Windows 95: Fixes itself when you aren’t watching Windows 11: Fucks itself up when you aren’t watching
Oh, every windows has fucked itself up silently. 95 was famous for needing a reboot at every mouse movement and a reinstall regularly.
I managed 100s of days of uptime on 95.
It really helped if you replaced the shell, imo.
The BSOD was a digital wellbeing feature, to make sure you didn’t use your computer for too long.
Being the guy who had to feed the whole 32 floppy disk stack to the wretched PC every time the user broke the Windows 95 installation pushed me to the *nix camp quite early, I can tell you that.
Each floppy had a good 10% chance of being faulty, so imagine the fun.
Oh, I’d actually forgotten how flaky 3.5" floppies were. That’s very true.
A 5.25" you could probably send in a letter and stick the letter on a fridge with a magnet so your remember to mail it and it would still work when it arrived.
Well, maybe not, but it was quite a difference.
3.5" was still better than zip disks. At least you couldn’t break your floppy drive with a bad disk. Zip drives would break due to a bad disk such that they damaged any other disks you used. Then those broken disks would break any working drive, etc. First and maybe only communicable hardware bug.
Even Windows 98SE gave me a long habit (only somewhat receded after moving to Linux) to, as much as possible, not even move the cursor without a clear purpose. Every event could be the last before everything hanging. Probably not as often as with 95 or plain 98, but.
I just found out what the glorious emulator 86box is and I installed everything. Fucking everything. 98, 98 SE, ME, XP, 2000.
And then there was 95. I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with that OS. Boot disks and ISO were absolutely fine, but Setup took almost an hour. Then I wanted to install Plus!, but I opened the wrong setup.exe.
Instead of warning my dumb ass, the fucking thing started installing over itself on the fly. And it shat the bed so hard, the whole machine was unusable after about 3% of setup and me cancelling the installation.
Manually starting explorer.exe after reboot (which for some reason brought up Task Manager every time) worked, but every tiny click informed me that Rundll32 has performed an illegal action. What in the futhark is that ugly ass OS.
edit: Typos wtf
Are you sure you’re using the best version of 95?
Like 95a didn’t even have out-of-the-box USB support.
You’ll want to use B or C versions for optimal driver support, including USB.
It’s B with Plus, but I won’t he using it anyway, ME does everything that 95 does and better. But thanks for the tip!
What in the futhark is that ugly ass OS.
It was the first step up from Windows 3.11 which was basically a DOS GUI. It was rough, but definitely an improvement. Compare that to the latest “updated OS” from Microsoft now.
And 30 years ago it was quite easy to do dumb shit that completely ruined your system, be it in DOS, Win95, or OS/2.
Example from OS/2 - deleting the image file used for the desktop background in presentation manager (OS/2’s core GUI) meant your system could no longer boot, and when you can’t just google shit to sort things out, you were essentially up for a reinstall at that point.
OS/2 sorely lacked user rights management (but then DOS/Windows didn’t have any either). Other than that, it was an amazing system at the time. It’s a shame that the industry went with Windows.
Fail safes were absolutely non existent it seems. The OS/2 fun fact is something else lol.
