Windows 95 was the “next-generation” OS from Microsoft: redesigned UI, long file names support, 32-bit apps and many other changes. Some of Windows 95 components are still in use today. How does it look? Let’s test it and figure it out.
It’s always fun to dive back into old operating systems we used to use every day. Windows 95 is such a monumental release, and one that changed the face of computing overnight. It turned an already massive computer company into one of the largest, most powerful companies in the world, and its influence on how desktop and laptop user interfaces work today can be seen everywhere.
Windows 95 also happens to be delightfully pleasant to look at, especially taking into account the jumbled, chaotic mess of a user interface Windows has become today.
The article appears to suggest that Win95’s internet client capabilities are limited to IE3, but it can run much more than that. IE5.5 is supported; Firefox 1.5 is supported; and there’s always a hacker out there doing something nuts like backporting newer TLS onto Firefox 2 specifically targeted to Win95 ( https://github.com/roytam1/RetroZilla .)
Ignoring user based focus like web browsing, I still maintain lots of mission critical hardware that runs Win95 through to Win98SE., but it’s getting harder by the day to keep these things locked down and running reliably. Most of my efforts these days goes into securing and sourcing old hardware.
cpcf,
I think a lot of us are curious how you are using these 🙂
Have you tried virtualization?
Personally I’ve had to support DOS systems until just a few years ago, haha. It was a case of “if it aint broken, don’t fix it”, even though it had numerous limitations, was running into memory barriers, relied on a frigile trumpet TCP driver, it became increasingly difficult to source hardware for (ethernet specifically).
Not the commenter you’re replying to, but I have a home music studio with a lot of 90s gear that will not work with contemporary Windows or in a virtualized environment, so I too maintain a small group of legacy PCs. Chiefly for a couple racks of Akai S5000 and S6000 outfitted with the USB card upgrades, but also some Roland gear.
You *can* get things like VirtualBox’s USB passthrough to work with Akai’s old Akai.sys software, however it’s incredibly error prone for a piece of software that’s already twitchy enough. I imagine that’s the case for most of everything that depends on a non 64-bit driver and physical data connection.
Every time some component needs to be replaced, I check out the virtualization solutions again to check for improvement, but I think developers of those solutions are too young to remember considerations that needed to be taken to properly handle USB1 and are (pretty much rightfully so) A-OK with just supporting USB 2.0 compatibility. I’ve been testing out an older refurb Dell running Windows 7 32-bit and it seems stable enough for my purposes, but dropping 16-bit and 32-bit drivers from 64-bit Windows really boned a lot of people. If Microsoft would allow those older drivers to properly load (as it did up until Vista), there’d be no need for any of this life support. But Windows 98 and even 7 is so easy to manage, that it’s not really a chore until you have to play eBay roulette to find new parts.
Heck, it’s not even a bad position to be in. scsi2sd technology has single handedly kept much of my gear in operation doing nothing more than replacing spinning storage media.
What do you expect when you opt to stick with old and unsupported gear? Microsoft isn’t the one giving you the headaches, you’re doing it to yourself. You’re spending more time and money choosing to stay in a constant state of ever-increasing pain-in-the-assness trying not to modernize. And, the longer this goes on, the harder and more expensive it’s going to be. I’ve known several people in your exact position and every one of them has had the exact same complaints. Some of them got tired of fighting a losing battle and some haven’t hit their `bottom` yet. The ones who have seem relieved to no longer carry the burdens.
Nostalgia and sentimentality can be costly and unless you truly truly truly love old gear, you’re not doing yourself any favors.
That’s quite a needlessly pessimistic point of view. People in studios do not get rid of gear because an upstream vendor has ended support for it. Run a studio of any size for more than a decade and it’s very likely that many vendors whose products you own won’t even be around by that time. Support for studio gear is quite a bit different from say an office or datacenter setting. Warranties are good and usually key for their time deployed in an office or datacenter setting, but they’re usually only for a year for this type of equipment. After that time, you send gear to your trusted repairman and/or you learn to maintain parts yourself.
One can certainly go the software only route to replicate many features of older gear, but it sounds different and doesn’t always provide the same capabilities. The benefits I derive from my Akais are that I can have many libraries I know very, very well, open at all times, in any project, on any computer. And I create my own libraries without having to worry about whether the next Mac OS or Windows release will break everything.
And you’re being pretty overblown has far as perceived costs go. I spend maybe 2 hours every 5 years fixing any hardware issues and 2 hours experimenting with virtualization in that same time frame. If you’re trying to make it a cost argument, I’ve saved countless money not chasing software transitional trends. I’m artistically free to write music in the manner in which I and my clients prefer. I’m not tied down with the anchor of restrictive software licensing.
I get that young people have a genetic deformity that results in the inability to look at beige electronic equipment and comprehend their persistent value, but that’s not an excuse for being wrong.
jonnyvice,
Haha, that’s the funniest variation of “get off my lawn” I’ve heard in a while. I hope that friedchicken takes it with a chuckle because obviously there is no right or wrong answer. It depends on what one’s requirements are.
