Impressive! But loading Google for kicks, in IE, sort of killed it.
Definitely can feel the nostalgia.
I remember the first time I decided to leave Windows 95 run overnight, the next morning, moving the mouse would send the harddrive playhead flying like crazy... You know the old "SHRrrrrt Shrrrt..."
It had such a memory leak overnight that moving the mouse was causing the swap to kick in non-stop!
Windows 95/98 stability really depended on the quality of your hardware, drivers, and software. If things intracted poorly, it was easy to get a system that needed a reboot every few hours to stay responsive.
Agreed. Drivers were a big one. As I remember, they had unfettered access to everything... so they could consume all ram or cpu or read any part of memory. Powerful and scary.
In win95, everything had access to everything if it wanted. E.g. DLLs were mapped in a shared memory segment that was shared between all applications. Lots of 16 bit code was still running, and this did IPC basically by messing in some other program's memory. Backward compatibilitty required very thin walls between processes.
DOS TSR programs started before windows were still running. I had one that popped up a calculator in dos text mode, and if you pushed its hotkey in win95, it switched win95 back to text mode, paused win95, did its thing, then popped back in win95.
Only the very basics of protected mode and virtual memory where there, and a well-behaving program had a reasonable chance of staying in its own sandbox. But only because it wanted to. Seen from the CPU, you could argue EMM386 was more the actual OS than win95/win98.
None of this is meant to be negative. It was a solid step up from windows 3.x, and yet quite usable with 4MB RAM of which the first 1MB wanted a very different treatment.
I used to joke that Windows 95 hated me more than I hated it, since it managed to "uninstall itself" within a couple of weeks. (For some reason, there was massive data corruption.) The odd part is that the computer was perfectly reliable under DOS/Windows 3.1, Linux, and OS/2.
The quality of drivers could be a serious problem in the Windows 95 era. If it was a driver shipped with Windows, everything seemed to work fine. If the driver was provided by the vendor, the reliability was so inconsistent that I would try to find a compatible driver that shipped with Windows even if it meant missing out on some features.
Omigosh, I really miss the heck out of when Windows had charm, and personality like this.
Stuff like Hover! - getting that Weezer music video with the Happy Days set on the Win 95 media edition or whatever...such cool little things that displayed a sense of ‘fun’ about very business-centric software.
My Pentium 100 could play this 320x240 video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc fullscreen with no choppiness. I had forgotten about this video until I saw it last year...
But Windows had skeumorphisms, even nowadays the screen with everything minimised is called "the desk[ ]top".
But I guess briefcases and recycle bins made things relatable...
Briefcases were supposed to be a tool to easily sync a directory structure with removable storage or a spotty network connection. Say you've got a computer at home and a computer at the office. You do a bit of work on some files over the weekend with your files in your briefcase. When it is time to head to the office on Monday you pop in a floppy disk (or PDA, or some other removable storage) and sync your briefcase to it. Get into the office, pop your floppy into your work machine and re-sync your copy of the briefcase there. You don't have to remember which files potentially updated and you don't have to work off your removable media the entire time.
It was a neat concept. I used to use that to sync stuff stored on my school's student network drive with a floppy (and later flash drive) with my home PC. They definitely didn't describe it well unless you went digging for why it exists.
Exactly, right? Can't believe people fell for Dropbox when you could build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem
Please don't bring up this ancient comment any time file synchronising or Dropbox is mentioned. Doing so was not funny the first time and it's still not.
The Briefcase feature was used to keep folders up-to-date across multiple machines, via removable media (as opposed to a network connection). You can still do this today using rsync.
It was buggy, mostly about detecting and overriding changes, but also some versions had problems with 0x00 and 0x1A bytes in files ... after losing a few files to briefcase, the only nostalgia I have is for eradicating it from any machine i used.
I always thought the briefcase came in with Windows Me. As others have mentioned, it was buggy and I lost files on it, so while I liked the idea, I had to stop using them.
