Re: Seeing VERSIONINFO under Vista?

In article news:<0is553l8q76s5pj2a1foljgs9tmo2m1167@xxxxxxx>, Joseph M.
Newcomer wrote:
But [Win95] was still crap. Because ...

Well, I wouldn't have put it quite so strongly ... but from a technical
standpoint I do agree, yes.

Amazingly clever crap, but crap.

However, from a marketing POV it was brilliant. NT had a (completely
erroneous) reputation for being "difficult" and would have been very difficult
to sell to home users. It was '95 that weaned most people off Win16 and onto
Win32, while still supporting old DOS apps like games. Without it MS would
have lost quite a lot of ground to OS/2.

I used it on laptops because NT-capable laptops were very expensive in
those days ...

I have one laptop from "those days": a Toshiba Tecra 750. That's a 233MHz MMX
Pentium with 64MB or RAM (OK, so not exactly bottom-of-the-range) and that ran
much better under NT4 than it did under the supplied Win95. I've even run XP
on it, though the low memory size makes that a struggle.

... the failure of hardware vendors to produce NT drivers ...

I certainly came across that.

I have an early Panasonic/Matsushita DVD-RAM drive in one of my desktop
machines. It's a dual-CPU Pentium III machine, and Panasonic had a lot of
trouble getting their drivers to work with the 2-CPU architecture. NT4 was OK
by the time I got the driver but the Win2k driver didn't work with 2 CPUs
until about 2 years after Win2k was released. That's unpardonable.

It's not always a technical issue, though: My wife had a Canon
printer/scanner/fax thing that she used quite happily for a while with Win95.
When she changed job she found that she had to upgrade to Win2k to make best
use of the office network, and then found that Canon didn't provide a driver
for her printer that ran under Win2k. Canon's excuse was that she had a "home"
printer and they didn't support it under Win2k because that was an "Office"
OS. So, Canon's printer went into the bin and was replaced with an HP, thereby
denying Canon any profit from the several hundred pounds she has spent on
inkjet cartridges since. Interestingly, under linux the same drivers (not
supplied by Canon) drive many of the "home" and "office" versions of the Canon
printers, so the distinction must have been just a restrictive trading
practice on Canon's part to prevent businesses buying cheap "Home" printers.

... and the failure of software vendors to write code that would run on
NT.

I've not found that to be a major problem. I did come across a version of
Quicken that wouldn't run on NT, so I used Excel instead ...

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.

We all had that problem. I also had to run '9x because I had to write and
maintain a VxD that provided the protected-mode side of a transparent disk
encryption package.

Don't be too hard on the Barnacle -- it's a damned clever piece of coding,
despite all its imperfections -- and don't fool yourself that DOS was an OS!

Cheers,
Daniel.






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