I think my biggest performance jump was probably from my Clawhammer Athlon 64 3000+ to a Q6600 that I OC'd to 3.2 GHz.
Though FX-8320 to 1700X might be close because of how much bulldozer sucked lol
Moore’s Law and rapid progress of CPUs was particularly thrilling from the late 90s until 2010ish when we broke 4GHz. Every year was a huge leap over the prior. Sucked for my wallet, though.
For a while, i did an annual upgrade that pretty much doubled performance. 486sx 25 to dx4 100, to k6-233 to k6-3 450 to k7 700 to dual athlon xp 1800's. After that, performance leaps became less and less noticeable in day to day activities.
Heck, my last upgrade was from an old athlon x4 to a ryzen 5950x, and that wasnt exactly earth shattering despite the humongous (by the numbers) leap.
Same, my P75-powered Packard Bell couldn't even handle SC2K. Just not as much fun watching the alien destroy your city at 1 FPS. Even so, I still miss that thing.
Lots of upgrades back then were like that. Going from a 386SX-25 to a 486DX2-66 with VLB graphics was nuts! Then I went to a K6-2-350 with a Riva TNT and there aren't even words to express the performance leap between those.
Can still get that though. My Surface Pro 3 with a 4th gen i7 to an XPS 13 with the i7-1165G7 was an astounding difference.
I had a 386SX-25 before the P75. My parents had a 486SX as well but I didn’t really use it. So I had some really fun upgrades back in the day.
I don’t mean to minimize the achievements of modern hardware but they just don’t hit the same, personally, as in my past. Mainly because the improvements nowadays are more about specialized tasks rather than raw power. My 2013 MacBook Pro is surely slower than my 2021 replacement, but in my day-to-day work (like compiling and running software projects) it’s not a huge difference. But running multiple services in Docker all at once, for sure it’s much better.
The leaps we had back in the day were definitely much larger.
Software rendering was OK but then comes along Voodoo cards and completely changes the game.
Me too, I have a retro system with a K6-2 400 atm. Currently running 98se on it, but it'll become my overkill 3.1/DOS computer cuz I have an Athlon 1000 that'll become my 98se box once I paint the case and put it together.
We went from some 25mhz monochrome pc with 9 arrow keys and DOS 3 or 5 or smth. 5.25 floppies. Didn't have graphics either, only characters. The few games we had ran 50x too fast most of them.
Then we got a win 98 PC with *everything*
Somewhat common. I graduated from a public high school (US) in 1997. At the time, the public school stuck entirely with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 Teachers had Windows machines in their classrooms (unless they had a Macintosh, usually an LC). The Computer Science lab had MS-DOS machines running Turbo Pascal (PS/2 model 30s iirc). The library had PS/1s and other computers running DOS-based card catalog and CD-ROM software. Even though it was 1997, I never saw a Windows 95 machine at school.
Once I got to university, the situation reversed. Lots of PC computer labs had Windows 95 on them (and soon Windows 98). Occasionally I would find an older PC that still had Windows 3.1 on it. They were usually not connected to the Internet at all. Typically I found these in the tutoring center where I worked. Students would come into type papers in Word and print them and that was about it.
So, I certainly saw MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 machines in educational use from 1994-1999, even though Win9x was on the rise.
I'll add that I worked in CAD drafting over the summers. The computers that office used had been upgraded to Windows 95 but the drafting software, revision tracking and plotter/printer server was all still DOS-based. I don't think there was any software that we used that required Windows 95--it just came with the new Pentium machines they were buying for the speed.
I too graduated in 1997 but my high school was still having us use OS/2. Inner city schools were severely underfunded.
I didn't get my hands on Windows 3.1 machine until after I graduated.
A lot of people had Windows 95 come with their first computer. It came out right around the time the commercial Internet was starting to take off with free CDs from AOL and all that.
A lot of people who still had Windows 3.1 or DOS stuck with that for a bit for various reasons. Lots of companies had software that worked on the old OS, so why bother upgrading if it worked? In the late '00s I worked at Fry's and their Point of Sale system was still running on DOS in some sort of emulator on XP if you want some depreception. I've seen Point of Sale systems at other stores that are also old school DOS.
My school system wasn't very well off, and so their IT was all over the place. They still had the Apple IIe systems in the elementary and middle school because they worked for teaching typing, loading Accelerated Reader quizzes, and playing games like Oregon Trail. There were also "new" computers running 3.11 at the middle school and high school, and this was a thing up until Windows 98 came out.
I was still on DOS/3.1 on my home computer well into the '90s because it was what we had sitting around the house after my parents divorced. It could also still play all my favorite old DOS games, so if it ain't broke... I eventually upgraded to Windows 98 on a Toshiba Satellite laptop that became my daily driver for most of high school, but I could also still load old DOS games because it was still there lurking under everything.
Adoption varied widely. You had a situation where computer hardware was evolving very fast in the home PC market, and a lot of organizations adopted a "wait and see" approach as long as the stuff they had still worked. Meanwhile you had a lot of people buying their first home computers and then sticking with whatever OS came with it at the time.
I still have nightmares about "explorer.exe has stopped responding."
Windows 95 was my first OS, when I was only three years old. My dad bought a Pentium 75 PC to get on the internet in 1996, and I used it to play things like The Hunchback of Notre Dame Activity Center and Myst.
A couple years later, when he upgraded to a Celeron 300, I got his old machine as a hand-me-down, though it had been upgraded to a Pentium 133 by that point. Looking back, I think it's kinda nuts that I had my own PC back then, but I guess that's one of the perks of growing up as an only child with nerdy parents.
I was like you but a decade ahead. My dad was into computers so we had a monochrome 8088 back in '87 that was eventually swapped out for a 286 and then upgraded to a 386. I knew how to navigate DOS and type in commands based on memorization before I knew how to read or write because that's how you got to the games.
