The thing I liked about Windows 95 the most was that the 8.3 (“eight dot three”) filename barrier was finally broken. Now filenames can have 255 characters, including spaces (though I usually use underscores).
Actually, it had a very effective marketing program set up to make people think it had multitasking. They’ve been telling people this since Windows first came out in 1980. In order to do true multitasking, which is the ability to do two separate computations at exactly the same moment in time, you must have two processors.
What it really had was clouds.
Which should tell you something.
I believe you’re think of multiprocessing. Multitasking is basically the ability to run interruptable processes or threads, where the interrupted process isn’t relinquishing control to the interrupting process. This was a new thing (for Windows) in Win95. Prior to that was “cooperative multitasking”, where a process would explicitly cede time to other processes; this was how Win 3.x and MacOS (pre OS-X) simulated multitasking. The downfall of this approach was that a misbehaving process could hog/hang the machine.
I think one big part of it is simply the large difference in interaction that win95 introduced. The use of a desktop in place of program groups, the entire elimination of the Program Manager, the introduction of the taskbar and system tray. The Start menu. Fundamentally a different GUI user experience.
Whoops. You’re right. They were advertising it as multiprocessing when Win95 came out, and, 'round about Win98, they started advertising it as multitasking, with a big advertising whitewash. “We meant multitasking. We always meant multitasking. Remember those old ads where we said multiprocessing? Just pretend we said multitasking instead, and then you’ll see we weren’t completely lying through our teeth about what our operating system could do. Thanks!”
Oh, and that bit about protected memory space? Every time my Win 98 or XP system locks up, I say, “Thankfully, now that the Windows operating systems use pre-emptive multitasking, it is no longer possible for an errant thread to take exclusive control of the processor and cause the computer to lock up” as I reach for the power button.
I’m a Mac user and pretty close to being a Mac zealot (I’d rather use Mac System 7 on an old beat-up Quadra than XP on a 4 GHz P4 with a gig of RAM) but Windows95 was the first time I looked at a PC and used it for awhile and thought “they’ve really got it, they’ve done it, it’s not a Mac but at least it’s finally a freakin’ operating system!”.
Windows 3.x sucked almost to the point of unusability unless you installed Norton Desktop (which, in retrospect, was almost a Windows95 skin for Windows 3.x – you could put shortcuts on the Desktop for your favorite programs, you could put disk icons for C and D and floppy A on the Desktop as well, and double-clicking on a disk icon would bring up the File Manager for that drive). Windows 3.x had that horrid split-personality thing going between the Program Manager and the File Manager. PC users (other than geeks) of that era set a new record for cluelessness about their own computer’s file and folder hierarchy, a dramatic change from DOS users who knew (and had to know) how their directories were laid out. The GUI was sufficiently bad that Microsoft dumped nearly all of it and started afresh for W95.
Lots of people are quite aware of the extent to which Macintosh standards were finally embraced in the PC world with the advent of W95 (some would say “stolen” — Apple itself said so but the courts said they’d managed to license it and Apple learned the value of hiring decent lawyers before signing stupid intercompany licensing contracts): a Desktop (a place you could actually put things); a trash can (recycle bin); an Apple menu (Start menu) to initiate functions you need access to system-wide; folders that retained views you set them to have; that opened to locations and dimensions you set them to have; files with icons that told you at a glance what program or purpose they pertained to; system-wide keystroke command equivalents that were easy to remember and use like Command-P (Control-P) to print, instead of keystrokes that differed from program to program and tended to be things like Alt-F6; etc etc…
But there were also lots of things that were done differently. I suppose if this had not been so, I, as a Mac person, would’ve liked it better, and/or reviews of Windows would have consisted solely of counting the ways in which it did or did not successfully emulate the Macintosh experience entirely; but in all fairness these differences were often just alien non-Mac things, not necessarily inferior in any objective sense, and in some cases downright good ideas; and it was weird and disconcerting to see another computer GUI that was actually usable yet wasn’t entirely like ours: the “X” to close programs, the right-click contextual menu, “open” and “save” dialog boxes that gave you substantial folder-management controls like deleting renaming or (for folders at least) adding items to the environment you were navigated to; the navigation widgets at the top of folders for moving up one level or displaying the entire directory tree; the alt-tab keystroke for program-switching; the mapping of the old “panic-and-restart” keystroke combo, Ctrl-Alt-Delete, to a task manager that would let you nuke errant tasks or see what’s playing…
My reaction was “I wouldn’t want to use this, but you know, a person could actually use this. If they’d just get rid of those opaque ‘application windows’, at any rate. Wow, an almost user-friendly PC, who’da thunk it?”
And, as with Apple’s Macintosh System 1, Microsoft seems to have recognized (for the most part) a good thing when they had it, and they (mostly) haven’t screwed it up by changing it much since then.
squeegee: At least part of the credit should go to the version of MS-DOS (7.0) which Windows 95 was riding on. The pretty window manager didn’t do a whole lot for the actual “behind-the-scenes” stuff. That came in later versions (IIRC, starting with ME) that started to be based on NT rather than DOS. But to this day, you can still get that familiar DOS-like command line. Sometimes, there’s no substitute for a CLI.
I think you’re getting a little hung up on terminology. The stuff under the hood is still part of Windows (the OS); I agree the front end windows (not the OS) UI wasn’t doing the heavy lifting.
Well, sure, and the CLI is darned useful. But it also has little to do with the OS plumbing. It’s just another interface to make the machine do what you want, just like the windowing system is also a way to control the machine.
Try this in XP:
Start - Run - progman
(It’s there for backwards compatibility, apparently)
Nope, wouldn’t be ME.
ME was the final iteration of the DOS—>Windows3.x—>Windows95—>Windows98 trajectory. Windows NT was not based in any fashion on the raw input & output & command set that comprises MS-DOS, whereas the systems in the previous sentence were. The WindowsNT 3.5—>NT4.0—>Windows2000—>WinXP evolutionary path has its own kernel and only runs DOS commands as a consequence of a separate tacked-on afterthought program, or so I understand. The NT/2K/XP command line shell program doesn’t get to directly talk to hardware and instead passes the request back to the NT kernel which does so, and so the command line isn’t “closer to the metal” at all the way it was under, say, Windows95, where GUI apps that wanted to talk to the hardware had to pass requests back to the DOS environment which actually controlled the computer physically.
Anyone who is more of a PC OS geek is welcome to clarify or correct me.
I’ve never really understood what people mean when they describe Windows 9x as running on top of DOS, or being “DOS in a party frock”. Once Windows has loaded, DOS and BIOS code is hardly used at all, mostly for backwards compatibilty with old drivers. Pre-emptive multitasking, 32-bit file access etc., all surely Operating System services, are provided by Windows, not DOS.