New Operating System

[Davidhelp]

Here is the new operating system. See image. I remember getting my first computer in Dec 1995. It was a Packard Bell. I bought it at Montgomery Ward's. Later I bought a separate copy of Windows 95 at I think Best Buy along with a web browser called Mosaic.
I had 4mbs of ram <-mega and not giga and the hard drive may have been 250mb? Later upgraded to 500mb.


I currently use Windows 7 and a gigabyte motherboard from 2015 with a 2tb SSD and other backup hard drives and 32gbs of ram. I have Windows 10 on a laptop and Windows 11 in the free Oracle VirtualBox.

I swear it is Windows 95 with some change in the look.

 

[donheff]

IIRC Win 95 was the first MS OS that included a TCP/IP stack - might even have been added as an update. Mosaic was one of the first graphical browsers, developed at the Univ of Illinois by Marc Andreesen, I think. He then moved on to Netscape fame. I'm surprised your Win95 had Mosaic, they must have added Internet Explorer later on in an update.

 

[target2019]

Mosaic may have been added to satisfy the anti-trust investigation?

In this mind the sheer number of floppies required was memorable.

 

[donheff]

Mosaic may have been added to satisfy the anti-trust investigation?

In this mind the sheer number of floppies required was memorable.

That makes sense. I installed a graphical bowser called Cello on Win 3 with Chameleon TCP/IP. What a PITA. I remember Gates embracing the Internet in 1995 - he got MS to turn on a dime and go all in. They quickly started gaining dominance with Win95 and Internet Explorer thus the anti-trust investigation.

 

[braumeister]

We have come a long way, haven't we?

 

[skyking1]

Oh that TCP/IP stack in win95 and 98.
It was more like a game of Jenga, if something went awry you could not poke the missing piece back in so it was that heady time of the fresh install.

 

[jollystomper]

I still have my Windows 95, 98, and NT installation CDs. Why, I don't know .

I did get rid of my Windows for Workgroups and OS/2 Warp installation discs, so I am not quite an "old operating system" hoarder .

 

[scrabbler1]

This brings back some memories. I bought my first PC in the summer of 1995, just around the time Win 95 came out. But I wasn't eager to be a guinea pig for a brand-new OS so I bought a PC (AST Advantage) which had Win 3.1 and had a built-in, albeit small, monitor. It had 4 mb RAM with 2 expansion slots, each allowing as much as 16 mb (36 mb total) which I filled over the next few years. It had some ancient, short-lived browser whose name I can't remember. The HD was about 500 mb. I remember a file got corrupted and, luckily, I was able to copy it from my office PC (they had Win 3.1, too) onto a floppy and copy it onto my home PC (I remembered how to use DOS).

In early 2000, I put Win 95 and IE on it, using a big stack of floppies. I barely had enough space on the HD, having to delete a lot of unneeded files, so many that the PC barely booted up! I kept it around as a back-up PC. Later in 2000, I bought a better PC which turned out to be a lemon before Gateway finally replaced it for free by the end of 2001. That PC, which had the recently released Win XP, lasted for 10 years.

 

[steelyman]

IIRC Win 95 was the first MS OS that included a TCP/IP stack - might even have been added as an update. Mosaic was one of the first graphical browsers, developed at the Univ of Illinois by Marc Andreesen, I think. He then moved on to Netscape fame. I'm surprised your Win95 had Mosaic, they must have added Internet Explorer later on in an update.

Mosaic went to Spyglass from Illinois (there was a big deal about licensing). As you say, the developers went to Netscape which competed against Internet Explorer.

Here’s a Wikipedia entry about Spyglass:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyglass,_Inc.

 

[donheff]

Mosaic went to Spyglass from Illinois (there was a big deal about licensing). As you say, the developers went to Netscape which competed against Internet Explorer.

Here’s a Wikipedia entry about Spyglass:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyglass,_Inc.

Interesting article. Internet Explorer was produced using the Spyglass/Mosaic codebase.

 

[jim584672]

I remember the blue screens of death.

 

[Davidhelp]

Star Trek Blue screen of death

Data upset at Blue screen of death

 

[latexman]

And, I'm using vDOS to still run some old DOS programs. vDOS is a DOS environment emulator for Windows. My laptop is W10 64 bit OS. Under W7 16 bit OS, most DOS .exe's still ran on their own, but the jump to W10 and 64 bit caused many, many problems with DOS programs.

