They already entered non support phase for DOS, W3.x, W95, NT3.5 at the end of last year. I’m am rather surprised they supported MS-DOS for as long as they did. MS-DOS stopped active development about a decade ago. Not many software companies that even claim to support anything that long. Then again there was a lot of people that clung to MS-DOS for a long while. I will be surprised if any company in the future will be supporting stuff that long. Heck, until some education people complained apple was talking about preventing people from even booting into OS9.
Great, that would explain why they’ve now made it even harder to install the “Desktop Enhancements” on Win95. Can’t download IE4 from microsoft anymore, IE5 doesn’t come with it, and the trick you used to be able to do to force the option during the IE5/6 install doesn’t work anymore because they seem to have removed the files from their servers. I’m sure that ~2MB file that you could only get by editing a temp file during the IE5 install was really eating up a lot of their bandwidth and storage space. Thanks, Microsoft!
A lot of coorporations have hardware/software for which no Win2K/XP drivers exist, and they are reluctant to upgrade from 95 to ME. Heck, even a lot of ISA cards still populate R&D workshops, and motherboards with ISA slots are hard to find. But I guess by this time most people dont need any more upgrades to 95, so I guess they’ll survive without Microsoft. Ofcourse, the best support option would be for Microsoft to open the source for the no longer supported products…
funny. the company i work for are so stubborn that they run an office of nt4 win98 and win95, and our most important machines are the 95 ones because the crappy transport software that we use to move the payroll info needs some crappy windows 95 app.
(yes i imagin there are other ways of doing what they need, but its not my responsibility).
Not to mention barely any of the software at our office is payed for licensing wise. winnt 4 server with 5 clients..ya right… and a few win98 licenses. and TONS of desktop software which is illegal.
Its quite amazing how companies function today. “We will steal someone elses work, but were sueing you if you mess with ours!”.
Quite pitiful how technology is still neglected. Maybe its just the Wyoming Valley, in Wilkes Barre Pa that still does this. ( I work at Advanced Employee Services, I only wish they would get audited somehow and have to pay big bucks It really irritates me when people neglect someone elses hard work so much. Although I am a *nix user, I do think that if software has a price, you must pay to use it, even if it is Microsoft (a company that probably doesnt need anymore money).
We’re still mostly on Win98 (one W2k (me) and 2 WinXP also). We run the business on a DOS Clipper DB app served from Netware 4.??. We jumped directly from DOS/Win3x to Win98 because 16-bit Java support didn’t exist/sucked (all for a lame menu applet on a 3rd party website that was later revamped to use an equally lame javascript menu). We’ve since squeezed in a Linux box for Email/FAX/Intranet/DB massaging scripts. It would still be on RH 6.X if the Hard drive hadn’t died.
I’ve had suprisingly few problems with Win98. Only have had to reinstall one system in several years due to unrepairable DLL hell. Have had more problems due to flaky/underpowered hardware. We just don’t push these machines that hard.
Oh, and at least half of our Win98 licenses are off-the-shelf (didn’t want to sign our firstborn to MS volume licensing) so we can legally transfer them to new hardware (the rest are OEM). Win98 is going to be around here for a while.
maybe this is a good time for freedos to start emerging as an option for companies who use dos. I have installed freedos before and it mostly worked quite well. It has the basics of everything a general user needs. Now just adding some bells and whistles and such.
>>>Just as an interesting idea, what if companys were forced to open source their products after they stop supporting them?
Companies can sign individual supporting contracts with Microsoft to get support. Just like IBM will keep on supporting OS/2 as long as companies willing to pay for individual support.
I dont see MS opensourcing any of their OSes ever, but even if they would, i doubt Win95 would be the one that they would. Cause 98 and ME arent dead just yet, and you wouldnt ever be able to convince me that there is something SUBSTANCIALLY different between those three. So by doing that, you open the key to OSes that they still support.
I think it would be interesting to see the actual code changes between 98SE and ME though, i mean, other than their fancyfied explorer.exe, i’d like to see what makes ME so much less stable.
Win95 was my favorite version of windows, and still the one im most comfortable with, hell, i had problems changing what workgroup this XP box was on this morning cause they changed all that stuff.
At least MS support thier OSes for a decent period of time. Mandrake release a new damn distro every week and good luck trying to install modern Linux apps on Mandrake 7.0 let alone getting support from Mandrake on this.
For me its Linux distros that need upgrading all the time just to keep up to date the 400 libraries that every damn KDE or Gnome program seems to need.
I can install and run all the latest games and Windows software on my 4 year old copy of Win98 without upgrading any damn libraries
It will never happen! Imagine MS openning win95. guess how much better wine becomes. it would improve on an order of magnitude!
win95.sourceforge.net … heh, i can imagine it now. it would take years for the OSS community to take out all the bugs, and “features” and release and openwin 1.0 . heh, it would be fun though.
