Teens React To Windows 95

wicktr0n_ said:
Are they dumb and uncultured, or is OP just old? Legit question, though.

If you're born in the 80's, you would say these same things about a punch-card terminal.
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Ha, I was born in 82 and My first job had a punch card terminal. I worked after school & over the summer at my school as a janitor with a old black guy named Otis, he was awesome and taught me how to properly tie a trash bag.
 
MV75 said:
Meh, just the generation that treats everything like a phone. They might be able to teach me how to use a modern phone. Nah not really, accomplishing phone wizardry is the domain of the idiot.
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It's not wizardry. Modern phones are just small really limited computers. If you can figure out a computer, you can figure out a phone (even if it may be frustrating at first)
 
This current generation thinks they know everything. Bah. They are spoiled. Back in my day, we had to walk four miles going uphill...wait. Wrong story.
My first computer was a Commodore 64. You turned it on, it said READY. I know I'm a punk ass to some of the wizards out there. I learned not to walk in their lawns years ago.
Damn - I don't miss played with himem.sys, emm386.exe just to get a game to work. I think my first PC came with DOS 5.0 (386, 33mhz). Prior to that, I had an Amiga (which in my mind was way ahead of the Intel/Microsoft platform for years after the fall of Commodore.)
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
It's not wizardry. Modern phones are just small really limited computers. If you can figure out a computer, you can figure out a phone (even if it may be frustrating at first)
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Old farts and kids think that it's wizardry if you are "good at using a phone" (always on it), and think it's some sort of tech savvy aspiration, thus it's the domain of the moron. I hope that clears it up. :)
 
That was idiotic. I don't think most of them ever actually used a computer besides a phone. Or they were just incredibly stupid.
 
21 3.5" floppy disks is what it took for me to install my first win95 box... oh the glory!
 
KazeoHin said:
MOST people use notebooks, tablets and smartphones now, if they DO buy a desktop, its an AIO desktop. Classical "Tower and screen" desktops are only for professionals and gamers at this point. Instead of waving your fists at these kids, you should really have a look about what these kid's reactions say about the industry at large.
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Most businesses still use a majority of desktops. And, with the exception of Mac users (whom you have to excuse for obviously being lower intelligence to begin with :p), I don't know of almost anyone who buys PC AIO models -- especially not twice, as most of the people I tend to deal with are cheap and they only upgrade monitors maybe every 3rd computer. This goes double based on the experience the few I know who have purchased AIO's have had with lower reliability, more expensive repairs, and shorter system life in general.

The other thing I have seen in the last year or so has been that fewer and fewer of my home customers are buying laptops -- or are not replacing their old ones when they wear out. The number of desktops I have been selling has increased the last 3 years and the number of laptops sales has declined almost the same. The number of desktops gets even bigger if you figure in boxes like the ECS Liva and higher end HTPC's. Essentially, I'm seeing more and more people who want a nice, big screen and decent keyboard on their home setup -- and for portability or "couch" use, which is typically email, Facebook, etc, they are buying tablets or phablets. And for teens, I've sold a heck of a lot of gaming boxes -- and even a super expensive Alienware gaming laptop doesn't even compare with a relatively inexpensive desktop where gaming is concerned (unless you go a step further and get the massive add-on external PCI-e x16 enclosure for the Alienware units, but that is essentially converting your laptop into an overpriced desktop anyway).

Personally though, I found the video both sad and hilarious at the same time -- and utterly depressing as to the average knowledge level of the teens in the video.

I'm old enough to have grown up with Apple ]['s, C-64s, TI99-4A's, etc. and I remember (and have had and played with) every version of Windows that has been released (I still have copies of Windows/286 around here somewhere -- and my original floppies with the first Beta of Windows NT) and, honestly, since Windows 95, things have not changed all that much really. And, even with Windows 95, they had those systems pretty well crippled with AOL on them. By the time 95 rolled out, I already had a (fast for the day) permanent 128K ISDN link. Even so, I was at least aware of computers older than what I had at home -- as I had to deal with horrendous crap in college like the Sperry-Burroughs BTOS systems we had in the math department lab, or (worse yet) the aging PDP8 we had over in the e-chem department which I occasionally used to get stuck with having to toggle in the boot code to get it to start feeding the paper tape. And, I spent way too much time mucking around with our cantankerous BAS100A analyzer doing oxidation/reduction curves (and when I say "mucking" it is with emphasis, as what I was working with was essentially raw sewage from a waste digester at Walt Disney World, based on a grant we had from them).

I actually still have a ton of parts from an old later model PDP11 out in my shed and garage -- I actually stripped down the RMO2 chasis's and use them as very nice, metal rolling carts in my garage, and gutted the old MagTape9 and stuck drawers in it as a nice standing cabinet. The power conditioning racks and some of the other electronics migrated to my workbench and still get used there quite a bit, and I think I may still have a couple of the old RMO2 platters out in my shed.
 
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macksomerville said:
21 3.5" floppy disks is what it took for me to install my first win95 box... oh the glory!
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Yup. I still have them.

