someones using windows 95?

[Zarathustra[H]]

I know I did but then again, I also built my own computers. I liked the fact that it booted up really, really fast.

My only recollection of Win ME is of the kids in college u fortunate enough to have it, as it wouldd constantly bluescreen. I always thought of it as the biggest fail of an OS ever.


This was back in the days before I developed a Linux habit. I kept a super lean Win98 SE install just for games, and dual booted to Win2k for everything else.

Win2k was solid, but I could never get games to feel right in it. The mouse feel was off, and performance was lower than in 98 SE.

Later when I got into Linux (first RedHat, then Gentoo, followed by Ubuntu, and now Mint) I just replaced the Win2k partition with a Linux partition and kept my barebones games install.

The games install got upgraded over the years. First to XP, then to Win7, and now Win10.

 

[BulletDust]

Constant swapping due to insufficient RAM?

Back then I was running Core 2 I think? DDR2?

With the ram densities around at the time I think I was running 4GB? 2GB was the norm back then from memory.

It's just what Vista does. Like ManOfGod said, it's constantly prefetching resulting in thrashing of the hard drive. Mechanical hard drives as boot drives are horrible things under Windows, even to this day.

Long live the Guru Meditation Error! The last OS available before Commodore went away was Amiga OS 2.04 and that was quite good to me.

I remember getting Guru Meditation errors all the time on my A500 in the day, could never work it out. It wasn't until my mates A500 died and he gave me his memory expansion (that I still use to this day) that I figured out that it was my memory expansion that was causing the errors as they all but stopped as soon as the old expansion was swapped out!

To this day I can't believe that I didn't click that the Guru errors started as soon as I added that memory expansion board.

My current A500 and A1200 both run an exact clone of AmigaOS 3.1 and I haven't seen a Guru yet.

 

[B00nie]

Those were the times. I paid the equivalent of 3600 dollars for my C64 + cassette drive. I paid it myself, was earning 100 bucks a week doing the paper route (illegally as I was only 12).

 

[BulletDust]

Those were the times. I paid the equivalent of 3600 dollars for my C64 + cassette drive. I paid it myself, was earning 100 bucks a week doing the paper route (illegally as I was only 12).

I bought mine off a mate at high school, no way I could afford a brand new one. The keyboard was stuffed and I had to swap it with the one out of my VIC20 and the clips holding the rear of the casing together were broken, but that machine never missed a beat. I still have it to this day, keys are broken off and it's seen better days, still powers up though, I use it for parts. The SID's dead as I stupidly touched it without using the anti static mat and strap that was centimeters from where I was removing the chip from the mainboard....

Some of my best memories were going to mates houses with my box of disks to copy games, can't even remember the name of the software we used to do so....

 

[Executioner]

Anybody ever use OS/2 from IBM?

OS/2 is a series of computer operating systems, initially created by Microsoft and IBM under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci, who later went on to found Citrix Systems, DayJet and VirtualWorks.[2] As a result of a feud between the two companies over how to position OS/2 relative to Microsoft's new Windows 3.1 operating environment,[3] the two companies severed the relationship in 1992 and OS/2 development fell to IBM exclusively.[4] The name stands for "Operating System/2", because it was introduced as part of the same generation change release as IBM's "Personal System/2 (PS/2)" line of second-generation personal computers. The first version of OS/2 was released in December 1987 and newer versions were released until December 2001.

OS/2 was intended as a protected mode successor of PC DOS. Notably, basic system calls were modelled after MS-DOS calls; their names even started with "Dos" and it was possible to create "Family Mode" applications: text mode applications that could work on both systems.[5] Because of this heritage, OS/2 shares similarities with Unix, Xenix, and Windows NT in many ways.

IBM discontinued its support for OS/2 on 31 December 2006.[6] Since then, it has been updated, maintained and marketed under the name eComStation. In 2015 it was announced[7] that a new OEM distribution of OS/2 would be released that was to be called ArcaOS.[8] ArcaOS is available for purchase.[9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2

 

[Paladin21]

I worked in a place for a while that was testing OS/2 Warp (the version that sat on top of Windows and would run those programs too). It was fine, though we only had a few things that were actually OS/2 native. Most stuff was just Windows programs, and so there wasn't any real benefit to it (though I can't remember it being any slower either).

 

[viper_0307]

Still have Windows 98 SE on a Pentium 166 and a 4GB SCSI drive as a standalone.

Thinking of going back to WFW 3.11 and still have OS/2 Warp.