Isn’t Windows NT for Workstations 3.5.x released some time after Windows 3.1. And isn’t Windows 95 released a long time about both of these releases? Why are they being killed at the same time?
Actually, WINE is for running Win16/32 apps, not for DOS apps per se. You could run DOS apps with it, but that’s incredibly stupid. There is dosemu, which runs all the DOS apps I throw at it.
At the rate WINE seems to be gaining ground I dare say that it will reach full Win95 compatibility sometime before anyone would have time collect all the API data from Microsofts code anyway…..
At least MS support thier OSes for a decent period of time. Mandrake release a new damn distro every week and good luck trying to install modern Linux apps on Mandrake 7.0 let alone getting support from Mandrake on this.
I agree. The support period of most commercial Linux distro is pretty low. Mandrake is definitely one fo them. Red Hat behaves already better and is quite right as “product support life”. Debian is very good too, as a non-commercial OS.
But there’s another fact to count: Linux being open source, you can easily upgrade it at no cost. On well developped OS, let’s pick up Debian as a great example, you don’t even need to upgrade if it fills all your needs. It can be old, but rock solid and without any (major) security issue.
I can install and run all the latest games and Windows software on my 4 year old copy of Win98 without upgrading any damn libraries
DLL hell my ass
That’s because proprietary/close source OSes nearly don’t share any librairy, hence no dependency. It just eats disk space, memory and cpu (duplication of code).
It’s theorically possible to build an entire Linux system with no, or very minimal, dependency just by blundling most of required librairies into each application, like it’s done on Windows. You’ll just loose lots of optimizations/power due to duplication of code (getting worse by running several applications at the same time).
It’s just 2 different development views. I much prefer the “share libraries” way. As for dependency hell (which is terrible), packages/applications need to be well build and Debian is just doing is right: no dep hell there.
Good old dos is still in use at the office of my car insurance agent. Huge 8088 beige box with the 5″ floppy drive. Monochrome black and green screen.
It was like going back to the late 1980s seeing that thing…. ~sigh~
And, yes, runs the database that everybody’s info is kept on.
—
The odd thing is, dos/Win 3.1 is the first computing system I really learned to use, and I have no fears about the command line in dos, never had.
The idea of using a command line in a *nix based program fills me with dread. Probably because I’ve never had anybody teach me *nix commands in a systematic way, and also because *nix is much more powerful than dos.
You mentioned Wine, but how sure are you that Microsoft, if ever making Windows 95 open source, would release it in a license where Wine could fork the code?
“I (and many others) heard there is a new dos/’win .net’ shell going on. Saying it will beat Unix shell on features. That would be a killer to Unix.”
That would be a surprise. Especially since the “command line culture” is all but dead in Windows shops. I can just see the elation on my boss’s face when I tell him I can save a whole file in an environment variable. He’ll jump up and down with excitement. Maybe even take me out to lunch because of my discovery. Especially once he realizes about all those script-kiddies now being able to whack at Windows “operating systems” without bothering to install Perl and such…
Besides, what makes you think *nix shell developers are standing still?
“I (and many others) heard there is a new dos/’win .net’ shell going on. Saying it will beat Unix shell on features. That would be a killer to Unix.”
That would be a surprise. Especially since the “command line culture” is all but dead in Windows shops. I can just see the elation on my boss’s face when I tell him I can save a whole file in an environment variable. He’ll jump up and down with excitement. Maybe even take me out to lunch because of my discovery. Especially once he realizes about all those script-kiddies now being able to whack at Windows “operating systems” without bothering to install Perl and such…
Besides, what makes you think *nix shell developers are standing still?
If they would only retire ME and 98 sooner…
…good riddance?
Rest in peace. Although it’s been a long time since I last used DOS, it was fun back when there wasn’t anything else!
They already entered non support phase for DOS, W3.x, W95, NT3.5 at the end of last year. I’m am rather surprised they supported MS-DOS for as long as they did. MS-DOS stopped active development about a decade ago. Not many software companies that even claim to support anything that long. Then again there was a lot of people that clung to MS-DOS for a long while. I will be surprised if any company in the future will be supporting stuff that long. Heck, until some education people complained apple was talking about preventing people from even booting into OS9.
and does anyone use that ancient crap anyways? I mean.. win95? only in vmware..
Great, that would explain why they’ve now made it even harder to install the “Desktop Enhancements” on Win95. Can’t download IE4 from microsoft anymore, IE5 doesn’t come with it, and the trick you used to be able to do to force the option during the IE5/6 install doesn’t work anymore because they seem to have removed the files from their servers. I’m sure that ~2MB file that you could only get by editing a temp file during the IE5 install was really eating up a lot of their bandwidth and storage space. Thanks, Microsoft!
that is uses for its diagnostics partition. The funny thing is that most fdisk programs identify the partition as Non-DOS but
Corel Linux 1.2 automatically mounted it and you could see the old familiar dos programs and some others.