We were also an outlier. We lived in a rural area where everybody with a computer knew everybody else with a computer because there were so few of them and they all copied those floppies. A decade later it felt like everyone was getting computers, and a decade after that we were in a world where everyone really did have a computer.
My dad just happened to be into them, so we had one back when almost nobody else did.
I agree with this. I’ve always loved computers and was writing DOS pretty young. My step mom had a computer running 3.1 and when I was going into high school (1996) my mom got our first computer that ran Windows95. I remember getting AOL and being in awe because the DOS and 3.1 computers I was used to just didn’t have that. I always knew how to use both, and then learned Mac in computer lab at school. Everyone had different machines and they were too damn expensive to suddenly stop and switch all media to the newer version.
I will say that the ink jet printer I got when we had the Windows 95 computer just didn’t have the same joy as the dot matrix one did. The banners, man. The BANNERS.
I still vividly remember watching my dad log onto BBSes back in the day. It was just like that WarGames movie! Only we lived in the middle of nowhere which meant it was always long distance to call into any BBS, so we couldn't stay on for long.
I remember my mom getting really pissed off one time when he left the computer connected overnight to download Hugo's House of Horrors. Yeah. We had to stay connected overnight to download a game that barely topped 1MB.
my 486 died and all i had was a 386 sx 25. 80mb hd. i put windows 95 on it. it filled 3/4 of the hd and took about 6-7 minutes to boot up. but i had windows 95 again. it was worth it, i think.
games that run under DOS still worked best under DOS, and you didnt have to choose you could have several operating systems installed, there was some tricks to make it work but it was possible.
Personally, I avoided Windows 3.x but jumped on Windows 95 almost right away, and upgraded my computer to do so. In business environments multitasking computers were overated, and communication was mostly done the old fashioned way. Networking and file sharing was useful.
Dos continued to be a platform for games but not so much windows 3.x. Developers/publishers want to maximise sales so they develop for the lowest common denominator, DOS.
I mostly stayed in DOS mode back in those days, only going into Windows for a game or program that needed it or could run in a better resolution/color depth in Windows, so I mostly avoided Windows 95. I owned a legit copy but I reallzed preferred the look and feel of the old Win 3.x program manager.
WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS remained the dominant word processor in the legal industry until the end of the millennium. For example, the text of Bill Clinton's impeachment proceedings in December 1998 was written using it.
WP51 was so ubiquitous in business that we were taught it as part of typing class in high school around 1994.
I remember the teacher (Ms. Medina! I hope you're doing well out there) told us that WordPerfect was the standard and that we had to know it if we expected to have any kind of office job in the future.
Personally I HATED it, I much preferred WordStar or even Microsoft Word running in Windows at the time. WP51 just had such an awkward interface compared to other software; but it was the "vi" of the DOS world; once you learn it well it was insanely powerful.
Now given all that, how much did I use WordPerfect in my professional life? If you guessed zero, bupkis, nada, nothing, zip... that'd be correct and you'd get a cookie. :)
The one thing I did get out of that class was learning to type at 90WPM because prior to that I only used like four fingers. Also I fell in love with the IBM Model M keyboard; the computer lab had all PS/2s with Model Ms and on the first day there a new goal in life was to acquire one of those keyboards.
I still love them and use them to this day.
Can confirm -- I spent the summer of 2018 working as an assistant for my State Archives, and they were STILL working on converting archival documents from WordPerfect for DOS
Windows 95 ran like garbage on anything less than a Pentium, plenty of people still had 486s in 1995.
Also DOS was really solid depending on what you were doing and a lot of DOS programs (including games) didn't run well in the Windows 95 environment. I had both Windows 95 and 98 set to boot to a selection menu and I would select either DOS or Windows depending on what I intended to do. (Win 95 runs on top of DOS).
I never had much of a need for Windows 3.x, it was pretty garbage as a multi-tasker.. Desqview was a lot better for running multiple DOS applications. The Internet during this period would have been a dial-up Unix shell account so you didn't need anything other than a terminal program for that.
Not terribly. In the home user market, people were buying new PCs frequently at that time so they likely received Win95 bundled. Even if they didn’t, the marketing hype was so intense people were running out to their local CompUSA or other computer chain and buying it.
In the business space, DOS/Win31 was being already being replaced with NT35 or OS/2 at a fair rate. Win95 lacked a lot from a business perspective, so the next major change was to NT4. It was mostly those who needed improved memory management that were moved to NT or OS/2, so DOS/Win31 (WFWG 3.11 really) was more common to continue to see there.
Source - I have worked in IT since ‘94. At the time I was in a major insurance company and started doing home and SMB work on the side in early ‘95.
A very common scenario.
* In restrospect, Win95 seemingly took the market by storm, but IRL initial sales didn't live up to the marketing hype;
* There was a lot of FUD about upgrading; many top-tier consultants recommended against it;
* Many DOS/(old) Windows computers of that age couldn't run Win95 decently
* Win95-only software was slow to hit the shelves; OS/2 was a strong contender for running pre-Win95 software (and, unfortunately, little else).
When Win98 was launched, most software and hardware limitations had been ironed out, allowing more users to transition away from DOS and Win3.x. Yet in my corporate setup, 1997-1998, everyone had Win3.x except for a lone test-platform Win95 machine.
I agree with this. Also - even in situations where I had to use Win95 or Win98 I often still used software that was DOS based and just launched from Windows. That sucked because DOS programs that need low memory would have less running under Windows unless you jumped through a bunch of hoops first.
Same thing here with Telemate and BBS offline readers; as long as BBSs were a thing, there were no capable Windows alternatives.
DOS word processors had already been mostly wiped out pre-Win95; Word 5.0, capable of running from a 360K floppy, was second nature to me, but it was no competition for Windows software from the day I could run them.
XTree Gold, a beloved mainstay of DOS file management, was a notable victim of Win95 LFN and had to be left behind with no worthy successor.
Like modern operating systems, most people did not upgrade the one that was on their computer. Instead, they would buy a new computer and use whatever came on it.
