PC Tools was was a great graphical shell/utility for DOS. Sadly they got bought out by Symantec, where good tools go to die.
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Teens React To Windows 95
- Thread starter Megalith
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The way you probably take your toilet for granted? Or clean water? Or electricity? Or modern fabrics?
And I thought I was the only one with that ability
Heh. I used to be able to whistle well enough to convince an old 110 acoustic coupler type connection I was a modem and sometimes connect long enough to spew garbage. I could convince a 300 to TRY to connect, but it would fail after that.
I also remember playing with my old Hayes Microcoupler/Micromodem II on my Apple ][ -- and figuring out that you could modulate the hook on/off signal fast enough to actually generate touch tones and other, "more interesting", tones as well -- and even crudely modulate recorded voice to the phone line.
Actually I do marvel at the toilet. How does all the poop and toilet paper NOT eventually clog up some big pipe somewhere. Toilets + sewage systems are one of the best inventions ever for humanity.
heatlesssun
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These kids need to see what it took to run a program on an Apple ][ or Commodore 64.
Running a program on an Apple ][ or C-64 was TRIVIAL, assuming you had a 5.25" floppy drive.
Go back to the TRS-80 CoCo or the TI-99/4A..... I remember having to load/save programs to audio cassette tape. Now THAT was a pain.
Or show them an Apple II connected to a Corvus Hard drive.
Corvus was one of the 1st hard drives available on the Apple II. I used to work on them when I first started in the computer industry, 10MB on a couple 8" platters. Drive was a big & heavy an original PC, and the controller consisted of 3 boards, each the size of an older mother board. If you swap one of the boards, you needed a dual trace scope and had to fiddle with 3 adjustments to re-align the boards. Then we ran them over night in a test cycle. Sounded like we had a jet engine running in the tech area
Yup. My first hard drive was an Apple Profile. Quickly followed by an Apple Sider.
heatlesssun
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The first computer I owned was the CoCo purchased in 1983 and yep, the floppy drive was well out of my budget for a couple of years. Audio cassette storage at 300 baud I believe totally sucked.
I remember rigging up 10-base2 with T-'s and terminators strung through the house we were renting in my college years -- all for the primary reason of being able to run multiplayer Doom!
Getting whipped by even Cat5 doesn't feel particularly good....
But what was REALLY painful was replacing a 32-pin EEPROM BIOS chip and, while pulling it out, have it flip over and "socket" itself into the palm of my hand. Now that HURT.
Two nicely parallel rows of scars that I had for years, though they have now basically faded to where I can't find them (or, more likely, the other callouses and scars have just blended into them).
Hey, some of us STILL program in assembly occasionally. Just try writing a decent, truly high speed interrupt handler on an Arduino without resorting to assembly.
Moronic AVR-GCC basically pushes EVERY bloody register onto the stack before entry to an ISR, even when I have hand optimized the code to where it needs, at most, 3 registers.
This is EXACTLY what I have run into a lot lately. Part of the issue is that most of the kids I've run into have experience with iPads, iPhones, and Macs. The schools around this area are almost exclusively Mac oriented -- and so is a lot of stuff at the University level. Almost all the computer classes and such around here are STRICTLY Mac based. And either the ability or at least the willingness of a lot of these kids to learn/explore something different is sorely lacking. I have run across far too many of them that get out of school and into the business world and they are literally being exposed to a PC for the first time (or some few who run into a class in college that doesn't use Mac's). Some of them figure it out -- usually fairly quickly, if they try. But way too many of them just sit there and say "this is too hard" and not what I'm used too and don't even try to do anything or figure it out. The schools are NOT teaching kids to explore things or figure things out on their own anymore. They aren't teaching LOGIC or basic scientific or diagnostic techniques. They are teaching to the tests and teaching the kids that there is basically ONE right way to do everything, and that if they don't know that right way, they shouldn't attempt to figure out another way to do it on their own, because it is worse to succeed the wrong way than to do nothing (which is unfortunately how many of the tests and a lot of crap like Common Core math are structured).
heatlesssun
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Good old inertia. But that's a problem with most things. I think it does also highlight in particular why Microsoft gets a lot of resistance to most any changes it makes to Windows. Windows is ancient compared to other common technology out there and there's still a lot of people that have used it forever and still do.
