
Why we should all be using Windows 95 - sandrobfc
https://medium.com/@Imaginary_Cloud/why-we-should-all-be-using-windows-95-5b63ad50e9e8
======
sincerely
>What really stands out are the main qualities that Windows 95, as a product,
had and that are not common nowadays. It had a memorable launch, it was honest
regarding its objectives, focused on the user, objective and transparent.

Maybe it's because I wasn't paying attention to computer stuff in '95, but I
found the author's focus on "a memorable launch" somewhat out of place
compared to the rest of the essay.

~~~
matthberg
I think the talk about the launch helps highlight that 95 was worthy of a
launch, it was actual innovation and they threw it a party. However, I also
agree that the initial focus on it is a bit unbalanced with what I consider
the main argument later.

~~~
genghisjahn
It was a big deal. The Stones got paid $3 million for the use of Start Me Up
in a win95 commercial. [https://www.networkworld.com/article/2220097/data-
center/wha...](https://www.networkworld.com/article/2220097/data-center/what-
microsoft-paid-the-stones-to-help-launch-windows-95.html)

~~~
tfranco
That was a milestone on the software industry.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Shameless plug: modern computers are fast enough you can run it in a web
browser.

[https://win95.ajf.me/](https://win95.ajf.me/)

~~~
sandrobfc
Now that's something worth the investment!

------
hapnin
The Chicago build of Windows 95 was one of the most stable OSes I've ever
encountered. I had a machine that ran it 24/7 with zero issues into the early
2000s until the power supply fried.

~~~
Yetanfou
Windows 95 had a bug which could crash it after about 50 days of uptime:

[https://www.cnet.com/news/windows-may-crash-
after-49-7-days/](https://www.cnet.com/news/windows-may-crash-
after-49-7-days/)

~~~
Someone
For those wondering: the actual limit was 2³² milliseconds (and I remember it
as _would_ crash, not _could_ crash)

~~~
Yetanfou
I remember never having any system with Windows 9x stay up long enough to even
come close to the required uptime to test the veracity of this bug report. We
tried with a machine which didn't do anything at all but even that one crashed
by itself in a week or two, probably due to some network traffic it didn't
like. In that time I worked as editor in chief for some IT-related magazines
so we had a lab full of machines to test and got invited to all the press
conferences - including the one mentioned here with Gates and the Stones. I
still think the later part of that Stones' song they used were a better fit
than the 'You can start me up' line:

You make a grown man cry, You make a grown man cry

------
cphuntington97
"most web designs out there could surely learn a lot from how Windows 95
solved so many problems by thinking about how target users would deal with
their product"

They weren't thinking about it; they were actually testing it with users.

~~~
news_to_me
Yeah, what does the author think Web designers do all day?

------
georgeecollins
Windows 95 really made Windows better than MacOS at that time. I had to
develop software for both at that time and the truth was, Windows was just
better. People would defend Macs very strongly at that time, but in my
experience it was because they had developed a preference.

~~~
tfranco
I was a software developer back then, and I don't remember seeing a single
Mac. On the other hand, Windows 95 was everywhere.

~~~
georgeecollins
Yeah, that too. PC hardware was getting really cheap so it was common. It is
really amazing that they came back from the mid '90s.

------
headhunter
> Windows 95 main objective was to allow you to use a computer easily.

>And it did just that.

That's true. Nowadays, if an OS _only_ gave you the ability to use a computer
easily, would people like it or hate it?

I don't know. What does Windows 10 provide beyond the ability to use a
computer?

~~~
api
That's a big part of the continuing appeal of Apple in spite of some of their
mis-steps. My Mac _mostly_ just gives me a working system that keeps working
and is mostly devoid of crap. The crap it does have can generally be disabled.

~~~
tfranco
Second that. And the fact it can run MS Office.

You can get some versions of Linux that are pretty stable with the right
hardware, but the lack of MS Office is a total bummer.

PS: First person to say that one can run MS Office using Wine, will get nailed
to a tree.

~~~
thethirdone
Is there a particular reason LibreOffice is not sufficient?

I rarely use MS Office like software so using LibreOffice has been perfectly
fine for me.