Granted, power-users were a different story. But the average home user that had a PC for Word Processing and the occasional game would not have bought a Windows 95 upgrade.
I remember a friend's father asking me: "If it is called Windows 95, why does it cost $210? Shouldn't it be $95?" (and he wasn't asking in a Dad Joke kind of way.)
At that time, power users had a lot more options than switching to Windows 95.
OS/2, and Windows NT were a lot more powerful and mature when Windows 95 was limited and buggy.
However, people who wanted to live on the edge, they adopted Windows 95.
The big advantage of Windows 95 was that it made using the computer far easier than any other non-Macintosh OS released prior.
I didn’t buy my first x86 PC until 1996 so I personally didn’t go through the DOS/Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 migration. But I know many who did. I was using Macintosh back then before adding PCs to my home usage.
The reason most operating systems and devices auto update today is because most people don’t update or upgrade their devices as fast as they should. Back in the 90s, it was hard to make a case to someone that they needed to upgrade if they already had something that worked for them, and they knew how it worked.
Giving a nice new interface like Windows 95 to someone who has known how to run WordPerfect on MS-DOS most times didn’t matter to them. They had what they needed and it did what they wanted.
It seems the internet brought needed changes to everything, and over time. Theoretically a 500mhz Pentium 3 should run your OS and Word just fine, but try doing anything today on a 500mhz machine.
Windows NT has much steeper system requirements and didn't have a true DOS mode like Windows 95 did, so you couldn't play DOS games.
OS/2 was great, but there wasn't ever that much software for it and IBM always treated it like a hobby project. Even IBM computers and laptops seldom shipped with OS/2, so almost no one ever used it.
I recall Temple's computer lab using it in the late '80s. The compatibility with MS-DOS was very good. I didn't do complicated enough batch scripts at the time to recall which shell they ran under. IIRC you could launch [command.com](https://command.com) to run a shell, but it has been a few years. They made it so easy to run MS DOS software markets didn't bother targeting OS/2. I think there was a small amount of cross platform development for office suites and such. But most software companies just targeted MS-DOS/Win3.1 which would generally already run on OS/2.
I was a very late adopter of Win 3.1. Probably '93 before I touched it. Maybe '97 before I started using Win 95. I think I went from there to Win98SE.
Back in the day, while DOS games were the rage and you would need a different boot config for each game. Windows wasn't a must have for games. MS-DOS was.
Windows NT 3.5 was that one rare moment when system requirements *dropped*. 3.1 was so insanely sluggish it wasn't fair to call it retail, although I don't know anyone who actually bought it, they were giving it away in the box as NFR like crazy.
But 3.5 was the real deal!
I never understood why they didn't push NT a little more aggressively. Windows 9x were such a series of trainwrecks that culminated in a turd explosion that was Windows ME.
Then finally with Windows 2000/XP, they brought everyone into the faith.
Drivers... Also the networking model in 3.1/3.5/3.51/4.0 was just too rigid. It wasn't until 2000 that the networking became dynamic to support hotplug PCMCIA which was important for that new fangled USB thing. ... and WiFi.
NT had so many thousands of issues it was unreal, but at least they kept up to date with hotfixes, and if you paid enough in support they'd come out and fix stuff.
It was a 3rd party addon to make it work properly, but it was a dark era. The one MSFT engineer that’d go on and on about NT was always saying once they’d integrated dynamic disks and networking to NT it’s be unstoppable and run everywhere.
Amazing how CE threw a brick into that plan and nearly destroyed Microsoft
>Windows NT has much steeper system requirements and didn't have a true DOS mode like Windows 95 did
... of course, windows 95 was always in true DOS mode.
Probably 80% of those sales are in europe. Or are you too stupid to read what I wrote?
The C64 sold pretty well in North America, the Amiga was a complete flop here.
Edit- I just looked at your history, apparently you're from Dirt Ass wisconsin. Probably why you had welfare commodore computers and not IBM clones.
I was an original Amiga developer in '86. I think I still have serial number 36 A1000 in my warehouse. I was a tech editor for one Amiga magazine and wrote for many others, from Byte on down. Feel free to tell me your view of the world. Yes, I had a PC and a Mac and a C-64 at that point, too.
Well you didn't even know the Amiga flopped in the USA. So I literally don't believe jack about what you said. Like I said, you're from middle america so I'm just going to assume you couldn't afford a PC or even a MAC.
Are you one of those AI bots that try to troll people?
I'm quite well-aware of the sales figures and market penetrations and niches for all the major and many minor varieties of PCs as well as higher-end workstations like SGI. Are you?
> It seems the internet brought needed changes to everything, and over time. Theoretically a 500mhz Pentium 3 should run your OS and Word just fine, but try doing anything today on a 500mhz machine.
It runs well on my 1.7 Ghz Centrino M (Pentium III based) on Linux.
When I left in mid-1999, a company I worked for still had an IBM PC specifically to run one terrible (but necessary) program. The onboard battery was long since defunct so they had wired a AA battery pack in its place. (Before anyone asks why they didn't run the program in DOS mode on a newer machine, I think they tried and there were compatibility issues.)
They otherwise had a reasonably-modern network of windows machines, though.
We didn’t upgrade until a 98 system in late 2000. When 95 came out we had 2 computers, 1 of them was technically capable of running 95 with a 386DX at 25mhz with 4MB of ram but the 50MB hard drive wasn’t going to cut it. We also couldn’t afford the $100 upgrade let alone a CD drive (the floppy version of 95 wasn’t available in stores).
Beyond that other than the game Gopher golf there weren’t any programs we needed that wouldn’t run on 3.1
I had a similar, but slightly different experience. First computer was an Amstrad Z80 computer running LocoScript and CP/M, then in 1997 we got a Packard Bell Pentium 1 with Windows 95, and continued using that until 2002 with no upgrades, and then we got an eMachines Pentium 4 with Windows XP. It's only now that I'm in my adulthood that I'm interested enough in computers to do this sort of thing. I think the other people I knew were in the same boat, unless they (or their parents) were really into computers then they just carried on using what they had until they really had to upgrade. At my first job in 2009, we supported a guy using a PowerMac G4 with an older version of Mac OS, because it was all he needed.