 

[BulletDust]

Still have Windows 98 SE on a Pentium 166 and a 4GB SCSI drive as a standalone.

Thinking of going back to WFW 3.11 and still have OS/2 Warp.

So cool....

 

[swatbat]

Go to some mom and pop car repair shop and see if the wheel balance machine or some other shop tool isn't running Win 95.

I have recently (within the last year) not only worked on a Win95 system, but also had to source and build a system for it with a motherboard that supported ISA cards. It was connected to an (extremely expensive) milling machine that the business didn't have the money to replace. While paying far more than the hardware should have been worth, it was still a bargain compared to the money required to do a full replacement.

A lot of people fail to realize how common this actually is. Replacing a home computer is nothing. Replacing a computer driving specialized hardware is another story. OS2 warp is still being developed and includes its windows 3.11 abilities(arcanoae). The reason is you have a lot of specialized hardware and software that is far more expensive to deal with. The only reason the atm industry went away from it to windows was because of the issues with accessibility options(sound was a big one). If it wasn't for that I'd bet most of the ones in the US would still be on os2.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/a-23-year-old-windows-3-1-system-failure-crashed-paris-airport/

That is from 2015 where an airport was using windows 3.11. It is far cheaper to keep fixing the old pcs than redoing the entire system which in that case should be happening now but I'm guessing is costing multiple millions.

I work for a MSP and the amount of old systems we see driving hardware is nuts. Very old machines running door locks, hvac, engravers, cnc machines, automotive stuff like the alignment machine above, etc. In the last year or so I can think of 2 hvac upgrades. One replaced a Pentium 166 running windows 98 booting into dos mode(a machine that itself was a replacement for an older computer at some point) and the other had a windows 95 laptop to control it. The pentium 166 machine I had actually made copies of all of the install disks on in case I had to swap it in the future(and had the software running in dos on an atom itx board I had laying around). They finally spent the multiple tens of thousands upgrading their entire hvac system and a new controller came with it. Same thing for the windows 95 laptop.

I have muliple clients with old engravers that run off various old hardware. One isn't that old and runs off a xp notebook(software will not run on windows 7). We had another client sell them a latitude a few years ago to replace what they had been using and threw a new hard drive in it(one of the last ones to have xp drivers). The machine isn't connected to the network and replacing the engraver with a new one would be a couple of grand. Another is an engraving shop. They have a few engravers that work fine but will not run off anything new. One laser engraver needs 32bit windows but does work with 7 so the machine that drives it is setup that way. Another runs off dos with a very old machine. It is more of a backup engraver but gets used when they are busy.

I had another client that a few years ago we put in a used core 2 machine that was being retired somewhere to run a dos application(way overkill but it works). We needed something with serial and a real parallel port as the security key looked for it via the memory address where lpt 1 or 2 would be. In this case the vendor did have a newer windows version of the software but it was missing some feature the client liked and was like 20 or 30 grand for the upgrade. Getting the software they liked working for a few hundred bucks on a machine being retired was a far better solution for them(they actually went to a windows solution in the last 6 months).

If you want to see something related look up the stories of the guy that runs floppydisk.com. The amount of industrial machines that load their files from floppies is nuts. Things like embroidery machines from the 80's and 90s that are still in use and will be for another decade or two at least.

 

[ZodaEX]

Still have Windows 98 SE on a Pentium 166 and a 4GB SCSI drive as a standalone.

Thinking of going back to WFW 3.11 and still have OS/2 Warp.

Well I've got WIndows 98 SE on a much much nicer Sempron 2800* based system with 1GB of DDR. It would run circles around that one you've got

 

[B00nie]

Back in the IRC days there was this girl who was joining IRC with a Windows 3.11 computer. She was happy because many of the DoS attacks (which were frequent back then) targeted only Windows 95 and newer systems lol.

 

[BulletDust]

If you want to see something related look up the stories of the guy that runs floppydisk.com. The amount of industrial machines that load their files from floppies is nuts. Things like embroidery machines from the 80's and 90s that are still in use and will be for another decade or two at least.

Which is the main reason why more modern alternatives to the floppy, like the Gotek, exist. Floppy's degrade massively over time, as a retro enthusiast myself I know that most of my Commodore 64 and Amiga floppies have degraded so badly that they actually shed magnetic media all over the read/write head resulting in a drive that won't read until the head is cleaned/demagnetized.

Quite disappointing as there's items of memorial significance that I really want to get off those disks.