Gives me PTSD-like flashbacks to the time when I was tasked with installing Windows 95 on 50+ computers on the local school.
For the young(er), Windows was on 14-ish 3.5" floppy disks, and I had to do some heavy calculation and logistics copying those discs while installing the OS to make my effort as efficient as possible.
IIRC, I managed to keep the installing cyclus going on 28 computers at a time, and finished the whole task during a very long Saturday and Sunday.
Back in those days re-formatting and re-installing Windows was a very common thing because usually the system would get into some kind of bad state after several months of usage (or at least mine did).
I believe I only had a Windows 98 'Upgrade' CD, which could not be used to install on a bare system. This meant I had to first install a previous copy Windows, which in my case was Windows 95 on floppy disks (and I feel like it was 20 disks, at least for my installation).
This worked fine until one re-install disk 15 decided to fail on me. I managed to hack it back together by copying the files that were still accessible to a different computer and then copying them to a blank floppy together with the missing files from the running system's Windows folder (I think it was a couple of dlls that were unreadable). I was surprised that it worked.
Windows 95/98 definitely decayed over time. Especially after installing stuff like AOL and RealPlayer, your system was like a disgusting cesspool of random trash. I distinctly remember nuking the entire thing would noticeably increase my frame rate in stuff like Homeworld lol
I stopped doing it around Windows 7 and have not really seen an issue. I have Windows 10 installations that date back to the original Windows 10 release (and have been updated with Windows Update all the way up to the current) and they are running perfectly fine.
That being said, I feel like I install much less software than I used to. They used to hand out CDs with computer magazines that were basically dumps of random quality freeware/shareware. The amount of registry items and other such crap that kind of software left lying around is probably a large reason why a re-format was required so often.
That being said, I think many people underestimated increased processing power over ages.
1gb of ram on win 7 equals 4 times of 256 mb win 98 era. With 8gb it's 32 times larger. That's just ram though, not to mention processing power between pentium 3-4 with multicore i series.
The difference in ram caching and cpu processing is big that some additional process won't give much problem.
I would say vista. Many programs would go out of their way to mess with the windows\system32 folder. MS locked most of that out. WinSxS fixed many of the issues where you needed to play around in system32. They also added in a huge chunk of 'compatibility' they would ship in the registry of programs they know are messed up with particular combinations of dlls. The downside of winsxs is cleanup. It was not until late in the lifecycle of win7 they added some way to purge old junk out of it.
Reinstalling Windows XP SP 2 on my computer growing up was one of the first things that got interested in what was going on at the operating system level. I found Windows XP Inside Out around the house, read it over so many times, and eventually re-installed it on my computer for fun.
I was floored to realize how much faster things were. No wait time for a Windows Explorer window to open. Everything was snappy, even after reinstalling games and antivirus. It blew my mind.
I still think it helps, but with a much longer tail on the frequency required. Windows XP definitely grew slow over time though, whether that was due to installing programs, caches I could’ve cleared with CClearner, or more incremental updating. We leave a lot on the OS over time.
I had the same experience with Windows XP growing up. Very few months I would reinstall my desktop computer that ran WinXP, and I did the same with the laptop I had after that which was also running WinXP. During that time I used to install a lot of random freeware and shareware and trial software and games and game demos. And probably those things were leaving stuff behind like you guys said.
The very first time I reinstalled WinXP was shortly after I got my first computer of my own for my 12th birthday. I was tinkering with some of the files, and discovered that I could open .cur cursor files in MS Paint. I edited one of the cursor files, saved it as a bmp and renamed the file to .cur under the assumption that this would work. Set my custom cur file as cursor and logged out. When I tried to log back in I couldn’t. Whoops. Freaked out for a second thinking I had broken everything. Remembered that there was a red floppy disk with an ambulance on it that came with the computer. Rebooted the machine with the red floppy disk and reinstalled Windows. Lost my files but had nothing valuable at the time anyways. Have lost more valuable data since then. And expect to lose more data in the future still :p
My most painful data loss was when I tried a Windows "alternative" called "Lindows" [0]. Touted as "Linux, but easy like Windows!."
So I put the disk in, and it says something like "Do you want to install Lindows?" with no options, no warnings or anything. So I hit Yes/Okay/whatever the single button on the screen was, and without zero warning, it proceeded to wipe my entire hard drive.
Every once in a while since I switched back to windows a couple years ago I’m tempted to fresh install… then I remember my machine still runs perfectly fast
many things like low level gaming api wouldn't work, and FYI we talk about ages when virtualization was at its infancy at best (Windows 95 era there was none that I am aware of for consumer PCs, XP era still super basic, quirky and resource hungry)
People running VMs aren't trying to play games on them though, are they? Seems like the best reason for VMs and refreshing back to start each time is perfect for freedom fighters and others web surfers that don't want their host system polluted by bullshit developer's and their internet games.
