
How to ensure that your program does not run under Windows 95 [pdf] - Rusky
http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780321440303/samplechapter/Chen_bonus_ch02.pdf
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rinon
This is an excerpt from "The Old New Thing" by Raymond Chen, in case you were
wondering like me.

~~~
shdon
One of my favourite books ever. Raymond Chen's blog of the same name has a new
and almost always very interesting article about software development (on
Windows in particular, of course) every workday. The most interesting and
entertaining blog posts were expanded and make up the book. Chen has
formidable talents both as a programmer, as well as as a writer.

~~~
frankchn
A bit of Raymond Chen trivia: he is as far as I know the only person to appear
in the Linux kernel credits file with an @microsoft.com email address.

~~~
geofft
Huh. Looks like it's for scripts/Configure, which doesn't exist in the 2.6
series? Was this an older version of `make config`?

There are certainly a lot of people in `git log --author=microsoft.com` (and
in MAINTAINERS), for Hyper-V guest drivers and the like.

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ryandrake
Although the author removed the names of the publishers to protect the guilty,
you can google many of the error messages to find out who he's talking about.

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Animats
The proper way, in 1996, to insure that your program would not run under
Windows 95, was to make it run under Windows NT 3.51, which was available and
stable at the time. Under NT, you could use OpenGL, NTFS, security features,
and TCP/IP networking (that was an add-on called "Plus!" in Win95) which
consumer-grade Win95 didn't support. You could run high-end applications such
as Softimage|3D. You could even run NT 3.51 as a network server.

NT 3.51 also offered a nice feature known as "not crashing". It was a far more
reliable OS than Win95, which had a huge amount of legacy and backwards-
compatibility code. On NT 3.51, the 16-bit subsystem could be disabled at boot
time, and everything ran fine without it.

Windows 8 _still_ has the 16-bit subsystem.

~~~
sjm
Could you really not use OpenGL under Windows 95? I seem to recall running
GLQuake and GLQuakeWorld a good while before the release of Windows 98.
GLQuake was released in 97.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Windows 95 included OpenGL and used it for screensavers.

~~~
notpeter
Not until Windows 95 OSR2
[https://web.archive.org/web/19991013115738/http://support.mi...](https://web.archive.org/web/19991013115738/http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q154/8/77.asp)

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angersock
Look how far we've come since the early 90s. Like, no, really--this is the
sort of arcana that we can basically ignore today completely.

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Grazester
I actually have found memories of Windows 95, Service release 2.5 of course.
Yes programs crashed here and there but it wasn't until Windows ME did I know
the true meaning of crashing. Thankfully I had also had Windows 2000. I
thought it was the best piece of software ever written at the time!

~~~
chipsy
It's frankly amazing that Win ME managed to be so much less stable than
previous iterations of Win 9x. I dealt with it for a year or so in college
before I was able to get my hands on something better, and it was basically a
"run once" OS, as in you ran your applications once and then rebooted because
anything else would guarantee the appearance of the BSOD.

People complained about Vista, but it was smooth sailing in comparison.

~~~
ANTSANTS
I also used ME for about a year but I don't remember it crashing once. Never
understood why everyone had such problems with it, I thought it was just
Windows 98 with USB drivers.

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yuhong
If MS didn't turn OS/2 2.0 into a fiasco, DOS gaming would not last as long.

~~~
gcb0
they didn't turn it into a fiasco. they did what they are good at at the time.
bait and switch.

they baited ibm (oh boy, yet again. don't they ever learn) and then run away
with as much code the contracts allowed and then some and launched NT.

