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How did Windows 95 decide that a setup program ran?

devblogs.microsoft.com

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Re: How did Windows 95 decide that a setup program ran?

#11
post #7

"Ayarla" is very confusing... Setup can't be translated to Turkish as "ayarla". The correct word would be "Yükle/Kur" (verb) and the correct noun would be "Kurulum". Ayarla means "configure" and "ayarlar" means "settings". Also, why just Turkish and Hungarian?

Same goes for the Italian "imposta". It's a direct translation of "set up", but not a verb anyone would use to mean "setting up a program", and I've never seen an installer named "Imposta.exe". Maybe they had an example of such a poorly translated program, though, which warranted adding a special case to the list. The correct verb would be "installa", which was already covered by "inst".

Re: How did Windows 95 decide that a setup program ran?

#13
post #8

Windows 95, for all its UX niceties, was a hack job under the hood. Reading this is just another example. When people make comparisons to clunky Model T cars in the 20’s and Win95, they aren’t far off.

> When people make comparisons to clunky Model T cars in the 20’s and Win95, they aren’t far off. I think they are. Model T’s were clunky because they were minimalistic; Windows 95 was clunky because it tried to do impossible things. This is a fine example. In the Windows 95 architecture, it’s impossible to detect whether a program is an installer, but they tried anyways. Another example is Plug and Play. The origina…

I think I understand your point. But I could argue that a Model T was trying to do an impossible thing too. Like, contain a gasoline explosion to reliably create forward thrust in an affordable design. And make them quickly and reasonably safely. That was “impossible” before.

So I guess the lesson here is any first technology that is trying to do the impossible will be clunky. Fortunately there was a lot of car competition so we got much better cars. Assuming you exclude that industry’s successful lobbying to bend US society into car culture.

After thinking about this I think my analogy was correct but for a spectrum of different reasons.

Re: How did Windows 95 decide that a setup program ran?

#14
post #7

"Ayarla" is very confusing... Setup can't be translated to Turkish as "ayarla". The correct word would be "Yükle/Kur" (verb) and the correct noun would be "Kurulum". Ayarla means "configure" and "ayarlar" means "settings". Also, why just Turkish and Hungarian?

Same goes for the Italian "imposta". It's a direct translation of "set up", but not a verb anyone would use to mean "setting up a program", and I've never seen an installer named "Imposta.exe". Maybe they had an example of such a poorly translated program, though, which warranted adding a special case to the list. The correct verb would be "installa", which was already covered by "inst".

DiscMaster[0] is useful for this!

It seems to agree with you. There's nothing I could find named imposta.exe or aryala.exe, but I did find installa.exe.

[0] https://discmaster.textfiles.com/

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