for me.

Hakuna matata!

~~~
Funes-
Our first one was Mickey Mouse. I have that memory burnt into my visual
cortex. So many fond memories... My brother loved the Lion King, we watched
that thing so many times the VHS copy we had (still have, somewhere) was all
worn out.

------
akamia
When I worked for Boeing there was some critical factory equipment that still
ran on Windows 95 and even Windows 3.1. IIRC, the manufacturers had gone out
of business so Boeing actually fabricated parts as needed to keep them
running.

------
mixmastamyk
I enjoy nostalgia as much as anyone, but there's no real need today. While
attractive, this was a particularly atrocious line of OS in the reliability
department.

The mind boggles at using it in a mission-critical environment and speaks to
how dire and ridiculous the situation was in the late 90s due to Microsoft
shenanigans and competitor blunders. When folks say to forgive MS now they've
changed, perhaps, but point to this post so the damage is not forgotten.

Depending on budget one of these paths should be taken:

\- Twenty year-old hardware is basically free at this point and can run a
version of NT. Security/cost continues to be an issue however.

\- Xubuntu or similar + (Wine || DOS/VirtualBox) would be more reliable and
secure. If an unmaintained driver is a requirement, this might be the best
choice.

\- FreeDOS exists and is pretty good, for the truly ancient.

\- React OS is a thing as well and there's a decent chance it can run older
software.

Personally, I'd pick a Xubuntu or Ubuntu Mate LTS and whip up a native GUI in
a robust language with plenty tests to replace such equipment.

~~~
Funes-
I don't think Ubuntu or any of its variants--or "flavors"\--are really well-
suited for old machines. I find them to be very "bloated", as it were. I'd
pick a bare-bones, basic installation of Arch/Artix and go upwards from there,
probably using i3 as the window manager, too.

~~~
the_pwner224
This is immediately obvious if you install them in a virtual machine - even on
the latest fast hardware Ubuntu and Fedora both lag pretty hard. Even Xubuntu
is pretty slow. I use a VM for Zoom and MS Teams, so after some time dealing
with it I finally gave up and installed Arch Linux with a minimal Openbox
configuration.

The VM gets to the desktop within a few seconds with autologin and automatic X
starting, and is lighting fast (zoom and teams still a bit slow but everything
else is instant).

I set the Openbox menu to only contain the items I need - Zoom, unofficial
teams-for-linux, v4l2 (webcam) test&configuration utility, pavucontrol (volume
control), SimpleScreenRecorder, Thunar (file explorer) with my shared folder
to get recordings out of the VM, and a shortcut to a .txt with my Zoom meeting
IDs and passwords (Mousepad as the editor).

It'd be nice to make a compact disk image from this and distribute it, but
there are some machine-specific things that need to be configured for the VM -
not hard, but you can't make it a zero-configuration download-and-run type
thing (shared folders, selecting USB passthrough for webcam, configuring
resource allocation to the vm, etc.). Installing Arch takes about 10 minutes
and installing+configuring all the GUI software takes maybe 60 minutes more.

Of course part of the slowness in VMs is due to not having fast graphics which
GNOME etc. rely on, but again Xubuntu is pretty slow too, and if you install a
GNOME distro on bare metal it still lags pretty often. Plus the boot times for
Ubuntu & Fedora are also really high in the VM.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Super fast startup is not a requirement for this application.

Also, I think you are overstating the case with the exception of Gnome 3. It
just had a big performance regression fixed. Mate and xfce never suffered from
it.

------
lgeorget
I recently got to witness the delicate use of an atomic force microscope from
a very crude GUI on a Windows 95 computer. I was told by the person in charge
of the lab that of course they could find a more recent tool but it would be
too expensive and not worth it while the computer keeps working well.

------
c-smile
Quite a lot actually. And even new software is designed these days to ride
those dinosauri.

Screenshot of one of Sciter's customers who develop software for Windows 2000,
Solaris 10, HPUX 11, AIX 5, etc : [https://sciter.com/necromancing-sciter-on-
windows-2000/](https://sciter.com/necromancing-sciter-on-windows-2000/)

~~~
non-entity
I came across a company who provided DOS drivers for their product. Last
updated 2014...

~~~
SomeoneFromCA
DOS is a true RTOS OS for the modern computers, because it not multitasking.
Just block all the unnecessary interrupts, and you'll get the best response
rate possible on the particaulr machine.