I sold that laptop and never bothered to try running any of those programs under WINE.
please elaborate…
A lot of coorporations have hardware/software for which no Win2K/XP drivers exist, and they are reluctant to upgrade from 95 to ME. Heck, even a lot of ISA cards still populate R&D workshops, and motherboards with ISA slots are hard to find. But I guess by this time most people dont need any more upgrades to 95, so I guess they’ll survive without Microsoft. Ofcourse, the best support option would be for Microsoft to open the source for the no longer supported products…
“and does anyone use that ancient crap anyways? I mean.. win95? only
in vmware..”
I still see DOS-based database software in use in businesses. WH
Smiths, one of the largest retail chains in the UK, has an ordering
system with a DOS-style display – of course, it might not be MSDOS
itself.
The local vet has a DOS-based appointments and database system. So did
my dentist until a year ago. The new Windows screens are harder to
read – smaller type, light coloured backgrounds, lots of clutter on
the screen – not what you want in a busy shop.
While Windows is good for providing complicated GUIs for DTP,
spreadsheet, or paint programs, it is not good on a terminal.
funny. the company i work for are so stubborn that they run an office of nt4 win98 and win95, and our most important machines are the 95 ones because the crappy transport software that we use to move the payroll info needs some crappy windows 95 app.
(yes i imagin there are other ways of doing what they need, but its not my responsibility).
Not to mention barely any of the software at our office is payed for licensing wise. winnt 4 server with 5 clients..ya right… and a few win98 licenses. and TONS of desktop software which is illegal.
Its quite amazing how companies function today. “We will steal someone elses work, but were sueing you if you mess with ours!”.
Quite pitiful how technology is still neglected. Maybe its just the Wyoming Valley, in Wilkes Barre Pa that still does this. ( I work at Advanced Employee Services, I only wish they would get audited somehow and have to pay big bucks
It really irritates me when people neglect someone elses hard work so much. Although I am a *nix user, I do think that if software has a price, you must pay to use it, even if it is Microsoft (a company that probably doesnt need anymore money).
We’re still mostly on Win98 (one W2k (me) and 2 WinXP also). We run the business on a DOS Clipper DB app served from Netware 4.??. We jumped directly from DOS/Win3x to Win98 because 16-bit Java support didn’t exist/sucked (all for a lame menu applet on a 3rd party website that was later revamped to use an equally lame javascript menu). We’ve since squeezed in a Linux box for Email/FAX/Intranet/DB massaging scripts. It would still be on RH 6.X if the Hard drive hadn’t died.
I’ve had suprisingly few problems with Win98. Only have had to reinstall one system in several years due to unrepairable DLL hell. Have had more problems due to flaky/underpowered hardware. We just don’t push these machines that hard.
Oh, and at least half of our Win98 licenses are off-the-shelf (didn’t want to sign our firstborn to MS volume licensing) so we can legally transfer them to new hardware (the rest are OEM). Win98 is going to be around here for a while.
isnt this a duplicate report?
maybe this is a good time for freedos to start emerging as an option for companies who use dos. I have installed freedos before and it mostly worked quite well. It has the basics of everything a general user needs. Now just adding some bells and whistles and such.
If you want DOS use FreeDOS http://www.freedos.org
couldn’t MS open source to the public?
See what we can do with it, thats if anybody wants to.
Just as an interesting idea, what if companys were forced to open source their products after they stop supporting them?
it seems like a good idea in a lot of ways. let people and other companys do the support you no longer want to do.
>>>Just as an interesting idea, what if companys were forced to open source their products after they stop supporting them?
Companies can sign individual supporting contracts with Microsoft to get support. Just like IBM will keep on supporting OS/2 as long as companies willing to pay for individual support.
I dont see MS opensourcing any of their OSes ever, but even if they would, i doubt Win95 would be the one that they would. Cause 98 and ME arent dead just yet, and you wouldnt ever be able to convince me that there is something SUBSTANCIALLY different between those three. So by doing that, you open the key to OSes that they still support.
I think it would be interesting to see the actual code changes between 98SE and ME though, i mean, other than their fancyfied explorer.exe, i’d like to see what makes ME so much less stable.
Win95 was my favorite version of windows, and still the one im most comfortable with, hell, i had problems changing what workgroup this XP box was on this morning cause they changed all that stuff.
I was under impression that MS only supports one version back is in W2K, but not NT4.0 or ME.
That’s also the way I understood article. ME and NT4.o are currently in extended = non-supported stage.
How did you figure that 3.51 and/or 95 etc. only become non-supported now?