~~~
Rjevski
LibreOffice is absolutely awful from an UX point of view. That’s enough to put
me off personally.

If you’re an office expert you’d probably figure out how to use it, but for me
I’ve only used an office suite maybe a dozen times in my life so I’m very new
to it, and latest Office 2016 allows me to get started easily (the much-hated
Ribbon UI works for me and is intuitive), where as I find myself Googling all
the time to do even the basic stuff in LibreOffice.

------
bluedino
Windows 95 didn't really offer much in the way of anything over Windows 3.11
for the everyday user. I remember everyone complaining about how it used 2x as
much RAM and made their 486/25 and 386/40 systems unusable.

Sure, the interface was a little bit better, but Program Manager wasn't
terrible. The 'desktop' is probably one of the worst UI concepts developed.
Multi-tasking was a little better, but 16-bit apps could still wreck stuff,
and the same went for memory protection. It crashed just as damn much.

~~~
moomin
I could run Lotus Notes and Excel at the same time without either crashing,
which had been impossible until I’d upgraded the PC.

Yeah, it crashed, but people forget how horribly unstable 3.11 was.

~~~
slantyyz
Notes and Excel as apps were quite stable on Win95 in my experience.

On the other hand, I found anything made by Corel to be extremely fragile in
the early days of Win95.

~~~
bluedino
>> anything made by Corel to be extremely fragile

Quark and Adobe weren't any better.

------
wilsonnb
>Windows 10 will be our best enterprise platform ever and will enable our
enterprise customers to be more productive than ever before, simplifying
management and deployment for IT and working seamlessly with existing
enterprise apps.

Quote from the Windows 10 launch that the writer is complaining about

>Our Product Design Process ™ includes multiple stages like benchmarking, UX,
UI design, design of the technical architecture and development of the project
plan.

>We apply the Software Development best practices and operate with a quality
mindset.

Quotes from the website of the company that wrote the article.

It seems hypocritical to complain that the Windows 10 launch was full of
dubious statements when you are doing the same thing yourself.

>It had a memorable launch, it was honest regarding its objectives, focused on
the user, objective and transparent.

Really? This is your argument for why we should look to Windows 95 for
inspiration? Who cares about whether a launch is memorable? I doubt that the
launch of Windows 95 is actually memorable for anyone outside of the tech
bubble, anyways.

Honesty regarding objectives is a somewhat reasonable complaint but compared
to Windows 10 I don't see why someone would say that 95 was more honest about
its intentions. They seem to be making this a dig at Facebook but I don't see
why Facebook should be compared to an operating system in this respect.

I honestly have no clue what they mean by saying that Windows 95 was
objective. Transparent is pretty much the same as "honest regarding it's
objectives". Focused on the user is a good thing but they haven't made a case
that today's products _aren 't_ focused on the user.

[https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*Zt8F-ZqANVVbq4T5VU...](https://cdn-
images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*Zt8F-ZqANVVbq4T5VUOzcA.png)

This chart seems to be saying that computers today have less utility than a
computer from 1995 running Windows 95. I don't think I even need to describe
why that notion is ridiculous.

For those of you that came to the comments without reading the article, don't
bother. It's just a poor attempt at marketing by some UI design company.

~~~
monkeynotes
Hypocrisy on the side of author is a logically false argument about the actual
content.

I can be a murdering psychopath and express in my memoirs from prison that
while I love killin', murder is immoral. Murder is still widely accepted as
being immoral regardless of who asserts the opinion.

That aside I found the article's author heavily corralled observations to
support his opinion.

> I’m not trying to compare operating systems with social media or mobile
> applications,

Yes, yes you are.

> I’m not saying we should solve every UI and UX issue with a start menu

I find it hard to actually understand what the author is really saying,
perhaps he/she is saying nothing at all. The irony about substance and honesty
isn't lost on me.

~~~
wilsonnb
I agree that hypocrisy doesn't refute their argument but it does demonstrate
that the author themselves either doesn't believe what they're writing _or_
they have some other unknown reason for being hypocritical.

Seeing as no other reason was expressed in the article, I am comfortable
taking the hypocrisy as a sign that the they don't believe what they're
writing. In my experience, this usually means they are trying to sell me
something.

