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Why did the Windows 95 setup use Windows 3.1?

Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen has responded to suggestions that the Windows 95 setup was overly complicated. People wanted to know: Why not just do that whole thing in MS-DOS? Chen's response came after his November explanation of how the Windows 95 setup was three applications that would eventually lead to the Start …

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Monday 17th February 2025 18:00 GMT Ball boy

Makes sense

Why re-invent the wheel? Far more economical - in time and resources - for them to have used the shell of what's already out there.

Of course, these days, using the Windows Preinstallation Environment means it's that much easier to shoehorn in some adverts and kick off the data-grab nice and early. Y'know, start as you mean to go on and all that ;-)

59 5 Reply
1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 08:52 GMT Danny 14
  
  Re: Makes sense
  
  I dont see any adverts on our PE. The datagrab is exactly why I use PE, so I can get donated machines initially onto our Autopilot in the correct groups.
  
  4 1 Reply
2. Tuesday 18th February 2025 09:45 GMT Phydeux
  
  Re: Makes sense
  
  They have to pay all the engineers who add so many new features and fixes into every version of Windows you bought for the low, low price of $99.99. And if you've been upgrading for free since Windows 7, that means you got the next 4 versions for free.
  
  But yeah, continue griping because you have to spend less than 10 minutes to turn off the ads. The world ain't free, and those engineers and programmers deserve to be paid.
  
  3 38 Reply
  1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 11:42 GMT Wade Burchette
    
    Re: Makes sense
    
    I would rather pay for my next version of Windows than to have ads, telemetry, and AI shoved down my throat.
    
    49 0 Reply
    1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 20:01 GMT H H
      
      Re: Makes sense
      
      That's not how it works. You pay AND get ads, telemetry and AI shoved down your throat.
      
      28 0 Reply
3. Wednesday 19th February 2025 09:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Re: Makes sense
  
  Last time I looked WinPE was a tiny command-line somewhat akin to MS-DOS. No adverts or data grab.
  
  1 1 Reply
4. Thursday 20th February 2025 12:47 GMT Manolo
  
  Re: Makes sense
  
  I thought PE stood for Pestilence Edition.
  
  1 0 Reply
  1. Tuesday 11th March 2025 14:33 GMT VicMortimer
    
    Re: Makes sense
    
    That's ALL versions of Windoze.
    
    0 0 Reply
Monday 17th February 2025 18:10 GMT ArguablyShrugs

Huh? People kept asking those questions EVEN after their last post from Nov 24?!?

It explained it all already…

…and it was a perfectly cromulent explanation.

Including the bits about starting a DOS graphical installer from within win 3.1 if one upgraded in place - even if usually not a good idea with windows way back then, but hey :-)

24 1 Reply
Monday 17th February 2025 18:45 GMT billdehaan

Marketing

Windows 95 was competing with OS/2 at the time.

OS/2's claim to fame was that it was a new operating system, unlike Windows, which was just a graphic user interface that sat on top of DOS.\

Microsoft countered that Windows 95 was a standalone operating system that, unlike Windows 3.1, did not require DOS to run.

The fact was that Windows 95 did did run on top of a DOS boot loader and kernel. However, unlike Windows 3.1, it was not sold separately from DOS. Windows 95 was sold as a packaged that included the DOS boot loader and the GUI.

So while at a technical level, Windows 95 required a DOS kernel to boot, at a marketing level, it was an integrated package, so MS could claim that it did not require DOS to run, since users did not need to buy it separately.

After going through those conniptions to convince the world that Windows 95 was not just a "clown suit for DOS" (as the joke went), having it boot to DOS to install would contradict the messaging. So, it used WIndows 3.1 instead.

35 7 Reply
1. Monday 17th February 2025 19:02 GMT kmorwath
  
  Re: Marketing
  
  At least it didn't require several floppies to boot the installer, as you had to do with OS/2 Warp, even if it came on a CD...
  
  0 15 Reply
  1. This post has been deleted by its author
    1. Monday 17th February 2025 20:58 GMT Sandtitz
      
      Re: Marketing
      
      "Windows NT 4.0 (released a year after Win95 and far superior in every respect) needed 4 boot floppies, before it would read from the CD."
      
      Windows NT 4.0 CD was El Torito compatible from the beginning - you can boot from it and install it from there.
      
      If however your BIOS didn't support booting from CD drive, then you needed the boot disks - all three of them. They included the IDE ATAPI driver and few usual Adaptec drivers a well, but if your system had some unorthodox SCSI / sound card / parallel port CDROM interfaces for which the boot disks didn't carry drivers, then yes - you needed a separate driver diskette for that one as well.
      
      31 0 Reply
  2. Monday 17th February 2025 19:43 GMT Charlie Clark
    
    Re: Marketing
    
    I seem to remember being able to boot OS/2 from CD. But that was only after they were using IDE or SCSI connections, until then you were dependent upon hardware-specific drivers and they needed space. Same was true for lots of audio and video devices at the time: Windows 95 was mainly a graphical refresh of Windows 3.11 and, as such, not much of an OS, but it was good enough for many and manufacturers found it useful to have only one OS to program for.
    
    7 9 Reply
    1. Monday 17th February 2025 21:36 GMT that one in the corner
      
      Re: Marketing
      
      > : Windows 95 was mainly a graphical refresh of Windows 3.11 and, as such, not much of an OS,
      
      Well, apart from being a 32-bit pre-emptively scheduled kernel, instead of 16-bit co-operative.
      
      But aside from the graphical refresh, the extra 16 bits for consistent flat memory addressing and the pre-emptive scheduler, what did '95 ever do for us?
      
      51 4 Reply
      1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 06:48 GMT EricB123
        
        Re: Marketing
        
        As a beta tester for Windows 95, it actually did a lot. I had many email "fights" with the top engineers at Microsoft for Windows 95. Most were about the precarious balance between stability and app compatibility.
        
        The Windows 95 parties at the Redmond campus were a blast, BTW.
        
        9 1 Reply
      2. Tuesday 18th February 2025 11:30 GMT Charlie Clark
        
        Re: Marketing
        
        The kernel was still cooperative and crashes were frequent: 32-bit pre-emptive wasn't possible on most of the hardware that was being sold at the time. It wasn't until NT was "slimmed down" and made less pre-emptive and rebadged as NT that consumers got a reasonable OS. But, design decisions in Windows 95 and things like Outlook Express had already opened the door for malware.
        
        4 14 Reply
        
        Tuesday 18th February 2025 13:31 GMT that one in the corner
        
        Re: Marketing
        
        > The kernel was still cooperative...: 32-bit pre-emptive wasn't possible on most of the hardware that was being sold at the time.
        
        The minimum spec for '95 was a 386DX and 4MiB of RAM: if you had '05, it was running 32-bit, pre-emptive. The 386 had been available since 1985 and overtaken the 286 by appoximately 1991; a lot of machines were already using it for Win32s under the current Win 3.11. The 486 had been available (ok, "available") since 1989. By the release of Win'95, both 386 and 486 were available from multiple suppliers: Intel (!), AMD, Cyrix, Texas.
        
        Older 286 boxes were still in use, but the machines that were sold at the time were able to run 32-bit.
        
        > and crashes were frequent
        
        Well, yes; it was 1995, computers crashed. Not helped by the number of software authors who hadn't even been using Win32s to get ahead of the game creating 32-bit exes :-(
        
        > It wasn't until NT was "slimmed down" and made less pre-emptive and rebadged as NT
        
        Um, I presume you meant "rebadged as XP" in which case, yes, you'll be hard pressed to find anyone who didn't find XP more robust than '95 and '98. Although nothing (well, money) was stopping anyone from running NT 3.1 as soon as that was available.
        
        But, "made less pre-emptive"? No idea what that is supposed to mean.
        
        19 2 Reply
        
        Tuesday 18th February 2025 15:38 GMT Charlie Clark
        
        Re: Marketing
        
        It wasn't just the processor (and it's not the number of bits that matter) that was needed for a pre-emptive kernel, it was memory to allow processes to run in isolation. Under the GUI Windows 95/98/ME were still doing a lot of things with DOS, which is why application crashes frequently brought everything down. Of course, it wasn't much different over in Cupertino, though the 68000s meant there was less need for shitty, seat-of-your-pants code.
        
        Yes, I did mean "rebadged as XP".
        
        Windows NT was a curious mix of ideas from OS/2 and VMS, including the HAL and a kind of microkernel. This meant that most software couldn't run in priveleged mode – great for stability and security – but it turned out that context-switching on x86 was unacceptably slow. As a result, and I think it was Windows NT 3.51, networking and printer drivers were allowed back into the kernel and things got faster. We still live with similar trade-offs today with a large number of exploits on mobile phones related to access to hardware.
        
        I remember early NT and, compared with OS/2, it was slow as a dog for everything because you simply couldn't get enough RAM to get it to run well on x86: I heard that performance on the Alpha and even MIPS was a lot better but we know what happened to them… Presentation Manager was prone to crashing, but at the time OS/2, as an OS, was a thing of beauty.
        
        8 0 Reply
        
        Tuesday 18th February 2025 17:11 GMT mirachu
        
        Re: Marketing
        
        Memory isolation? You think pre-emption requires an MMU? You'd be wrong.
        
        3 0 Reply
        
        Tuesday 18th February 2025 19:24 GMT that one in the corner
        
        Re: Marketing
        
        Indeed. You can do pre-emptive scheduling on, say, a simple 6502.[1]
        
        More up to date, FreeRTOS defaults to pre-emptive on all sorts of processors of varying sizes.
        
        [1] have to carefully sculpt your code...
        
        4 0 Reply
        
        Tuesday 18th February 2025 23:34 GMT Herby
        
        Re: Marketing
        
        scheduling on a 6502...
        
        I worked on a system that had 5 threads running Forth on a 6502. Lots of limitations, but it DID work. lots of address space fiddly bits, being that part was in ROM, some was in EEPROM (no flash memory then!), and some was in RAM. While it DID work, I actually didn't like (read despised) the 6502. The CMOS version had a few more instructions, but it was still bad. Other processors of the time I did this (read 6809) were MUCH better.
        
        Long ago in a galaxy far far away!
        
        4 1 Reply
        
        Tuesday 18th February 2025 20:17 GMT that one in the corner
        
        Re: Marketing
        
        > It wasn't just the processor (and it's not the number of bits that matter)
        
        Microsoft only did pre-emptive scheduling once your 386 CPU was in protected-mode, one of whose major features (which *every* programmer was able to take immediate advantage of[1]) was to switch to the flat-memory model and 32-bit addresses. Hence it was referred to as "32-bit mode" or just "32-bit": less clumsy than saying "protected mode" and it made immediate sense. Of course, you also got all the other goodies, including the MMU/Page Tables, v86 mode for your DOS command window...
        