At least MS support thier OSes for a decent period of time. Mandrake release a new damn distro every week and good luck trying to install modern Linux apps on Mandrake 7.0 let alone getting support from Mandrake on this.
For me its Linux distros that need upgrading all the time just to keep up to date the 400 libraries that every damn KDE or Gnome program seems to need.
I can install and run all the latest games and Windows software on my 4 year old copy of Win98 without upgrading any damn libraries
DLL hell my ass
It will never happen! Imagine MS openning win95. guess how much better wine becomes. it would improve on an order of magnitude!
win95.sourceforge.net … heh, i can imagine it now. it would take years for the OSS community to take out all the bugs, and “features” and release and openwin 1.0 . heh, it would be fun though.
it was fun back when there wasn’t anything else!
Despite the bitterness it was what you got.
…pushed a key too many … no one would expect a longer life to win NT 3.x and dos ( I started with NT4 and it has been a hell of a ride).
I (and many others) heard there is a new dos/’win .net’ shell going on. Saying it will beat Unix shell on features. That would be a killer to Unix.
Isn’t Windows NT for Workstations 3.5.x released some time after Windows 3.1. And isn’t Windows 95 released a long time about both of these releases? Why are they being killed at the same time?
Actually, WINE is for running Win16/32 apps, not for DOS apps per se. You could run DOS apps with it, but that’s incredibly stupid. There is dosemu, which runs all the DOS apps I throw at it.
At the rate WINE seems to be gaining ground I dare say that it will reach full Win95 compatibility sometime before anyone would have time collect all the API data from Microsofts code anyway…..
I hope so anyway.
At least MS support thier OSes for a decent period of time. Mandrake release a new damn distro every week and good luck trying to install modern Linux apps on Mandrake 7.0 let alone getting support from Mandrake on this.
I agree. The support period of most commercial Linux distro is pretty low. Mandrake is definitely one fo them. Red Hat behaves already better and is quite right as “product support life”. Debian is very good too, as a non-commercial OS.
But there’s another fact to count: Linux being open source, you can easily upgrade it at no cost. On well developped OS, let’s pick up Debian as a great example, you don’t even need to upgrade if it fills all your needs. It can be old, but rock solid and without any (major) security issue.
I can install and run all the latest games and Windows software on my 4 year old copy of Win98 without upgrading any damn libraries
DLL hell my ass
That’s because proprietary/close source OSes nearly don’t share any librairy, hence no dependency. It just eats disk space, memory and cpu (duplication of code).
It’s theorically possible to build an entire Linux system with no, or very minimal, dependency just by blundling most of required librairies into each application, like it’s done on Windows. You’ll just loose lots of optimizations/power due to duplication of code (getting worse by running several applications at the same time).
It’s just 2 different development views. I much prefer the “share libraries” way. As for dependency hell (which is terrible), packages/applications need to be well build and Debian is just doing is right: no dep hell there.
Good old dos is still in use at the office of my car insurance agent. Huge 8088 beige box with the 5″ floppy drive. Monochrome black and green screen.
It was like going back to the late 1980s seeing that thing…. ~sigh~
And, yes, runs the database that everybody’s info is kept on.
—
The odd thing is, dos/Win 3.1 is the first computing system I really learned to use, and I have no fears about the command line in dos, never had.
The idea of using a command line in a *nix based program fills me with dread. Probably because I’ve never had anybody teach me *nix commands in a systematic way, and also because *nix is much more powerful than dos.
If you read only this headline and nothing else, it sounds like good news!
You mentioned Wine, but how sure are you that Microsoft, if ever making Windows 95 open source, would release it in a license where Wine could fork the code?
“I (and many others) heard there is a new dos/’win .net’ shell going on. Saying it will beat Unix shell on features. That would be a killer to Unix.”
That would be a surprise. Especially since the “command line culture” is all but dead in Windows shops. I can just see the elation on my boss’s face when I tell him I can save a whole file in an environment variable. He’ll jump up and down with excitement. Maybe even take me out to lunch because of my discovery. Especially once he realizes about all those script-kiddies now being able to whack at Windows “operating systems” without bothering to install Perl and such…
Besides, what makes you think *nix shell developers are standing still?
“I (and many others) heard there is a new dos/’win .net’ shell going on. Saying it will beat Unix shell on features. That would be a killer to Unix.”
That would be a surprise. Especially since the “command line culture” is all but dead in Windows shops. I can just see the elation on my boss’s face when I tell him I can save a whole file in an environment variable. He’ll jump up and down with excitement. Maybe even take me out to lunch because of my discovery. Especially once he realizes about all those script-kiddies now being able to whack at Windows “operating systems” without bothering to install Perl and such…
Besides, what makes you think *nix shell developers are standing still?
Slap my hand!