Why I Still Use Windows 95

http://www.andrew-turnbull.net/tech/windows95.html

by edw519 • 18 years ago

26 35 18 years ago

ctkrohn2• 18 years ago

There's a definite pleasure in using old, well-designed pieces of technology that were state-of-the-art in their time and have managed to remain competitive with newer equipment. I love my record player, I still use a high-quality CRT, I ride a steel bike, and I print documents with a mid-90s HP LaserJet. Many of you would cite LISP, a 50-year old language, as a perfect example of this phenomenon.

Windows 95, however, really doesn't strike me as one of those things.

serhei• 18 years ago

Well, there is a reason why it sold six kazillion copies back in the day.

Unless you think the reason was that it was hyped to high heaven in a gigantastic advertising avalanche.

nailer2• 18 years ago

Man, mid 90s HP Lasetjet. Maybe a Laserjet 4.

Two hundred bucks on eBay, ink isn't overpriced, and you can beat the living shit out of it with a baseball bat and it will still function.

lpgauth• 18 years ago

I wonder why he doesn't use Linux, seems he could build whatever he needs and forget the bloatware of windows. Specially with a distribution like Gentoo he could build a custom system and not have to have the technology drawbacks of Windows 95.

rufo• 18 years ago

That was my first thought as well: "Hasn't he ever heard of Linux?"

But then again, if he's got all the apps he needs, running as well as he needs them, and isn't bothered by being unable to run newer applications (which he pretty clearly states at the end of the essay): well, more power to him, I guess...

brandonkm• 18 years ago

Exactly. This is definitely one of those cases of use whatever works for you. I really can't fathom using windows 95, but reading over his reasons for doing so it seems like those are valid reasons for him. Still makes for an interesting read on a os no one ever really talks about anymore.

deathbyzen3• 18 years ago

He wants to play old DOS games natively. I bought a surplus PC ($40) for just that reason as well, so I can understand.

juanpablo• 18 years ago

http://www.dosbox.com

jncraton• 18 years ago

Because X is client-server based, it actually performs much worse than Windows 95. That might be one of the issues he would have with using Linux. It's very high performance as a server platform, but it does a little worse as a consumer OS.

jrockway• 18 years ago

An article about Windows 95, and a comment spewing FUD from the Windows 95 era. How appropriate.

Anyway, I doubt any overhead of the X protocol is visible on a modern machine. With two cores, the client and server can both run at the same time, and server operations are so fast you wouldn't notice anyway. I certainly don't notice any delay, although I do see that X has used 495 minutes of CPU time on my machine (in 9 days). (Compare that to 285 minutes of CPU time that emacs has used, and 137 that Firefox has used.)

reazalun• 18 years ago

I have to agree with you. I believe that guy can be even more productive with very lightweight distros like Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux.

Yes, with today's hardwares, Win 95 is fast in performance. But I believe Puppy Linux (just 88 MB) in my USB drive performs a lot better than Win 95.

deathbyzen3• 18 years ago

At first, I was looking for the publishing date hoping I would find April 1st somewhere, but I guess not...

Tichy• 18 years ago

Security Updates?

petercooper2• 18 years ago

Windows 95 is so old that I'd doubt (though I might be wrong!) that its vulnerabilities are being actively exploited anymore. WinNuke ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinNuke ) was the most annoying, and in the late 90s you were guaranteed to be nuked within a few minutes of getting online without a firewall.

kaos2• 18 years ago

The Win95 Viruses are extinct already ;)

petercooper2• 18 years ago

I admire and salute this guy. He's one of those that keep our whole geek society interesting. He's a bit like a writer who still uses a manual typewriter rather than a word processor. It's very charming.

(On further browsing of his site, he seems an interesting chap. These mid-late 90s style sites chock full of various types of content are far more interesting than most of the vapid personal sites nowadays that have nothing besides blog entries.)

dcurtis2• 18 years ago

I assume he also drives a model T, writes with a fountain pen, and uses a cell phone from 1995 as well?

Seriously, though, the advances from Windows 95 to Vista are less about improving the "tool" and more about improving the experience of using the computer. I don't think you can really call a computer a "tool" anymore, anyway. It is the communication, entertainment, and productivity center of many people's lives. It serves far more value than a hammer or a pen. It has the ability to morph into practically anything. Back in 1995, when the real value of a computer was still somewhat ambiguous, people called them tools because that was the closest metaphor to a a familiar paradigm. Today, the computer is the paradigm.

The argument this guy uses is kind of stupid and reminds me of the short-sighted, extremely stubborn attitude of the most geeky people I know. He doesn't like Internet Explorer 4, so he refuses to use an operating system based on IE. While IE 4 was a terrible internet browser, it served Windows pretty well; using the idea of back and forward buttons for browsing files/folders is still used today in Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Sure, Windows 98 sucked at it, but that's exactly what Windows XP improved on. (Arguably, Windows Vista improved on this as well.) That's why people upgraded.