        > it was memory to allow processes to run in isolation.
        
        Win'95 provided virtual memory, just as did Win 3; the base level 4 MiB requirement was tight (they *always* make the minimums tight) if you were running Word and Excel and... all at once, but it handle that by paging to VM - slow, of so very slow, but it carried on.
        
        > which is why application crashes frequently brought everything down
        
        Nah, it was because the programs were not 100% isolated from each other and you could mess with another process's resources. Isolation is a Good Thing, expecially if you are running a multi-user OS, but it is expensive - MS just didn't complete that job in 95 (or 98).
        
        > networking and printer drivers were allowed back into the kernel
        
        The Big Change for the NT kernel was when graphics drivers were run in kernel mode - NT 4.0 - because *every* program uses those, compared to printing or networking. But that is getting away from the joys of 95.
        
        [1] death to "memory models" and continually converting segment:offset addresses into a canonical form (e.g. make sure the segment is the lowest value it can be - no, that isn't a linear address!) before trying to compare them
        
        3 0 Reply
        
        Wednesday 19th February 2025 08:13 GMT Roland6
        
        Re: Marketing
        
        > Um, I presume you meant "rebadged as XP"
        
        The first rebranded release was Windows 2000 (the successor to NT 4.0), which was very stable from the first release; unlike XP where you were best served by avoiding it until SP2 (a complete overhaul).
        
        5 0 Reply
        
        Wednesday 19th February 2025 08:39 GMT Piro
        
        Re: Marketing
        
        I've run 95 on a 386SX with 4MB of RAM. 4 MB is not something you'd ever want to bother with, it's unusable on win95.
        
        4 0 Reply
        
        Tuesday 18th February 2025 16:04 GMT kmorwath
        
        32-bit pre-emptive wasn't possible on most of the hardware that was being sold at the time
        
        The Intel chips can allow pre-emptive multitasking easily since the introduction of the 80286. You don't need a multi-core chip. It just means there is a scheduler in the kernel that controls which process can execute in a given time slot. Once the slot closes, the scheduler saves the process state, checks which process should run next, loads its state, and activates the process. You can even write a pre-emptive scheduler on an 8086 and DOS too - with far less suppport from the CPU - but of course the lack of process protection and resources doesn't make it very useful.
        
        Anyway, by the time Windows 95 came put, 486 were being replaced by Pentiums.
        
        "It wasn't until NT was "slimmed down" - NT wasn't ever "slimmed down" - simply average hardware became powerful enough to run NT. If you had the hardware to run OS/2 properly, it could run NT also.
        
        Actually, it was Apple OS that kept running on cooperative multitasking until they switched to macOS. And not many complained, after all.
        
        8 3 Reply
        
        Wednesday 19th February 2025 08:24 GMT Roland6
        
        Re: 32-bit pre-emptive wasn't possible on most of the hardware that was being sold at the time
        
        The 286 definitely supported 32-bit pre-emptive multitasking however from memory the instruction set was quite heavy and used a relatively large number of the clock cycles at 10Mhz. Speeding the chip up (ie. Treat 386 @ 25Mhz or better as simply faster 286) didn’t reduce the number of clock cycles, it effectively reduced the actual time taken up by the “OS” instructions and left more clock cycles for applications/real work.
        
        0 0 Reply
        
        Tuesday 18th February 2025 17:08 GMT mirachu
        
        Re: Marketing
        
        Pre-emptive multitasking was possible a decade before Windows 95 on consumer grade hardware. AmigaOS did it.
        
        8 0 Reply
        
        Tuesday 18th February 2025 21:57 GMT Nick Ryan
        
        Re: Marketing
        
        ...and we still had to sit there and listen to the nonsense that Windows 95 had pre-emptive multi-tasking - which for most practical purposes it absolutely did not. If an application did not pump the Windows message queue the Operating System, as in the graphical shell and everything dependent on it, hung. That's pretty much the definition of cooperative multi-tasking.
        
        Some drivers and similar level processes could operative in a pre-emptive manner but the graphical shell was purely cooperative and it was only until the Windows NT kernel was renamed Windows 2000 and pretended to be the next version of consumer Windows after Windows ME/98/95 was real multi-tasking in place in the Operating System.
        
        1 2 Reply
        
        Wednesday 19th February 2025 07:45 GMT kmorwath
        
        ". If an application did not pump the Windows message queue"
        
        No, that was OS/2 (until its last version) - which had a single message queue shared by all applications. Windows 95 already had per-application message queues. And that was a Win95 advantage, the single message queue was probably the worst OS/2 design decision.
        
        Even in OS/2, processes still get switched - just you can't interact with them. Of course processes waiting for user input were stuck there.
        
        It looks the "Age of AI" is full of misinformation, and statistical methods unable to identify correct informations among fake ones will only make it worse.
        
        1 6 Reply
        
        Wednesday 19th February 2025 18:49 GMT Nick Ryan
        
        Re: ". If an application did not pump the Windows message queue"
        
        The single point of failure was the GUI shell. This would lock due to a non-responsive application, i.e. one that was not pumping the message queue or not responding to certain messages sent by the GUI shell, and the GUI shell would then promptly lock up,
        
        In consumer OS Windows 2000 and later the GUI shell system would report that an application was "not responding" but not hang the entire Operating System. CPU load would still likely be 100% of course...
        
        1 0 Reply
        
        Friday 21st February 2025 18:52 GMT kmorwath
        
        Re: ". If an application did not pump the Windows message queue"
        
        That can still happen today, since the shell is a Windows application itself. A watchdog can try to restart if - but invoking task manager and killing the shell always spawned a new copy. And applications can still run without the shell - which is how the server version works when the shell is not installed.
        
        0 2 Reply
  3. Wednesday 19th February 2025 11:04 GMT Anonymous Coward
    
    Re: Marketing
    
    @kmorwath
    
    I have a retail copy of os2Warp. I have just looked at it. It needed one and as far as I know, later versions booted from the cd.
    
    0 0 Reply
    1. Friday 21st February 2025 18:49 GMT kmorwath
      
      Re: Marketing
      
      No, they were at least two: https://archive.org/details/os2warp3diskettes
      
      IIRC more if it had to load some drivers. Remember there were two different versions of OS/2 Warp 3 , the "blue" and the "red" one.
      
      0 3 Reply
2. Monday 17th February 2025 21:19 GMT williamyf
  
  Re: Marketing
  
  Following that logic, Novell netware (3.11 and 4.1 in particular) ran atop of DOS, because they needed DOS to boot, and you could exit from them to DOS.
  
  The reality was that Win1.o depended heavily on MS-DOS. Win 2.0 took some of the things DOS did, and started doing those itself in 286 (or 386) protected mode. Win3.x Took even more things away from MS-DOS, ditto for Win95(SE), Win98(SE) and WinMe. So, each iteration sheded more and more of MS-DOS
  
  With the advent of WinXP, MS-DOS was completely exorcised from the consumer OS.
  
  8 3 Reply
  1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 00:18 GMT david 12
    
    Re: Marketing
    
    Technical/Linguistic observation:
    
    Even then, it depends what you mean by "DOS". MSDOS/PCDOS was a shell that ran on a kind of virtual machine -- IBMIO.SYS. OEM DOS 2.x hardware was more or less IBM compatible -- sometimes not hardware compatible at all, other than using an 80xxx CPU. OEMs had to provide the API that DOS ran on top of. It wasn't until 3.x that a version of that hardware compatibility layer was available from MS.
    
    MS provided "DOS", OEM's were responsible for providing IO.SYS and ROM BIOS (if the machine design used something like that). In that sense, no part of Win95 ever ran on top of "DOS" -- it sometimes used 16 bit drivers, which sometimes used IO.SYS -- but the driver layer wasn't "DOS" and IO.sys wasn't "DOS" -- those were just things you got from MS or OEMs to use with "DOS"
    
    (You may return to your normal software naming practice now.)
    
    5 4 Reply
    1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 11:27 GMT Liam Proven
      
      Re: Marketing
      
      > MS provided "DOS", OEM's were responsible for providing IO.SYS
      
      Not really. That is how CP/M worked. I think you're conflating or mixing up CP/M and DOS.
      
      MS, maybe via IBM, provided both IO.SYS and DOS.SYS. (Filenames varied.)
      
      The vendor provided the BIOS, but in ROM. It was part of the hardware.
      
      CP/M had the split you describe: OS vendor provided the DOS bit, hardware vendor provided the BIOS part, as software.
      
      8 0 Reply
  2. Tuesday 18th February 2025 11:24 GMT Liam Proven
    
    Re: Marketing
    
    > Win 2.0 took some of the things DOS did, and started doing those itself in 286 (or 386) protected mode
    
    Not really, no.
    
    > Win3.x Took even more things away from MS-DOS
    
    Kinda sorta ish. Really only anything very significant with Windows for Workgroups 3.11, not before.
    
    > ditto for Win95(SE),
    
    Doubly no.
    
    1. Win95 had a fully pre-emptive OS kernel of its own and didn't really use DOS for anything any more.
    
    2. There was no "Win95 SE".
    
    Your timeline is wrong.
    
    > Win98(SE)
    
    Did not really do anything 95 didn't in this area.
    
    > and WinMe.
    
    Removed the ability to boot to, or exit to, DOS. That's no replacement; it was a simple disablement.
    
    > So, each iteration sheded more and more of MS-DOS
    
    No.
    
    > With the advent of WinXP, MS-DOS was completely exorcised from the consumer OS.
    
    No. XP was nothing new. It was NT 3.1 which did that, a decade earlier. The "consumer OS" thing is marketing BS. Never believe the marketing lizards.
    
    19 1 Reply
    1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 19:41 GMT williamyf
      
      Re: Marketing
      
      Re: Marketing
      
      > Win 2.0 took some of the things DOS did, and started doing those itself in 286 (or 386) protected mode
      
      Not really, no.
      
      > Win3.x Took even more things away from MS-DOS
      
      Kinda sorta ish. Really only anything very significant with Windows for Workgroups 3.11, not before.
      
      ----- PErhaps that's why I said Win 3.X and not 3.0 or 3.1 ...
      
      > ditto for Win95(SE),
      
      Doubly no.
      
      1. Win95 had a fully pre-emptive OS kernel of its own and didn't really use DOS for anything any more.
      
      ----- ¿Then how come I coud use things like MS-DOS NDIS drivers with cards that did not have native Win95 drivers inside Win95? (And when I say I did, I do not mean "one did", I mean "I" did)
      
      2. There was no "Win95 SE".
      
      Your timeline is wrong.
      