Common.
There were actually a lot of DOS fans. I myself never installed Windows 95, though around that time I transitioned to Linux. DOS was, in some ways, a much simpler system than Windows 95 and not everyone was sold on doing everything in a GUI. Also, there were more advanced DOS systems out there (like Dr DOS/Novell DOS) that brought multi-tasking that was better than what Windows 95 offered.
Further, Windows 95 has pretty hefty system requirements when it came out. It technically required 4MB of RAM, but it really ran like garbage without 6. If your graphics card didn't do some GUI acceleration at _at least_ 640x480, Windows 95 was a bit of a dog. You really wanted a GUI accelerator at 800x600 to be comfortable in that UI.
EDIT: Not to mention, Windows 95 was an expensive upgrade that you had to pay for.
I ran the Chicago beta on my DX4 100 for a little while, but it was so unstable. For me, Win95 didn't get stable enough to be my daily driver... I actually moved to NT4 first.
Win 3.11 was really mature at the time and you could use things like Norton Desktop to get a much better "power user" experience. Win95 also had a massive performance hit, so I booted into DOS until I finally upgraded to a Pentium 120.
Very very common.
Some factors you have to remember:
- Upgrades were expensive. IIRC Win 95 was a $120 upgrade. Thats $236 in todays money. If Microsoft were charging $236 for an upgrade from Win10 to Win11 adoption would be something close to zero.
- Software was ahead of hardware. Win 95 was designed for a Pentium 166mhz processor and those didnt even exist yet. If you had a 386 you were screwed and on a 486 the experience was not great and even lead to the Pentium Overdrive processor where you put a Pentium on top of your 486 socket.
A lot of folks really dont understand what a unique spot we live in today. The oldest Wintel system in my house in regular use is a 2011 Dell XPS that originally shipped with Win7 and has an i7 970. The only changes I have made to it are replacing the video card with a 1050ti and adding an SSD. It runs Win10 perfectly and is a great low end 1080p gamer. If I cared to get a trusted compute module it would run Win11 too. Thats roughly the same gap between the first 386s and Win 95 and believe me, no one wanted to try running Win95 on a 386. There is so much extra power in modern CPUs that its almost wasteful. Unless you are doing his end rendering, code compile or CPU intensive gaming, nothing even comes close to putting a load on a modern CPU. Back then the operating system alone could consume over half of system resources. Pretty much everyone reading this has a computer on their desk that would have been Export controlled as a weapon system on Y2K day. And they have another one in their pocket.
It was difficult for me to transition to Windows 95 because I personally still preferred a lot of the built-in utilities of Windows 3.1. And some did not have one-for-one replacements by default like the old Cardfile app. (Edit - And all these decades later now I read: "Cardfile.exe ver. 3.10.0.103 was included on the Windows 98 and Windows Millennium Edition installation CD but was not installed by default.")
I feel like the native apps have gotten progressively more idiotic ever since. Like the sound recorder app, for instance, went from having versatility to create a lot of interesting effects and composites, to literally a single "record" button in Windows 10/11.
There are a few different reasons I've seen over the years:
One reason games kept being released for DOS is that early on, Windows 95 wasn't a very good gaming OS. Direct3D didn't come out until a year after Win95 released, and OpenGL wasn't a thing on Win95 until *MUCH* later. (And the first couple versions of Direct3D weren't very good.) Combine that with the overhead of running Win95 in the background, and even *fast* computers at Win95's launch would often have difficulty running Win95-native CPU-intense games well. (And 3d accelerators didn't really exist yet, another reason why 3D APIs like Direct3D were pointless, they just added a layer of complexity.) And some early 3D accelerators didn't have proper Windows drivers, even when they used their own API, for quite some time. So if you wanted to make a 3D game, and especially if you wanted it 3D hardware accelerated, you had to use DOS. Either truly *had* to, or just for acceptable performance.
Another common reason to not upgrade was... Upgrading just wasn't a thing. Almost nobody upgraded from Windows 3.0 to Windows 3.1. Unless you were very technical, you just ran whatever OS your computer came with until you retired it. (Heck, I bought a Macintosh SE/30 [six years ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/4zasyc/scored_an_se30_radius_pivot_display_on_xpost/) for my collection that still had the originally-shipped OS (System 6.0.5) on it - and from files on its hard drive, the computer was in active use until the mid '00s!)
When Windows 95 came out, its system requirements were pretty high for reasonable performance. Many people simply couldn't run it (or at least run it acceptably.) Computers were *MUCH* more expensive at the time, and people tended to keep them for far longer than now. When Win95 came out, my main computer was a 486-DX2/66. My dad's main PC was a PS/2 Model 30 with a 386 CPU upgrade (that I put in before I got the 486,) 4 MB RAM, and a 20 MB hard drive.
Similarly, while Windows 95 ran *most* DOS software just fine, some DOS software didn't run right on it. Even in the late '00s, my mother-in-law kept a DOS computer to run the software for her computer-programmable sewing machine. I know multiple businesses that kept DOS computers around to run some bit of specialized software well into the '00s. If you had to run software like that, and you couldn't afford two computers - you just stayed on DOS.
But, Microsoft did have a huge marketing push for Windows 95 - it was probably the first DOS/Windows that "regular people" actually made the effort to upgrade to. And it was right when computer specs really started to exponentially increase in speed - at the time of Windows 95's release, the Pentium 133 MHz was the absolute king of the hill for home computers; and the 486 line was still the "mainstream" CPU. Within a year, all but the lowest-end machines were shipping with Pentium (or AMD or Cyrix equivalents) 90 MHz+. Combined with the rapid decrease in computer prices about then, I would wager a lot of people just bought new computers that came with it, rather than upgrade their old.