You think 21 disks was bad. You should have tried installing Slackware 2 -- it was over 70 blasted floppies!

Hmmm.....seeing this article has got me thinking. I need to see if I can find my old archival copies of Slackware 1 & 2 and see if I can find something to install them on (this is assuming that the 20+ year old CD-R's I burned them on are still readable).
 
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The way they talked about WIFI and other technical things was comical. This video seemed more along the lines of "Young non-technical people try to use an old computer."
 
Redmud said:
DOS and QEMM?
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Remember it well :)
And optimizing upper memory to try an load as much of the network drivers into upper memory, so applications could still have at least 512KB of ram available.

And what all this talk about WiFi? Windows 95 supported Ethernet cards (as well as arcnet, pcnet, token ring, etc.)
All they needed was an Ethernet card to plug in the network and get on-line.
 
KazeoHin said:
MOST people use notebooks, tablets and smartphones now, if they DO buy a desktop, its an AIO desktop. Classical "Tower and screen" desktops are only for professionals and gamers at this point. Instead of waving your fists at these kids, you should really have a look about what these kid's reactions say about the industry at large.
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Unless an office user needs a laptop, I still buy desktops for the office (although I've switch from mini-towers to small desktop units the last few years).
I can get a much faster desktop for less money, plus I can reuse the old LCD, and it's a lot cheaper to fix if they spill something on the keyboard.
 
Keljian said:
Seriously, who aside from geeks and IT guys uses the terminal/command line? Utterly unnecessary for Joe user
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By and large for the average user, this should be 100% correct. For developers and IT support, like me, it's a different issue. With Linux, I still basically treat the GUI as nothing more than an easy way to launch/view multiple shells (and, honestly, I use "screen" over SSH about as often as I actually use the GUI).

Which is the reason for what had been one of my biggest gripes about Windows 8.1 -- having to explain to some of my business users how they now had to use friggin "netsh wlan" from the command line to change the priority of their wireless networks, as Microsoft was kind enough to remove the GUI that you used to do it with in Windows 7.
 
Im curious how they would react seeing installation method of Windows 3 for example, using 9-10 floppy diskets, or seemg an 1 Giga HDD (a BIG one at some moment) :))
 
Ducman69 said:
They're just dumb.

2016 monitors still have power buttons independent of the desktop. While we don't use modems over phone lines, we still use modems for cable connectivity, so there's no good excuse to not understand what a modem is. Ethernet hardwired connections are still very much commonplace in 2016, which also confused them as they only knew how to use wifi. And considering the inherent similarity between the basic GUI of Windows 95 and even Windows 10, yeah, they are just dumb.

That brunette had a serious rack though... but since she apparently wasn't even born yet in 1995, I consider that entrapment. All <18 year olds should be required to wear duct tape over their chests to flatten those puppies, and not wear makeup so I can't tell how old they are.
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Looks like she's 19 from the video. I wouldn't say entrapment but probably not a wise choice as far as one's career would go if you're aiming for a younger beauty like her.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
That and the AMAZEMENT at having to type commands in order to use a computer, is really just silly. There is still a command line interface in current windows, mac and linux operating systems...
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98% of people who used computers have never used a command line. Verified statistic. ;)

Though honestly, most people will not know what a command line is and likely never used it in any semi recent version of an OS. Most people do not even know how to disable programs from start up in Windows.
 
And this is why I have a few vintage systems that I let my boys play on. They'll have experience with Apple IIe's and early Macs, Windows 3.1, Win95/98 and XP. Why? Because there are some awesome games that they'll need to know how to use those systems in order to play them.
 
nutzo said:
Unless an office user needs a laptop, I still buy desktops for the office (although I've switch from mini-towers to small desktop units the last few years).
I can get a much faster desktop for less money, plus I can reuse the old LCD, and it's a lot cheaper to fix if they spill something on the keyboard.
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That's what I meant by 'professionals': people who use PCs at work. Many offices are moving to notebooks with docking stations, though.
 
Windows 95 did not receive as much credit as it deserves. When I have asked people about Windows 95, they say it sucked. Windows 7/10 is much better. Well, yes, but you cannot compare it to new technology. It must be compared with previous technology. For one, memory management. No more memmaker.exe or memmnger.exe. No more dealing with 640K conventional, upper, extended and expanded memory. Best of all, no more 8.3 file name format.
 
KazeoHin said:
That's what I meant by 'professionals': people who use PCs at work. Many offices are moving to notebooks with docking stations, though.
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and? i still use an eternal LCD cause its bigger.
 
Quick, some one grab the video from the stage presentation of the Win95 launch where all the exec's are dancing like the whitest men on the planet to the Rolling Stones.
 
Kor said:
Quick, some one grab the video from the stage presentation of the Win95 launch where all the exec's are dancing like the whitest men on the planet to the Rolling Stones.
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couldn't find that one, but i always found this promo to be the most hilarious:

(real fun starts at around the 7 minute mark, but the whole video is full of gems)



oh linda...tell me more about each application having a dedicated 640kb of RAM!
 
