Windows 95 Anniversary

Big day today, 20 years since the launch of Windows 95.

Meh... Workbench 1.3 in the Mid 1980s was far superior to Windows 95 in the mid 90s.

A friend of mine bought an Amiga 1200 which had an even better OS and an 80MB hard drive...!!!

My first computer was one of these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81

But I upgraded in 1989 to an Amiga 500... what a difference...

GarryB wrote:Meh... Workbench 1.3 in the Mid 1980s was far superior to Windows 95 in the mid 90s.

Do you mean the one from Amiga 500? It wasn't even a proper OS, just a user interface,. It had no be looaded from a floppy disc each time upon turning computer on and when yu played a game, you could not access the OS.

Morpheus Eberhardt wrote:My first general-purpose digital computer was an "IBM" System/360.

The following image is an earlier version of the System/360 than the one I was using.

Wrote my first assembler program in 1967 on an ICL mainframe for a car dealer in Birmingham, included in the computer's price was a systems and programming team of which I was part. We were in regular competition with those IBM systems, sometimes we won others they did. But we had a big installed base of punched card tabulator/calculator installations that we were able to hold onto.

In the 70's I first supported then sold some really big systems. First exposure to PCs was in 1982, good old WordPerfect and Lotus 123.

Seen it all

Do you mean the one from Amiga 500? It wasn't even a proper OS, just a user interface,. It had no be looaded from a floppy disc each time upon turning computer on and when yu played a game, you could not access the OS.

I guess you are not an IT person... Workbench was a proper OS... the fact that it originally came on a floppy disk was because hard drives were enormous and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars at the time.

When you turn on your 286 and start Windows 95 it loads from hard drive the same way Workbench loads from Floppy. Both are operating systems, but one you bought separately from the computer and came on a dozen floppy disks with almost twice the capacity of the floppy disks used on the Amiga ten years before... on the Amiga it used the same 720K floppy disks the IBM computers used but with superior formatting they had a capacity of 880K. The IBM floppies were improved to 1.44MB double sided double density disks but the Amiga never made the same upgrade so it remained an 880K double sided standard density disk.

Of course you could use Workbench to control all aspects of the computer, but just like DOS games for old IBMs they used all of the fast memory so they unloaded the OS and the computer game controlled the computer including RAM etc.

the breakthrough was XP where XP acted as a software layer and controlled the computer hardware directly... that meant when you installed a game you didn't have to choose sound and graphics options because the games made requests for hardware access through the OS instead of directly to the hardware.

That does not mean Windows 95 and Windows 98 and Amiga Workbench were not OS.

Amiga workbench allowed me to pretty much do everything XP could do, but due to the fact that XP operated between other software and the hardware it was vastly more stable so crashes that required reboots were rather more rare.

A new Workbench designed like XP would be the best Linux OS ever...

Even at the time windows 95 was renowned for being bloatware... Windows 3.1 did the job fine.

But to throw Microsoft a bone, I will say that Windows 7 is stable and OK as was WinXP. Every other version is utter trash.

Microsoft were a bunch of greedy sharks, IBM on the other hand were a bit naive... fortunately that was the correct way around because the IBM standard or clone meant anyone could make components to that standard and with a driver could be added to almost any IBM system. With Apple... you bought Apple.

I haven't had much experience with Windows 7 or Vista for that matter, and I have a KVM switch running my oldest IBM clone running Windows 98 as a games machine for old games, two machines running XP, and a machine I just loaded Cinnamon Linux.

I have an old mini laptop with Windows 10 as a free upgrade... it came with Win 7 but was almost non functional with that OS... ironic as my mini laptop has a touch screen that is ideal for Windows 10.

I have just installed Knoppix on a laptop and I am really impressed with the software that comes with it...

I got it from here:

http://www.technic3d.com/Knoppix-Mirror/knoppix-dvd/

And I downloaded the english version of the latest release:

http://knoppix.technic3d.com/knoppix-dvd/KNOPPIX_V7.6.1DVD-2016-01-16-EN.iso

Just over 4GB but it looks like a pretty complete and free operating system.

I am upgrading my computer this year and probably setting up a NAS and a media centre computer and I am thinking of making them all various versions of Linux to keep costs down.

Anybody has Eastern Bloc/Soviet old computers ?

kvs wrote:IBM f*cked up the market big time.  It chose a piece of sh*t OS and CPU for its PC.   The IBM executives did not treat the PC
as a serious computer platform.   Of course they were morons who did not understand what Moore's "law" meant.    

IBM should have chosen the Motorola 68000 (a real 16/32 CPU with linear memory addressing) but instead chose the turdlet
known as the Intel 8088 an 8 bit waste of silicon with segmented memory addressing.  Instead of adopting the available, superior
Unix OS flavours on the market it chose some no-name upstart Microsoft and their Mickey Mouse DOS.   A total joke compared to
Unix.  

IBM established the Microsoft and Intel monopolies (de facto) in the PC marketplace.  And we have been living with this legacy
ever since.   Although I will credit Intel for going somewhere, eventually.   But Microsh*t and Winblows are still afflicting us today.
Winblows is nothing but semi-functional bloatware.   All of its claim to greatness is utter triviality that Linux has had since the 1990s.
With Linux and GUI Unix OS's you can chose the menu-driven point and click or the command line as you wish.  Nothing is foisted on you.

Winblows still does not have proper security features.   You can't hack Unix like you can hack Winchunks.   And God that endless hard
disk grinding and the epic conceptual fail called the registry.   Then you have the cherry on top: every software package you install
mucks around with system shared libraries.   This public toilet approach to OS design is hallmark Microshaft.   A real OS does not allow
applications to do this.  

But to throw Microsoft a bone, I will say that Windows 7 is stable and OK as was WinXP.   Every other version is utter trash.        

There speaks I suspect a techie view.

Quite a different view from marketing and sales (where the commercial power is) as the last thing the big computer (mainframe) manufacturers wanted was to introduce a product that would eat into that market quickly. With hindsight the Microsoft/Intel combination with the phased introduction of more powerful processors and operating systems was pure marketing genius. First they surrounded the mainframe with intelligent replacements for dumb terminals then they ate into the mini computer market, killing the typewriter and comptometer markets on the way. It was many years of juicy profits before they impacted mainframes.

A famous quote from an IBM executive was that he saw a world wide demand for computers at maybe 6 or 7 computers the size of a large multistory building.

Personal computers had no future...