Re: Seeing VERSIONINFO under Vista?

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But it was still crap. Because it had no security, it wasn't suitable for mixed family
usage (adults and children, for example), it was fragile, it encouraged exceptionally poor
programming style for applications (talking directly to hardware, for example).

The number of horror stories of adults having their files deleted (e.g., their TurboTax,
Quicken, etc.) by a curious child was amazingly high. And in some cases, the adult
"favorites" in IE were, shall we say, not G-rated. Or even PG-13. I used it on laptops
because NT-capable laptops were very expensive in those days, but I never did anything on
a laptop that mattered in the slightest, so the reliability issues never came up.

I was forced to use it in my business for two reasons: the failure of hardware vendors to
produce NT drivers (for years, my scanner ran on my only Win95 machine) and the failure of
software vendors to write code that would run on NT. I also used it for testing to make
sure that code I developed could run on a brain-dead 16-bit operating system (don't fool
yourself: it was a 16-bit OS with a 32-bit barnacle grafted to it, badly) because some
customers ran it. In 2000, the last of my clients who was supporting Win9x declared that
Win9x was dead and I was able to decomission that machine, since it no longer served any
useful purpose.
joe
On Tue, 22 May 2007 10:47:10 +0100, Daniel James <wastebasket@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article news:<FE7C5887-172B-4F42-AEBF-A78F25B0ED8B@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Tom
Serface wrote:
I beg to differ. I think Windows 95 was so much better for end users than
Window NT (even with newshell) and certainly better than Win 3.1. I think
this was the most significant end user version of Windows yet. Windows 98
was not bad, but Windows ME shouldn't have happened.

Windows 95 was a masterpiece of coding, in many ways. It successfully provided
most of the Win32 environment from NT on top of DOS in a way that allowed home
users to run DOS software (mostly games) that wrote directly to the hardware
in the same environment as safer, 32-bit apps. It was what the domestic market
wanted at the time of its release, and was the right compromise between
usability and security for the home user.

No sane person should ever have used any of the Win9x OSes for business.
That's a completely different market and the ability to run badly-behaved DOS
apps is not a requirement -- indeed the ability to prevent the running of
badly-behaved DOS apps was a virtue. Remember that WinNT 3.1 had been around
for long enough when Win95 was released that there was enough stable, mature,
32-bit business software that ran on NT that business needs could be met
without using DOS apps.

It's worth noting that by producing two different Win32 platforms -- one
well-suited for home use and one well-suied for business -- Microsoft covered
the marketplace better than IBM, which tried to cover address both audiences
with one product: OS/2. OS/2 was a good attempt to cover all users' needs with
just one OS, but wasn't as good a compromise as '9x for the games market and
wasn't as robust or secure as NT in the office. That's why OS/2 failed.

Windows 95 was an oddball mixture of 16-bit and 32-bit code, it virtualized
the hardware aggressively while making provision for falling back to 16-bit
code when virtualization couldn't (for some reason) work, it provided new
features in a way that old programs could just ignore them but new ones could
make use of them ... allowing gradual migration of (just about) everything to
32-bits without disrupting the use of 16-bit apps. All in all it was an ugly
mish-mash of bodges and compromises, but it WORKED (most of the time). I have
always been impressed by the inspirational leap of faith that must have taken
place somewhere in Microsoft for such a project to have been considered
feasible when commonsense says it should fail at every turn ... it killed
OS/2, so it paid off in spades.

For business use, though, moving to NT 3.1 and sticking with it was the only
plan that ever made any sense. '9x was never as stable, never as secure, never
as robust; and it did not, in fact, require fewer hardware resources to run
well. It was just the wrong product for that market.

I agree that Windows ME should not have happened. I don't think that '98
should have happened, either -- not because it wasn't an improvement on '95,
but because that was the time to push everyone onto NT.

Cheers,
Daniel.

Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
email: newcomer@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Web: http://www.flounder.com
MVP Tips: http://www.flounder.com/mvp_tips.htm
.

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