I could feel my intelligence dropping the longer I watched that video.
From what I know, no Windows has wifi. the computer has it or it doesn't, not the OS.
 
conner_1994_fakery.jpg

Ready...

conner_brak_SMART.jpg


Steady...

windows_95.jpg


Come ooooon Hover. F*** yeah. It's photorealistic!
 
While I agree with everyone in this thread, we all sound like a bunch of old guys who had to walk to school up hill in the snow both ways.... Could you see the article in the newspaper where they showed a couple of kids (our age) an outhouse or the proper way to make butter. I do agree that kids and even most parents my age (mid 40s) have not clue how a computer works or that the internet is more then facebook or google...

Remember when Windows did not have a proper TCP/IP stack and you had to install "internet in a box" I grew up with a Unix slip account on dial up. Was fortunate enough to have one of the first public ISP(unix only) in our city.

Those where the days but then again I sound old and grumpy....
 
They must tell the kids to act as loopy and stupid as possible when they film this crap.... Made it to the part about what modem's are and couldn't stomach any more of it. Just completely ridiculous. Hur dur as if kids think Wifi is the only way to access the internet and no teenagers have a fucknig clue what a modem and router is. I'm sure most of those kids probably know more than their parents do about computers.
 
I remember standing in line with my win 95 box of all those diskettes, I could not wait to get home. Those were the days.

LOL @ connor drive.
 
Punk Kids!

They do not know how easy they have it!! LOL

Also i love how almost everyone could not originally power it on.
 
NeghVar said:
Windows 95 did not receive as much credit as it deserves. When I have asked people about Windows 95, they say it sucked. Windows 7/10 is much better. Well, yes, but you cannot compare it to new technology. It must be compared with previous technology. For one, memory management. No more memmaker.exe or memmnger.exe. No more dealing with 640K conventional, upper, extended and expanded memory. Best of all, no more 8.3 file name format.
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It sucked a bit until the last few service releases. Stability and hardware/software issues were common early on but it was a crash-happy OS to the end. You were still dealing with memory management when it came to DOS games. Some of them didn't play nice with MS-DOS mode so floppy boot disks were needed to get them to run.
 
I can only imagine what the video was like, not giving the finebros any clicks though.
 
VMaxx said:
Its not that surprising really unless you grew up around an IT type person. Windows 3.11 would have been a good one for them to see. Xtree would have been a hoot for them I'm sure.
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It would have been hilarious to watch them try to get Trumpet Winsock to work on dialup in Windows 3.11. That's internet, old school. Even funnier to watch them try to configure a dialup modem under DOS.
 
Ducman69 said:
They're just dumb.

2016 monitors still have power buttons independent of the desktop. While we don't use modems over phone lines, we still use modems for cable connectivity, so there's no good excuse to not understand what a modem is. Ethernet hardwired connections are still very much commonplace in 2016, which also confused them as they only knew how to use wifi. And considering the inherent similarity between the basic GUI of Windows 95 and even Windows 10, yeah, they are just dumb.

That brunette had a serious rack though... but since she apparently wasn't even born yet in 1995, I consider that entrapment. All <18 year olds should be required to wear duct tape over their chests to flatten those puppies, and not wear makeup so I can't tell how old they are.
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Lol yea I didnt hear a word she said....., and the asian was funny too 'my dad would be proud of me'
 
Makaveli@BETA said:
... The have the computer skills of a 70 year old no one is asking them to program code but for the love of god learn some basics!
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!?!??!?!?!?!?

I just happen to be 70 years old, and if they had the 'computer skills' I have the would have known how to code in IBM Assembler Language, COBOL, RPG, FORTRAN, and NEAT3.

I've been in Data Processing (what you kiddies call IT) since 1968, LONG before you were ever a gleam in your pappy's eye.

Don't dis your elders :D:D:D
 
dark_reign said:
It sucked a bit until the last few service releases. Stability and hardware/software issues were common early on but it was a crash-happy OS to the end. You were still dealing with memory management when it came to DOS games. Some of them didn't play nice with MS-DOS mode so floppy boot disks were needed to get them to run.
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Why use boot floppies instead of booting straight to DOS from the HDD?

Super easy to do since config.sys and autoexec.bat support doing menus for booting with different configurations.
 
Quite honestly, a bright group of kids. Well spoken in comparison to what we normally see. I'm rather pleased. I'm 50 and what I see in this generation coming out of High School is just scary. The black guy was the brightest of the group. So much for stereo-typing!
 
DJS4000 said:
couldn't find that one, but i always found this promo to be the most hilarious:

(real fun starts at around the 7 minute mark, but the whole video is full of gems)



oh linda...tell me more about each application having a dedicated 640kb of RAM!
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Youtube - search for:
Windows 95 launch

 
cyclone3d said:
Why use boot floppies instead of booting straight to DOS from the HDD?

Super easy to do since config.sys and autoexec.bat support doing menus for booting with different configurations.
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Because some of them simply did not work right with the MS-DOS mode under Windows 95 -- even if you booted straight to it and never started the GUI. You basically HAD to start from a MS-DOS 5 floppy for everything to be happy.
 
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