But you're right, overall most of this stuff isn't that hard to figure out. But you do fall into patterns. All of my personal mobile devices, including my laptops. Actually I currently don't own any conventional laptops, they're all 2 in 1s. But when I do use a conventional one like my work laptop, I'll find myself wanting to tap the screen at certain times. It just becomes second nature and while I'm pretty good at not doing as much as I used to, it's just one of those things that just becomes part of the experience. I'd go nuts if I had a MacBook just because of this one little thing. Well, not nuts, but I doubt I'll personally ever one a non-touch laptop again. In fact I'll probably just stick to 2 in 1s unless I ever decide to go for a gaming laptop.
I played games from a cassette in high school. I vaguely recall a football program, but I have no idea how that would have worked.
Yes, but the vast majority of programmers will never write assembler after college, assuming they had to do it in college and it'd be next to impossible to write modern apps or an OS completely in Asm.
I 100% agree on the 2-in-1 front -- I absolutely love my Dell 7352 (which, with an i7, 8Gb, and a Sandisk Ultra II 960, absolutetly rocks).
I never find myself tempted to use the touch screen on a desktop -- but given a choice between a touch screen and a laptop touchpad -- touch screen all the way, but I'd still take a mouse any day of the week (assuming I'm at a desk or table).
But for "couch" use and surfing -- tablet mode is the way to go. Which is why I probably will never upgrade my 7352 to Windows 10 -- Metro IE under 8.1 is so much better than Edge that it's obnoxious.
Edge, at best, reminds me of all the thing I dislike about Chrome on my Android tablets.
And, yes, intertia is hard to overcome -- but at least the previous generations were used to having to figure things out occasionally. This generation seem to expect EVERYTHING to just work and to always work the same way. The ability to sit down and just figure out how something works, based on logic and what you have experienced before, is sorely lacking. It's like the ability to extrapolate from their current knowledge to do other things has just been left out of the equation somewhere....
And, in some respects, I am among the world's worst when it comes to inertia -- I utterly hate change, unless it is for a demonstrably good reason that is more efficient.
Which is why I really dislike a lot of the things Microsoft did in Windows 8/8.1 in desktop mode (though it works great in tablet mode) and really dislike a lot of the things in Windows 10 -- basically Windows 7's UI is still what I find optimum in 90% of cases, especially visually.
That said, I have figured out basically everything about the innards of Windows 10 (and 8.1 before it) and can easily sit down and use a PC running any of the 3 OS's.
Of course, my response to the inertia of preferring Windows 7 over Windows 10 is quite different than most -- whenever I sit down at a new OS I immediately start figuring out what I don't like and figuring out how to change it (i.e. on Windows 8.1, the loss of the wireless config panel irritated me to no end, so I sat down and wrote a VC# program that allowed me to change wireless network priorities without resorting to "netsh wlan" all the time, at least until I found one someone else had written that worked better). That said, I know I'm basically weird and not typical (i.e. the last time I ran into a piece of hardware I needed to connect up to my RPi2 that I didn't have a driver for, I just downloaded all the data sheets and sat down and wrote one).
So, in my own concession to inertia, while I am running Windows 10 on my desktop -- I have tweaked the heck out of it:
1) ClassicShell -- the new menu sucks.
2) GadgetPack8 and Yahoo Widgets (nee Konfabulator)
3) Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird (running Classic Theme Restorer and a ton of tweaks -- to the point of unpacking omni.jar, modifying the actual code, and then repacking it).
4) Reinstalled the classic Win 7 calculator.
5) Modded and reinstalled all the classic games from Win 7.
6) OldNewExplorer to lose the ribbon in File Explorer, put back classic menus, and revert to the old style Hard Disk/Devices with Removable storage view.
7) Banished Quick Access, restored Libraries, etc.
8) Installed the hack of WMC.
9) Forcibly blocked, firewalled, or killed every service related to Telemetry or feedback.
10) Disabled Windows Update (and I have a semi-working script that uses some WSUS related tricks to let me point it inhouse and pull down only those updates I want).
11) Reverted all the icons back to Windows 7.
12) Hacked uxtheme and changed back to a very good semblance of the Windows 7 Aero window style with borders, etc.
13) Uninstalled Edge
14) Uninstalled Cortana and created search buttons in ClassicExplorer and on the taskbar that launch AgentRansack instead.
15) Restored the Quick Launch bar.
16) Restored the old Windows 7 Photo Viewer.
So, my reaction to my own UI inertia was to figure out how to turn Windows 10 back into Windows 7, while still keeping the ability to run the new apps, the better SSD handling, and other true optimizations -- while removing or blocking all the annoying privacy and UI related stuff.
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True. These days, about the only time I delve into assembly are when I am doing really low level embedded stuff (and typically only in the really time critical regions even there) or when doing stuff at the boot loader level (and even the majority of that is in C these days -- e.g. barebox).