No, but it is no longer supported by Microsoft so it is abandonware. It is still closed source and piracy to copy without permission but Microsoft does not care about it because it is too old to sue over.
They've been known to send C&Ds to various sites that host old versions like this.
"no longer supported" is a flimsy argument for abandonware anyway. by that reasoning, Windows 7 is abandonware and it still runs basically every Windows program ever.
I think that kind of boils down to the ‘spirit of the law’ kinda thing.
Windows 98, conversely; cannot run modern software, and the majority of software in use for the last decade - it is only going to be installed as an experiment by geeks like us, for the most part.
It's not really the "spirit" of the law. It's more like a risk/reward calculation.
Sometimes you just have to take calculated risks. Like the sites that have VT100 ROM images for VT100 emulators.
The risk of getting a C&D letter, or worse-yet a lawsuit, are tiny compared to the reward of being able to emulate and study a classic computing system. The copyright owner may be more than happy to look the other way.
And there really are cases where the company that owns the copyright is simply gone. Then it's probably safe to take a chance on it.
Most of the abandonware sites that I've seen are aware that it is illegal, will only post software that has not been sold or supported for a certain time frame (usually a decade), and deliberately avoid companies that are known to be hostile to the concept. If a product comes up for sale again, some sites will remove the software at their own initiative.
While those self imposed criteria may be regarded as acts of self-preservation, I get the impression that some of the people who run these sites are more interested in software preservation. (In earlier times, many sites actively sought out permission to post software but it sounds like that became all but impossible for various reasons.)
Honestly, the term "abandonware" applies to software that has been "abandoned" by companies or had the companies that own the IP go under without someone buying the assets.
If a company is sending out cease & desists, it's not abandonware by definition.
> If a company is sending out cease & desists, it's not abandonware by definition.
True, but you cannot assume that it is abandonware if a cease & desist letter is not sent out. The rights holder may be unaware of the unauthorized distribution or the site maintainer may be unaware that the rights holder is still selling or supporting the product. While I have seen examples of games being pulled by abandonware sites at their own initiative, that is typically because these releases are higher profile. In the case of application and operating software it would be much more difficult to figure out since anything that is still being supported is probably going to be through obscure channels for legacy systems.
Off-topic tangent, but if you like Minesweeper you would really like the games Hexcells and Tametsi, each available for less than $1 on Steam. They're both like Minesweeper but have the improvement that every move can be logically deduced so you never have to guess.
Yeah, too bad it is clear and straight down to business, readable by any version of every browser and since the text color is black instead of light grey one can actually read it.
The guy of Bellard's caliber does not need flying unicorns on a screen to attract people.
Wow, what a flashback! This was the OS I actually grew up with. I remember being 3 or 4 years old and playing Carnivores 2 on my Dad's Windows 98 PC. Even the slowness and unresponsiveness is there, just like I remember! Yeah...this was the golden age. So much hope and so much optimism for what could be in regards to technology and what it would allow for the general population. I still think we're not there, but we can get there still, perhaps.
This was really interesting to read. Thanks for sharing your memory. There was a big difference between win98 and win98 “second edition”. Do you know which you used?
Back then, I wasn't so much interested in the computer itself as I was in what I could do with it - as a four year old, that meant hunting and killing pixelated T-Rexes.
Yep, it makes me so nostalgic. If you like this, there's a channel on twitch streaming old episodes of Computer Chronicles [1] and the optimism and excitement in it is something I just don't feel anymore nowadays.
> this was the golden age. So much hope and so much optimism for what could be
Funny that because I grew up in the 80s and for me the golden age was 10 to 15 years earlier and I saw Windows 98 as the decline.
There was so much variety and experimentation in the 80s, and so much excitement too when GUIs first started appearing on home computers. There was also much more diversity in the computing landscape with different hardware architectures and operating systems. In fact back then DOS machines were some of the least interesting hardware and early Windows (pre 3.x) was just terrible compared to what Acorn, Atari, Amiga and Apple were doing. Then came the mid-90s and everything had converged into x86 running Windows. I remember at the time feeling rather let down by just how boring and crummy desktop computing had become considering all the interesting things that preceded it. Things picked up again once I discovered BeOS and Linux -- I guess even in the 90s I didn't like Microsoft Windows and to be honest little has changed over the years.