      ----Sorry, it was called OSR2, not SE. My bad... But yes, win95 had a second edition, wich brought things like USB (1.x) support. While it mostly came with new machines, world + Dog used a "pirate" OSR2 to re-install their original Win95, because downloading the patches to make OG Win95 do what OSR2 did over dial-up was a PitA
      
      > Win98(SE)
      
      Did not really do anything 95 didn't in this area.
      
      > and WinMe.
      
      Removed the ability to boot to, or exit to, DOS. That's no replacement; it was a simple disablement.
      
      > So, each iteration sheded more and more of MS-DOS
      
      No.
      
      > With the advent of WinXP, MS-DOS was completely exorcised from the consumer OS.
      
      No. XP was nothing new. It was NT 3.1 which did that, a decade earlier. The "consumer OS" thing is marketing BS. Never believe the marketing lizards.
      
      ----- Every reader of "The Reg" knows that XP is nothing new and descends from NT 3.1... But many of the things consumers like to do could not be done on 2000 at launch. many of those related to WinG, DirectX and hardware with VxD drivers only instead of WDM drivers, as well as some weird 16 bit software that needed shims that were not available in 2000. That's why I say DOS was completely exorcised from the consumer line with the advent of WinXP.
      
      0 2 Reply
      1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 20:28 GMT that one in the corner
        
        Re: Marketing
        
        >> Then how come I coud use things like MS-DOS NDIS drivers with cards that did not have native Win95 drivers inside Win95
        
        The Amazing Raymond Chen and his Dancing Windows have the answer: What was the role of MS-DOS in Windows 95?:
        
        > MS-DOS served two purposes in Windows 95.
        
        > * It served as the boot loader.
        
        > * It acted as the 16-bit legacy device driver layer.
        
        > Once in protected mode, the virtual device drivers did their magic. Among other things those drivers did was “suck the brains out of MS-DOS,” transfer all that state to the 32-bit file system manager, and then shut off MS-DOS
        
        (followed by spine-chilling details about INT numbers, and finally the bit we are really interested in)
        
        > In other words, MS-DOS was just an extremely elaborate decoy. Any 16-bit drivers and programs would patch or hook what they thought was the real MS-DOS, but which was in reality just a decoy. If the 32-bit file system manager detected that somebody bought the decoy, it told the decoy to quack.
        
        So you are *both* right (isn't that nice?). MS-DOS wasn't running once 95 had booted, but your 16-bit NDIS driver's code had been sucked into the maw of 95.
        
        2 1 Reply
        
        Friday 21st February 2025 19:26 GMT FIA
        
        Re: Marketing
        
        So you are *both* right (isn't that nice?). MS-DOS wasn't running once 95 had booted, but your 16-bit NDIS driver's code had been sucked into the maw of 95.
        
        Just don't run out of DOS handles, otherwise you can't start any more Windows programs.
        
        Revisionism is great, but Windows (including 95 and onwards) was (an increasingly elaborate) graphical shell that ran 'on top' of DOS. Even if it did then do nasty things to it.
        
        Remember DOS isn't a pre-emptive OS, when a program is running under DOS DOS isn't running itself, it may have routines in memory you can call, but it's not 'running' in the sense that something like the NT kernel is.
        
        However, the Windows 9x line was intertwined with DOS far more than being a bootloader. Much of the 32 bit stuff may never have called into it, but it did _rely_ on it being there. (Raymond references this later in his article when he talks about 'helper functions'... that's basically what DOS was....)
        
        1 0 Reply
    2. Tuesday 18th February 2025 21:23 GMT FIA
      
      Re: Marketing
      
      No. XP was nothing new. It was NT 3.1 which did that, a decade earlier. The "consumer OS" thing is marketing BS. Never believe the marketing lizards.
      
      I'm not sure that's entirely fair. NT certainly wasn't aimed at the mainstream home user. You wouldn't be playing games on it in the 3.1 or 3.5 days, and the hardware to run it was out of the reach of most consumers.
      
      You needed 4MB for Windows 95, vs 12MB for NT 3.5 (and 16MB for NT 4.0), that's an extra $400-$500 in memory... then you need 90MB HD space free, not the 55MB you need for '95... also not cheap.
      
      Also you needed hardware with drivers for NT, in the mid 90s this wasn't a given.
      
      I remember running NT4 in the late 90s because I didn't play many games, but most of my flatmates were still on 98SE as DirectX was important.
      
      1 1 Reply
      1. Wednesday 19th February 2025 10:05 GMT Mage
        
        Re: 4MB for Windows 95, vs 12MB for NT 3.5
        
        In practice Win95 needed 6 to 8M and NT 3.51 could run in 6M RAM. Higher resolution than base VGA true colour also used up more non-graphics memory. When dis shared Mobo RAM and no dedicated video RAM com ein?
        
        Even in WFWG 3.11 you'd have wanted 80 M or more HDD. We had 800 M WFWG 3.11 to edit video. Even for Windows 3.1 (not NT 3.1) a 40 M Byte HDD was really too small.
        
        Certainly the minimum spec of Win95 was much lower than NT 3.51, but we only used Win95 for one of the kids PC and used WFWG with 32 bit disc drivers, 32 bit TCP/IP, Win32s etc till NT 4.0, by which stage the HW was too expensive (our server ran NT 3.5 and then NT 3.51). We then ran NT 4.0 till May 2002 and then moved to XP. XP till early 2016, brief Win7 till Jan 2017 and then Linux Mint. IMO Win7 was a service pack for Vista and should have been free to Vista users.
        
        1 0 Reply
3. Monday 17th February 2025 22:24 GMT BinkyTheMagicPaperclip
  
  Re: Marketing
  
  Whilst that was one of OS/2's marketing points, it really wasn't the major one. Having a more advanced interface, multithreading, a much better file system, the ability to multitask DOS and 16bit Windows programs next to new OS/2 apps without affecting stability was the draw. Plus it was 32 bit.
  
  By the time '95 arrived it was good enough for most people. Long filename support hacked on, FAT32 a couple of revisions later. Multitasking that was better than Windows 3.1. DOS compatibility that was also an improvement. A vastly improved API and interface. We can argue just how much better OS/2 or 9x were, but one thing you also have to give Windows is introducing plug and play - which had some support in OS/2 but frankly was much better implemented in 9x (again you could argue about whether it's better to have present but rather flaky PnP, over largely absent PnP but a stable system it was necessary to configure yourself. It was only with Windows 2000 that PnP stopped being horrific).
  
  OS/2's fate was sealed even before 2.0 was released, but even so it was a great OS at least until 94-95. The release of 95 killed it off (not to mention all the resource wasted on OS/2 PowerPC), and by the time Warp 4 was released in 1996 it was very clear it was at the end of the road. Windows NT 4.0 was released that year, featuring the 95 interface and a load of new features. Whilst its lack of USB support and later versions of DirectX would really start to bite in the late 90s, a lot of the OS/2 vendors started developing NT releases of their software, and the userbase switched mostly to that, with a few Unix transfers.
  
  7 1 Reply
  1. Monday 17th February 2025 22:35 GMT billdehaan
    
    Re: Marketing
    
    Whilst that was one of OS/2's marketing points, it really wasn't the major one.
    
    It depends on where you were. I was working at IBM at the time on an OS/2 1.x product (part of AD/Cycle, if you remember that), and at all the trade shows, the IBM presenters pushed the "you don't need DOS" and "it doesn't sit on top of DOS" lines constantly.
    
    OS/2 was 90% of the way there to being better than Windows for a huge number of users. What was really annoying was that instead of putting in the effort to address that 10% (the SIQ in particular), IBM just blamed the press, the retailers, and the end users for not appreciating the fact that it was better. They finally fixed the SIQ in Merlin in 1996, four years later, but if they'd done that, and addressed a number of other issues with the WPS in 1992, it would have lasted a lot longer.
    
    OS/2's biggest problem wasn't competition from Microsoft, it was (mis)management within IBM. Some of the internal communications I saw were just jaw dropping in their delusions.
    
    19 0 Reply
    1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 05:09 GMT jake
      
      Re: Marketing
      
      "it would have lasted a lot longer."
      
      How long do you want? It is still available, if you know where to look. Latest update released yesterday (Feb 16th, 2025).
      
      https://www.arcanoae.com/arcaos/
      
      6 0 Reply
    2. Tuesday 18th February 2025 08:35 GMT Ilgaz
      
      Re: Marketing
      
      I keep reading comments from developers saying they were really interested but the absurd price of SDK and compiler prevented them. It isn't like a developer will pirate IBM software.
      
      I used OS/2 V3 with IBM global network. Funny that looking back, I really didn't need Windows but the horrible negative press must have effected me.
      
      2 0 Reply
    3. Tuesday 18th February 2025 08:41 GMT kmorwath
      
      Re: Marketing
      
      IBM too didn't understand people use applications, not operating systems. When users started really to move from DOS/Win16 to Win32 applications, OS/2 fate was sealed, because it couldn't run them, and IBM did very little to have good native applications on OS/2. It did buy Lotus, and spent more time to deliver Windows applications than OS/2 ones. Since MS Office had already won over Lotus SmarSuite on Windows, it was a very stupid move. It couldn't take market share from Windows, and OS/2 didn't have a native Office suite but StarOffice.
      
      RAD tools like Visual Basic and Delphi were allowing to develop Windows applications quickly. Delphi switched to Win32 with version 2.0, and it couldn't be run, nor its appplications, on OS/2. A lot of business application back then (pre-web era) were written with those tools, replacing mainframe terminals and DOS ones, and OS/2 could not run them - Windows 95, however it booted, and whatever code it run in a given moment, could - on cheaper hardware. And they also replaced a lot of applications built with Lotus Notes, killing it as well. Even as a server OS, available applications were moslty IBM ones.
      
      All OS/2 better features were useless if you did not have the applications able to use them. Since Win32 applications had many advantages over Win16 ones, the switch happened farily quickly, faster than the Win32-Win64 one. Microsoft needed a platform able to run 32 bit applications, and Win95 delivered it, even if required many kludges from setup to daily opeartions. But Linux users should appreciate kludges, Linux itself is a huge kludge - since it inherently lacks a coherent design. And any attempt to remove some kludges is frowned upon.
      
      This is true for Linux as well, and Linux is still worse than OS/2, as a desktop operating system. And this is also a warning from Nadella's Microsoft - keep on killing Windows applications because "cloud", and Windows becomes useless.
      
      6 11 Reply
      1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 10:59 GMT BinkyTheMagicPaperclip
        
        Re: Marketing
        
        The TLDR response is that OS/2 had a number of decent, technically able applications but with the best will in the world the win32 market was orders of magnitude larger, win9x was 'good enough' for many users and NT usable for others. Games started to move to Windows and by 1997 that battle had been won.
        