I guess you could still write a modern app in assembly, but it would be SO painful. I've been part of a team that implemented the entire software for a couple of TV sets and their UI's in pure assembly before -- on both an 8051 (83C055 MTV) and a funky 9-bit Sanyo processor. And at one point in years past, I personally wrote an entire commercial teleprompter program from scratch, in pure assembly, and it had a fairly well developed UI and was even capable of importing files from two different word processors for display. It took forever to write though, and I definitely wouldn't want to have to do it again.
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I don't get the calculator issue. If you don't like the size of the modern app, make it smaller. Mine is about the same size as the old windows app and it's got way more features.
I do use the gadget pack, because I love my Pro Weather gadget and the various ones from Addthis. I've basically been using the same gadgets since Vista.
The rest of that is unneeded for me. I type what I want in the start menu (same as windows 7), so nothing has changed from my POV, other than going to settings instead of control panel. I much prefer the new photo viewer and I have no idea what "quick Access" is.
Quick Access is the new auto-adding, annoying replacement for Favorites in the File Explorer window.
The new calculator is functional, just hideous and you CAN'T make it as small as the old one was, however my biggest complaint is with programmer mode -- where you can't see the bit pattern view and the keypad at the same time, which is VERY annoying when trying to type in and interpret raw I/O registers.
The other thing is, I rarely, if ever type anything into the Start Menu on Windows 7 (or any other version), I almost always use the menu -- which I have regrouped into custom folders by application type, like "Photo Editing", "Video Conversion", "Program Development", etc. I also usually enable to XP style cascading Start Menu, which is MUCH easier to navigate when you have a ton of subfolders. Trying to user search to type in the name of a program is useless when you can't remember remember what it is called -- just that it is, for instance, the IDE for the Freescale 16-bit processor cores that I last used 2 years ago. I typically turn the indexing service off completely anyway.
The new Photo Viewer is also sorely lacking in many areas -- especially when it comes to printing multiple standard 4x6, 3x5 prints to a single sheet of Photo Paper, etc. I also hate that the scroll wheel now changes pictures rather than zooming in/out. It's not horrendous, just uglier and adds basically nothing that is useful to me (i.e. the entire "share" button is a big who cares to me -- as I *never* post pictures or anything personal to Facebook or anything else). I also miss having the "burn" option, though I don't use it as often as I used to.
Additionally, GETTING to Control Panel on W10 is too much of a pain without pinning it somewhere or adding the icon to the desktop (and, yes, I do realize you can left click on the Start Menu), and a large number of functions are still only accessible there. Settings is an annoying melange that duplicates some features from Control Panel, omits others, or has weird variations on a few of them. And navigating it takes WAY too long. Settings needs a decent icon view like Control Panel has where it shows ALL the control panel items alphabetically without the stupid nesting hierarchy. The "GodMode" icon primarily gets access to the lower sub-menus that you access through Control Panel rather than Settings. Also, with Settings, unlike Control Panel, I can't have multiple dialogs to different settings screens open at once, which can sometimes be a headache when changing settings that are complementary or interrelated.
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Comixbooks
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Yeah I wasted 1997-2015 in front of a PC daily I was 21 now I'm 40
Waste of Time?
Yeah...
I spent 3 years playing Ultima Online alone EVERDAY.....
Waste of Time?
Yeah...
I spent 3 years playing Ultima Online alone EVERDAY.....
YeuEmMaiMai
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the video is actually funny if you are in your late 40's and older and can remember things like the Commodore PET
Darunion
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Yes, but also could be said about any piece of technology and an age gap of this. We like to brag about our coding skills or engineering skills but we are starting to sound no different than listening to our granparents talk about working on vacuum tube circuits, farm tractors, or adding machines. We were the out of touch kids at one point, maybe not this group specifically but overall the mass was playing with geocities site creators and aol messaging and didn't know much else beyond that. Just as in this generation there are the groups that surpass us in knowledge (regardless how our pride might alter our view) and eventually we will be the old fogeys talking about old ways of doing things that are much easier now and dont require huge amounts of time to figure out first.