In the end, by using Windows 95, he is just torturing himself. He might gain pleasure from the novelty of writing stories like this one and getting strange reactions from people, but in the end, his experience of using his computer is just... terrible.

tomjen• 18 years ago

There are still people who swear to a fountain pen. Not all old tech is useless.

dcurtis2• 18 years ago

I love fountain pens. The idea is that a ball point pen is far more practical for every day use.

felix_t• 18 years ago

Assuming he is using it, how exactly is he running Firefox 3 (he has an entry about it's release on his blog) on Win95? I haven't tried it but the OS isn't showing a message and then denies the possibility to install FF3? And what kind of productivity do you get with, let's say, 6 or 7 year's old software? I wonder, really, what kind of development/usage is he attributing to that machine.

ctkrohn2• 18 years ago

Pre-Firefox Mozilla (what became Seamonkey) could be made to work on Windows 95... I was unfortunately forced to do so one time. You had to download a couple extra drivers and install some updates from Microsoft, but it worked.

sc• 18 years ago

He didn't say he used Win95 exclusively, he just said he used it for his main box.

drm237• 18 years ago

Every time a new (microsoft) OS is realeased, you find tons of people who say that it isn't any better and there's no need to upgrade. Then a few years later everyone says, "you're still using previous_version?". (Vista actually seems like it may be the exception...)

It seems to me that this is an extreme case of the above situation. This guy has something that works for him. I would say works well, but until you've used something for a while and understand how it enhances your productivity, you really don't see the error of your old ways.

Some are asking why he doesn't install Linux. My thought is that if one of your decisions when choosing an OS is maintaining compatibility with your DOS games, you're probably not an ideal candidate for linux. Note that it doesn't matter if you Can play DOS games on linux; it's just a completely different mindset.

kaos2• 18 years ago

Win95 c'mon, lets help this guy with other cooler ways to getting attention and being "different".

edb• 18 years ago

This article reminds me of my father. He still uses what we call "lefebvre books" to do his business's payroll by pen. When I was younger, I thought he was an idiot. Eventually he rationalized it to me for long enough that I thought it was charming and really interesting that his business is like a snapshot of how things were run in the past.

Right now, his company grew to more than 20 employees and he's selling it because his tools and methods don't work in his changing environment and he refuses to adapt to new tools.

Don't get me wrong, he's by no means unhappy, but his business is no longer running at it's full potential. I think a comparison can be drawn here. I believe that your output is a function of your methods AND tools.. I don't care who you are, you can't build facebook in DOS.

If your environment is changing and you still want to excel in that environment, I believe that you have to adapt.

toki2• 18 years ago

andrew turnbull is completely right. i used windows 95 too, as long as possible (2006).

windows 95 has many good things that the modern version of windows have lost or never had:

- lightweight (Doesnt even use memory <128 MB)

- very fast

- total cost of ownership = 0

- functional (office, opera, etc: everything works somehow)

- easily replaceable (ebay)

- robust (works even with damaged hardware - somehow)

- security (through obscurity)

- i have an idea how it works (in modern version of windows i have somehow lost the overview)

- no need to update (just accept how the system is)

- free of distractions (no widgets, sidebars, audoupdates)

toki2• 18 years ago

oops: hackernews somehow didnt like the layout of my last comment and made one big sentence out of it.

just use your imagination to see some paragraphs in my last message. :)

gscott• 18 years ago

The changes that MS makes now seem to be just for selling new versions. I use Windows 2000, it is handy, no Internet registration scheme where they track your usage, and so on. When I was younger I wanted to run the newst thing out there and would change often. Now I stick with whatever works best until it breaks.

nailer2• 18 years ago

I've read that the 95 kernel fits in the CPU cache of current Intel CPUs.

workpost• 18 years ago

Great points, actually. I was running it in Virtual PC recently and marveled at how incredibly few resources it used. I was surprised by how much software I could get to run on it as well.

mleonhard• 18 years ago

I think the best reason for him to switch from Win95 to WinXP is Office 2007.

rcoder• 18 years ago

I still have NT 4.0 install media around, and have even tossed it on an older box a few times to remember what it was like back in the days when Windows could be a decent developer OS.

Unfortunately, anything older than Win2k leaves you pretty much out of luck for mobile computing (power management, WiFi, and display switching) as well as most modern peripherals (USB support being notably lacking).

For even more retro fun, though, I recommend firing up a copy of Mac OS System 7 inside Basilisk II or SheepShaver -- even under emulation, it absolutely screams through day-to-day tasks.

Why I Still Use Windows 95

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