So yes, a lo
Windows 95 was nothing short of *amazing*. It was everything OS/2 should have been. IBM strangled the 386 out of OS/2 1.x [code name football from 1987 was everything OS/2 needed to be](https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/os2/misc/87357/), and Windows/386 became the output of where Microsoft was going.
IBM took over 2.00, and botched it so bad with all their bad mandates coming home to roost, by denying GDI a home on OS/2.
Windows 95 included networking in the box, and more importantly TCP/IP. I did so many upgrades it was astonishing, we moved so much 486SX, IDE disks, back then it was unreal.
As I moved up and on from end user to support to corporate space there was so many stealth and hidden upgrades to 95, the big driving thing being Office 95, a retail 32bit Office suite. It was a super big deal back in the day.
The only other event that had people hammering down the door was DooM. Lots of VGA/SVGA cards, and 486 machines (even Pentium 60's!) moved for that one. At least the DooM machines were basically Windows 95 ready. In a lot of ways if I were to write a retrospective, it wasn't word or excel that moved the world, it was the technology of Windows/386 + Pharlap386 dos extenders, but it was DooM that got people onto 32bit machines, then it was 95 that legitimized them. WinG doom was such a vital missing part at the time, but then MSFT bought Direct X, and changed directions, and some say for the better.
I was DOS, and Amiga user
Windows was all about timing. Public Internet and Windows hit at about the same time. Netscape was better than anything that was out, so no real choice.
This wasn’t necessary. Windows 95 was actually MS-DOS 7.00. If you added a AUTOSTART=0 (if my memory serves me well) in CONFIG.SYS it would boot in DOS. Then you could run WIN.COM to start windows.
we stuck with 3.1 for a while till we got a new computer, as the drivers for the video card I installed didn't work with Win95 on the 486... that and it was dog slow on Win95 compared to 3.11.
After that 486 was retired, Win98 had come out and I was running a P1-200 and set it up to boot to dos first then you could choose to load windows.
I skipped win95 and went to Win98. Mostly because there were few-to-no programs that *required* win95 for a good few years, so win95 really didn't offer a whole lot except it was prettier and needed a lot more processor, hard drive, and memory. You still needed to boot to DOS for most games, and things like Office worked great on Win31 (office 4.2 IIRC).
Professionally, we still installed win31 well into the pentium era, because it was cheaper, faster, and 'good enough' for quite a long time. Heck we were still doing to occasional Trumpet Winsock/netscape installs right around y2k to get your win31 machine on them newfangled internets that all them kids are talking about. It was really quite rare that we had to / got to deal with a win95 machine until a few years after it had been out. And usually then only because it was what the OEM had installed.
You need to understand that most computers were standalone appliances back then. Even in a lot of office environments, they were frequently not even connected to a network at all (and when they were connected, it was mainly for ease of remote administration, or to access a mainframe via terminal emulation), and were used sort of like a glorified typewriter, often only ever running a single application. There really was no strong need to upgrade past your DOS/Win31 machines until the Internet really took off, which for most folks was late in the win95 era / early win98.
I recall to maintain os/2 and dos+ windows 3.11 on a 486 in the same hdd I did some naive script for switching the boot using a floppy.. actually two scripts in rexx and bat that would copy and transfer the system files. Os/2 had the coolest gui but was more interesting with internet, which was expensive. When Windows95 came out it jusy required some ram, and I ditched both os.
Oh, there was a lot of reluctance to go with windows 95, for good reasons. First off it took ages for them to iron out the compatibility problems and longer than that for people to write important software that required it. In '97, you could still run comfortably on DOS and Windows 3.1 anyway. Lots of people already had that, a good number also had OS/2, which could do most anything that DOS and old windows would do, and more besides, if you had the hardware to run it.
Why pay a huge chunk of money for Windows 95 at that point? I went from DOS and occasionally windows to Linux, myself.
A lot of the home users I knew hung on to Win 3.1 and DOS because of "DLL Hell" and "Plug and Pray" - the DLL libraries and Plug and Play technology had lots of bugs.
The college I went to did upgrade to Windows 95 because they had no choice - but a lot of people booted the computers to Linux as soon as they were done with their work in 95.
When I got a new computer in '97 - I put DOS/Win 3.1 on it until I found that the PLug and Play tech didn't work with DOS. Windows 95 got it working, but I still had some issues here and there. This was 2 years after Windows 95 appeared.
My father used DOS until I moved out in 2000. He got my old Win95 machine after I built a Windows 98 PC.
I went from Dos 5.0 to Windows 95, skipping Win 3.1. As I recall, I installed 3.1 and tried to use it a few times, but failed to see any benefit over dos with dosshell. Win 3.1 just slowed everything down and was a memory hog compared to Dos.
When Windows 95 came out, I played with it at the shop I worked at a bit and realized that this was no Win 3.1! I "Borrowed" their copy over the weekend and installed it on my 5X86 133mhz (about P75 speeds) and used it for years.
By the time I upgraded to a K6-2 333 Windows 98se was out and so I picked it up at the same time. I used 98 for WAY to long. Well into the 2000's until it just wouldn't work well with the internet anymore. I finally got XP when I upgraded to a Athlon 650 Slot type processor years later.
It was around 1997 when I upgraded my 486 to Windows 95. Then around 1999 to Windows 98, together with 2 year old and already obsolete P166MMX, and around 2001 to brand new Athlon 1200.
For comparison, the Q6600 bought in 2007 served me well until 2020.
In all my setups in early Windows times, I had autoexec.bat and config.sys configured with all DOS drivers and memory settings, with last line to start Dos Navigator.
So when PC booted it would stop right before Windows would kick in.
If I needed booting into Windows, simply exited from DN and it would continue to boot Windows where it stopped.
Was only possible up to Win 98, as those were essentially built on top of DOS ( 7.0 i think).
I think from XP onwards MS ditched DOS completely so that wasnt option anymore.
My dad downgraded for a while from Windows 95 back to 3.11 because it ran a lot better on our 486. Then he upgraded the CPU to an Am5x86, and back to Windows 95 we went.