~~~
monkeynotes
Sorta feel the same way since the article really has zero substance. I hate
being cynical but the days of Win95 transparency are truly over.

~~~
wilsonnb
They're not all the way dead yet. Sublime text seems to be very transparent,
in a 90's software sense. Pay some money, get some software, keep it forever.
I'm sure there are other examples out there too. It does seem unlikely that
any software like that will be as widespread as Windows 95 was, though.

------
sebazzz
Not to talk specifically about Windows 95, but older is better in regarding
that until Windows 8 desktop composition could be turned off, which is a major
source of latency [1]. I surely do miss that.

[http://www.lofibucket.com/articles/dwm_latency.html](http://www.lofibucket.com/articles/dwm_latency.html)

------
wink
If anyone had told me that Windows 95 A didn't play well with SCSI (Adaptec
AHA-2940AU and a Teac CD-R 55s) that would have save saved me like 20
reinstalls. Yeah, maybe having access to the internet would've also worked.
Also kind of interesting that I didn't have to google for these 2 exact
product names after what, 20 years? :)

------
Yetanfou
While it might be true that the step from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95 was more
of an improvement for Windows-users (but not so much for those using OS/2, its
main contender at that time) the author does seem to view history through rosy
glasses. Windows 95, just like its predecessors and its successors Windows 98
and (especially) Windows ME was hampered by it being built on top of MS-DOS,
remnants of which would rear their ugly heads in many situations. It was all
too easy to bring down the whole system by a single malfunctioning program,
Windows itself and especially many third-party drivers were riddled with bugs
which would cause it to 'blue-screen', Microsoft's in itself admirable drive
for backward compatibility caused many problems from earlier days to linger
around. Network security was a mess, it was trivial to bring down whole office
farms by sending packets with a few bits in the right positions. The lack of
library versioning ('DLL hell') meant that installing program A could stop
program B - or even the whole system - from working. On the topic of
installing and removing programs, this was still a hit and miss affair with
all programs using their own installers, many of which lacked functioning
uninstallers, others which left loads of crud around.

In short, Windows 95 (and 98, and ME) was a card house built on quicksand.
Windows NT 3.x made good on the promise of stability at the cost of
performance and resource consumption. Windows NT 4.x improved performance at
the cost of stability by moving drivers - which in earlier versions ran in
user space - back into kernel space. Windows 2000 was probably the most
balanced version, XP coming in second (after removing the Fisher-Price
interface that is...). Given that many of the long-standing problems with
Windows still have to be fixed I don't see any utility in the later versions,
Windows 7 included. For those looking for an operating system to do the 'usual
stuff' \- internet-related activities, document processing, some multimedia -
one of the more polished Linux distributions - Ubuntu, Mint, etc - is a much
better choice which will save the user many a frustrating moment. If you need
to run Windows-only software wine might be an option, otherwise just run it in
a VM using Windows 2000 or XP if possible.

Windows on the server has been a no-starter from the beginning, this is not
even worth discussing. The only reason for using it is running something like
Microsoft Exchange, the question here is whether this is worth the hassle of
having a Windows-based server park.

~~~
Joeri
_Windows NT 4.x improved performance at the cost of stability by moving
drivers - which in earlier versions ran in user space - back into kernel
space._

I ran NT4 for a number of years, and it remains by far my favorite windows
version. Maybe it wasn't stable enough to run a server (although I've heard
otherwise, with uptimes measured in years), but I have no recollection of it
crashing. It was essentially a modern OS that could happily run in 32 MB of
RAM, which isn't even enough these days to launch a single windows program.