Sometimes new is better, but sometimes the old stuff has better quality, more tactile interaction and feels less cheap compared to the plastic and touch UIs that dominant today’s products. Modern products have mastered the art of cost reduction and are not typically designed to last a long time.
There’s nothing pessimistic about anything I said, it simply is what it is. You haven’t made a single compelling argument to the contrary. You’re the one who was whining about your grievances, now you’re blowing it off like it’s no big deal. Which is it? Additionally, you trying to use old Akai sound libraries as some sort of justification is laughable. That you think “modernizing” means chasing software, trends, of “restrictive software licensing” is even more so. You can also save your `artistic freedom` rhetoric. As if that weren’t enough, your hurt feelings-fueled attempt at an insult is the perfectly predictable closing by someone who whines about how much of a hassle it’s becoming to maintain their “legacy PC” based “home studio”. I said, “I’ve known several people in your exact position”.. You should ponder why that is, maybe ask me what I was doing in the 90’s and who I was doing it for. I have no doubt I have forgotten more than you will ever learn and had my hands on exponentially more gear than you will ever have any access to. For that matter, I’m sure that’s true of just the gear I still have in storage. It’s nice you and your “clients” think your little setup is cool though. It’s almost cute.
@Alfman I didn’t have a chuckle, just thought it was dumb. If anything I’m probably more the `get off my lawn` one when it comes to this subject. I maxed out years ago on patience for people who think they’ve got it all figured out by reading “pro”-sumer forums, an archived Mix magazine subscription, and talking about “production” with Guitar Center employee’s. It’s no coincidence I haven’t mentored anyone in a studio almost equally as long either. I suppose I should appreciate any time someone does touch real gear, even if it’s old crap. I’m all for people having their own processes, I just don’t like when they whine about it.
friedchicken,
That’s kind of what I find funny.
To be fair I didn’t think he was posting to whine about it. It was an on-topic response to the question of what people are using these old systems for. Everybody’s got quirks, jonny’s vice is old studio equipment, yours is fried chicken and beer, it’s all good 🙂
@Alfman Can’t argue with that! 🙂
Have you experimented at all with PCI/PCIe passthrough, and giving a VM an entire USB card of its own?
It’s all about drivers and vintage hardware built on cards using old platforms like AT, ISA, EISA or SCSI bus. I even have to hack hardware like replacing the odd RTC with a modern substitute or slowing a newer CPU to keep things working.
There are services about that will use FPGA to build replacements of these old cards in a format like PCMCIA, but it’s very expensive, so the old ways survive.
The old custom hardware is made to last, it is repairable and reliable, like Apollo vintage systems. Keeping the PCs running that contain the cards is another issue. The PC industry has almost zero regard for the past.
I think I’ve posted here before, people would be shocked if they actually knew how much critical infrastructure depends on hardware they thought was redundant two decades ago!
The industrial PC industry, on the other hand, is pretty much 90’s PC’s reincarnated. Parallel, serial and PCI slots are still quite common on industrial motherboards manufactured today. It wasn’t too long ago when ISA slots were still very much a feature on industrial PC’s
Yep, agreed, and I’ve used them where budgets permit, you can basically get built what you like and need but they don’t come cheaply. Ironically, it’s the lack of spending to keep or replace old hardware that forces people into an expensive solution, there is no avoiding spending some money.
The other downside, you find yourself locked into an expensive supply chain, you won’t be buying spares off Amazon or Ebay once you go down that route!
I’ve done some Windows 95 VxD development recently, for fun, and I succeeded in using the VirtualBox guest device for host logging, Shared Clipboard, (bad but functional) mouse pointer integration, and the beginnings of Shared Folders.
Would you or anyone else be interested in further development? I’d be happy to open source what I’ve done so far, but if there is enough interest, and ideally some funding (eg. a Kickstarter project) for the bigger/harder parts, much more could be added, eg. host hardware accelerated graphics, better USB passthrough, etc.
Win 95 sucked until OSR2. Win98 only exists becuase they never released OSR2 retail. OS2.5 is 99.6% Win98. (somewhat).
“It’s gonna make us rich”-dance :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAkuJXGldrM
Would it be possible to create a proxy server that transpiles modern HTML & JS into a form that can be ran by ancient browsers?
FriendBesto,
At one point the mobile version of opera did something kind of like this: rendering websites on a server and displaying the result on the client. It did this to get around apple’s prohibition of alternative browsers on IOS. In principal this kind of technology could be used to give older computers access to the modern web, although I don’t know if there was ever a desktop client or if the server components were released publicly.
An alternative would be to launch a browser remotely via X11 network forwarding, I did this on windows 98 and should continue to work until we finally kill off X. Personally I’d just be inclined to install a modern linux rather than going through the trouble of finding ways to use an old OS.
Opera Mobile did that on non-smartphones running a variety of OSes, as it was a Java ME application. I had a Sony w580i feature phone that ran Opera Mobile and allowed me to surf just about any non-video-based website around in 2007. Spent a lot of time on various web forums and webmail platforms using that little phone. 🙂
Even after getting a real smartphone running Android (Sony Xperia pro), I still ran Opera Mobile for awhile, as it cut down on data usage.
Web Rendering Proxy exists for exactly this purpose.