~~~
tartoran
Dos was my first command line environment on a 8086 with 640kb of ram and a
whooping 20Mb harddrive. I had on that hd so many games and software including
win 3.1, it embarrasses me to think how much bloat there is in a modern OS. I
wouldn't use DOS now, I'd rather go with a barebones linux distribution.

~~~
agumonkey
Even a slim mainstream linux distro would blush seeing your old 20mb setup.

------
am_lu
Got a working copy of XP running in virtual machine on Linux. Gets used for
backing up my phone (Nokia E72) and managing the settings on audio DSP board i
use in the studio (minidsp). All aging software backed up ready to reinstall
if needed again one day.

~~~
Jaxkr
Why do you use such an old phone? I tried a “minimalist” (obsolete) phone
setup and while it was nice, I couldn’t stick with it.

What are your favorite things about your Nokia?

~~~
manquer
I would love to go back to a Nokia 1100

the biggest advantage is the battery performance, If you are travelling
trekking etc, the phone battery reliably can work for a week easily, no
charging worries.

It is distractions free phone with just calls and SMS,

It is very robust device, very light weight and sturdy, I have dropped it from
a height 4 floors and into a swimming pool and it still worked perfectly fine.
The b/w display is high contrast making this the phone ideal phone in
construction / industrial site, the modern day equivalent is the overpriced
CAT android phone.[1]

I would pay good amount of money for a boxed one today. After few months(
android or iOS) of usage I find the charge hardly lasts till the end of the
day, and you are running around trying to find a charger, or lugging a battery
pack.

Yes modern phones are computing device and consumes less power for what they
do, however a mobile phone is a phone first, if I can't make calls at end of
the day , what good are all the apps and features

[1] [https://www.catphones.com/](https://www.catphones.com/)

~~~
mywittyname
> however a mobile phone is a phone first,

To you; to me, it's a means to access the internet first.

But I still agree very strongly with your post. Smart phones have become this
jack of all trades, master of none devices. So almost everyone hates how smart
phones don't do well enough The One Thing they use it for the most.

------
iancmceachern
Yes, I use it to run Mach 3 CNC with my small desktop Taig CNC milling
machine. I run it on an old pentium 2 computer that was made when computers
still had parallel ports (needed to interface with the CNC drive box). Ain't
broke, im not fixing it.

------
breals
Probably running some point of sale, ATM or industrial machines where it isn't
cost effective to upgrade. However, they are likely running super-customized
versions of it. End users are likely running it in a VM.

~~~
Doches
Hahaha. Hah. Ah.

I sell a SaaS point of sale program[0] for niche retail stores, and this
comment made me laugh and cry in equal measure. It's a web app, and I have
dozens of users who access it through IE 5 on Windows 95. Not a VM, not a
super-customized version -- just a computer they've kept on life support for
twenty years and refuse to get rid of. And this isn't even close to the most
antediluvian nonsense I've gone through on support calls [1].

[0] [https://quailhq.com](https://quailhq.com) [1]
[https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-a-point-of-
sale-s...](https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-a-point-of-sale-saas-
business-makes-900-mo-fc20295e84)

------
redisman
As long as it's not connected to a network I guess. I wonder though is someone
still scanning for Win95 machines? Maybe it's safer to use it these days than
it ever was during it's active period.

~~~
ksk
I am curious to know what security holes you can exploit in a fully patched
system with a firewall.

~~~
mywittyname
Depends on what you're letting past the firewall. Even ICMP requests could
(not sure if this was ever patched) be used to DoS a Win95 machine. There are
several open TCP/IP bugs with Win9x, the newest one being from 2008.

------
anonymousiam
Lots of lab instruments run Windows 95. It's common on Tektronix oscilloscopes
for example. I remember battling with IT when they told me that it could not
be connected to any company network. (I won.)

~~~
moftz
The new test equipment all runs Windows 10. It's weird to hop between pieces
of equipment where some run still run MSDOS and others run Windows 7 or 10.
They are all calibrated and still chug along doing what they need to do, just
a little slower. The only annoying thing is when you can only grab data off
the unit with either a GPIB interface or a floppy.

------
agumonkey
15 years ago I ran into a govt agency relying on win95 to run a terminal
client to access some as/400 app[0]. It was a tailored win95 under some
special maintenance contract. Still surprising but alas.

[0] application being the nicest job ROI I've ever had the pleasure to
witness, bare terminal UI, zero learning time, zero waiting time, fully
dedicated to help you do your task quick and right.