        You're absolutely correct that people use applications not operating systems. The problem as I see it, at least at the consumer end is that OS/2 had its own culture of entitlement. The users expected programs with equivalent functionality for a Windows application, technically superior to a Windows application, adapted to OS/2, for a similar price to a Windows application. That is simply not going to fly for a minority platform - they don't have the economies of scale.
        
        The way to win with a minority OS is to pay a little more for less but higher quality functionality than the market leader. That's a big ask for a lot of people who still have difficulty understanding that the best way to get a printer that works is to pay more, not buy a thirty quid pile of crap with extortionate ink prices from the supermarket.
        
        In the crucial period between 93-96 OS/2 had :
        
        Lotus AmiPro. It wasn't very good - had a lot of horrific bugs. By the time WordPro made its way to OS/2 it was using the win32 compatibility libraries, and the operating system wars had already been lost
        
        Star Office. Not actually a sizable competitor at the time.
        
        IBM Works (bundled with Warp 3). Actually reasonably good, if a little buggy.
        
        Describe - technically brilliant word processor/low end DTP package. Lovely printer output. Sadly it had no word counter (you had to program one in REXX. It was a frequent complaint, but was never added), and for long documents it was frankly a complete chore to use.
        
        Mesa/2 - stunning spreadsheet. Far better than Excel for a number of purposes at the time. I was still using it in the 00s because Excel was limited to something like 32K rows, and Mesa had no problem with manipulating a million plus.
        
        various other older or minority office apps
        
        There were a number of VB like development tools for OS/2
        
        OS/2 did have a reasonable amount of free software, but sadly a notable proportion of the userbase had a Windows mentality where they thought software should be provided to them without effort.
        
        It was far too easy to run win16 applications under OS/2 without supporting OS/2. My shame is that whilst I spent a considerable amount of money on OS/2 applications, when I wrote my university dissertation, I used : AmiPro under WinOS/2. Describe was simply too much of a pain for long documents, and additionally AmiPro was available on university computers whereas OS/2 wasn't installed anywhere.
        
        3 0 Reply
        
        Tuesday 18th February 2025 15:45 GMT TheFifth
        
        Re: Marketing
        
        I used OS/2 3 on my 486DX33 for a little while. The computer came with Win 3.1 but I acquired an OS/2 disk from a friend, so gave it a try. I liked it and with it's ability to run 16 bit Windows apps, I could do everything I needed to in a far more stable way than Windows 3.1 ever could.
        
        But as you say, "people use applications not operating systems".
        
        By the time I started university in late 95, I had switched to Windows 95. All the computers at uni ran either Win 3.1 or 95, with most on 95, so if I wanted to use the same apps on my machine I'd have to use 95.
        
        It was a fun few months messing with OS/2 but ultimately I had to use what the uni was using if I wanted an easy life.
        
        A couple of years later I did install Warp 4 during a uni holiday, just for a bit of fun. It was given away for free on a magazine cover disk, which I guess was IBM's last ditch effort to gain some market share. Again, it was good to use, but there were things I needed that were Windows only, so it was again replaced by Windows.
        
        1 0 Reply
        
        Tuesday 18th February 2025 16:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
        
        Re: Marketing
        
        Back in 1995 I had started working for a large multinational where everyone (within the office environment) had a PC - a mix of Win3.x, Mac and SPARC, depending on your operational needs. I was given a Mac and I hated it! It crashed several times a day and needed various driver tweaks to connect to office printers and other hardware (the OEM versions provided never seemed to have been finished for actual users to use) - and the crashes were not associated with driver tweaks, before anyone suggests, as the crashes happened on Macs without the tweaked drivers as well. My home desktop ran NT4 (then XP when that was released) and rarely stumbled.
        
        The company had ongoing problems of interoperability between the PCs and Macs and, in 1996/7 replaced everyone's PC/Mac with a Win95 machine - desktop for most, although some of us (who needed portability for working at other sites) got laptops. Worldwide, each division bought either IBM or Dell - the UK went with IBM - and I believe the hardware bill was around $200m. I found Win95 worked well for most of the time for me, although I left late 1997 and ended up with an NT4 desktop in my new job.
        
        One thing I recall was playing MS Flight Simulator on the laptop (and once tried setting it up on an actual flight - unsuccessfully as the laptop had to be switched off and stowed for take-off and landing). With that version of MS F/Sim, one of the scenarios you could get if you selected a random one, was over New York, with the Twin Towers right ahead of you. I wondered, post 9/11, whether that had been the original "inspiration" for the attack...
        
        0 0 Reply
        
        Tuesday 18th February 2025 16:24 GMT kmorwath
        
        Re: Marketing
        
        "Lotus AmiPro. It wasn't very good"
        
        I know. I spent a lot of time with Lotus support to try to use it and have bug fixed. They sent me a lot of patches (on a large number of floppies) trying to address them. Eventually, I gave up. Moreover Lotus spent a lot of time on the 16 bit suite and delayed the 32 bit one. Office had a very easy life, while Borland made its best to imitate Lotus with Quattro and dBase/Paradox.
        
        I tried for a long time to build an alternative to Microsoft - OS/2, Lotus, Borland, etc. - but all of them failed.
        
        Describe, Mesa, etc. - little known by most users. They knew Lotus, WordPerfect, Borland, Adobe, Corel... and they were looking for that. There was no Internet then (but for a few anointed), and even BBS were not for everybody. IBM didn't enough to promote the software, and anyway a lot was still missing. Free software too had to come on floppies or CDs - but magazines targeted Windows users.
        
        Moreover, even those who routinely got illegal copies of software (not a few, especially in some countries) had a far easier life to find Windows ones than OS/2 - if they tried. While OS/2 software had a chance of being more expensive too.
        
        Good IDEs were lacking too - sure, some VB copies (and VB was strongly associated with MS), but nothing able to match Delphi. IIRC Borland ported its C++ compiler, and nothing more. dBase like applications (dBase itself, Clipper, FoxPro) were also missing, and that what a lot of people used until RDBMS became usable outside big iron.
        
        "The way to win with a minority OS is to pay a little more for less but higher quality functionality than the market leader"
        
        I'm afraid it doesn't work that way for most users. If they are used to some functionalities, they require them, especially if alternatives do not exist or are cumbersome. "Quality" for them may not mean extremaly stable applications and a faster file system, I'm afraid.
        
        That's what hinder Linux too - its pundits expect people to switch from Windows just because it is "better", even if most desktop applications are well behind their Windows/macOS counterparts. Wishful thinking - user don't care if the Linux scheduler is better or if ZFS is better than NTFS.
        
        4 2 Reply
        
        Tuesday 18th February 2025 21:04 GMT BinkyTheMagicPaperclip
        
        Re: Marketing
        
        So far as HPFS vs FAT<nn> goes, it was certainly objectively better. True by the time 9x came along the long filename advantage had gone, but it *was* much more stable. Still, once you get away from FAT, from an end user point of view there's little to compare HPFS, NTFS, JFS, ZFS or whatever - most of it is angels dancing on a pin territory.
        
        Borland C++ did get ported - the compiler was atrocious. The resource editor was absolutely stunning, light years ahead of IBM's tools, but sadly it also had lots of bugs. There were various Visual REXX products though, and Pascal ones (that I never touched) later on, plus IBM's Visualage moved things on over C/Set++.
        
        Yes, I take the point about looking for well known names - but if you're using an OS that works differently, you should be prepared to use different applications too!
        
        There definitely *was* Internet, remember that in 1994 OS/2 shipped with an Internet dialer and browser included!
        
        Linux wise (well, FreeBSD), I tried to pay money by looking at CLion. Unfortunately it's completely wedded to CMake to the point of unusability. I wanted to be able to integrate with makefiles, so ended up using a free IDE instead, even if it means having to fart around with config files.
        
        0 0 Reply
        
        Wednesday 19th February 2025 08:19 GMT kmorwath
        
        Re: Marketing
        
        I really liked HPFS back then - it was not only stable, but very fast, faster than FAT, at least from my point of view. But again I was a techie and understand it. I remember PC Magazine writing that VisualAge looked designed by a committte. IBM was unable to understand the "PC revolution" it unwillingly brought to the masses thanks to "IBM clones" changed the software used expected. More and more users were able to choose the applications they wanted to use, instead of being forced to use those the IBM sales reps sold to their executives.
        
        "if you're using an OS that works differently, you should be prepared to use different applications too!"
        
        You're right, but if they were not promoted enough, how the users got to know them? I remember asking IBM for a publication about available software. They shipped me a huge catalog - but there were very few "generic" applications, and most of them far inferior to their Windows and Apple counterparts, and not easy to find and buy from my usual resellers. The others were just vertical application for specific sectors.
        
        For large companies could have been easier to get the software - but the success of an OS was no longer dictated by what large companies choose by then. The fact that Win95 installer booted from DOS and then switched to Windows 3 was irrelevant - especially when you got Win95 preinstalled. And since most users usually use few applications at the same time (not rarely, only one), even if the OS scheduler is pre-emptive or not matters little (until the application hangs!), for desktops (not for servers, of course). People using Photoshop on Apple back then didn't notice much they had not a pre-emptive scheduler. But of course they appreciated the font and color management features.
        
        "There definitely *was* Internet, remember that in 1994 OS/2 shipped with an Internet dialer and browser included!"
        
        OS/2 had a browser, and I used it to learn the basics of HTML. But I did not have an Internet connection, because there was no local POP, commercial Internet was still in its infancy. The Web itself was still in its infancy - HTTP/HTML were published in 1990, and Mosaic in 1993. Search engines as well... and even if you had an access, not all companies may have had a web site where to find their products.
        
        "Linux wise"
        
        Well, Linux dialed IT back thirty years. As some article here noticed, there were better, more usable and powerful software thirty years ago. Now people got back used to tools designed for 1970s TTYs and 80x25 character-only monitors. And it's difficult to find a well-rounded software, now that most of them are built on a pile of many external and different tools and libaries, to save on investments, but lacking coherency.
        
        1 2 Reply
  2. Monday 17th February 2025 22:47 GMT tracker1
    
    Re: Marketing
    
    I didn't really start switching away from OS/2 until late in nt4 lifetime and fully with windows 2000. I had a dual boot for games for a few more years though.
    
    Last time I tried OS/2 I couldn't even hardly remember how to use the things.
    
    0 0 Reply
  3. Tuesday 18th February 2025 21:52 GMT Decay
    
    Re: Marketing
    
    Between cost, and application availability it was a lost cause for IBM in the mid nineties. The only real use I saw in real life was running banking backend custom apps and leveraging MQSeries. That actually was pretty nifty and still used in one bank well into the late noughties. But that was tied back to a mainframe and that was always going to be a rock solid, never changing, well built, piece of coding by people who really knew what they were doing.
    
