
Switch to Windows 95 - beefhash
https://blog.krnl386.com/index.php?post/2018/02/03/Switch-to-Windows-95
======
hapless
Confusingly there was also a windows 95/nt compatibility environment released
for win 3.1 -- the win32s subsystem. Many, if not most, applications written
for win95 or NT 3.x APIs could run on windows 3.1.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win32s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win32s)

Microsoft has always been laser-focused on forwards- and backwards-
compatibility, whether it makes sense to the rest of us or not.

~~~
wryun
My (possibly faulty) memory of win32s is that it was came out before Windows
95, and that it would not run most of the programs that were later released
for Windows 95. I'd call it a 'Win32 API for Windows 3.1' rather than a
compatibility environment for Windows 3.1.

~~~
digi_owl
Yep, i recall trying to get a game demo going that required Win32s and WinG
installed. Ended up taking up so much of the old HDD that i barely could get
the game going, and it crawled.

~~~
lathiat
I remember running Win32s with a shell that emulated the look of Windows 95 on
3.11. My 486 has some kind of Boot sector overwrite prompt to protect against
viruses but it displayed on screen in text over the graphical UI of the Win95
installer and that froze the machine and I couldn’t continue.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Perhaps the closest thing to this remaining in 95 is that the setup lets you
choose the “Windows 3.1” GUI, which means the old Program Manager is the shell
instead of Explorer. Quite a different experience though.

~~~
evfanknitram
Program Manager had quite the run. It was included in versions up to and
including Vista. I took a quick look for progman.exe on Windows 10 but looks
like they stopped shipping it.

~~~
Stratoscope
For anyone who ever needs to search for files on Windows, try one of my
favorite utilities, Everything by voidtools:

[http://www.voidtools.com/](http://www.voidtools.com/)

I set it up with Ctrl+Shift+Space as a hotkey so it's easy to open. I have
about two million files on my C: drive. When I open Everything it displays
them all, and then as I start typing in the search box it filters the list as
fast as I can type. Highly recommended!

It just searches filenames, not content, but often that is enough.

~~~
bane
"Everything" is an amazing utility. I have it setup on a windows server as
well and can seamlessly search my desktop as well as everything on the server
pretty much instantly. I'm at just under 4 million files with it.

------
mhd
I actually remember a few people using OS/2 because it felt easier integrating
some Win 3.1 programs. And Warp generally being a better system than 95.

Although personally they both crashed on me a lot back then, which is why I
bought one of these new-fangled "Linux" distributions back then.

~~~
squarefoot
I used OS/2 2.1 and 3 Warp extensively back in the day to develop DOS db
software in Clipper. Turned out that two or more DOS windows opened on OS/2's
desktop could perfectly emulate a DOS client-server situation with two or more
machines on a LAN, speeding up development a lot. Attempting the same on
Windows would not work, or was very crash prone.

~~~
sehugg
Yep. I did this too, testing the network component of my Windows 3.1 game with
virtual environments.

------
liveoneggs
I was hoping for updates from this guy:
[https://youtu.be/PH1BKPSGcxQ](https://youtu.be/PH1BKPSGcxQ)

------
digi_owl
One thing i liked about Win9x was that i could move the C drive between
motherboards and things would boot just fine.

These days if it does not balk about missing drivers it will be some kind of
DRM check that fails.

BTW, i could have sworn that at least the UI layer of Win3.x was found inside
Win95 in the form of Progman.exe.

~~~
Izkata
It was definitely in Win98. You could edit system.ini and change the shell
from explorer to progman; I did this once when explorer got corrupted somehow
and me and my brothers just wanted to play games while waiting for it to be
fixed.

------
anonymfus
So what would happen if you run win31.exe on other Windows versions? OSR2? 98?
ME? NT4? ...10 (32 bit)?

~~~
anonymfus
Patched version on Windows 7 x86 IE8 virtual machine from
[https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-
edge/tools/v...](https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-
edge/tools/vms/):

    
    
        ---------------------------
        Application Error
        ---------------------------
        WIN31 caused a General Protection Fault in
        module WIN31.EXE at 0001:01FE.
        
        Choose close. WIN31 will close.
        ---------------------------
        Close   
        ---------------------------

------
interfixus
The Windows 95 UI was innovative and trulky groundbreaking. People like to say
it was a rip-off of one thing or another, but it really wasn't.

