Vaporwave.
Windows 96
261–270 of 332 posts
Re: Windows 96
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just looked it up -- Windows 98 was THIRTY EIGHT floppy disks hahahahaha
I bet a sealed 38 floppy edition of Windows 98, in mint condition, would go for a million USD.
I wonder if you could build a modern-ish browser on Windows 98 and use it as a minimalist daily driver? Give me a modern browser, bash shell (perhaps an old version of cygwin?), and a decent text editor and I probably could for the most part. I'd have to really get in the '90s spirit and break out the cassette deck though because running an obese Electron app like Tidal would probably be difficult.
I guess you're limited to 3.5 GB of memory too what with Windows 98 being a 32-bit operating system which might be a pain, and perhaps a bigger problem is that no drivers have been written for a couple of decades.
Re: Windows 96
#263There's some potential in making a web-driven GUI with legit application repository, I can imagine offices using this for real work.
Re: Windows 96
#264Massive regression compared to Windows 95 - there's no minesweeper or freecell.
You can install Windows 95 from the package manager (runs in dosbox), and both minesweeper and freecell are present.
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 integrate.
Re: Windows 96
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Protip: Windows 95 (and 98) installs much faster hdd-to-hdd if you start smartdrv.exe in your config.sys/autoexec.bat even with minimal write cache.
Thanks, that would have been really helpful advice a quarter of a century ago :)
funny fact - freedos does not support smartdrv even in 2021
Re: Windows 96
#266Pretty. :) 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…
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…
One time I wanted to tweak my graphics on Windows 3.1. Normal VGA with 640x480 was no problem to configure since it could use some kind of generic drivers. So eventually I choose one of the SVGA modes with 800x600 and after restarting the screen was just dark. Luckily I managed to undo the settings with the keyboard and a blank screen. IIRC the settings for that were quite exposed and it worked. However, countless times where I lost my system setup.
> usually the system would get into some kind of bad state after several months of usage (or at least mine did)
Sometimes some part of the bad state would go okay again for me after some more months of waiting. E.g. the system would only go past the Windows 95 loading screen after opening and closing the CD-ROM drive but at some point that problem would disappear.
Re: Windows 96
#267Needless to say I opened "You are an Idiot".
Wow, what a demonstration how far web technology has come.
Re: Windows 96
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like to think that if we tried installing Windows 10 entirely via floppy disks the floppy drive would fail somewhere around disk 5000.
The Windows 10 ISO is ~3.5 GB in size, and a standard 3.5 in. floppy could hold 1.44 MB. So you'd actually need almost 2500 floppies.
For the sake of science:
Microsoft historically used the 21 512 byte sector, 80 track, double-sided DMF format for 3 1/2" Windows installation media, yielding 1,720,320 bytes per floppy.
Assuming this format, floppy requirements for the four Windows 10 21H1 variants currently on MSDN are
x64 Consumer (Home/Pro): 3,398 floppies
x64 Business (Enterprise/Education): 3,323 floppies
x86 Consumer: 2,416 floppies
x86 Business: 2,361 floppies
x64 Consumer: 3,965 floppies
x64 Business: 3,876 floppies
x86 Consumer: 2,819 floppies
x86 Business: 2,755 floppies
Assuming ideal 500 kbit/sec performance and two seconds per disk swap, reading 4,000 "1.44 MB" floppies (or DMF floppies with equivalent data) would take just under 28 1/2 hours.
So you could easily install any Windows 10 21H1 version from floppies in the course of a single work week, with enough time left over, perhaps, to check Windows Update over a 56 kbps modem (though you'd probably need the weekend, at least, to actually download the updates).
Re: Windows 96
#269The thing that you can install and play Half Life in this is just... wow!
Re: Windows 96
#270Earlier 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?
That's not what I meant, but I knew a guy whose brother couldn't attend their grandma's open casket funeral due to being overseas and took photos there to show him.