    0 0 Reply
  4. Wednesday 19th February 2025 10:13 GMT Mage
    
    Re: OS/2
    
    The biggest problem for OS/2 was designing for a '286 instead of a decent CPU. Also not doing a '386 version as soon as '386 launched in 1985. I only saw the IBM OS/2 on desktops when we were replacing them with NT4.0 after we showed the customer that their sole OS/2 text mode finance program ran on NT 4.0 (1998) and also MS OS/2 (1989 edition?) as a server with lanmanager in a school with Win3.1 or WFWG 3.1 or 3.11 Research Machine PCs in about 1994.
    
    0 0 Reply
4. Monday 17th February 2025 22:40 GMT Annihilator
  
  Re: Marketing
  
  Debunked several times over, Windows 95 wasn't "a GUI that sat on top of DOS"
  
  https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2024/11/19/chen_windows_95_setup/#c_4968643
  
  5 0 Reply
  1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 22:04 GMT Nick Ryan
    
    Re: Marketing
    
    No, but it was a GUI that required DOS to start. Once started Windows 95 took over but it was unable to launch on its own. It was only when the next version of Windows NT was renamed Windows 2000 and pushed as the successor to Windows 95/95/ME was there a wholly Windows boot process for consumer systems.
    
    0 0 Reply
5. Monday 17th February 2025 22:48 GMT katrinab
  
  Re: Marketing
  
  Linux at the time needed LILO to boot.
  
  Apart from the fact that DOS was maybe a little more capable than LILO and Linux (+GNU+XFree86 etc) far more capable than Windows, was there really any difference?
  
  4 0 Reply
  1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 05:20 GMT jake
    
    Re: Marketing
    
    "Linux at the time needed LILO to boot."
    
    Unless you hacked the MBR to do the same thing, or re-wrote one of the early BSD-on-386 loaders, or wrote your own. None of these options was exactly rocket surgery ... the PC boot process is pretty elementary.
    
    3 0 Reply
6. Tuesday 18th February 2025 01:59 GMT Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch
  
  Re: Marketing
  
  How did it go again? Oh yeah:
  
  A set of 32-bit extensions to a 16-bit shell for an 8-bit OS originally written for a 4-bit microprocessor by a 2-bit company that doesn't care 1 bit about its user base.
  
  22 0 Reply
  1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 22:05 GMT Nick Ryan
    
    Re: Marketing
    
    I thought it was:
    
    "A set of 32-bit extensions to a 16-bit shell for an 8-bit OS originally written for a 4-bit microprocessor by a 2-bit company that doesn't like 1 bit of competition."
    
    4 0 Reply
7. Tuesday 18th February 2025 06:42 GMT EricB123
  
  Re: Marketing
  
  I used to compare Windows 3.x apps to Boeing jets.
  
  I mean, if WinWord crashes, at least nobody dies.
  
  I wonder how many down votes I'll get from this post.
  
  7 2 Reply
  1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 10:49 GMT phuzz
    
    Re: Marketing
    
    Weren't Boeing still ok in those days though? The McDonald-Douglas merger didn't happen until 1997.
    
    13 0 Reply
8. Tuesday 18th February 2025 11:20 GMT Liam Proven
  
  Re: Marketing
  
  > So, it used WIndows 3.1 instead.
  
  I think this argument falls down because Win3 needed DOS anyway.
  
  The Win9x and WinNT setup processes were very clever.
  
  You could boot from the existing hard disk, and then start setup from DOS, or from 16-bit Windows, or from existing Win9x. Whatever, it worked.
  
  Don't have a bootable HD? You could start from removable media. Boot DOS, keep going.
  
  NT? Same. Stage 1 could be run from DOS. It built a minimal skeletal NT system, installed a boot loader, booted into it, used it to run the real Setup, built the real OS, booted into it, then removed the temp copy. Or it could boot that temporary OS from floppies.
  
  I deployed an NT4 network on Netware this way: workstations were old 386s upgraded with highly integrated cheapo motherboards. On board graphics and network. New RAM, new HDD, kept the old floppy drives.
  
  Boot new machine from DOS floppy with Netware client: partition HD, put DOS on a small FAT16 partition, copy the NT install files from the Netware server. Run SETUP.EXE. Install NT, bung the swap file on the DOS C: drive.
  
  Saved 50 or 75 quid per PC for optical drives to be used once and never again -- enough money to pay for 2 more workstations. No need for fancy PITA network booting either.
  
  The client was very happy. For the cost of a couple of new high-end workstations, I deployed literally an entire training room full of a few dozen students' workstations. They didn't know the Netware client was freely downloadable so the fact that they'd lost the media didn't matter.
  
  I ended up putting in my first production Linux server at that site: a Caldera OpenLinux box sharing a big EIDE disk (a few GB) full of installation CD images. Zero additional license fees.
  
  I argued with the OS/2 community that it needed the same: instead of boot media that needed drivers for the installation source, start from DOS.
  
  They didn't get it and mocked the idea.
  
  7 0 Reply
  1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 21:17 GMT BinkyTheMagicPaperclip
    
    Re: Marketing
    
    I don't see the point either. Starting from DOS provides the advantage of getting files on to a disk more easily, and sidestepping issues that exist on the install disks but not on an installed system.
    
    There aren't actually many of those situations, so instead of pushing the problem further down the line, effort would be better spent making the boot work - or perhaps not having to faff with CONFIG.SYS. Also, simply increasing the number and quality of drivers.
    
    Starting from DOS also ties your install to FAT16, limiting the size and reliability of partitions, and necessitating a conversion tool (which never existed) if the user wants to change to HPFS.
    
    The install files could always be sourced locally - so optical media weren't a problem. Alternatively a diskless install could probably be achieved using RPL, but that's probably bit over the top for anything but large scale deployments. After all, it's not until 2.1 for Windows that OS/2 came on CD - before then files had to be loaded from floppy or over a network.
    
    0 0 Reply
Monday 17th February 2025 19:34 GMT navarac

A Mess

These days, installing Windows is a convoluted mess. Out of interest, I did a clean install on a spare Desktop today. It took nearly an hour. Then, of course, you have to de-bloat all the ads and other unnecessary crap out of it before you can think to load programs and actually use it. I then clean installed Linux Mint 21.1 Cinnamon. That took about 20 minutes, including running 2 scripts to run uppdates and download all the software I use. No competition in my book. Never going back to ANY Microsoft products.

31 8 Reply
1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 07:48 GMT Fred Daggy
  
  Re: A Mess then ... still a mess now
  
  One used to do that with every OEM PC you got. Clean it up. Obligatory was some Anti-Virus, "Free for 12 months" or some such. It was often Norton or McAffee - or some wanna-be. Potentially a media player. Microsoft works as well. Then the IBM or later Lenovo connection manage for managing dial-up. Oh, and later a firewall. there were probably others that have been garbage collected away from my memory. Cleaning it up was a good practice, but it was only so good as the uninstallers, which weren't very good. So there were DLLs around that were still loaded by Windows.
  
  The only answer was to do an actual clean install. But, a lot of the time you were SOL as the factory re-install disks did not have a pristine copy of Windows, but rather the same OEM-loaded crap. Back to square one.
  
  Now, you actually can get your hands on the Windows installation media, but you do need to spend the time to ... clean the crap out. Just like in 1995.
  
  (Anyone tried to deploy a single version of Windows lately, but also ensure that local language and region settings are automated? It was working well until about Windows 10 20h2(?) then MS decided to improve them .... and broke years of workflow.)
  
  My take: In 30 years the installation of Windows has not improved one millimeter.
  
  5 2 Reply
  1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 18:17 GMT Yankee Doodle Doofus
    
    Re: A Mess then ... still a mess now
    
    I don't recall how language and region settings are handled, but you may want to check out Microwin, which will produce a debloated Windows ISO that is a huge time saver for getting a clean install with no extra crap and no need to use a Microsoft account.
    
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92SM8Az5QVM
    
    https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
    
    0 0 Reply
2. Tuesday 18th February 2025 08:03 GMT kmorwath
  
  " It took nearly an hour."
  
  Time to ditch you 486SX and US Robotics modem, probably... I really like these Linux worshipper spreading FUD without any evidence.
  
  7 9 Reply
  1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 17:43 GMT mirachu
    
    Re: " It took nearly an hour."
    
    FUD? I switched my 5900X desktop to Win11 about a month ago (in-place upgrade), it took *over two hours* to install things on an NVMe drive, and most of that was just the installer doing its thing. And opening the new Start menu for the first time took *ages*, possibly because I have tons of games installed. It's not like you couldn't populate it during the install. :P
    
    0 0 Reply
    1. Wednesday 19th February 2025 08:36 GMT kmorwath
      
      Re: " It took nearly an hour."
      
      Generalizing what happen on your system (and an in-place upgrade is not a clean install) to the whole world is always a dangerous assertion. I have the experience of installing hundreds of Windows, Linux and BDS machines over the years.
      
      1 2 Reply
  2. Wednesday 19th February 2025 03:12 GMT el_oscuro
    
    Re: " It took nearly an hour."
    
    FUD? I have performed dozens of Linux installs on all sorts of random laptops over the last 20 years and all of them worked right out of the box - about 20 minutes. Linux Mint, Ubuntu, MX Linux. The process is usually the same - booting from the USB stick brings you up to a full usable desktop - without installing anything. You can play around with it, make sure you like it, before clicking on the "install button". 20 minutes later you have a working desktop with a full suite of applications, with everything fully up to date.
    
    1 1 Reply
3. Tuesday 18th February 2025 09:18 GMT Danny 14
  
  Re: A Mess
  
  an hour? I was testing a new laptop last week. this was on a fairly low spec i3 13th gen HP laptop. I was testing it for driver compatibility. I flattened the laptop, installed base 11 (about 6 minutes from a USB stick), then let it Autopilot via intune to install office, Adobe, a few apps (about 20 minutes) - yes I DO run a script to force Intune update from the hidden OOBE shell screen, otherwise I would have had to leave it about 15 minutes to phone home on its own - i was being impatient). I was on the desktop usable in around 40 minutes (update took about 5 minutes with one restart). This would be much faster without the Autopilot segment but certainly not as automated, internet connection is fairly irrelevant as I find Autopilot to be throttled by Microsoft.
  
  This was for one laptop of course. I have another 50 that I will be setting up (automatically as those are registered in Autopilot ready to go).
  
  On the contrary, I installed Ubuntu on an 11gen i7 HP laptop before Christmas, this was being given away. This took around 5 minutes to install. Then another 15 minutes to manually install software (open office and browser), plus certificates, proxy configuration, network configuration etc. I admit that I have no idea how I can script this to work on 50 laptops remotely and securely.
  