That's just my opinion though. The "golden age" is a very subjective thing that I suspect is largely driven by the age of the observer.
I grew up using Windows XP/Vista and browsing the early days of the interactive web, mostly based on Flash. For me of course that was the golden age, and now we’re stuck with huge walled gardens and invasive adtech…iPhone had come out and it was amazing watching the mobile market rapidly advance. I remember seriously suggesting Windows Phone to my parents…Google Docs totally upended how we did assignments in late elementary school.
I don't think Google Docs was a thing until I was in high school. Still, don't think my schools adopted it quickly. I do have many fond memories of flash games too (and of course, viruses I inadvertently introduced to my parents' computers).
Back when I was learning computers in elementary school, we were taugh to use Yahoo! as our search engine and most of our 'computer' assignments for the day involved drawing butterflies in Microsoft Paint or seeing how many words we could type per minute.
I belong to a similar generation and for me actually only Windows and macOS map to the feelings that I enjoyed while using those 16 bit machines and small flirt with BeOS and QNX demo floppies.
For many years I looked forward to GNU/Linux settling into one stack and offering a multimedia experience like the Amiga, Atari and Acorn, but that was in vain in the kingdom of CLI and forking projects.
I'm like you - that the Windows era was a low point in computing for me. I used Workbench 3.1 before, and Linux afterwards, and both of those kindled my interest in computers far more than Win 3.1 - XP ever could. On the otherhand I do have some nostalgia for those Windows days - it wasn't all bad, just a little on the boring side. I remember those themes from Win98 with the associated screensavers fondly. I also posted here about running old versions of microsoft office, and I enjoyed playing around with them and had forgotten that they were actually pretty decent pieces of software.
I still prefer the pre-ribbon bar era of MS Office :)
Funny you should comment about screensavers, the first thing I did when I loaded the Win98 emulation these comments refer to was the display settings then clicked 'Preview' on the pipes screensaver. I believe there was also one that looked a little like Wolf32?
You're definitely right, what each of us individually perceive as "the golden age" is probably driven largely by age and nostalgia.
I think I phrased my initial comment incorrectly - I definitely didn't mean it was the golden age of personal computing, but rather the golden age of the internet.
Certainly, some things have improved. There's been more standardization and a proliferation of knowledge about the 'right' way to design a website (from both a tech and marketing perspective). Back then, there was an excitement and a feeling of freedom I got when browsing the web. Part of it I suppose could just be that I was young and not yet so cynical, but it felt like the wild west to me back then.
Every site looked different, many were ugly and gaudy as hell with bright colors, flashing animations like the Vegas strip, and regularly broken links, but despite this, there was something charming and endearing about it that just isn't present today.
Browsing the internet today is a very contained and sanitized experience. Everything is wrapped in plastic and padded with nerf, and though you may go to different sites, there's a feeling of sameness to it all. Every time I click on something, I'm making someone money. The data I generate while browsing is sold off to the higest bidder. You can assume, like a digital panopticon, the man in the watchtower (NSA, other government alphabet agencies) could be watching you at any given time.
Maybe not all of this is true or framed accurately - browsing the web has definitely become easier and more streamlined and for the average user, that's a good thing. But something's been lost for me - the wild west of the internet has become a guided tour.
I agree. Honestly, I'd take the gaudy animated GIFs and marquee tags back if it meant there was less reliance on Medium / Facebook / etc.
For me the biggest change is the shift from content to consumption. 90s web was generally content first. Today's web is all about lower quality content and force-feeding consumers until they're addicted to it like crack (some massive generalisations there)
Between architecture changes (PowerPC to x86 to x86-64 and next up ARM), and compiler changes (I doubt Objective-C code written for OS X 1.0 will compile on the latest XCode), breaking API changes, security changes, and even deprecating standards (can't use latest OpenGL, you gotta use Metal)... not really.
