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Windows 96

windows96.net

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Re: Windows 96

#301

Post by dagw »

globular-toast wrote: post #298
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…

Our copy of Windows 95 was on a CD, but it still needed a floppy boot disk (I don't think CD booting was a thing for another few years). I hated using floppy disks and hated booted from them the most. I always had the feeling it just wasn't going to work and now I had no way to boot my computer at all.

And if you could boot from the CD you also needed floppies with the correct device drivers to actually do the installation.

Re: Windows 96

#302

Post by globular-toast »

ddnb wrote: post #292
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…

Off topic but it's funny to me how seemingly everyone in this writes "floppy disk" correctly with a "k" but writes "discs" (when still talking about the floppy disks) incorrectly with a "c". Must be a habit when not adding floppy in front!

It is funny. I looked it up and apparently the spelling of the general work "disc" (meaning, thin circular thing) is disc in British and disk in American. But universally it's disk for floppy disks and hard disks and disc for compact discs, DVDs etc. My theory is "disc" looks a bit more "modern" for some reason, hence using it for the newer media. For me (a British speaker), it seems totally natural to use "disk" for floppies and hard disks, but disc otherwise.

Re: Windows 96

#303

Post by globular-toast »

dagw wrote: post #301
globular-toast wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our copy of Windows 95 was on a CD, but it still needed a floppy boot disk (I don't think CD booting was a thing for another few years). I hated using floppy disks and hated booted from them the most. I always had the feeling it just wasn't going to work and now I had no way to boot my computer at all.

And if you could boot from the CD you also needed floppies with the correct device drivers to actually do the installation.

Yeah, I needed to do that even with XP because I had an early SATA computer.

Later I learnt you could customise the Windows CD, burn it yourself and include service packs, drivers etc. on it. That saved a lot of time (because back then, reinstalling every few months was a thing).

Re: Windows 96

#304

Post by sumtechguy »

thomasz wrote: post #189
koyote wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped doing it around Windows 7 and have not really seen an issue. I have Windows 10 installations that date back to the original Windows 10 release (and have been updated with Windows Update all the way up to the current) and they are running perfectly fine. That being said, I feel like I install much less software than I used to. They used to hand out CDs with computer magazines that were basically dumps of ran…

Pretty sure it stopped being helpful with Windows 2000.

I would say vista. Many programs would go out of their way to mess with the windows\system32 folder. MS locked most of that out. WinSxS fixed many of the issues where you needed to play around in system32. They also added in a huge chunk of 'compatibility' they would ship in the registry of programs they know are messed up with particular combinations of dlls. The downside of winsxs is cleanup. It was not until late in the lifecycle of win7 they added some way to purge old junk out of it.

Re: Windows 96

#305

Post by timw4mail »

kortilla wrote: post #180
skhr0680 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cute messages are ok sometimes, they’re easy to make aggravating though. Like on Smugmug, which is generally a great product, when you try to delete a photo it has a message like “Do you really want to say good bye to … .jpg” Imagine if that was a photo of your dead grandma or worse

Why would you take a picture of your dead grandma?

It was actually a popular thing early in the days of photography.

Re: Windows 96

#308

Post by yyyk »

justusthane wrote: post #300
yyyk wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minesweeper and freecell are basic system functionality. Putting these available only via a store^W package manager makes as much sense as replacing the UI with a flat interface suited for tablets and phones. Actually I didn't notice the package manager. It's a bit slow to install, and after installing I get ZIP file error when trying to run dosbox. There are a billion minesweeper clones that likely are trivial to in…

But it's not a clone of Windows 95; it's its own thing, which I think is kind of the point. Whether or not to include a Minesweeper clone is totally up to the author. The fact that you can run an actual copy of Windows 95 inside it and run Minesweeper there is way more impressive to me (and it worked fine for me, for what it's worth).

The entire design and name is retro. Without it, I don't think the HN crowd would have been so enthusiastic. The only really new thing is the package manager, which is another step in running an OS under a browser.

* There are existing examples of JS x86 emulation or compiling stuff to WebAssembly, e.g. [0] let you run Windows 2000 in a browser over a decade ago.

[0] https://bellard.org/jslinux/

Re: Windows 96

#309

Post by theandrewbailey »

globular-toast wrote: post #302
ddnb wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off topic but it's funny to me how seemingly everyone in this writes "floppy disk" correctly with a "k" but writes "discs" (when still talking about the floppy disks) incorrectly with a "c". Must be a habit when not adding floppy in front!

It is funny. I looked it up and apparently the spelling of the general work "disc" (meaning, thin circular thing) is disc in British and disk in American. But universally it's disk for floppy disks and hard disks and disc for compact discs, DVDs etc. My theory is "disc" looks a bit more "modern" for some reason, hence using it for the newer media. For me (a British speaker), it seems totally natural to use "disk" for…

When I looked it up, "disc" meant the recording medium itself without any casing or I/O mechanism. Anything else was a "disk".

Re: Windows 96

#310

Post by theandrewbailey »

pram wrote: post #113
koyote wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in those days re-formatting and re-installing Windows was a very common thing because usually the system would get into some kind of bad state after several months of usage (or at least mine did). I believe I only had a Windows 98 'Upgrade' CD, which could not be used to install on a bare system. This meant I had to first install a previous copy Windows, which in my case was Windows 95 on floppy disks (and I fee…

Windows 95/98 definitely decayed over time. Especially after installing stuff like AOL and RealPlayer, your system was like a disgusting cesspool of random trash. I distinctly remember nuking the entire thing would noticeably increase my frame rate in stuff like Homeworld lol

If you moved the same installation between different motherboards, the decay happened alarmingly fast. After 2 or 3, you're lucky if it doesn't bluescreen every hour or two.
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