  So for 50 laptops, I needed to spend about an hour in Intune setting up my policies and software. The rest is completely automated short of adding an initial WIFI code before the certificate/WIFI policy is enacted by Intune. For Ubuntu I would need to hand feed 50 laptops, at the minimum I would need to run scripts at certain parts. But for Ubuntu I would have no idea how I could do this for a machine that is being delivered to someone's house 200 miles away.
  
  MS might be evil but it works for us.
  
  5 6 Reply
  1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 11:00 GMT phuzz
    
    Re: A Mess
    
    I admit that I have no idea how I can script this to work on 50 laptops remotely and securely.
    
    That's the sort of thing Puppet (or similar tools) works well at. When I first came across Puppet (I started out as a Windows admin) my first thought was "finally someone has invented a Linux version of Group Policy!". They're quite different, but they cover the same "I want all of these machines to have this config and these programs" ground that GP does.
    
    Although I'm yet to find a Linux desktop environment that offers the configurability of Group Policy on Windows (suggestions welcome).
    
    1 0 Reply
  2. Tuesday 18th February 2025 11:38 GMT Liam Proven
    
    Re: A Mess
    
    FOSS desk here. I call BS. Aggressive MS-style advertorial BS.
    
    > then let it Autopilot via intune
    
    So what you are _really_ saying but trying to keep quiet is that you have $20K of corporate enterprise back end to automate what the OS ought to be able to do for itself, and then you installed another $1K or $2K of additional paid proprietary apps on top of this paid OS.
    
    Now, if this were 1 person with 1 machine, we need to do that. So, how long did that auto provisioning tool take you to set up? Be fair: factor that in too. And the pricing. And the cost of the server hardware for the back end.
    
    Sadly for me, I still occasionally have to set up a Windows PC, and I reckon even with the aid of SDIO and Ninite, it takes a minimum of 4 to 6 hours of manual work to get a Windows 11 (or preferably 10) box ready to use.
    
    > another 15 minutes to manually install software (open office and browser)
    
    More partisan BS.
    
    Ubuntu comes with a browser. You don't need to add one and anything you added was probably worse, such as Chrome.
    
    It comes with LibreOffice. If you genuinely added OpenOffice and this wasn't more lies, then you out yourself as dangerously incompetent, because OpenOffice is unmaintained bloat mouldering away on the Apache Foundation's servers, with known security holes unfixed for 5 YEARS or more now.
    
    > plus certificates, proxy configuration, network configuration etc
    
    More BS. I set up Ubuntu and Mint machines for people too and none of that is needed.
    
    If it were, it was a corporate environment, and someone with a clue -- so not someone who'd install OpenOffice -- would have this automated.
    
    To coin a phrase:
    
    "Go away or I shall replace you with a very small shell script."
    
    14 5 Reply
    1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 14:33 GMT Deckard_C
      
      Re: A Mess
      
      Don't call BS on something you don't know anything about.
      
      This will be for a business, so he is probably paying £200 per user per year for Microsoft Business Premium. Which gets him Office, email hosted by Microsoft, Managed Windows Defender and intune including autopilot. Back end is all Microsoft Cloud no additional cost there or hardware.
      
      Yes you do have to learn how to use it like you also have to lean the FOSS methods, that's just being in IT. You're not using this if your not a business and also not if you setting up PCs for friends/family or one offs.
      
      autopilot generally means when you buy a bunch of windows PC from you supplier they are already registered with you Microsoft Business Account, so they can be sent to the user. When they turn it on and connected to the internet the Windows OOBE will branded with you company and asking for a company user login. So they login it Skips all the privacy allow/disallow and sets up windows and installs the applications you have pushed out via intune. Although I would like to know how you can force it to immediately do a windows update.
      
      As a business this is really useful. Also nice being able to deploy software to a laptop for a user who can be in a different office or working from home. The business I work use software that is only supported on Windows, we don't have a choice.
      
      You can hate MS as much as you like but as a Reg Hack just don't spread FUD
      
      Oh yeah I dislike Adobe as well.
      
      3 6 Reply
      1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 16:01 GMT Liam Proven
        
        Re: A Mess
        
        > he is probably paying £200 per user per year for Microsoft Business Premium
        
        "Probably... Business... Premium"
        
        Renaming it does not invalidate my point.
        
        These are _business_ tools which are not accessible to ordinary standalone users. Therefore including them is breaking the terms of the deal. You, and he, don't get to argue "X is easy" when your justification is "if you also use product Y and service Z" which costs a bunch of extra money.
        
        The baseline is the baseline. One standard copy, one standard single user license for that product if it uses a license at all, and one ordinary internet connection, and no special extras.
        
        OP tried to move the baseline, and you're defending him or them. That's bollocks.
        
        8 1 Reply
        
        Tuesday 18th February 2025 17:13 GMT Deckard_C
        
        Re: A Mess
        
        We on "The Register: Enterprise Technology News and Analysis" so I'd thought most of use here would be Business baseline, if I was on Toms Hardware then I wouldn't be talking about intune, as you say that is just for Business. Yes it's one copy, one user then I wouldn't being trying to automate it.
        
        My main objection to your post was the massive over the top cost you was giving, if you just said that's only useful for business then fine.
        
        Installing Windows 10/11 for one device is easy. Yes windows 11 can be a pain with TPM as even when you do have it for home built the bios defaults my not have it enabled so in BIOS that may be disable CSM and enable fTPM for AMD based PC. Off topic There is a MBR2GPT util if you needing to convert disk format to do a in place 10 to 11 upgrade.
        
        Installing software I don't think is hard.
        
        If you want to make it not look like Windows 11 and more like Linux or an old version of Windows 11 I should think that would be a pain, I should imagine making Linux look Windows 11 would be a pain if hadn't found distro which had already done it for you (who would be that mad anyway). Yeah ads, I don't use Edge, Chrome or Windows home edition so I probably don't get it as bad.
        
        I don't really like Windows 11, but support those who do use it so I use it as standard as possible so I'm used to it.
        
        1 0 Reply
    2. Tuesday 18th February 2025 18:06 GMT Yankee Doodle Doofus
      
      Re: A Mess
      
      Liam,
      
      I had to google SDIO, and I assume you are referring to Snappy Driver Installer Origin? I had never heard of this, but I generally find that Windows Update can find the drivers I need in the vast majority of cases. Perhaps I have just been lucky in this regard? Is this SDIO something I should consider adding to my toolkit?
      
      I wasn't familiar with Ninite either, but I have used Chris Titus' Windows Utility, which can quickly perform a bunch of tweaks on Windows itself, as well as install and update software like Ninite apparently does. Even better perhaps is it's ability to take a fresh Windows ISO downloaded from Microsoft, and create a debloated ISO that streamlines the process of getting a clean debloated installation without needing a Microsoft account. It's a huge time saver. Have you had the opportunity to check it out? It is FOSS also, with a bunch of contributors. I'd be curious to hear your opinion on the project. My apologies if you've written about it already. I see most of your articles, but I'm sure I miss some, and my memory is far from perfect.
      
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92SM8Az5QVM
      
      https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
      
      0 0 Reply
    3. Wednesday 19th February 2025 03:24 GMT el_oscuro
      
      Re: A Mess
      
      On all of my Linux desktop installs, the steps required are:
      
      1. Select your WI-FI access point from the list
      
      2. Provide your WI-FI password.
      
      That is it.
      
      I do have to admit that since I have set up a PI-Hole, I do have set the DNS server on the WI-FI network if I want the network to actually use it. Same as Windows.
      
      Question for Windows users: If I set the Windows DNS to the pi-hole, will that block all of the MSFT advertising and spyware? Are there any good block lists for Windows spyware?
      
      1 0 Reply
      1. Wednesday 19th February 2025 10:32 GMT kmorwath
        
        "will that block all of the MSFT advertising and spyware?"
        
        No, it may not. Some are backed deeply into the system and bypass regular DNS resolution. You'd need to block the IPs.
        
        0 2 Reply
    4. Wednesday 19th February 2025 08:30 GMT kmorwath
      
      "it takes a minimum of 4 to 6 hours of manual work to get a Windows"
      
      What do you mean "ready for use"? Installing the OS, or installing all the software you need? Two very different things. I do routinley install different Windows versions in my lab for tests, and none take an hour or more to install. Not even on some slow iDRAC virtual media.
      
      0 2 Reply
  3. Tuesday 18th February 2025 13:33 GMT theOtherJT
    
    Re: A Mess
    
    "I admit that I have no idea how I can script this to work on 50 laptops remotely and securely."
    
    ...and I think that really kinda covers this reply. You don't know how to do this. That's fine, you appear to be a Windows admin, I wouldn't expect you to. I don't know how to use intune because the last time I was a professional Windows admin was in 2011 and it had only existed for a year and the place I worked didn't buy it. It'd be a funny old world if we were all the same and all that, but everything you've described here is actually pretty easy to do on Ubuntu - most of the tools are right there in the installer if you have need of them.
    
    What I will grant you is that this process - like most things FOSS - is so open-ended that it's not always easy to know where to start or find the right documentation. When everything is possible, it's hard to know where best to start doing anything.
    
    3 0 Reply
  4. Tuesday 18th February 2025 17:30 GMT Peter Gathercole
    
    Re: A Mess
    
    If everything is in the main repository, or one that you can add to APT, you can script the install of all of the DEB files using apt-get or one of the other tools.
    
    If I worked at it for a short whle, I could probably also put such a script onto the install media that you install Ubuntu from so that it runs as part of the install (may need either a wired network connection or some research finding out how to populate the Network Manager with WiFi keys though).
    
    You could put the .deb files (plus any requisites) onto the install media as a local repository, and point APT at these local files.
    
    Or alternatively, I could probably come up with a solution to back up the partitions of your ideal model system into a couple of tar files, or even compressed DD images, and boot from a live USB disk with those images on it, partition the hard drive. and populate from the tar or other files (would probably need to do something to differentiate multiple systems installed via this route).
    
    Or even..... Use the Ubuntu Network Installer from Canonical.
    
    Linux as a whole contains all the tools for a 'bake-your-own' image in so many different ways, and that is without you going down the route of a hack-your-own-distro using something like Cubic.
    
    3 0 Reply
  5. Tuesday 18th February 2025 21:33 GMT ExampleOne
    
    Re: A Mess
    
    For Ubuntu I would need to hand feed 50 laptops, at the minimum I would need to run scripts at certain parts. But for Ubuntu I would have no idea how I could do this for a machine that is being delivered to someone's house 200 miles away.
    
    The important bit here I have bolded.
    