On this post, I should have changed my signature to:

CD \
EXIT
Latexman

 

[Sojourner]

I did get rid of my Windows for Workgroups and OS/2 Warp installation discs, so I am not quite an "old operating system" hoarder .

OS/2 Warp! I vividly remember working with a guy who absolutely loved OS/2 and would talk my ear off in the breakroom about why Windows was so abysmal and worthless in comparison to it. He was the only person in the company who refused to run Windows (or anything Microsoft) on his PC. Super nice guy, very intelligent and friendly, but when it came to operating systems... oh boy, just don't get him started!

 

[jim584672]

My co-worker said he had a WindowsMe machine brand new and on first boot it went BSOD. Windows didn't get stable until Windows 2000.

 

[Souschef]

My first computer was a CORDATA "luggable" with a 7 inch high definition display and 2 floppies. I "expanded" the memory from 512K to 640K with a memory card, then bought a Western Digital "hard card". They messed up the order and sent me 12! I picked the best one and shipped the other 11 back.
I was using Lotus123, which gave me a head start to learn Excel.

 

[ERD50]

My first computer was a CORDATA "luggable" with a 7 inch high definition display and 2 floppies. I "expanded" the memory from 512K to 640K with a memory card, then bought a Western Digital "hard card". They messed up the order and sent me 12! I picked the best one and shipped the other 11 back.
I was using Lotus123, which gave me a head start to learn Excel.

A bit of what is probably forgotten trivia for most people, Microsoft Excel first appeared on the Macintosh OS, more than two years before it came out on Windows:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel#Early_history

Microsoft released the first version of Excel for the Macintosh on September 30, 1985, and the first Windows version was 2.05 (to synchronize with the Macintosh version 2.2) in November 1987.[94]

-ERD50

 

[MRG]

OS/2 Warp! [emoji23] I vividly remember working with a guy who absolutely loved OS/2 and would talk my ear off in the breakroom about why Windows was so abysmal and worthless in comparison to it. He was the only person in the company who refused to run Windows (or anything Microsoft) on his PC. Super nice guy, very intelligent and friendly, but when it came to operating systems... oh boy, just don't get him started!

OS/2? OMG. I thought I was the only person who used that. I was doing development on OS/2 when it was brand spanking new and nobody knew what it could do. We were pushing the capabilities of it but IBM allowed us access to the development team. They were amazed by what we had done with it as we were supporting thousands of concurrent connections for a homegrown file system.

One of my coworkers was a communications guy. He'd get into communications manger and type ahead screen after screen, he could walk away from the PC and get coffee before it caught up.

 

[steelyman]

These discussions always remind me of this Dilbert strip:

https://dilbert.com/strip/1992-09-08

 

[neihn]

I remember I got so exciting going from 300 baud rate to 9600 baud rate - At megacorp, we came up with and idea to combine 2 modem connections so that we could have 9600 bits x2 (it later called bonding). As I recall we was using windows 3.0 with netware ipx (tcp is not in fashion yet)

Now I have 1gbs up/down from fiber.

 

[braumeister]

These discussions always remind me of this Dilbert strip:

https://dilbert.com/strip/1992-09-08

And one of my favorites:
During the violent unrest in Russia back in the 90s, vandals were looting Orthodox churches, breaking the stained glass windows and stealing the sacred ikons to resell.

The comment was "No windows? No icons? They'll have to say Mass at the prompt!"

 

[aja8888]

I still have my Windows 95, 98, and NT installation CDs. Why, I don't know .

I did get rid of my Windows for Workgroups and OS/2 Warp installation discs, so I am not quite an "old operating system" hoarder .

I still have my MSDOS installation floppy discs!

I also had a Apple IIe and a separate floppy drive back in the day (plus an Okidata dot matrix printer). I remember giving all of it to my daughter's grade school as a tax deduction!

 

[Souschef]

I remember I got so exciting going from 300 baud rate to 9600 baud rate - At megacorp, we came up with and idea to combine 2 modem connections so that we could have 9600 bits x2 (it later called bonding). As I recall we was using windows 3.0 with netware ipx (tcp is not in fashion yet)

Now I have 1gbs up/down from fiber.

OMG! I just had a flash of memory! I was using GE Tymeshare with a 300 baud modem and a teleprinter with a paper tape punch and reader.
I was programming in Basic and inputting the program and data in on paper tape.

 

[Kabowest]

We have come a long way, haven't we?

When I was growing up, all we had was the 0 (zero).

 

[REWahoo]

When I was growing up, all we had was the 0 (zero).

Sheer luxury!