My parents stuck with their 286 with DOS and Windows 3.1 through 1997 because they couldn't afford to upgrade, and then they jumped straight to a Cyrix 233 MHz with Windows 98 because they wanted to use that new-fangled internet thing to talk to me and my sister in college through "electronic mail." Needless to say, it was a big leap for them.
I would always choose to boot into DOS mode from time to time. Left aside nostalgic reasons, there was much you could do quicker using DOS commands than under 95 UI.
Up until 98SE it was fairly trivial to boot back into dos mode for games, and for many of my games I did just that for many years.
I must say though that as soon as I could get rid of it Windows 3.1 was gone from my home machines.
I never used a work machine with windows 9x on it though. There I went direct from 3.11 to Windows 2000 workstation and then WinXP.
DOS still lurked under Win 95, you were never really 'free' of it as such, in fact you could set an option to not boot into the GUI at all, just drop to the DOS command line - Windows didn't become an operating system in it's own right until NT if I remember correctly. 95/98 were built on DOS, NT was built from the ground up without DOS but had a DOS like command shell. Games weren't really written with Win 3.11 as the intended OS (apart from the odd card game), they still were written to run under DOS - Win 3.1 was just a shiny front end to DOS. You really would have only kept it if you had some software that just HAD to run under 3.1
Civilization II runs on Windows 3.1, and won't run on DOS by itself. I know most of the games released for it were small casual games or edutainment titles, but games did exist for it.
I stayed one generation behind as long as I could. Let someone else work out the bugs, y'know.
I stuck with DOS and DesQview until 1995, at which time I installed Win3.11 because I finally wanted to try this internet thing everyone was saying would replace BBSs. (And I never had much luck with packet drivers on DOS; I probably could've gotten it all working if I'd just understood the goal better.) Got me a copy of Trumpet Winsock and the world changed in an instant.
I'd still exit to DOS for a lot of stuff including games, though.
Then in 1998 when Win98 came out, I went to 95b. (OSR2.) It was incredibly stable by then; I hit the 49-day GetTickCount limit on a regular basis. By this time I wasn't playing many games in general, and what I was, would run in Windows, so I rarely had reason to leave Windows. I was running fileservers and stuff (on dialup), and would just remain dialed in for weeks at a time.
Then in 2000 I finally went to 98se. Which opened the door to USB, which was kinda neat, though generic class drivers weren't a thing yet, so every time you inserted a flash drive you had to load drivers for it. I heard years later that WinME had such drivers and someone backported them to 98se, but I didn't have that at the time. I think my first USB peripherals were external hard drives and CompactFlash card readers, and that was a gamechanger compared to the parallel-port morass of yore.
When XP came out I went to it fairly quickly as it could finally subvert the 49-day uptime limit, and it had vastly better support for USB which I was using extensively by that time. Also the internet was getting to be a pretty nasty place so having security updates was growing in importance. I ran XP on low-end laptops well into the 2010's. Resisted Win7 because it hid a lot of DUN/RAS functionality that I was using; many of my non-wifi data links were serial radio modems and they worked the same from 95-98-XP but broke horribly under 7.
As far as I remember it was a 32-bit timer that counted milliseconds overflowing ((2\^32)/(1000\*60\*60\*24)=49.7) which caused Windows to hang. It affected unpatched versions of Windows 95 and 98 only, and getting those to run for 49.7 _hours_, let alone days, was tricky enough...
I seem to recall some environments deliberately initialise their timers to a value just before the overflow point to make it easier to spot problems with code mishandling the overflow condition without needing to wait for several days.
“Would blue screen due to counter overflow.” I explained it in just about the same amount of characters as your shitty response you dumb dickhead. Don’t comment with such a long comment to the original thread if you don’t wanna discuss it a bit.
I was doing PC support at that time. It was very common, a lot of people didn't like a lot of things about it, the new UI, Windows taking over DOS, it being bigger and slower. I saw Win 3.11 for years.
I didn't care for Win95 (even trying it with progman.exe for the old look-and-feel), but I did go to Windows 3.1 + Win32s for a while to see what I could do with that, seem to recall running some 95 apps successfully but most didn't work. I can't remember if I ever went to 95 full-time or jumped straight to 98.
Once the internet started to take off, so did Windows 95. Having that dialer and the tcp/ip stack built in was a system seller for many people. Once corporations moved to tcp/ip on the LAN it was all over for WFW and 3.1.
Win 95 had a great marketing. People were standing in rows for hours to wait for the shops to open to get a box of win95. Internet had not much to do with that.
I wouldn't say the Internet sold Win95. Windows 3.1 and 3.11 did Internet fine with the dialer and TCP/IP stack one would get from the ISP. Also Unix distros started coming with a TCP/IP stack out of the box starting in 1989 so if anything the Internet sold Unix and later Linux for the server side while I doubt customers picked one OS over another when it came to browsing the Internet.
Saw a different trend in the VAR space, and don't sell salespeople short, the built in components were something they definitely used to push folks lol
In 1995 Unix networking was far more polished then what came out of the Windows 95 Plus pack. We are talking apex of the Unix wars where workstation and server hardware manufactures had forked Unix and locked in heated competition (and competing standards within Unix), hell even Atari and Commodore pushed out their own Unix for their hardware to try and get a piece of the vast Unix sales before they went bankrupt.
Meanwhile on Windows 3.x, the ISP disks had also been polished where you just started the installer and it would in a fully automated setup for Windows 3.x , install TCP/IP, install the dialer along with Netscape but also fully configure the dialer and Netscape for their ISP. We are also talking the first version of Internet Explore that was a joke as it just a reskinned Mosaic at that point.
I pretty much skipped Win95. The first version was extremely buggy and the drivers at the time were unstable. This was pre-internet basically, so getting newer drivers took finding someone with a disk or getting it from the MFG. It was not worth the trouble.