Depends on how complicated it was. I can assure you that your simple GUI still mostly works as those classes came from NeXT and aren’t going anywhere soon.
I'll propose a test for whether it's true. We'll try writing instructions to a non-technical user how to perform some tasks. Then, we shouldn't know exactly which version they're using, only "I'm using OS X" or "I'm using Ubuntu." If they can reasonably muddle their way through the tasks without knowing the OS version, the OS's have remained consistent.
Example tasks would be, "run a program," "find a file on disk," "save your work," "copy and paste between applications," "close a window."
Examples that would often fail include updating configuration settings or manipulating disks. These are important tasks, but not core tasks.
Restricting Linux to the mass market distros, my limited experience is they've been reasonably consistent. They can probably use Win-R to run a program. These distros mostly use the ZXCV clipboard keys, and adopt other Windows-like conventions like Ctrl-S to save and clicking an X to close a window.
Some Linux distros could fail some reasonable tasks because of poor design; e.g. I recall Ubuntu's tiny hitbox for resizing windows being very annoying.
On OS X / macOS, Apple has chaned things up with features like autosave, which fundamentally changed how some applications behave. But according to my test, I'd just tell the person, "hit command S" and while it will create a new revision instead of saving the file, this doesn't do a thing we don't want.
I think the biggest lack of core consistency is in Electron apps and other non-native UI creeping in. I don't think I'd pin that on OS designers, though.
First think I had to do was see if Active Desktop worked... And yes it does. "View My Active Desktop as a web page", I guess Windows 98 was just ahead of its time.
I think the pinnacle must have been before the title bar gradients were added. They always annoyed me: is the title bar any less of a title bar towards the right? No? Then why does it fade out?
The color is a background for the text. It fades out because the bar stops being about showing the title text, and starts being about showing window controls, that exist as buttons with their own backgrounds and borders.
Sort of like how desktop icons have text with a blur-extruded drop-shadow. It fades out at the point where text is no longer shown.
The title is shown in the entire title bar (e.g. long titles for web pages) all the way until it reaches the buttons, which as you say have their own border, so there is no gradual change in its character. It's 100% draggable and 100% showing text all the way, so the form (showing gradual change) is at odds with the function (sharp distinction between title and buttons).
There's ways. Detecting whether tools like VMWare/Virtualbox are installed, whether certain drivers are installed, checking the hardware listings etc. etc.
Malware is quite a good study subject about this question. There's a lot of malware that won't run if it's in a virtual machine to avoid researchers from testing it inside one.
And is there VM software used for malware research, that employs counter-countermeasures, e.g. generating drivers with randomized names/IDs; randomizing the hypercall op for the VM and then rewriting the deployed drivers to use that op; etc?
Or, are there modes for emulators like qemu/bochs, where they'll run entirely with "real" (LLE-emulated) hardware?
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 266 ms ] thread[1] http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html
Definitely can feel the nostalgia.
I remember the first time I decided to leave Windows 95 run overnight, the next morning, moving the mouse would send the harddrive playhead flying like crazy... You know the old "SHRrrrrt Shrrrt..."
It had such a memory leak overnight that moving the mouse was causing the swap to kick in non-stop!
DOS TSR programs started before windows were still running. I had one that popped up a calculator in dos text mode, and if you pushed its hotkey in win95, it switched win95 back to text mode, paused win95, did its thing, then popped back in win95.
Only the very basics of protected mode and virtual memory where there, and a well-behaving program had a reasonable chance of staying in its own sandbox. But only because it wanted to. Seen from the CPU, you could argue EMM386 was more the actual OS than win95/win98.
None of this is meant to be negative. It was a solid step up from windows 3.x, and yet quite usable with 4MB RAM of which the first 1MB wanted a very different treatment.
