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Windows 95 let installers trash its files then fixed the mess behind their backs (www.theregister.com)

submitted 3 days ago by Rekall_Incorporated@piefed.social to c/retrocomputing

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[–] NachBarcelona@piefed.social 24 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

I just found out what the glorious emulator 86box is and I installed everything. Fucking everything. 98, 98 SE, ME, XP, 2000.

And then there was 95. I don't know what the fuck is wrong with that OS. Boot disks and ISO were absolutely fine, but Setup took almost an hour. Then I wanted to install Plus!, but I opened the wrong setup.exe.

Instead of warning my dumb ass, the fucking thing started installing over itself on the fly. And it shat the bed so hard, the whole machine was unusable after about 3% of setup and me cancelling the installation.

Manually starting explorer.exe after reboot (which for some reason brought up Task Manager every time) worked, but every tiny click informed me that Rundll32 has performed an illegal action. What in the futhark is that ugly ass OS.

edit: Typos wtf

[–] dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world 2 points 23 hours ago

What in the futhark is that ugly ass OS.

A ham-fisted attempt to drag the DOS world into the 32-bit era. Oh, and they needed to compete with OS/2 but Win3.11 and NT4.0 weren't going to cut it.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 5 points 3 days ago (2 children)

What in the futhark is that ugly ass OS.

It was the first step up from Windows 3.11 which was basically a DOS GUI. It was rough, but definitely an improvement. Compare that to the latest "updated OS" from Microsoft now.

And 30 years ago it was quite easy to do dumb shit that completely ruined your system, be it in DOS, Win95, or OS/2.

Example from OS/2 - deleting the image file used for the desktop background in presentation manager (OS/2's core GUI) meant your system could no longer boot, and when you can't just google shit to sort things out, you were essentially up for a reinstall at that point.

[–] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

OS/2 sorely lacked user rights management (but then DOS/Windows didn't have any either). Other than that, it was an amazing system at the time. It's a shame that the industry went with Windows.

[–] NachBarcelona@piefed.social 1 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

I really have to try it, I never saw OS/2 in action.

[–] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 1 points 15 hours ago

There never was any software for it, and they added a windows compatibility layer, ensuring there never would be. But it actually was a single user modern operating system with all the trimmings. Lost opportunity.

But we got Unix back, so it's not too bad.

[–] NachBarcelona@piefed.social 1 points 2 days ago

Fail safes were absolutely non existent it seems. The OS/2 fun fact is something else lol.

[–] fallaciousBasis@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Are you sure you're using the best version of 95?

Like 95a didn't even have out-of-the-box USB support.

You'll want to use B or C versions for optimal driver support, including USB.

[–] NachBarcelona@piefed.social 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It's B with Plus, but I won't he using it anyway, ME does everything that 95 does and better. But thanks for the tip!

[–] A7thStone@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's the first time I've ever seen anyone say ME is better than anything.

[–] NachBarcelona@piefed.social 1 points 1 day ago

Well, not to XP or 2K, but ME is superior to 95 in every single fucking pre-aero-frutiger-piss-shitting low DPI cuntsucking regard.