Gregory's ServerI miss the days when a brand new OS would just let you reboot into a legacy OS. Happy 28th birthday to Windows 95! 🎉🎂🎈🍾🥂
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 @dosnostalgic let's be fair: Windows wasn't letting you "boot into the legacy OS", it was just letting you quit out of the shell, because at the time, it was literally just a fancy GUI shell for DOS, and remained so (for home users, enterprise users got NT in the early 90s) until Windows XP @vinesnfluff No. Windows 9x was not "just a fancy GUI shell for DOS". In fact it was sort of the other way around. It was a full on standalone OS that had legacy DOS support fully integrated in its kernel. But if you wanted an actual MS-DOS you had to reboot. There was nothing to quit to, as DOS 7 that was used as a bootloader was completely gone by the time Win9x was running. @vinesnfluff Here's Raymond Chen, the guy who was essentially responsible for DOS in Windows, on how that actually worked: @dosnostalgic @vinesnfluff More like Raymond CHAD for me, this guy is awesome even though I hate Windows and M$ @speaktrap @dosnostalgic Microshaft has done *good work* for Tech. DirectX as a whole, bringing Multitasking and GUIs to mainstream PCs, the fact that they gave IBM the slip allowing for the entire "PC Compatible" ecosystem, which made computers cheaper over time. They were never incompetent... They were always evil. "Lawful Evil" to use DnD words :P @vinesnfluff @dosnostalgic @dosnostalgic@mastodon.social @vinesnfluff@equestria.social Ah, Raymond Chen. He had the best blog on his brother emailing actual heads of state to complain about family members and petty grievances. In addition to Raymond’s professional accomplishments, he was a fantastic storyteller as well. @dosnostalgic @vinesnfluff when the black screen told you in orange letters that it was safe to shut the computer off, you literally had a shell, you just had to run the commands to clear the screen. Not saying win95 was just a fancy gui for dos, nor do I remember how functional that shell was given that I was in primary school when I messed around with it, but it was at the very least somewhat functional. @kly @dosnostalgic aaaand now you got me wanting to set up win9x on 86box just to try that  @dosnostalgic @vinesnfluff @kly It's been years, but IIRC, if you boot to MS-DOS mode, run @dosnostalgic @kly Well paint me purple and call me "Twilight", it actually works. The process goes: @dosnostalgic @kly PS this was a clean install. Or, cleanish. I did install the drivers needed to get sound/graphics properly out of 86box, cuz if I was setting this up, I might as well have it ready to screw around with some gaems. @dosnostalgic @kly Bonus: If you type 'win' instead of 'cls' it goes back to windows. @kly @vinesnfluff That only happened when you had a shitty DOS driver sitting in memory refusing to shut down. That command prompt was still very much Windows. If you didn't, there's nothing you could do on that screen besides shut your machine off.  @dosnostalgic clear options, obvious ways to cancel completely out of it if you clicked by mistake, dimming the rest of the screen so it took your focus and gave you the power, and a help button that actually tried to help. No dark patterns, no marketing, no patronising, no "this nameless system icon is preventing your computer from restarting", no "we rebooted automatically for updates, all your work is gone and all your tabs will reload". I miss not arguing with my PC just to get things done. @dosnostalgic oh, and no "other people might lose work if you restart now!" on my own literal personal computer that nobody else has an account on, nevermind is logged into. It's terrible how much we're forced to just accept our own possessions flat out lying to us on a daily basis. @timixretroplays @dosnostalgic that. Yes, OSes must be boring to be good OSes. @appzer0 @dosnostalgic it's not even about being boring - they're tools! They should do what they're told to do, anything else is hostile to users. @dosnostalgic i have access to a computer still running this. it's not mine, it's my mother's from college. the OS is older than me, but loved using that computer growing up lol. windows 11 could learn a thing or two from past versions. sometimes less is more.  wednesday the valkyrja, the incentives in the modern IT industry are all wrong, very wrong. And there's hardly any competition nowadays. @dosnostalgic @codinghorror This prompt and the buttons just felt weird to me. The question begins with "are you sure you want to" so it looks like a yes-no question, and the buttons are for a yes-no question and yet it is actually a multiple choice question! Why didn't they rephrase the prompt to be "what would you like to do", remove the question marks from the selections, and change the buttons to read "continue" and "cancel" respectively? @dosnostalgic Still upset that Microsoft was able to hide the 95 code and put Word Perfect, Borland and other competitors out of business. Thanks Bill Clinton.  @HoffmanLabs @dosnostalgic "Windows XP Mode" was an... interesting approach as well.  @ids1024 @dosnostalgic If you want to see where the Windows NT design arose, look no further than the DEC MICA operating system: > The approach Apple used for migrations with Rosetta and Rosetta 2 was far smoother. NT had (16-bit) x86 emulation on non-x86 Windows version from the beginning (then DEC made 32-bit x86 support for NT Alpha). Nowadays ARM64 Windows runs both x86 and x64 programs.  @dosnostalgic Ah, fond childhood memories :) Looking back now, it's so awkward how you needed to pick 1 of 3 radio button questions and then confirm with "yes". Or pick something and decline with "no", which makes the picking useless. Great times  @dosnostalgic @dosnostalgic I had a machine in the office with a PCM/CIA Flash card programmer in it. Needed to be in DOS mode for the programmer software to work, and needed to be in W95 in order to transfer the data on the network. We just put up with stuff like that back then. @dosnostalgic You would have loved the old Windows NT bootloader which let you boot multiple different versions of the OS out of different subdirectories. (e.g. C:\NT3.1, C:\NT35, C:\NTbeta, etc) |
@dosnostalgic Back to normal mode! That weird GUI stuff will never catch on 🤣