The Windows 96 Story

https://blog.racket.com/the-windows-96-story/

by maguay • 5 years ago

86 44 5 years ago

blog.racket.com

mrweasel• 5 years ago

Sadly Windows 96 in a browser is more responsive that Windows 10 on real hardware.

fb03• 5 years ago

I'd dare to say it is as snappy as i remembered win95 to be

agumonkey2• 5 years ago

10$ bet: nobody was disappointed by win95 latency when booting their old 586 era machine

krige2• 5 years ago

Having used win98 back on a Pentium 200 I was flabbergasted by how sluggish and prone to delay it was. Coming from AmigaOS there were jarring delays everywhere, even for something as simple as opening the Start Menu. God forbid I set an jpg wallpaper, Active Desktop murdered performance.

chrisco255• 5 years ago

Snappier, even. And it boots up faster. I remember Windows 98 taking 3-5 minutes to boot up.

wongarsu• 5 years ago

I remember Win98 opening the start menu instantly, but taking annoyingly long to open the "all programs" menu. Considering that this distinction is removed in Win10, Win10 on a 500GB SSD is snappier in that regard than Win98 was on a 3GB HDD.

FerretFred• 5 years ago

I agree!

tored4• 5 years ago

What kind of hardware do you run? Mechanical drive?

I have an ancient machine but with SSD, Windows 10 is still snappy.

TheFreim• 5 years ago

I switched a while back to Linux and like my setup much better than what I can do on windows but I think a lot of the "windows is slow" stuff is overblown. I temporarily had windows installed the other day and it was just fine in terms of being "snappy".

ycuser2• 5 years ago

Opening context menu of task bar items takes about 500 ms here with SDD and i7.

tendstofortytwo• 5 years ago

I think Windows 10 is simply very I/O dependent, much more so than older Windows or Linux, so having that SSD or not would make or break your experience. I've had really new (8th gen Intel) laptops perform absolutely atrocious until I swapped in an SSD.

Ideally everyone should have an SSD in 2021, but that doesn't seem to have happened yet.

drewzero1• 5 years ago

RAM matters too. I never had much trouble running Windows 7 with 2, 3, or 4GB but since upgrading our office machines I've noticed they feel sluggish with anything under 8.

asicsp• 5 years ago

Related discussion from 5 days back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27978463

krige2• 5 years ago

Gates correctly recognized that browsers were the last app we’d learn how to use, that so much of the software to come would be browser-based SaaS.

Is it really the correct context for Gates' statement of "You just learn one thing, and that’s the browser"? I really don't think browser-run software was a thing for long while yet. I thought he meant the initial internet hype as the source of -information-.

qwerty4561272• 5 years ago

Whatever, browser-based apps still are apps, not necessarily easier than native apps. A browser essentially is a launcher with its own UI toolkit and discovery mechanism. Open GMail, Google Docs or whatever, hide the address bar and you essentially get an ordinary app you still have to learn.

robbedpeter• 5 years ago

There are significantly more constraints within the browser than inside a general os environment, though. It's becoming less of a difference, but there are important contexts and operations lost by browser apps.

AstralStorm2• 5 years ago

An ordinary app with half the integration, third of features, twice the bugs and few supported formats.

cztomsik• 5 years ago

Given how much MS was into developers I would say this was more about learning just one set of APIs.

kalleboo• 5 years ago

Windows 98 was when they turned the whole file explorer into some kind of pseudo webview integrated with IE.

This was also when they were terrified of Java web applets making Windows as a platform obsolete so they were busy embrace and extending that (and pushing ActiveX in order to turn the web Windows proprietary).

So I think it very much sounds like the correct context.

thrashh• 5 years ago

When we were in high school we played around with IE5 web applications made with .hta files that were basically Electron apps 15 years before Electron.

And we used to screw with replacing the HTML of folders on shared drives in middle school with secret games and other stuff (the actual folder listing was some ActiveX you dropped into the page), until some folder war broke out and the sysadmins banned it.

mst• 5 years ago

Ah, yes, active desktop, crashy little bastard that it was.

When I was doing desktop support for 9x I got very good at enumerating the things active desktop theoretically did, checking users weren't using any of them, and turning the flipping thing off. This was infinitely less painful for everybody than trying to coax it into actually working.

(and before you say "but the users would just turn it back on again" ... yes, and then I'd turn it back off while explaining I'd warned them about that just loudly enough that the next time they turned it back on their colleagues would laugh at them before they got as far as contacting me and the problem then became self-solving)

Angostura• 5 years ago

Certainly back around 1996 when Frames became a thing on web pages, and Javascipt and Jaava were on the rise people in Microsoft were genuinely concerned that the broswer would eat the OS

vetinari2• 5 years ago

Considering, that the objective was to reduce Windows to a poorly debugged set of device drivers (as said by Marc Andreessen), their concern was justified.

bitwize• 5 years ago

Netscape was talking about making the browser the user's primary app platform even before Windows 98 came out. The irony was, their play in doing so was to make the Windows monopoly irrelevant. Same thing with Sun and Java. The glorious future was one in which applications were delivered to you from "the net" and ran without regard to CPU or OS platform, thus making Microsoft and Windows irrelevant. It was a last-ditch play from the Unix workstation vendors whose lunch was being eaten by Windows NT; Netscape was aboard because it was run by oldschool Unix people.

tored4• 5 years ago

Happy that it failed. The critique against Microsoft of the 90s back then was in many ways correct, however I’m not convinced that net delivered applications with Netscape would be an improvement, even if it was executed by old school Unix people.

And if we look how the web has evolved it is nothing but a nightmare. Java applets would probably be an even larger attack vector. Not really encouraging that we in the end got the better solution of the "net delivered applications", but here we are.

FuriouslyAdrift• 5 years ago

Outlook Web Access was developed in 1995 and release with Exchange 5 in 1997. The invented XMLHttpRequest to do it and it later became the W3C standard and the cornerstone of AJAX.

pcthrowaway• 5 years ago

If they manage to get some working software that runs in Kiosk mode, they might actually get a lot of people using it, not just as a novelty

1_player• 5 years ago

Given the poster's history, this definitely is a subtle way of promoting their latest blogging platform.

l30n4da5• 5 years ago

totally thought this was a dev blog for the Racket language. Was tying to figure out why the devs of Racket would be blogging about Windows 96 in the browser....

legrande• 5 years ago

Windows93 and Windows96 work best in a fullscreen Window. Press F11 to enjoy them properly.

zekrioca• 5 years ago

Although not full operating systems, since at least 2005 there were also some solid systems using similar concepts (not Windows though), like eyeOS [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EyeOS

The Windows 96 Story

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