The quality of drivers could be a serious problem in the Windows 95 era. If it was a driver shipped with Windows, everything seemed to work fine. If the driver was provided by the vendor, the reliability was so inconsistent that I would try to find a compatible driver that shipped with Windows even if it meant missing out on some features.
https://sites.google.com/site/edmarkovich2/whywindows95andwi...
Stuff like Hover! - getting that Weezer music video with the Happy Days set on the Win 95 media edition or whatever...such cool little things that displayed a sense of ‘fun’ about very business-centric software.
hover.io
But Windows had skeumorphisms, even nowadays the screen with everything minimised is called "the desk[ ]top".
But I guess briefcases and recycle bins made things relatable...
It was a neat concept. I used to use that to sync stuff stored on my school's student network drive with a floppy (and later flash drive) with my home PC. They definitely didn't describe it well unless you went digging for why it exists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briefcase_(Microsoft_Windows)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
I still have a bunch of floppy disks with briefcases in them. Alas, the feature has been removed from recent versions of Windows.
"no longer supported" is a flimsy argument for abandonware anyway. by that reasoning, Windows 7 is abandonware and it still runs basically every Windows program ever.
Windows 98, conversely; cannot run modern software, and the majority of software in use for the last decade - it is only going to be installed as an experiment by geeks like us, for the most part.
Sometimes you just have to take calculated risks. Like the sites that have VT100 ROM images for VT100 emulators.
The risk of getting a C&D letter, or worse-yet a lawsuit, are tiny compared to the reward of being able to emulate and study a classic computing system. The copyright owner may be more than happy to look the other way.
And there really are cases where the company that owns the copyright is simply gone. Then it's probably safe to take a chance on it.
While those self imposed criteria may be regarded as acts of self-preservation, I get the impression that some of the people who run these sites are more interested in software preservation. (In earlier times, many sites actively sought out permission to post software but it sounds like that became all but impossible for various reasons.)
If a company is sending out cease & desists, it's not abandonware by definition.
True, but you cannot assume that it is abandonware if a cease & desist letter is not sent out. The rights holder may be unaware of the unauthorized distribution or the site maintainer may be unaware that the rights holder is still selling or supporting the product. While I have seen examples of games being pulled by abandonware sites at their own initiative, that is typically because these releases are higher profile. In the case of application and operating software it would be much more difficult to figure out since anything that is still being supported is probably going to be through obscure channels for legacy systems.
https://codepen.io/joelbyrd/pen/hdHKF
http://www.minesweeper.info/downloads/MinesweeperX.html
The guy of Bellard's caliber does not need flying unicorns on a screen to attract people.
Back then, I wasn't so much interested in the computer itself as I was in what I could do with it - as a four year old, that meant hunting and killing pixelated T-Rexes.
[1] https://www.twitch.tv/computerchronicles
Funny that because I grew up in the 80s and for me the golden age was 10 to 15 years earlier and I saw Windows 98 as the decline.
There was so much variety and experimentation in the 80s, and so much excitement too when GUIs first started appearing on home computers. There was also much more diversity in the computing landscape with different hardware architectures and operating systems. In fact back then DOS machines were some of the least interesting hardware and early Windows (pre 3.x) was just terrible compared to what Acorn, Atari, Amiga and Apple were doing. Then came the mid-90s and everything had converged into x86 running Windows. I remember at the time feeling rather let down by just how boring and crummy desktop computing had become considering all the interesting things that preceded it. Things picked up again once I discovered BeOS and Linux -- I guess even in the 90s I didn't like Microsoft Windows and to be honest little has changed over the years.
That's just my opinion though. The "golden age" is a very subjective thing that I suspect is largely driven by the age of the observer.
Back when I was learning computers in elementary school, we were taugh to use Yahoo! as our search engine and most of our 'computer' assignments for the day involved drawing butterflies in Microsoft Paint or seeing how many words we could type per minute.