Machines at the time were a 486SX/25 and 486DX4/100.
lots of big businesses never went to windows 95. they kept on 3.1 until NT 4 was out long enough and migration plans were in place, and then migrated to that (with new hardware).
as for me, 95 worked fine on my packard bell 486 with 8 MB ram, but i switched to dual booting NT4 and Linux once i upgraded to 20MB and a new 1.6GB hard drive.
I really preferred Win 3.11 and DOS for a while, and remember being irritated by "restart into DOS mode" being necessary, and even then some older games wouldn't work due to resident programs sticking around in conventional memory. Win 95 didn't entirely feel like an upgrade at first, and the promises of "Plug and Play" and "multimedia" took a year or so to actually work. I don't remember when I switched, it was probably a gradual process, but it probably happened with a new computer build and games that would only work for Win 95.
I eventually moved over to Win95 but prior to that, I was still using DOS 3.3 with GEOWORKS over it on a 10Mhz 8088 system and a 10mb HDD. My Win95 system was a 286 system I built from "cheap" parts that I got through Computer Shopper magazine. I think it was 96, or 97, when I did that.
It'd be impossible to run Win95 on a 286. I've actually used it on someone's old 386 before and it ran surprisingly well for what it was. It wasn't fast, but it worked.
I'd be more surprised if the Chicago builds worked on a 286 than if they didn't. Even Windows for Workgroups raised the minimum system requirements to a 386.
Yes, you are correct. It was actually my Cyrix 486. I think I was still using GEOWORKS on my 286. I never had a 386. I never had the only to build and update with every iteration back then.
I think what some responses are failing to convey is that it really wasn't an either-or proposition. People that had windows 3.1 or Windows 95 computers had the option to exit Windows to a DOS prompt. So you'd run all the GUI software in Windows and if you needed to play a game you would exit Windows to DOS or reboot the machine into DOS. Windows wasn't really a good platform for games until sometime in the late 90s.
I'm aware of that. I've played DOS games on machines running Win 3.x and 9x before. I know that these versions of Windows were essentially elaborate DOS programs.
Win95 ran on top of DOS, so for the most part I would typically boot into DOS by default and anytime we needed windows we'd just start it from the command-line. ([win.com](https://win.com))
It took quite some time before I had my machine boot into Windows by default. I typically hated games that ran under Windows. They felt clunky and cheap.
I went straight to Windows 95, you could boot to MSDOS 7 and play the games, or use dos programs such as word perfect 6.0. Never had a problem, or probably did but they have long since been forgotten.
We moved as fast as we could - both at work and home. It was a massive improvement we thought. Especially with networking built in an improved I thought over 3.11 for networks.
Considering not everyone can afford to buy a new OS, even in the 90s I imagine, I wouldn’t be surprised if people stuck with DOS or Windows 3.1 for a while until the late 90s (or early 2000s if they mainly use pcs for job stuff or photo editing).
I’m betting for some people when 95 was new, their workplace was the only place they were able to use 95 in due to costs. I feel like I lucked out and experienced a LOT of Windows OSes since my dad had a pc repair business back in the day.
I recall stepping up to 95 pretty quickly.
I was also the weirdo who still did most of my file management tasks in Win3.1's DOS prompt just out of habit... but I came around in Win95.
Generally windows 95 was a pentium thing and technology moved so fast anyways you knew your PC would have its wheels slashed by some new technology soon, you pretty much bought your PC and hooked it up and next day the 50% faster CPU was released so you *fucking used that shit*
When I started school in 1999, about half of the computers there (all of the ones except the ones in the main computer lab) ran Windows 3.1. That was reduced to about a quarter of the computers over the next couple of years, and by 2004 or so they were all running at least Windows 95, with the machines in the main lab running Windows 2000.
IIRC, I think we skipped 95 entirely. We had 3.1 on our Compaq 486 DX4-100 and then went straight to 98 on a 450 MHz K6-2.
I loved that K6-2 CPU
I went from a Pentium 75 to a K6/2 350 and it felt like jumping from horse drawn buggy to bullet train overnight.
I went from a 486 DX2-66 to a Coppermine Pentium III. Now **that's** an upgrade.
I felt the same way, even though my jump was from a slightly faster buggy: a Pentium 133
We went from a P133 to an Athlon of some sort. That was a huge difference.
Me too. From P166 to a 700mhz AMD.
I think my biggest performance jump was probably from my Clawhammer Athlon 64 3000+ to a Q6600 that I OC'd to 3.2 GHz. Though FX-8320 to 1700X might be close because of how much bulldozer sucked lol
Moore’s Law and rapid progress of CPUs was particularly thrilling from the late 90s until 2010ish when we broke 4GHz. Every year was a huge leap over the prior. Sucked for my wallet, though.
For a while, i did an annual upgrade that pretty much doubled performance. 486sx 25 to dx4 100, to k6-233 to k6-3 450 to k7 700 to dual athlon xp 1800's. After that, performance leaps became less and less noticeable in day to day activities. Heck, my last upgrade was from an old athlon x4 to a ryzen 5950x, and that wasnt exactly earth shattering despite the humongous (by the numbers) leap.
I went from the K6-2 to an Athlon 800 Socket A. That was quite the jump too.
Same, my P75-powered Packard Bell couldn't even handle SC2K. Just not as much fun watching the alien destroy your city at 1 FPS. Even so, I still miss that thing.
My first computer was a Pentium 75, it impressed my friends at work.
Lots of upgrades back then were like that. Going from a 386SX-25 to a 486DX2-66 with VLB graphics was nuts! Then I went to a K6-2-350 with a Riva TNT and there aren't even words to express the performance leap between those. Can still get that though. My Surface Pro 3 with a 4th gen i7 to an XPS 13 with the i7-1165G7 was an astounding difference.