I have to think that at least with modern phone OSes, apps are so compartmentalized, that there really isn’t an opportunity to pollute your entire phone.
But feel free to look at all the extensions and bullshit you have in your browsers and bash shell
If you moved the same installation between different motherboards, the decay happened alarmingly fast. After 2 or 3, you're lucky if it doesn't bluescreen every hour or two.
This is why I would create a c:\wininst folder and dump the CD worth of files. When I needed to do an OS reinstall, I'd boot to DOS mode, cd \wininst, and do the install from hard drive to hard drive. Much MUCH faster and much MUCH less painful.
Having the CD dump on the hard drive was a must in the Windows 9x days because every time you would want to add a device, a network protocol or whatever it would ask you to insert the CD. I rarely ever installed from the actual CD directly but always copied it to the hard drive first. Obviously there there were exceptions because some computers just had too little of HDD space so you had to save it for your user files and the apps to be installed (this also is the case with 120 GB MacBooks nowadays - I can't afford a Windows VM on it).
I don't think there any modern tech modern that can induce the stomach-turning horror of hearing hearing the pitiful, repetitive grinding of the floppy drive motor that presaged a "Cyclic Redundancy Check error"
it comes close, but it's not as visceral to me. I guess it doesn't happen often to me, and considering how cheap storage has become, I can always download what was on the HDD or recover from backups. The data I had on floppy disks were more often than not, the only copy I had access to.
I once had a CD shatter inside the drive, followed by sounding like a cross between an angle grinder against metal and a blender full of rocks. It was hideous.
I wonder if you could build a modern-ish browser on Windows 98 and use it as a minimalist daily driver? Give me a modern browser, bash shell (perhaps an old version of cygwin?), and a decent text editor and I probably could for the most part. I'd have to really get in the '90s spirit and break out the cassette deck though because running an obese Electron app like Tidal would probably be difficult.
I guess you're limited to 3.5 GB of memory too what with Windows 98 being a 32-bit operating system which might be a pain, and perhaps a bigger problem is that no drivers have been written for a couple of decades.
I’m only seeing one sealed Windows 95 floppy retail box on eBay at the moment, and even though it’s sealed it looks to be in poor condition. Plus I am skeptical that it’s even the original sealing. Could have been resealed. And they want about $200 for it plus shipping.
One time I wanted to tweak my graphics on Windows 3.1. Normal VGA with 640x480 was no problem to configure since it could use some kind of generic drivers. So eventually I choose one of the SVGA modes with 800x600 and after restarting the screen was just dark. Luckily I managed to undo the settings with the keyboard and a blank screen. IIRC the settings for that were quite exposed and it worked. However, countless times where I lost my system setup.
> usually the system would get into some kind of bad state after several months of usage (or at least mine did)
Sometimes some part of the bad state would go okay again for me after some more months of waiting. E.g. the system would only go past the Windows 95 loading screen after opening and closing the CD-ROM drive but at some point that problem would disappear.
I remember the same eventual "system got into broken state" issue on a laptop with XP. After reinstalling everything the third time (including wireless network drivers from a USB drive and at least a billion service packs shudder) I figured out how to take a disk image with a linux live-cd and save a clean iso of a fresh install with updates and my preferred programs pre-installed onto a separate partition where I also carefully mapped all my user data directories. If windows started being screwy I'd pop in the LiveCD, run some commands to format the OS partition and reimage it from the iso on the data partition, and after applying a couple of patches I'd be up and running again. I think I got the whole process down to like 30 minutes at one point.
After several months of use? One summer around that time I used to remember my w95 serial key by heart :) It was not only that windows would eventually get in some kind of bad state, it was also me: a young kid learning on his sole computing capable device (ie no spare laptop/smartphone) with no internet connection to search google/youtube/so/etc for solutions to problems
> Back in those days re-formatting and re-installing Windows was a very common thing because usually the system would get into some kind of bad state after several months of usage (or at least mine did).
I actually still do that with Windows 10, about once a year I start over. I have a chocolatey command to re-install 90% of my software.
>I believe I only had a Windows 98 'Upgrade' CD, which could not be used to install on a bare system.
As I recall it, there was actually a minimal set of files needed to trigger the CD to install and you didn't actually need a full 95 install. I worked at a shop at the time and remember doing a lot of reinstalls from those upgrade disks and we definitely didn't spend the time to reinstall both OSs.
I tried searching and the closest I could find was that win95 upgrade would do a full install if you told it to find the old win3.1 on the win3.1 install floppy. I vaguely remember doing something similar, so either it was those versions (unlikely, but possible) or later versions had the same trick.
We definitely did a lot of full windows installs from the upgrade disks without installing the full previous OS first.