Imitation being the sincerest flattery, my present Arch/Xfce desktop is
basically a somewhat enhanced version of that very classic interface.

~~~
eadmund
> The Windows 95 UI was innovative and trulky groundbreaking. People like to
> say it was a rip-off of one thing or another, but it really wasn't.

Say what‽ I like this ad from Apple[0]:

    
    
             Introducing Windows 95
    
        It lets you use more than eight
         characters to name your files.
    
        It has a trash can you can open
         and take things out of again.
    
        It lets you drop files anywhere
            you want on the desktop.
    
                 Imagine that.
    

The funny thing is that it's now 23 years later, and Windows is _still_ not as
usable as a circa-1995 Mac. It's a bit crazy!

[0] [https://www.cultofmac.com/386189/how-apple-responded-to-
the-...](https://www.cultofmac.com/386189/how-apple-responded-to-the-release-
of-windows-95-twenty-years-ago-today/)

~~~
bdcravens
I would say the Start menu and File Explorer were the biggest innovations. I
don't know that Finder of the day was as useful, and in many ways, I think
Finder in 10.12.x still falls short.

~~~
askvictor
Though, in order to shut down the computer, you first had to click start. Not
a real problem, or notice by most people, but when you sit down and think
about it...

~~~
bdcravens
Isn't the same true of every OS? That you have multiple clicks to get to
shutdown? (other than hardware power button)

~~~
therein
He was talking about the issue with the naming. "Start".

------
agumonkey
I found a p3 box with win95 on it. Booting on a 64M of ram I missed nothing. I
seriously thought, with a security layer and a lisp editor (and driver
isolation I know) I'd use that everyday.

~~~
orf
Until you need to do anything modern that is

~~~
bdcravens
Of course in 2018 "modern" means a text editor that takes 1.5GB of RAM

~~~
orf
Yeah, I was tounge in cheek referencing this. But seriously, I doubt you could
find many development tools written in the last 10-15 years that would work
correctly on 64mb of RAM.

Maybe vim/emacs, but would gcc? What about a huge git project?

~~~
bdcravens
Yeah, compilers might struggle, but I think for most developers, the browser
would be the issue. (Back then I was doing a lot of ColdFusion and ASP
development; I was able to run a dev server and editor and get work done
somehow)

A quick peek at Chrome's Task Manager shows the tab I'm writing this comment
in is taking 225 MB.

~~~
agumonkey
You can't have tham on these machines. That said, Dillo with a dozen of tabs
(wikipedia pages) uses 0 cpu and about 35MB.

------
emersonrsantos
Windows 3.1 shell and software run under OS/2 as a user-mode system inside a
virtual DOS machine (VDM).

Also the Windows 3.1 shell is "Flat 2.0" in the 90's.

------
oldcynic
If I was going to switch to anything that old it would be Intuition (Amiga)

~~~
0x0
I think you're missing the point of the article. The article is a
demonstration of a less known feature in windows95 that let you run windows
3.1, but offered a button to "switch to windows95" at runtime (i.e. switch to
something newer, not to something older).

------
lerie82
I bet Windows 95 runs like a beast with the memory we have these days.

~~~
freehunter
Windows 95 actually had a soft limit of 512MB of RAM, but if you modified some
config files you could get it to recognize up to 2GB in some cases... but it
would cause pretty significant system instability.

[https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/304943/computer-
may...](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/304943/computer-may-reboot-
continuously-with-more-than-1-5-gb-of-ram)

~~~
gambiting
And it wouldn't run at all if you had more than 1 CPU. I remember disabling
one core in a Pentium D processor to keep running Windows 98.

------
x0054
Does anyone read the damn article any more??? A lot of the comments here are
arguing about weather or not it's a good idea to literally switch to Windows
95 as your main OS in 2018. Hint, that's NOT what the article is about,
despite the title.

~~~
spydum
I wonder if many comments these days are bots just trying to farm karma, so
they can sell astroturfing campaigns later. They all take turns upvoting
themselves.. Or maybe I'm paranoid

~~~
rmrfrmrf
That happens on Reddit already, so no surprise it would happen here sooner or
later.

~~~
ShabbosGoy
Just take a look at /new with showdead on. There are spam bots on there
offering “free serial key” sprinkled with some Unicode characters.

I’m sure dang and the mod team have some automated way of detecting bots and
voting rings.

------
danschumann
These posts are fun, but they are in jest right? Does win95 have true
advantages over any modern OS? ( I currently use debian for most of the day )

~~~
fredley
It has the one genuine advantage over any current consumer-oriented OS that it
is not tracking your actions in any way and reporting them back to the vendor.
Even Ubuntu includes some basic tracking of its users.

~~~
Sylos
There are many consumer-oriented Linux distributions that do not track the
user.

I'm also pretty sure that Ubuntu does not. You might be thinking of the so-
called "Search Lenses", which sent your search terms from the system search to
Canonical's server, then they proxied that to prominently Amazon by default,
optionally to others as well, to gather product results for your search term.

Their privacy policy was perfectly straightforward that they do not store the
search results or use them for anything else and it's disabled by default
since Ubuntu 16.04, and is effectively unavailable from Ubuntu 17.10 onwards,
as they switched to GNOME for the desktop environment, which does not support
this.

~~~
fredley
I'm aware that almost all *nix distros don't track, but they might be for us,
but they certainly aren't for 99.9% of consumers.

~~~
mindslight
Neither is Windows 95, because essentially the only feature that makes an OS
"for [most] consumers" is that it comes pre-installed on the appliances at
Best Buy.