    What you are telling us is you know the MS tools, but don’t really know the Linux tools. Allowing for this, I completely agree Windows is the better choice for you.
    
    Other people, with different skill sets, will draw different conclusions.
    
    1 1 Reply
4. Tuesday 18th February 2025 09:48 GMT Carnotaurus
  
  Re: A Mess
  
  I don't know what computer and version of Windows you used, but when I got my newer desktop several months ago, it took about 20 minutes to install Windows 11 from scratch onto an empty SSD (possibly less). And honestly, I have yet to see the supposed ads that some people claim are there. (I suspect FUD.)
  
  The Kubuntu install took about as long, if not a bit more. It is there to tinker with but no serious use planned. Between Power Toys and the software for my Logitech gaming keyboard, I can do things faster on Windows. Can't replicate that on any Linux distro.
  
  6 4 Reply
  1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 14:20 GMT AndrueC
    Re: A Mess
    
    And honestly, I have yet to see the supposed ads that some people claim are there. (I suspect FUD.)
    
    They are very few and far between. I have Home edition on two of my laptops and I occasionally get an 'alert' suggesting that I might be interested in something. At a guess it happens two or three times a year. Now I'm on record as being someone who absolutely loathes and detests advertising but this happens so infrequently and is gone within typically ten seconds that I struggle to give a damn about it.
    
    The things I do give a damn about are:
    
    Every major update offering me various features including Edge requiring me to page (carefully) through a stupid marketing wizard.
    
    After some minor updates I get the Edge welcome page appearing as an additional home page on my browser. Now it only does it once but I still find it deeply offensive and am surprised that MS haven't been taken to task about it.
    
    Other than that Win11 seems like business as usual. I've posted before that I fail to see any difference between W10 and W11.
    
    3 0 Reply
Monday 17th February 2025 20:51 GMT FirstTangoInParis

Oldie but goodie

I recall installing SunOS 4 using exactly the same philosophy. Boot off CD, load mini root into memory, and run that to install to disk. Plus ça change …..

3 0 Reply
1. Monday 17th February 2025 21:48 GMT the spectacularly refined chap
  
  Re: Oldie but goodie
  
  You could boot and install SunOS from a tape drive. On a SCSI controller it had no driver for, on to a disk on that same controller. OpenPROM and Open Firmware were designed from the outset to be extensible. No driver for that device? Well the firmware driver for it is written in Forth, we'll just carry on rolling with that in our own hosted implementation when the main OS goes up, the user can install a native driver later.
  
  Where is the boundary of the operating system exactly, especially since the very same firmware was also the boot manager and kernel loader? The endless debates over when Windows became an operating system (as above) are utterly meaningless when considered against all the other alternatives.
  
  2 0 Reply
  1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 05:32 GMT jake
    
    Re: Oldie but goodie
    
    The early SunOS, being based on BSD it was fairly easy to make your own to suit yourself. You could boot from tape, CD or floppy ... depending on your system ROM, of course. Even changing the ROM wasn't really all that difficult. Personally, I think Sun's biggest sin in the early days was shipping each and every system with the same default root password ... They didn't even suggest changing it in the installation guides! And this for a machine that was designed from the ground up to automagically connect to Stanford's TCP/IP network (which you may know as TehIntraWebTubes ... ). Sadly, the hackability suffered greatly once they (mostly) dumped BSD with the release of Solaris.
    
    "Where is the boundary of the operating system exactly"
    
    The use of EEPROMs in the early Sun kit certainly blurred that line a trifle ...
    
    1 0 Reply
Monday 17th February 2025 20:51 GMT Gene Cash

Linux distros

I think some of these thousands of nearly identical Linux distros could pick up a trick or two here.

But then I realize I use a distro nearly identical to Debian, except for rejecting the heresy of the People's Republic of Systemd as espoused by that vile heathen Poettering.

12 1 Reply
Monday 17th February 2025 22:05 GMT Anonymous Coward

I notice Windows 8, 10 and early 11 use Windows 7 during the installer (you can tell because of the Windows Basic theme). I guess its a similar reason.

3 3 Reply
1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 08:04 GMT kmorwath
  
  It was in the article. It's Windows PE.
  
  8 1 Reply
  1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 15:08 GMT karlkarl
    
    Obviously but specifically the Windows 7 "era" of Windows PE is what is interesting.
    
    2 1 Reply
    1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 21:29 GMT the spectacularly refined chap
      
      Obviously but specifically the Windows 7 "era" of Windows PE is what is interesting.
      
      Alternatively it may simply be they are keeping the interface simple for an instance where it doesn't matter and makes things simpler. Aero requires DirectX which is a big subsystem in and of itself, and drivers for the specific GPU in use. Basic works fine (albeit slowly, but who cares for an installer?) using generic VESA instructions and treating the screen as a dumb framebuffer.
      
      I somehow doubt they would be willing to another kernel maintained to address the quirks of modern hardware JUST for an installer.
      
      1 0 Reply
Monday 17th February 2025 22:33 GMT Doctor Syntax

IOW bootstrapping all the installs of all these systems listed above uses a bootstrapping approach.

2 0 Reply
Monday 17th February 2025 22:41 GMT Annihilator

Given Windows3.1 dialog boxes survived until Windows 10 (possibly 11?), it's unsurprising:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/l85hsx/windows_31_just_called_they_want_their_dialog_back/

4 0 Reply
1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 00:51 GMT RAMChYLD
  
  possibly 11?
  
  Can confirm. I just went looking for it. It's still there in Windows 11.
  
  3 0 Reply
2. Tuesday 18th February 2025 09:19 GMT Danny 14
  
  yes, and check out the icons in shell32.dll
  
  1 0 Reply
  1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 19:12 GMT Sandtitz
    
    Oh, those are the modern icons! Check the moricons.dll next time.
    
    1 0 Reply
Tuesday 18th February 2025 05:38 GMT jake

Easy answer.

"Why did the Windows 95 setup use Windows 3.1?"

Because the Microsoft Marketing Department said they had to.

0 14 Reply
Tuesday 18th February 2025 07:47 GMT Confucious2

Win 3.0

Windows 3.0 was the one that broke us free from the 640k limit.

Anything after that was just bloat.

0 6 Reply
1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 08:42 GMT Dan 55
  
  Re: Win 3.0
  
  What, even long filenames* are bloat?
  
  * AKA normal-length filenames for other contemporary OSes.
  
  7 0 Reply
  1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 14:21 GMT AndrueC
    
    Re: Win 3.0
    
    What, even long filenames* are bloat?
    
    The way they are stored on the file system isn't particularly elegant or efficient.
    
    2 0 Reply
    1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 16:21 GMT Dan 55
      
      Re: Win 3.0
      
      Such a shame because the rest of Windows is so well engineered.
      
      5 0 Reply
      1. Wednesday 19th February 2025 15:57 GMT AndrueC
        
        Re: Win 3.0
        
        I suppose that considering what they had to work with the solution was quite clever. One of the issues Microsoft do have to deal with, something that doesn't plague Linux, is backward compatibility. In this case it's compounded by the fact that it's not just compatibility with previous versions of DOS/Windows but also with a huge range of hardware manufactured by companies they know nothing about.
        
        Being the de-facto standard in personal computing for so long has become an unfortunate millstone around Microsoft's neck.
        
        But whenever people set in to criticise Windows I often feel that they are overlooking the issue of backward compatibility that they have to deal with. They started with an 8-bit single tasking operating system on little more than a home computer. Everything from then on was an evolution that tried (and to be fair largely succeeded) to allow existing software to be supported. It's actually (in my mind) quite impressive for a product that is now approaching fifty years old and that is basically underpinning the world's desktops.
        
        That's not to say that some of it isn't their fault for poorly designing things and having/choosing to throw away a solution when it's proved to lack longevity but I don't think I'd include the FAT file system in that. It has stood the test of time remarkably well all things considered.
        
        1 0 Reply
2. Tuesday 18th February 2025 09:21 GMT Danny 14
  
  Re: Win 3.0
  
  NT 3.51 and NT4.0 were the innovators. Ironically it was the drivers that were hardest to get sorted on our production lines at the time. We were writing borland C programs and our NT4 boxen were rock solid for the time.
  
  4 0 Reply
Tuesday 18th February 2025 08:48 GMT eamonn_gaffey

Why ?

...is The Reg droning on about historical artefacts like Win 3.1 and 95 ? Almost pre-history in digital terms. How about current (and interesting) content/discussions, that has the added bonus of keeping the mag relevant.

1 13 Reply
1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 09:10 GMT Dan 55
  
  Re: Why ?
  
  I thought it was pretty much settled that modern-day IT is one of the circles of hell, the only thing is deciding whether it's the third (data slurping and bloat), fifth (having to deal with IT on a daily basis), eighth (malware), or ninth (lock-in contracts).
  
  5 0 Reply
  1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 09:29 GMT Danny 14
    
    Re: Why ?
    
    I dunno, im glad I dont have to play with genius 2000 network cards and their terminators from hell. Im also glad I dont need to play IRQ roulette when you want a SCSI scanner, sound card, IDE card, serial (for the plotter) and parallel (for the zip disk). Talking through jumper swapping with people on the phone when production sent a replacement CD drive with MASTER instead of SLAVE jumper set.
    
    or even older for those of us who are ancient. Formatting a drive needed geometry data that was printed on the winchester.
    
    8 0 Reply
  2. Tuesday 18th February 2025 12:04 GMT Bebu sa Ware
    
    Re: Why ?
    
    I thought it was pretty much settled that modern-day IT is one of the circles of hell
    
    Which one?
    
    If Dante's Inferno were any guide modern-day IT would be crowding out each and every of the nine circles save perhaps the first.
    
    I can easily imagine any of our contemporary tech bros billionaires locuming for the big guy at the bottom.
    
    2 0 Reply
2. Tuesday 18th February 2025 09:22 GMT jake
  
  Re: Why ?
  
  Because those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, of course.
  
  That, and it often makes for good craik.
  
  _{Nostalgia ain't what it used to be, is it?}
  
  7 0 Reply
  1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 22:11 GMT that one in the corner
    
    Re: Why ?
    
    > That, and it often makes for good craik.
    
    If you want the English spelling, what originated from N.E. England (around South Shields)[1] then it is "crack", as in "The Crack" magazine found in all good venues[2] in the N.E.[3][4]
    
    If you want the Irish neologism, when they borrowed the word in the mid/late 20th Century and gave it a (cod-)gaelic spelling (mostly to write it onto the outside of Irish-themed pubs well outside of the Emerald Isle, though it has since slithered its way to Eire, in exactly the way that the snakes didn't) then it is "craic".
    
    Should we assume that "craik" is the Yankee Oirish spelling? And is is pronounced like "crack" or more like the bird, "crake"?
    