22 floppies if I remember correctly. I was in charge of our high school lab, and the floppies were old. No 14 was prone to the dreaded: retry, abort, ignore dialog box
I babied mine extremely hard, and didn't re-install for some years. But then I needed to and I could no longer install my sound card drivers (at which point I was forced to migrate to XP)
I learned computers because in 1996 I was completely ignorant and a little kid who decided to drag everything into the recycle bin because I thought it would be 'recycled' back into place but really it just destroyed windows enough that I had to learn how to reinstall from floppies created in DOS
I like how old OSes let you place anything in the recycle bin, or remove system files without permission (because the concept barely existed).
Simplicity at the extreme. I miss those times where hacking and learning was as easy as breaking things and repairing them. But I think this also was a source of fear against computers for most people : if I click on the wrong place, it will break and cost money.
Nowadays systems are nearly unbreakable, and that’s cool, but o boy when they break, good luck finding why.
The concept of permissions existed far before Win95 launch. At least on Unix and WinNT. As a Unix and WinNT seller, Microsoft knows it perfectly. It was also not possible on Macos to through system files in the trash bin.
Hahahaha.. same thing I did. I didn't realise there is a thing called hidden files.. I went to a folder in system32 and it seemed empty to me.. I was like let's delete it.. I deleted some 10-20 folders like these and when I try to restart the OS.. it wouldn't load.
Microsoft historically used the 21 512 byte sector, 80 track, double-sided DMF format for 3 1/2" Windows installation media, yielding 1,720,320 bytes per floppy.
Assuming this format, floppy requirements for the four Windows 10 21H1 variants currently on MSDN are
x64 Consumer (Home/Pro): 3,398 floppies
x64 Business (Enterprise/Education): 3,323 floppies
x86 Consumer: 2,416 floppies
x86 Business: 2,361 floppies
Assuming the "1.44 MB" (18 512 byte sector, 80 track, double-sided) format, you'd need
x64 Consumer: 3,965 floppies
x64 Business: 3,876 floppies
x86 Consumer: 2,819 floppies
x86 Business: 2,755 floppies
In this case, assuming the most popular (x64) platform, you'd actually need closer to 4,000 floppies.
Assuming ideal 500 kbit/sec performance and two seconds per disk swap, reading 4,000 "1.44 MB" floppies (or DMF floppies with equivalent data) would take just under 28 1/2 hours.
So you could easily install any Windows 10 21H1 version from floppies in the course of a single work week, with enough time left over, perhaps, to check Windows Update over a 56 kbps modem (though you'd probably need the weekend, at least, to actually download the updates).
I just want to quietly grumble, like an appropriately crotchety old man... '3.5" floppies? Bah! Try 8", and they were really floppy! Try installing AT&T Unix from those...'
I still feel that OS/2 Warp feels more valuable in ones hands, just because of the sheer weight of it… (compared to modern OSes that have no weight because I download them…)
The research org where I was interning bought OS/2 1.2 for a project and I loved it. When 2.0 came out I called the local IBM site (this was in Stuttgart Germany) and they told me "we have a new beta program, just bring 20 3.5" floppies and you can copy it, no questions asked". I went there, did the deed and the guy told me. You want the SDK and C compiler as well? Come back with 20 more floppies. You can bet I was back the next day.
In middle school I was taught that 5.25" diskettes were "floppies", and 3.5" diskettes were "hard disks", because of the hard plastic case. It was awesome.
It's been so long since I've seen the word "diskette" that upon seeing it, I just had a crazy a-ha moment: could it be that the convention of "disk=magnetic, disc=optical" is based on the fact that they were all originally discs but the c was changed to k for magnetic media in order to facilitate the spelling of diskette (since discette with a c doesn't really work)? Or put another way, disk is just an abbreviated version of diskette which is a small disc, and therefore a tiny optical disc might also be rightfully called a disk?
I prefer your explanation, but I suspect it's also a chain of events from "Edison Disc Record" to "Compact Disc". The link is "Audio", absent from both product names.
Maybe it will just be called an "audio" someday! "Hey, I have an audio of that new band Named!" Hooray, it works in a sentence. Sold.
The CMX video editor I learned to edit on used these. By the time I was learning on it in '92, it was already an old system but still the top system. All it held was text based EDLs, so it didn't need a lot of space. Once the smaller hub based tapes like 30min BCSP/Digibeta were available, the floppy holding the EDL was bigger than the tape holding the image data. I kinda miss the old tape based edit rooms.
I do not recall greasing HDDs (the 70's Control Data drives, the ones that looked like top loading washing mashing inserts, yes you had to lube those), but the Seagate 40MB HDDs (to me the first real consumer HDD) had a bearing lubricant problem, where it would get too thin over time and mess up timing.
The solution was to put it in the fridge for a few minutes, read as much as possible off before the lube got thin again.