My favorite desktop OS overall is BeOS R5. It was just so much fun to use. Not
actually very useful, with the lack of apps, but definitely fun.

~~~
waddlesplash
> My favorite desktop OS overall is BeOS R5. It was just so much fun to use.
> Not actually very useful, with the lack of apps, but definitely fun.

You should check out Haiku, then. The same old BeOS R5 desktop you remember,
with modern customizeability, a package manager, and tons of ported software.
:)

------
decasteve
In terms of stability and performance, with work and gaming capabilities,
Windows NT4 Service Pack 3 (IIRC) was the sweet spot for me. I could use my
Windows NT workstation for gaming with DirectX support. It was both snappy and
solid.

The sweet spot OS for me at the moment is Ubuntu MATE.

~~~
tfranco
Slackware 4 ever.

------
AdmiralAsshat
> Why we should all be using Windows 95

I use a Gtk2-derived desktop environment (Cinnamon/MATE/Xfce), which is
heavily Windows 95-inspired in its UI, so I'd say I have the next best thing.
Plus FLOSS.

------
moomin
Windows 95 was extremely secure by default. No TCP stack, no web browser.

~~~
tfranco
Good point. On the other hand, PEBCAK was much worst back then, as people were
still trying to understand what a computer was.

~~~
LyndsySimon
> people were still trying to understand what a computer was

Did they succeed, or did we (meaning the tech industry) just change the
abstractions that are presented to the use to match what they _thought_ a
computer was?

------
s17n
Clickbait title, should be something like "What Windows 95 did right" or
"Product design lessons from Windows 95".

Also, the article is crap.

------
harshreality
The curse of capitalism in software (and to a large extent, hardware)
businesses. It provides great leaps every once in a while. If you want to call
Win95 such a leap, okay, or maybe the better versions of OSX or MacOS were
great leaps. You can find great leaps on the hardware side, HP's early
printers, the iPhone, etc. But businesses can't sustain themselves with
incremental improvements between those great leaps, so a pathology develops.

Companies tend to resort to a release schedule that packages a bunch of
necessary and useful refinements with more flash, changed UI, and added
partially-broken features. That ends up making the products worse by removing
functionality some users depend on, making the products slower or less
efficient in some cases, and requiring users to re-learn interfaces.

~~~
sandrobfc
I believe that Windows 95 was a huge leap, but it's not the only good example
we have of products that changed the game for any given industry (and
computers in particular, as well).

Windows 98, for example, was a better version of the OS, in almost every
aspect, but it was not as important as Win95.

~~~
rblatz
Minus Windows ME Microsoft was delivering amazing updates that increased
stability and added useful features in the 95 -> XP years. Then as XP started
aging OS X really began to pick up steam peaking with the 2009 release of Snow
Leopard. Since then we've been in a bit of a rut with both Windows and MacOS.

We are about due for something to shake things up, but I'm not really sure
what that is going to be. Maybe it's Chromebooks, or tablets, but it seems
like they'd have taken off already. Maybe we are just waiting for someone to
drop a revolutionary release and suddenly it will be obvious in hindsight. I'm
excited to see what's coming next though.

~~~
LyndsySimon
I think the revolution is happening slowly and going largely unnoticed,
because it's different than we expect it to be.

Personally, I've ditched my personal laptop and moved to an LTE iPad full-
time. Between native apps, web apps through Safari, and access to a remote
server over MOSH I have everything I need in a mobile computing device. For
"real work", I have a MBP that my employer provides... but honestly, I
probably don't get enough utility from it to justify the cost. I could work at
~90% capacity from my iPad. If more people adopt my approach, in time we'll
see things like full IDEs on iOS and Android that operate against a remote
server.

I think Windows and macOS will continue to dominate the desktop environment
for the foreseeable future and continue with evolutionary updates, but people
will be using mobile phones, tablets, and eventually wearables to do more and
more of what they used to do on a desktop OS. We're seeing a slow but thorough
redefinition of what people see as a "computer".

I'm looking forward to the rise of AR. VR still feels like it's in its infancy
to me; it's fun to play with and you can see the potential, but the real
utility hasn't become apparent to the world and won't until several more
iterations have happened. I believe the future will look more like Google
Glass than Windows 95.