    [1] Apparently, it was recorded in Scots earlier than from the Shields, but I'll just put that down the Scots having too much free time on their hands and doing dull things like "writing" instead of getting out and enoying the crack.
    
    [2] And in a whole load of dives!
    
    [3] Or the online version if you insist on not having anything around to help mop up your spills
    
    [4] Not to be confused with "Crack" magazine, an upstart from Bristol, which means that it probably sounds like the noise you'd expect the Crake to make - Craawwk[5]
    
    [5] Right, that's it, now I'll have to move from the N.E. and won't be welcome back in Brizzle; guess I'm off to the Black Country.
    
    0 0 Reply
    1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 23:34 GMT jake
      
      Re: Why ?
      
      I rest my case.
      
      Beer?
      
      1 0 Reply
3. Tuesday 18th February 2025 09:23 GMT Danny 14
  
  Re: Why ?
  
  the parallels of PE to 11 mirror those of DOS to 95 though. There is still elements of 95 lurking in 11 too. It is an article, and there are quite a few of us who have been admins throughout these times.
  
  0 0 Reply
4. Tuesday 18th February 2025 09:39 GMT Tubz
  
  Re: Why ?
  
  Because I.T is like politics, if you don't look at the history you make the same mistakes, look at Hitler/Stalin carving up Poland and now you have Trump/Putin about to do that to Ukraine. On a positive side, Putin found his Nazis, they are in the Whitehouse.
  
  13 1 Reply
  1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 12:57 GMT Bebu sa Ware
    
    Re: Why ?
    
    "if you don't look at the history you make the same mistakes, look at Hitler/Stalin carving up Poland and now you have Trump/Putin about to do that to Ukraine. On a positive side, Putin found his Nazis, they are in the Whitehouse."
    
    On that positive side I have a ridiculous picture the DOGe in chief stomping around the ~~Shit~~... Whitehouse with his kepi and tunic emblazoned with a square enclosed Z aka a Zwaztika.†‡
    
    If I were to force the analogy I would think ultimately the Russian Federation would collapse with loss of territory westward (and eastward) while the US will have descended into 21st century version of a repression channeling and exceeding that of the Stalinist state. In this unlikely state of affairs the necessary major player who would have saved the western tradition would likely come as a surprise to many.
    
    Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) to whom the original quote is incorrectly attributed did write rather more perceptively:
    
    "History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends."
    
    _{† officially was intended as a task force identifier to reduce the risk from friendly fire. In the event unfriendly fire removed that risk.}
    
    _{‡ for DOGe reuse might be rechristened a Twatzika.}
    
    1 1 Reply
Tuesday 18th February 2025 09:46 GMT DoaJC_Blogger

I think Windows 98 and ME were the same way

1 0 Reply
Tuesday 18th February 2025 09:47 GMT DCEdinburgh

Decades of anti Windows stories and in 2025 the best the register has is an attack on a Windows 95 installer. Windows has served billions and Linux hasn’t. Get over it.

2 13 Reply
1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 23:38 GMT jake
  
  "Windows has served billions and Linux hasn’t"
  
  Phones and set-top boxen.
  
  'nuff said.
  
  _{Yes, I know, there is much, much more in our modern world that runs Linux, from cars to medical gear etc. etc.}
  
  2 0 Reply
Tuesday 18th February 2025 10:55 GMT vcragain

I bought a new Win 11 machine several months ago, for the usual reason of having to upgrade from my Win 10 machine - and it's still sitting there waiting to be used - and I'm still typing this on my old box - there is NOTHING to be said for the nuisance changeover & I have so many changes to this current machine - basically back to my old Windows 98 front end, and so many added packages that changing is a major, major nuisance to me now, so of course I have been putting it off !!! And I'm just an 85yr old lady who spends her days wandering around the internet ! If it wasn't for that loss of support eventually I would not bother at all ! I have all my 'favorite stuff' duplicated on a 2gig drive 'just in case', and waiting for a 'good day' - which does not seem to be quite yet !!!!

3 0 Reply
Tuesday 18th February 2025 11:43 GMT Bebu sa Ware

A surprising bit of sanity from Redmond

The last version of Windows I ever personally ran seriously was 3.x on a box with a Hercules mono adaptor (HGA) so the idea that a 95 installer would be written to run in a cutdown Win3 environment makes sense even if it would discover and report the non VGA hardware and abort the installation.

Proprietary Unix installation and upgrades often booted a minimal Unix kernel from tape or existing system disk (with an in memory file system? mfs?) to perform the task. The proprietary Unix hardware vendors' firmware was also vastly more capable than the humble bios of the IBM PC. The boot floppy with installation CDROM install media for the x86 version of Solaris 2.6 recreates much the functionality of the Sparc OpenBoot environment.

0 0 Reply
Tuesday 18th February 2025 13:43 GMT big_D

Funny coincidence...

Funny, half an hour ago, I was double checking the status of some of our laptops on the Dell Support website.

I put in the TAG and called up the specification of the laptop and one line item in the BoM (Bill of Materials) caught my eye:

Item Description

57154 Service Charge,Software, Windows 98,Fully Integrated System Test

Erm, that is a 2021 laptop and Dell are still doing a fully integrated Windows 98 test on it? :-D

2 0 Reply
Tuesday 18th February 2025 13:59 GMT Blackjack

Since Windows 11 is such a pain I wonder if someone managed to run Steam in Windows PE (Windows Preinstallation Environment)?

2 0 Reply
Tuesday 18th February 2025 15:19 GMT Wemb

I'm still curious as to why installing windows 95 from a CDROM got you to a point where it rebooted halfway through installation to a system without any support for CDROM and still needed to access the .cab files on the cdrom. Once you've hit that particular dumb brick wall a couple of times it was second nature to copy the contents of the /cab/ folder to the HDD before you started an installation but this was always a complete nonsense...

3 0 Reply
1. Wednesday 19th February 2025 06:02 GMT Blackjack
  
  Probably because Microsoft never tested it in computers that did not have a DOS CDROM driver? I never had that specific reboot problem when Installing Windows 95 however.
  
  Windows 98? That one crashed during install more than once.
  
  0 0 Reply
Tuesday 18th February 2025 16:47 GMT Nintendo1889

We can thank Windows PE for all those bootable Windows troubleshooting discs!

Theoven.org

It speaks to the capabilities of haiku os, that the full OS can run from USB and even save files and install apps (but you'll have to create and install from within haiku to do the saving as you will need to format the disk larger than the install image, whereas raw USB image software doesn't know how to partition the disc).

For a while there I was running haiku OS as a second OS via an external USB 3 hard drive adapter, and the performance was pretty decent with an SSD.

0 0 Reply
Tuesday 18th February 2025 16:50 GMT Kev99

And after these years you'd think the schemers and machinators at mictosoft would 1) know how to write clean, compact code; 2) close all the holes, leaks, backdoors and other assorted and sundry failings; and 3) write code that JUST WORKS.

1 2 Reply
1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 17:39 GMT Nintendo1889
  
  Have you seen the Windows 2000 code? It was actually clean compact and tight. It just suffers from the cruft of backwards compatibility
  
  3 0 Reply
  1. Tuesday 18th February 2025 22:17 GMT that one in the corner
    
    > Have you seen the Windows 2000 code?
    
    NO. OF COURSE NOT.
    
    Nobody has, I don't know what you are talking about!
    
    0 0 Reply
  2. Wednesday 19th February 2025 10:25 GMT kmorwath
    
    " It just suffers from the cruft of backwards compatibility"
    
    Which is why Windows kept its position on the desktop, while Linux can't get more users. Especially with expensive commercial applications, backwards compatibility IS important. That's why Win95/NT run DOS and Win16 applications - and they were removed from Windows only when the virtual86 mode was dropped in 64 bit mode.
    
    An OS unable to run previous versions applications is mostly useless for a lot of users. VM can resolve the issue only partially. IT people need to understand they are not the whole user base.
    
    1 3 Reply
Tuesday 18th February 2025 22:50 GMT David 132

"surely a battleship gray button was a possibility"

...too late, the Skutters already repainted it to Military gray. That's the old, drab, Battleship gray button on the right, and the new, purposeful, exciting Military gray button on the left...

...or is it the other way around?

0 0 Reply
Wednesday 19th February 2025 04:42 GMT Tam Lin

Doctor GUI explained it contemporaneously

Keep in mind that while Microsoft has always been incompetent, it only started doing it hurmouslessly, maliciously and criminally after Ballmer took over. And got rid of the good Dr.

1 1 Reply
Wednesday 19th February 2025 11:25 GMT Mint Sauce

Random Access Memories

Lots of fond memories unlocked after reading through the comments here, pints all round!

Writing scheduling algorithms on Tanenbaun's MINIX for my systems programming coursework at OxPoly...

Installing TamuLinux from 17 floppy disks...

Being impressed with OS/2

Being unimpressed with NEXTStep

Suntools!

Silicon Graphics - helping build a better dinosaur (loved 'my' Indigo :D)

The DLL Hell era of all the different versions of Windows 95 when trying to distribute our software...

Being the first in my company to switch to using Windows 2000 (beta) and finding it a vast improvement all round...

er, jumpers for goalposts? ;-)

1 0 Reply
Wednesday 26th February 2025 08:06 GMT Zakspade

And yet...

...it is still shite, today.

My daughter's laptop - having been upgraded to 11 from 10 - and my daughter swearing she didn't ask Microshite to do so - has just asked me to provide a 48-digit code to access her data drive after having to reset Windows. It was Windows 11 HOME. My understanding is that BitLocker isn't part of Home in 10 or 11.

I spent years working for Microshite Gold Certified partners. During that time, I was part of beta testing of OSes from Windows 95 through to Windows 7. ALL were used by me and i supplied feedback. In forums I discovered that much of what I provided as feedback was not dissimilar to others. Yet, Windows 11 still has gaffs and quirks that existed in Windows 95. Basically, Microshite doesn't listen to users but ONLY their accountants.

Am I bitter? Hell, yes! Over 160GB of data gone from my daughter's university laptop. Tears. Much of her work is held on university servers, but what was the data held on the 250GB volume? We don't know - and there is the pain.

Guess who was bought a Macbook to finish her university course? A better solution might have been to just install Linux, but while that would work for me, my daughter is 100s of miles away. Tweaking and testing to get it working for her is too hard and the Macbook just works.

Incredibly lazy programming to cut corners and maximise obscene profits at the expense of users. If I were running the world, I'd be looking at breaking up the likes of Microshite and Apple (and don't think you are free to grin, Google). If I were a world dictator, then jail for those who ran/run said companies might be an option (if advisors manage to taljk me out of other options involving interesting instruments...

0 0 Reply

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