True. To a point. The point being that it is becoming harder and harder to find good engineers to replace the ones who are currently in the work place. I know of several companies I do work for that have had open req's that they have been unable to fill for going on 3 years now. And, at a couple of them, they have hired in new people out of school who had degrees, but their initiative levels were near zero and trying to train them to do anything that required original thinking or creative problem solving just didn't happen. There are bright kids out there, but finding them isn't easy -- and there are fewer of them than there used to be (which I blame largely on culture and our education system). And, yes, we are old fogey's, but the engineering population that has designed and programmed all the new cell phones and computer systems is graying rapidly -- as are a lot of the other "hard" engineering disciplines. Too many of the kids view these disciplines as "no fun" or "too difficult" -- and effectively NO ONE is going into analog electrical engineering anymore. The best EE I know is near 80 and is still one of the busiest people I know -- and still does contract work all the time. Basically, all we hear from the younger engineers is that "no one needs analog anymore", which ignores things like power supplies, circuit noise and cross talk problems, FCC certifications, WiFi tranceiver/receivers, cable modems, etc -- it may all be digital when you finally process it, but the actual PHY layer and things like QAM are inherently analog in nature and always will be. In this case, it's not like people no longer needing vacuum tube specialists, it's that the vast majority of the current crop of youngsters view the underlying technologies that allow things like the Lithium Polymer batteries, charging circuits, 4G transmitters, power supplies, etc as "magic" and aren't learning how to fix them or maintain them. In 10-15 years when the ones currently working on all this stuff retire, we are going to be a world of hurt, just to maintain CURRENT technologies that make all these "magic" devices work.
Darunion
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Well said. I really do think most people when they think analog only picture analog gauges. They believe digital is just simple programming of a cpu with 1's and 0's. As we know it isn't that simple by any stretch. Oh and side note, screw failing FCC for unintentional emissions, what a headache lol.
I will say this is the age group that I have heard say "we need to get rid of 110ac and just make power lines use 5v dc like everything already uses, it would be cheaper and devices would be smaller"
.....
dammit I'm already the fogey... "these damn kids dont know sh**"
heatlesssun
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Will I do understand why people do this, some of it a little odd. Like the old Photo viewer. The Windows 10 UWA version has quite a bit more functionality that the Windows 7 Photo viewer. Classic menus really are the greatest thing for touch. The old calculator does have more functionality but it always bugged me that it wasn't resizable. There's some pretty decent on in the Windows Store. My favorite is Calc Pro HD, it's $8 but does a lot more than the Windows 7 calculator, there is a free version. Cortana I'm really liking now. I know there are those that have issues with privacy around tools like this, but I really like just being able to bark out web search now.
heatlesssun
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Commands in text that control a computer's function. That's about as "computer code" as it gets.
but that isn't code, that is a command that it already knows and that command runs the code. that is how I look at it.
heatlesssun
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In computing, source code is any collection of computer instructions (possibly with comments) written using some human-readable computer language, usually as text.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_code
Something as simple as "dir" is a computer instruction a therefore code.
DJS4000
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a bit late but .... jesus. i love it how steve goes absolutely mental and bill is like "yeah i'm part of this somehow".
It's not quite as short, but it's narrower. The total area used is less than the old calculator. So Classic Calc uses 73,644 pixels (228x323) and Modern Calc uses 72,674 pixels (203x358) That said, I agree that the programmer mode is a flaw, You should send them feedback as that could be fixed (I think).
It's so rare that I don't know what I'm looking for that I'll just search the menu or in explorer if I can't find it.
Don't get me wrong, before Windows 7 I always organized my folders, but I just don't see the point now. Even for stuff in control panel/settings, I can search for what I think I want and 99.9% of the time it comes up. About the only time it doesn't work is with some enterprise apps that don't have the name of the program associated with the binary, but if I use them enough, "ll just tack them to the task bar (or they end up on my most used in the start menu. I understand what you're saying, but I got over it by 2010 (earlier if Vista had it towards the end of that release).
OK, I only used it to preview pictures/scroll through them and even then mostly just to see how it'd look in that app. The new one handles Raw files very well, which is nice, even if it's also available in Lightroom. I'd have to double check, but my recollection is that the color rendering respects the ICC, and either full screen or windowed mode did not.
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I'd, again, argue that just typing what you want ('co' in the start menu, for example, for Control Panel) gets you what you want.
As for showing all icons in CP in alphabetical order, I use to do that, but at this point, I can type whatever task I'm looking for in Control Panel, and possibly from the start menu and it almost always comes up (even though I may not know exactly what I'm looking for) . About the only thing that they need to fix, IMO, is migrating everything to settings so we don't have some things in CP and others in Settings.
That said, going back to Windows 95, I've always put a Control Panel icon on my desktop, but it's not as necessary as it once was.
auntjemima
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I have not watched the video, yet, however I feel that using the OS is really very similar to even windows 10. If anything going from Windows 95 to Windows 10 would be a huge shock.. Windows 95 had the start menu and the few options that are available are all easily understood.
