A while back I did a quick install and tour of Windows 98, today it was the turn of Windows 95. Playing around with it I can see why so many companies where I did tech support used it in favour of Win98.

Look – I loved Win95 and 98/98SE. This was just before I plunged into Linux for the first time in 2000, and to me Windows was the way to go. It was certainly cutting edge in my eyes – being able to have a desktop background and whatnot really gave me the wowzers.

Installation

Installing Windows 95 was a bit of a hassle – early on you only had floppies, and later on you could get it on a CD, but still needed a floppy to boot from and partition the disk. To my embarrassment I have to admit that I eventually had to mount the Win95 drive on a Ubuntu vm to copy the installation files over, I could just not figure out how to get the friggin CDROM working in DOS – even though the floppy said it had a CDROM driver on it. Somewhere.

I had severral flashbacks while doing an Fdisk and format, also when I copied SYS over to the C:\ drive.

When I eventually had the system files on the drive all I had to do was type “setup” and the installer started up.

What struck me was how much this installer looked like the Win98, looked like the WinME, Looked like the Win2000 and looked like the Winxp Installers! Wow, similar language “Windows (insert version here) is the fastest Windows yet…” Oh my. One would have thought that Microsoft could have updated some of their party lines a bit. Who is taking bets that Windows 7 will have that line – or a thinly disguised variation of it – in the installation procedure?

Reboots

Windows 95 required less reboots to install than 98 did, and also was less of a hassle to configure. While I could for the life of me not get the network card in 98 to work in my Virtualbox in Win95 it worked instantly.

First Boot

The Windows greeter. Wow – you have been around a while haven’t you? Kill the greeter and tool around a bit. It looks like 98, except for a few minor tweaks, and Outlook Express is not there. Windows Mail is there – hmmm I did not realise that the name “Windows Mail” was merely recycled in Vista. What a surprise…

TCP/IP has to be expressly installed – it is not available by default, and it is a “Microsoft Protocol.” The TCP/IP setup window still looks identical to Win95 – I wonder if Win7 will bring something new in that department.

internet

Internet Explorer 3.0 is a hoot! Google.com works fine on it, and that is about it. I guess that is all that was needed in a browser back then – text was about all that was available on the internet when it came out, and today’s internet sends it into a flat spin.

Weird to click on an IE icon that does not feature the well known E sign – this one sports a little globe (the earth) with a magnifying glass over it. Interestingly the E is in the browser, where on later versions the E is in the icon, and the globe is in the browser.

Features

Features are almost identical to what Vista offers. No office, IE, Windows Mail, and some games. USB support is non existant of course, and graphics support is of course very limited.

I find it telling that I could install vanilla 95 and Vista and have basically the same productivity tools, except for a much improved browser and a better version of “Windows Mail.”

I just checked and Notepad, Wordpad and Paint are all there in Win95 – also almost identical to the versions we have today. Wow.

Win98? No thanks.

At the bank where I used to work, the first computers with Windows we got had 95 installed, this was in 1999 – and now I see why. (Previously we had a mainframe and terminals – Unix Terminals.)

On Identical setups I have found 98 slower, more of a hassle, and not really offering anything earth shatteringly different to Win95. It takes almost three times as long to boot, is less responsive and is just more of the same with some minor tweaks. For gamers Win98 was a vast improvement – being able to handle larger harddrives and more RAM, as well as better support for the then new AGP cards. ISA cards were still new when Win95 came out.

None of the improvements that 98 offered was of direct relevance to corporate users, and the same has been said of Vista.

That installer

Jokes about the recycled lines that the Windows installer feeds you aside – this is one of Microsofts better features. Even in Windows95 I found it easy to use – once I got past the boot-from-floppy-enable-CDROM bit. Once the installer was started it was easy to do. Windows XP is somehow a step backward for me, but only because it feels as if the built-in partition/format dialog seems like an afterthought tacked on.

Summary

If it were not for new hardware and security issues making it obsolete Windows 95 would be a viable option to Windows XP/Vista today. Neither of them offer anything ground-breaking that has real world value to the end user. Sure Vista looks nice, and is much more secure than 95, but without MS Office it is the same thing – you cannot do anything of real world importance with them.

With Ubuntu, PCLinux, BSD and other operating systems you can install them and start with “real” work immediately – no add-ons required. Yes – this was true even in the days of Mandrake Linux and Novell Linux. And although the installer for Red-Hat 6 was a pain it also had an office suite included, once you got it to actually run on your machine.

Operating System?

Okay so I am adding a header below “Summary.” One argument for the bare bones installation that Windows was and is, is that they are “Operating Systems” – hence they are designed to run the computer. The “Office System” is intended to allow you to work. The problem with that argument is that the term “Operating System” has evolved quite a bit since the days of Windows 95 – using a computer means doing more than just switching it on – it means being able to Operate It! Operate it means using it productively, and sadly Vista cannot do this out of the box. Vista is no longer an “Operating System” in the modern sense of the word – it is glorified firmware.

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