| ▲ | zabzonk 12 hours ago |
| Perhaps aesthetic - both Windows 1.0 and 2.0 were (to me at least) very ugly. Things got a bit better with Windows 3.0 and 3.1 (and easier to program) but it wasn't really until Windows 95 that the whole thing came together. One thing you have to give Microsoft (at least back then) is that they did keep trying. And, speaking as a Windows developer, their documentation was very good. |
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| ▲ | monkeydreams 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Perhaps aesthetic - both Windows 1.0 and 2.0 were (to me at least) very ugly. But it was amazing for those of us used to black and white/green/amber screens in DOS. You could put an image as your background. And it stayed there, lurking behind your word processor or spreadsheet, to spring back into your vision whenever you finished up your work. |
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| ▲ | dylan604 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > it wasn't really until Windows 95 that the whole thing came together. I remember the launch parties for 95. I remember thinking to myself how strange it was to go to all of that expense to promote an OS. |
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| ▲ | zabzonk 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | they weren't promoting an OS, they were promoting a user experience - A GUI that competed with the Mac. There were OS improvements too, but I have forgot what. The real improvements came with Win2K - one of the best versions of Windows ever. | | |
| ▲ | jonhohle 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Win2K was my favorite as well. The transparency was tasteful. Everything worked and for the most part didn’t crash. Many (most?) games worked. It ran great on a PIII 600mhz. Everything good about NT4 was better and most of the consumer friendly stuff starting to take shape. The disc was even gorgeous. Peak MS design and engineering. | | |
| ▲ | SoftTalker 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yep, favorite version of Windows ever. Even with Windows 7 and XP I switched the settings back so it looked like Win2K. | |
| ▲ | porl 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Win2k was the last one I was excited about. |
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| ▲ | jsolson 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don't remember if Plug-n-Play shipped with the original Windows 95 (it's certainly there in the final OSR), but that was a pretty big shift from the manual IRQ and port mapping days of DOS/Windows 3.1. | | |
| ▲ | MBCook 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It did. That was one of its big features. It also was the first version to remove the 8.3 limitation and give us long file names. | | |
| ▲ | conception 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | They were fake long file names though. At the actual dos layer they were 8.3. And the plug and play was terrrrible. I always turned it off. Ugh the plug and play modems/soundcards were trash. | | |
| ▲ | jsolson 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | You're not wrong, but PnP including the configuration basis for PCI which still sits at the config space layer of the latest and greatest PCIe. That's the piece I find so significant. I work with GPUs that mostly communicate over a proprietary C2C connection, but how does the OS find them? PCI enumeration. |
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| ▲ | dylan604 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | back then, it was still plug-n-pray. it didn't work as well as it was intended when it was first available |
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| ▲ | SoftTalker 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | IIRC we got long filenames with Win95, and a built-in network stack, no more Trumpet WinSock. And it did seem more stable, not nearly as good as NT/2000 but better than 3.1. |
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| ▲ | hulitu 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > Perhaps aesthetic - both Windows 1.0 and 2.0 were (to me at least) very ugly. Microsoft got back to the roots with Windows 10 and 11. |