For many years I looked forward to GNU/Linux settling into one stack and offering a multimedia experience like the Amiga, Atari and Acorn, but that was in vain in the kingdom of CLI and forking projects.
Funny you should comment about screensavers, the first thing I did when I loaded the Win98 emulation these comments refer to was the display settings then clicked 'Preview' on the pipes screensaver. I believe there was also one that looked a little like Wolf32?
I think I phrased my initial comment incorrectly - I definitely didn't mean it was the golden age of personal computing, but rather the golden age of the internet.
Certainly, some things have improved. There's been more standardization and a proliferation of knowledge about the 'right' way to design a website (from both a tech and marketing perspective). Back then, there was an excitement and a feeling of freedom I got when browsing the web. Part of it I suppose could just be that I was young and not yet so cynical, but it felt like the wild west to me back then.
Every site looked different, many were ugly and gaudy as hell with bright colors, flashing animations like the Vegas strip, and regularly broken links, but despite this, there was something charming and endearing about it that just isn't present today.
Browsing the internet today is a very contained and sanitized experience. Everything is wrapped in plastic and padded with nerf, and though you may go to different sites, there's a feeling of sameness to it all. Every time I click on something, I'm making someone money. The data I generate while browsing is sold off to the higest bidder. You can assume, like a digital panopticon, the man in the watchtower (NSA, other government alphabet agencies) could be watching you at any given time.
Maybe not all of this is true or framed accurately - browsing the web has definitely become easier and more streamlined and for the average user, that's a good thing. But something's been lost for me - the wild west of the internet has become a guided tour.
For me the biggest change is the shift from content to consumption. 90s web was generally content first. Today's web is all about lower quality content and force-feeding consumers until they're addicted to it like crack (some massive generalisations there)
Between architecture changes (PowerPC to x86 to x86-64 and next up ARM), and compiler changes (I doubt Objective-C code written for OS X 1.0 will compile on the latest XCode), breaking API changes, security changes, and even deprecating standards (can't use latest OpenGL, you gotta use Metal)... not really.
Example tasks would be, "run a program," "find a file on disk," "save your work," "copy and paste between applications," "close a window."
Examples that would often fail include updating configuration settings or manipulating disks. These are important tasks, but not core tasks.
Restricting Linux to the mass market distros, my limited experience is they've been reasonably consistent. They can probably use Win-R to run a program. These distros mostly use the ZXCV clipboard keys, and adopt other Windows-like conventions like Ctrl-S to save and clicking an X to close a window.
Some Linux distros could fail some reasonable tasks because of poor design; e.g. I recall Ubuntu's tiny hitbox for resizing windows being very annoying.
On OS X / macOS, Apple has chaned things up with features like autosave, which fundamentally changed how some applications behave. But according to my test, I'd just tell the person, "hit command S" and while it will create a new revision instead of saving the file, this doesn't do a thing we don't want.
I think the biggest lack of core consistency is in Electron apps and other non-native UI creeping in. I don't think I'd pin that on OS designers, though.
Also, Matrix never had a sequel.
eSheep 64!
(I haven't tried it)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ
I've got to say, the icon for .txt files brought on some very specific hit of nostalgia.
Was this the pinnacle of UI design, or is nostalgia clouding our judgment?
I think it's the latter issue that drove it to it's doom.
Sort of like how desktop icons have text with a blur-extruded drop-shadow. It fades out at the point where text is no longer shown.
Very funny seeing it on such a small format in the top right corner.
Makes me think a "Windows 98" PWA on mobile would be super funny.
Unfortunately the windows sound wave file doesn't make any sound in the browser. I guess this is because a Soundcard or Speaker is not emulated.
Malware is quite a good study subject about this question. There's a lot of malware that won't run if it's in a virtual machine to avoid researchers from testing it inside one.
https://github.com/AlicanAkyol/sems
(dunno if these would build/run on win98 though)
Or, are there modes for emulators like qemu/bochs, where they'll run entirely with "real" (LLE-emulated) hardware?