I’m glad people are looking at old Windows - it’s surprisingly well architected for the problem space at the time. I’ll also keep an eye on that new VBE SVGA driver. I wrote a mouse driver for it a while back, but someone else wrote an even better from-scratch driver that supports a lot more things.
One thing I’ve been fascinated by, personally, is how my opinion of old Windows has generally improved as I’ve gotten older. Win 3.1 and 95 were definitely flawed systems, and neither was the best at the time on many axes, but Microsoft honestly did a solid job balancing backwards compatibility against moving forward. That said, I don’t have the motivation to go back and code for the thing the way some of y’all do. Win32 for 95/NT 3.51 is about as old as I actually enjoy.
My first consistent use of Windows was in the 9x era. The Amiga had become quite inviable and we switched to a Windows home computer. This was also the dawn of the Internet for me.
It was horrible. I have some hazy memories of dual booting Linux at that age, and they weren’t great either, but as soon as I had some money of my own, I bought a laptop to run Linux in 2002.
This might be unreliable memories, but in my first intern job, I remember being jealous of the people who used Windows NT (likely 4). My team was on 9x and we had constant problems, while the people with NT had 0 trouble and everything seemed to work much better.
If NT-based Windows had been easily available at the end of the Amiga era and beginning of the Internet, my computer history might have been very different. Unfortunately, XP came a bit too late- I have used XP and later extensively, and while I prefer Linux, XP through 11 are perfectly usable to me.
Windows 9x was especially vulnerable to driver issues and DLL hell. I was old enough by then to know how to maintain the system, and found it v. Slackware 96 to be fairly comparable, but both systems required a lot of work compared to my Mac—and it wasn’t as if Macs were terribly stable back then, either. I attempted to use OS/2 Warp for a bit, but that ecosystem was already dying by that point, and OS/2 had nothing like Delphi or VB at equivalent price points. (And much later, on a lark, I tried writing for OS/2 in 2006, and yegads am I glad Windows NT won!)
All that to say: your experience was really common, and mine was rarer, but the bones were there for the eventual move to NT.
Ah, I had overlooked OS/2, that’s also on my “curiosity” list.
And of course, there’s always been nice workstations… but out of reach for mostly everyone. I’m thinking NeXT, for instance. We also had Solaris boxes at University that were supernice, and likely other UNIX vendors had nice workstations (SGI?).
macOS X, Windows XP, the beginning of viable Linux desktops… all of that came at more or less the same time. I guess Internet availability made this kinda necessary for the world to move forward.
If NT-based Windows had been easily available at the end of the Amiga era and beginning of the Internet, my computer history might have been very different. Unfortunately, XP came a bit too late- I have used XP and later extensively, and while I prefer Linux, XP through 11 are perfectly usable to me.
Unfortunately, the RAM requirements, not to mention the application compatibility ecosystem would have made that painful. It basically came early as it could.
Oh yeah. Meeting the compatibility requirements Microsoft had to then, and doing so in systems with 1-4 MB of RAM, was very impressive. The resulting architecture (especially one based around virtualization) was particularly well designed.
I’m glad people are looking at old Windows - it’s surprisingly well architected for the problem space at the time. I’ll also keep an eye on that new VBE SVGA driver. I wrote a mouse driver for it a while back, but someone else wrote an even better from-scratch driver that supports a lot more things.
One thing I’ve been fascinated by, personally, is how my opinion of old Windows has generally improved as I’ve gotten older. Win 3.1 and 95 were definitely flawed systems, and neither was the best at the time on many axes, but Microsoft honestly did a solid job balancing backwards compatibility against moving forward. That said, I don’t have the motivation to go back and code for the thing the way some of y’all do. Win32 for 95/NT 3.51 is about as old as I actually enjoy.
My first consistent use of Windows was in the 9x era. The Amiga had become quite inviable and we switched to a Windows home computer. This was also the dawn of the Internet for me.
It was horrible. I have some hazy memories of dual booting Linux at that age, and they weren’t great either, but as soon as I had some money of my own, I bought a laptop to run Linux in 2002.
This might be unreliable memories, but in my first intern job, I remember being jealous of the people who used Windows NT (likely 4). My team was on 9x and we had constant problems, while the people with NT had 0 trouble and everything seemed to work much better.
If NT-based Windows had been easily available at the end of the Amiga era and beginning of the Internet, my computer history might have been very different. Unfortunately, XP came a bit too late- I have used XP and later extensively, and while I prefer Linux, XP through 11 are perfectly usable to me.
Windows 9x was especially vulnerable to driver issues and DLL hell. I was old enough by then to know how to maintain the system, and found it v. Slackware 96 to be fairly comparable, but both systems required a lot of work compared to my Mac—and it wasn’t as if Macs were terribly stable back then, either. I attempted to use OS/2 Warp for a bit, but that ecosystem was already dying by that point, and OS/2 had nothing like Delphi or VB at equivalent price points. (And much later, on a lark, I tried writing for OS/2 in 2006, and yegads am I glad Windows NT won!)
All that to say: your experience was really common, and mine was rarer, but the bones were there for the eventual move to NT.
Ah, I had overlooked OS/2, that’s also on my “curiosity” list.
And of course, there’s always been nice workstations… but out of reach for mostly everyone. I’m thinking NeXT, for instance. We also had Solaris boxes at University that were supernice, and likely other UNIX vendors had nice workstations (SGI?).
macOS X, Windows XP, the beginning of viable Linux desktops… all of that came at more or less the same time. I guess Internet availability made this kinda necessary for the world to move forward.
Unfortunately, the RAM requirements, not to mention the application compatibility ecosystem would have made that painful. It basically came early as it could.
Oh yeah. Meeting the compatibility requirements Microsoft had to then, and doing so in systems with 1-4 MB of RAM, was very impressive. The resulting architecture (especially one based around virtualization) was particularly well designed.