The tribal knowledge why we put very specific HDDs in the fridge got lost, but people still stick failing HDDs into fridges... go figure.
Fond memories of installing Slackware from floppies for me. Sure, USB dongles are better, and floppy disks corrupted if you looked at them funny, but inside of those floppies was magic for 15 year old me :)
E: back when we had 28k and 56k dial up modems (think 2-6KB per second) the computer was more of its own universe. I learned Linux through info and man and internet resources for bigger concepts. O’Reilly books were great back then. I learned so much that is still with me today because it’s what I had available and it was still and expansive universe. How small and limiting it would feel by today’s standards.
I was thinking about how we did things back then, and Norton Ghost came up - allowing you to create and restore system images, for either easy recovery or installation. But it was only made in 1995 and only bought and distributed by Norton in 1998, so a bit later than the Windows 95 era.
Still, a godsend for multi installs and undoing the abuse from the youth.
Actually installing Windows 95 on every machine was never really necessary. You could just install it once, configure it and clone the hard drive. Even actual cloning was not necessary - you could just copy the hard drive contents with a reasonable file manager like Total Commander (which was called Windows Commander those days).
Good luck convincing the nervous principal of a semi-rural Texas high school in 1997 that he should let some teenage girl go at his expensive computer labs with a screwdriver…
$6.50/hr rotating diskettes around computer rooms >>> $4.35/hr sweeping hair and cleaning toilets at a beauty shop
Our copy of Windows 95 was on a CD, but it still needed a floppy boot disk (I don't think CD booting was a thing for another few years). I hated using floppy disks and hated booted from them the most. I always had the feeling it just wasn't going to work and now I had no way to boot my computer at all.
Yeah, I needed to do that even with XP because I had an early SATA computer.
Later I learnt you could customise the Windows CD, burn it yourself and include service packs, drivers etc. on it. That saved a lot of time (because back then, reinstalling every few months was a thing).
Off topic but it's funny to me how seemingly everyone in this writes "floppy disk" correctly with a "k" but writes "discs" (when still talking about the floppy disks) incorrectly with a "c". Must be a habit when not adding floppy in front!
It is funny. I looked it up and apparently the spelling of the general work "disc" (meaning, thin circular thing) is disc in British and disk in American. But universally it's disk for floppy disks and hard disks and disc for compact discs, DVDs etc. My theory is "disc" looks a bit more "modern" for some reason, hence using it for the newer media. For me (a British speaker), it seems totally natural to use "disk" for floppies and hard disks, but disc otherwise.
I remember those floppies... The 8th disk was kinda finicky on older hardware. I think that's where the installer actually tried to switch from DOS to Windows mode. If it failed for whatever reason, you had to start again from the 1st disk.
Funny.. my least favorite part of floppy installs of Debian is that it had exactly the opposite problem: reading floppies was hit-or-miss until _after_ disk 2 or 3.
The weather might help, as well as the phase of the moon.
But you could be a little more scientific and try different parameters once you went back to disk 1. Maybe also remove some of the more questionable drivers or memory-saving tweaks from your DOS configuration while you were at it. Or perhaps it was just a flaky floppy drive that randomly flipped a bit somewhere.
I had the install disks copied to a Novell server and then xcopied them to c:\install\win95\ and then ran setup in that directory. It went faster than swapping floppies.
The CD version would have saved you a bunch of time, too. It was also fun to have the CD around even after the installs because it had a couple of bonuses (given all the extra space it had) like the "classic" videogame Hover! [1] and the music video of Weezer's Buddy Holly.
I give a little prayer to people like you when I add a few more numbers to my “matrix” field in GitHub actions and spin up 4 more machines in parallel.
I still remember the excitement when the second grade me copied _all_ applications from my school computer and they fitted in a single floppy disk and the frustration when I couldn't launch any of them on my home computer. It took me a week to realize that what I copied were desktop shortcuts and that's different from the software.
My school got students to do the work of maintaining these computers! But they bribed us with our own room in the library with a handful of computers with admin access, so we could play games. And we had Norton Ghost, so re-imaging was a breeze.
Been there, 60+ computers in a call center over a weekend. Computers were PS/2 model 95s originally running OS/2 in Spanish, needed network card installs, windows 95 (in English), new US keyboards and a Netware client stack.
I had a Backpack parallel printer port hard drive back then. I could boot my DOS floppy with the driver, and have full access to 300 megabytes of stuff. It made installing stuff so much easier.
Gives me PTSD-like flashbacks to the time when I was tasked with installing Windows 95 on 50+ computers on the local school.
For the young(er), Windows was on 14-ish 3.5" floppy disks, and I had to do some heavy calculation and logistics copying those discs while installing the OS to make my effort as efficient as possible.
IIRC, I managed to keep the installing cyclus going on 28 computers at a time, and finished the whole task during a very long Saturday and Sunday.