------
lqet
Ha, that brings back memories of trying to get Windows 95 installed on an old
386 machine with a 100 MB harddrive, 2 MB of RAM and only a floppy drive. I
think this was 2001 or so, and you could already download the floppy disk set
for Windows 95. If I recall correctly, there was a warning during the
installation that Windows would be very slow on this machine. The warning was
correct. I think it took 10-20 seconds just to open the start menu. I quickly
reverted back to Windows 3.11. That machine is stored somewhere at my parent's
house. Last time I checked, it still worked.

~~~
acomjean
My brother had the floppy disk install for windows 95 . We recently got rid of
the 20+ floppy disks that it took.

~~~
lqet
As a kid, I didn't have that many spare floppy disks. Simple solution: write
the first disk image on your father's machine you used for downloading it,
start the installation on your machine, and as soon as it asks for disk 2,
remove disk 1, insert it into your father's machine and write the disk 2 image
to it. It took a while, but man was I proud when I saw that boot screen that
looked so much cooler than that boring Windows 3.11 box.

------
vidanay
You know all those recent posts here on HN about amateur radio and hams? A lot
of those guys are still using Win95.

~~~
thedanbob
Yup, a friend of mine has a repeater he needed to reprogram but the software
has been out of support since 1999. I ended up setting up a Windows 3.11 VM
for him but Win 95 would have worked too.

------
Gunax
Definitely. Some lab equipment I used was handled by a computer running CPM.

If it works, don't touch it.

------
bitwize
Yes, albeit not on the job.

Many years back I picked up a Toshiba Libretto laptop with Windows 95 on it.
Bought it from an old man who was selling various old computing-related
knickknacks at the MIT Swap Meet. (Among them was an intact Enigma machine for
$250,000!)

It sat unused while I pondered what to do with it, then I started watching
retrocomputing channels like LGR and the 8-Bit Guy -- and I realized I had a
retro PC of my own! So out it came. I installed QBasic and a couple of other
things on it. I wonder how long it'll keep going for. But it's real cool to
have -- a netbook-sized, full-power PC from well before the netbook era.

------
jansan
The judiciary of Berlin just migrated from Windows 95 to Windows 10. At the
moment the system appears to be next to unusable, and some judges refuesed to
work with the new system. Therefore they are considering migrating back to
Windows 95 until problems are solved.

I am not making this up:

[https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/wieder-it-panne-an-
berlin...](https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/wieder-it-panne-an-berliner-
gerichten-richter-koennen-nicht-arbeiten-performanceprobleme-an-
computern/26169946.html)

------
sleepysysadmin
You'd be quite surprised how many industrial machines. CNC, or similar run on
win 95. Meanwhile the automotive industry basically depends on these machines.

------
Snitch-Thursday
Not Windows 95, but Windows NT 4 lurks below certain theme park rides, reading
the PLC diagnostic data and printing out the roller coaster's mood once a day
for maintenance to file away in a write-only file cabinet.

IT (us) have never in 10+ years had to help 'em. Can't say the same for the
Windows XP-based successor PCs on newer rides though. Something about that
3/4/586 hardware is just solid.

------
xnyan
About 10 years ago, one of my jobs in a pharmacology lab involved using a very
specialized microscope driven by a PC running windows 95. A new license would
cost an obscene sum of money, and it did exactly what it needed to do. The
same setup is still in use and will likely continue to be used until it’s
impossible to continue.

------
RandallBrown
Kinda surprised a train would run windows 95 at all and not some sort of
custom train specific OS.

~~~
paleogizmo
I don't get it either. Can someone familiar with trains explain what on a
train needs a desktop OS? A train is more like a car than an ATM machine, I
would expect a collection of computers running either bare-metal or an RTOS
like QNX/VxWorks (the pictured train is from 2000, so embedded linux hadn't
taken off yet).

~~~
dmitriid
You'd probably have an OS with GUI for non-essential services like lights,
intercoms, A/C etc. And present some additional info in nice graphics: the
state of carriages, situation ahead on the line (as a complement to just
flashing a green/red light on the board). The rest would run RTOSes or
similar.

------
fsflover
Would it be possible to replace it with ReactOS if you really need it?

~~~
Topgamer7
You might get better support with ReactOS I suppose, at the same time... you
might have more reasons to need support.

------
stuart78
For a use case like this, I don't see the reason to upgrade. It is clearly
stable and solving the need.

------
gdevenyi
When I left my old research lab 6 years ago, we had a machine running Windows
3.1

------
lmilcin
I saw building access system still running on Windows 3.11 3 or 4 years ago.

------
_trampeltier
We still have at least one OS/2 machine. Runs 24/7 :-)

------
known
I do in compaq-armada-7800-laptop

------
nunez
Some (old) ATMs run WinNT4 still.

