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Windows 96

windows96.net

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Re: Windows 96

#51

Post by quaintdev »

feikname wrote: post #4

If you click activate windows it says its not a genuine copy, greys out and starts spitting out DLL errors haha, nice easter egg.

"Failed to load DLL". You have to click "Damn" to exit dialog box.

I wish today's apps made interactions little more fun like this.

Re: Windows 96

#52

Post by luxuryballs »

thatwasunusual wrote: post #29

Pretty. :) Gives me PTSD-like flashbacks to the time when I was tasked with installing Windows 95 on 50+ computers on the local school. For the young(er), Windows was on 14-ish 3.5" floppy disks, and I had to do some heavy calculation and logistics copying those discs while installing the OS to make my effort as efficient as possible. IIRC, I managed to keep the installing cyclus going on 28 computers at a time, and…

I like to think that if we tried installing Windows 10 entirely via floppy disks the floppy drive would fail somewhere around disk 5000.

Re: Windows 96

#53

Post by ComputerGuru »

Koshkin wrote: post #36

Windows NT 4 was the pinnacle of usability (and sanity).

Naw. If you used NT4 then you probably used Windows 2000 as well, which was newer but still sane. The actual newest but good (by that same metric) to make it to the shelves was Server 2003, but you had to enable certain desktop features and disable certain server features to get a good workstation configuration.

Re: Windows 96

#55

Post by plushpuffin »

blibble wrote: post #22

Windows RG was fun at the time (sadly built using flash so unusable these days)

Kitboga is a scam baiter (a guy who messes with phone scammers) on YouTube. He once set Windows RG to fullscreen in a VM and had a Windows tech support scammer connect to it and try to go through his scam script in the Windows RG flash app.

https://youtu.be/F0peLpovDB8

Re: Windows 96

#56

Post by sidpatil »

Koshkin wrote: post #44
asddubs wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you feel that way, you might want to check out the serenityos project. it's a custom unix with a classic windows interface

The worst of both worlds. (I’d prefer Windows with a classic Unix interface.)

So, DOS?

Re: Windows 96

#57

Post by GuB-42 »

pier25 wrote: post #5

These UIs definitely look outdated, but somehow they seem better than current Windows UIs. Not, sure if it's nostalgia or if there's something there.

I don't think it is nostalgia, I'd say that Windows 2000 was the peak when it comes to usability, and XP, Vista and 7 made it prettier, taking advantage of improved graphics hardware. And then Windows 8 arrived and broke everything.

It is easy to find the culprit: tablets, and mobile devices in general, and to a lesser extent, web apps.

Mobile devices needed a new kind of UI, something suitable for small touch screens. People tried things, apparently they are still trying, because it is a mess.

But now, we have another problem. Desktop UIs and Mobile UIs are very different. And this, in itself, is a bad thing. Mobile and desktop computers do a lot of the same thing, you shouldn't have to learn how to do it twice. So they tried to unify, and in the process, lost decades of UI refinement.

The next issue is portability. We have web apps, Desktop UIs, Mobile UIs, different OSes, etc... Developers don't want to make a different UI for every system, and users want consistency. The least common denominator is the web browser, so designers use that, but the web is made for documents, it is terrible for apps, but clever devs make do.

So as you see, we now have a lot of hard problems to solve at the same time, and the desktop UI became part of it.

Re: Windows 96

#59

Post by floatingatoll »

The Maximize button works correctly on portrait orientation mobile, even when nothing else is okay with that width. Good game, Maximize button. I concede awesomeness.

Re: Windows 96

#60

Post by floatingatoll »

actually_a_dog wrote: post #46

For some reason, I can't get this to load past ">> Mounting C:/ system drive..." on a recent-ish Firefox version. AdBlock Ultimate says it blocks one thing, but, even when I disable it, I still can't load the UI. Works like a charm in Safari, although I am annoyed that Safari won't give me an actual full screen experience without fiddling with some setting I've probably never paid any attention to before ("Always Sho…

Double-click doesn’t work on Safari Mobile, but portrait kind of does.
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