I'll watch it, I suppose.
I'll watch it, I suppose.
I agree, but clearly many feel the move from 7/10 is huge (and thus install apps to make it look like 7 or even XP or 95. That said, there big shocks were the things that the OS doesn't do (like turn off the computer), the way you turn it on and other things like that. Honestly, I'd forgotten that Windows didn't turn off the computer. It's been a long time.
auntjemima
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Well, I finally watched it. They seemed to grasp the OS perfectly fine. Things like AOL or modems, not so much and quite frankly I don't expect them to. Both of those things, while huge in our time, aren't even relevant anymore.
heatlesssun
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Actually the old Windows Photo Viewer has nothing to do with printing, that's actually part of File Explorer. The same printing options are still there in 10 without the using the old Photo Viewer though you have to do it through File Explorer, the new Photos app uses a modern printing dialog. The modern Photos app does have some nice basic editing options and can display things like animated GIFs.
Even so, I think one of my biggest gripes here is one of efficiency/human factors -- specifically, the need to remove your hand from the mouse, type something on the keyboard, then go back to the mouse again. Similarly (or maybe conversely), I still use the ALT key to access the File/Edit/View/etc menu on many apps from the keyboard while working, so I don't ever have to move my hands over to the mouse. Things should be organized to where you can most easily achieve the entire operation with the minimum number of input device switches required.
And, when you have to deal with 4 versions of the OS (XP, 7, 8, 10) plus Linux on a daily basis doing IT support, good luck trying to remember specifically what the option you are looking for is called in that version of the OS (or remembering the exact sequence to navigate the Settings tree to locate it, when you can't remember what it's called). This also makes doing blind telephone support for people a real pain -- especially as about half the time I'm doing it, I'm driving somewhere, on my headset, telling them what and where to click from memory.
I realize you can get to it from the File Explorer, but that just makes it a two step process when it used to be a one step one, in many cases anyway.
And, yes, the new one displays the horrendous new modern printing dialog -- which has no ability to get to the advanced printer settings dialog to adjust paper types (e.g. photo paper -- all you can adjust is size), printer security features, watermarking, et al.
Basically, they have "dumbed down" the print dialog, just like a ton of other stuff.
heatlesssun
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The way I see it, the modern Photos app is a much better viewer and basic image editing tool, the old Windows Photos doesn't even crop. The printing aspect is much less important these days as people share images online far more often than they print.
That's fine, but there's literally no reason to use the mouse on the Start Menu, unless you have no idea what program you want (a rare occurrence). For that situation, you could either go to File Explorer or you can organize start menu folders and click through that way (but again to me that should be a rare occurrence).
Well that's legit, though aside from XP, to me, they're all the same. I literally transitioned from 7 to 8 to 10 within 6 months and aside from the move of Windows update to Settings, virtually nothing has changed for me.
rediornot
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in 1991 I got moved from an aircraft maintenance job to chief of logists at spangdahlem afb in Germany. they had one computer in the office shared by 7 people, it was a zenith 248, it had 248 meg of hard drive and 2 ram cards for a total of 20meg of ram. we had msdos, loaded to the computer was database 3 and wordstar 4. all data was saved on a 5 1/4 inch floppy that had to be formatted first. and don't get it near a magnet or it would corrupt your data.
I organize Start Menu folders and have custom grouped folders. My own way of working is that I generally keep everything current that I'm working on accessible via shortcuts on the desktop, stuff I need access to frequently (Firefox, Notepad++, Calc, etc) on the Quick Launch bar, and everything else in the Start Menu. And, I generally always use the mouse when I'm navigating between stuff -- which you pretty much have to in most programs, so, unless I'm actively coding or typing, I never want to HAVE to remove my hand from the mouse when I need to find something in the Start Menu.
Windows Settings is fairly uniformly useless in what it allows access to -- 90% of what I need is still in Control Panel, or a level deeper under Administrative Tools. Too many things are missing from Settings for it to be useful -- advanced power plans, device manager. file explorer options, system, firewall, network adapter properties, etc. And until Microsoft comes up with a way for Settings to allow and implement CPL files, to add things like Realtek HD Audio Manager, Nvidia Control Panel, Mail, etc. it will never be able to totally replace it. I have to access the "Mail (32-bit)" option to setup Outlook profiles several times a day on numerous machines.
Or, I guess you could sum it up by saying that I'm an old fart who doesn't like change.
On the other hand, change for the sake of change has no value -- it's just fashion, which also has no value, unless you are a fashion designer.
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