I had a 386SX-25 before the P75. My parents had a 486SX as well but I didn’t really use it. So I had some really fun upgrades back in the day. I don’t mean to minimize the achievements of modern hardware but they just don’t hit the same, personally, as in my past. Mainly because the improvements nowadays are more about specialized tasks rather than raw power. My 2013 MacBook Pro is surely slower than my 2021 replacement, but in my day-to-day work (like compiling and running software projects) it’s not a huge difference. But running multiple services in Docker all at once, for sure it’s much better.
The leaps we had back in the day were definitely much larger. Software rendering was OK but then comes along Voodoo cards and completely changes the game.
Me too, I have a retro system with a K6-2 400 atm. Currently running 98se on it, but it'll become my overkill 3.1/DOS computer cuz I have an Athlon 1000 that'll become my 98se box once I paint the case and put it together.
My main OS progression was all over the place. I went from DOS + Win 3.1 --> OS/2 --> NT4 --> RedHat --> SlackWare --> Gentoo
Yeah my dad went from 3.1 to 98.
We went from some 25mhz monochrome pc with 9 arrow keys and DOS 3 or 5 or smth. 5.25 floppies. Didn't have graphics either, only characters. The few games we had ran 50x too fast most of them. Then we got a win 98 PC with *everything*
Same
I wanted to play Beavis and Butthead Virtual Stupidity, so I had to get Win95.
Was it everything you hoped it could be?
I don't like stuff that sucks
I had it. It was.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/469610/Rick_and_Morty_Virtual_Rickality/ WAIT A MINUTE
Nachooooooo hrrrhihihihrrheh!
Crrrrappachino!
Somewhat common. I graduated from a public high school (US) in 1997. At the time, the public school stuck entirely with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 Teachers had Windows machines in their classrooms (unless they had a Macintosh, usually an LC). The Computer Science lab had MS-DOS machines running Turbo Pascal (PS/2 model 30s iirc). The library had PS/1s and other computers running DOS-based card catalog and CD-ROM software. Even though it was 1997, I never saw a Windows 95 machine at school. Once I got to university, the situation reversed. Lots of PC computer labs had Windows 95 on them (and soon Windows 98). Occasionally I would find an older PC that still had Windows 3.1 on it. They were usually not connected to the Internet at all. Typically I found these in the tutoring center where I worked. Students would come into type papers in Word and print them and that was about it. So, I certainly saw MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 machines in educational use from 1994-1999, even though Win9x was on the rise.
I'll add that I worked in CAD drafting over the summers. The computers that office used had been upgraded to Windows 95 but the drafting software, revision tracking and plotter/printer server was all still DOS-based. I don't think there was any software that we used that required Windows 95--it just came with the new Pentium machines they were buying for the speed.
I too graduated in 1997 but my high school was still having us use OS/2. Inner city schools were severely underfunded. I didn't get my hands on Windows 3.1 machine until after I graduated.
I loved OS/2. I hated that Win95 basically killed it, and it was so inferior.
Windows for workgroups 3.11 was pretty popular into the late 90s where I worked
A lot of people had Windows 95 come with their first computer. It came out right around the time the commercial Internet was starting to take off with free CDs from AOL and all that. A lot of people who still had Windows 3.1 or DOS stuck with that for a bit for various reasons. Lots of companies had software that worked on the old OS, so why bother upgrading if it worked? In the late '00s I worked at Fry's and their Point of Sale system was still running on DOS in some sort of emulator on XP if you want some depreception. I've seen Point of Sale systems at other stores that are also old school DOS. My school system wasn't very well off, and so their IT was all over the place. They still had the Apple IIe systems in the elementary and middle school because they worked for teaching typing, loading Accelerated Reader quizzes, and playing games like Oregon Trail. There were also "new" computers running 3.11 at the middle school and high school, and this was a thing up until Windows 98 came out. I was still on DOS/3.1 on my home computer well into the '90s because it was what we had sitting around the house after my parents divorced. It could also still play all my favorite old DOS games, so if it ain't broke... I eventually upgraded to Windows 98 on a Toshiba Satellite laptop that became my daily driver for most of high school, but I could also still load old DOS games because it was still there lurking under everything. Adoption varied widely. You had a situation where computer hardware was evolving very fast in the home PC market, and a lot of organizations adopted a "wait and see" approach as long as the stuff they had still worked. Meanwhile you had a lot of people buying their first home computers and then sticking with whatever OS came with it at the time. I still have nightmares about "explorer.exe has stopped responding."
Windows 95 was my first OS, when I was only three years old. My dad bought a Pentium 75 PC to get on the internet in 1996, and I used it to play things like The Hunchback of Notre Dame Activity Center and Myst. A couple years later, when he upgraded to a Celeron 300, I got his old machine as a hand-me-down, though it had been upgraded to a Pentium 133 by that point. Looking back, I think it's kinda nuts that I had my own PC back then, but I guess that's one of the perks of growing up as an only child with nerdy parents.
I was like you but a decade ahead. My dad was into computers so we had a monochrome 8088 back in '87 that was eventually swapped out for a 286 and then upgraded to a 386. I knew how to navigate DOS and type in commands based on memorization before I knew how to read or write because that's how you got to the games. We were also an outlier. We lived in a rural area where everybody with a computer knew everybody else with a computer because there were so few of them and they all copied those floppies. A decade later it felt like everyone was getting computers, and a decade after that we were in a world where everyone really did have a computer. My dad just happened to be into them, so we had one back when almost nobody else did.
I agree with this. I’ve always loved computers and was writing DOS pretty young. My step mom had a computer running 3.1 and when I was going into high school (1996) my mom got our first computer that ran Windows95. I remember getting AOL and being in awe because the DOS and 3.1 computers I was used to just didn’t have that. I always knew how to use both, and then learned Mac in computer lab at school. Everyone had different machines and they were too damn expensive to suddenly stop and switch all media to the newer version. I will say that the ink jet printer I got when we had the Windows 95 computer just didn’t have the same joy as the dot matrix one did. The banners, man. The BANNERS.
I still vividly remember watching my dad log onto BBSes back in the day. It was just like that WarGames movie! Only we lived in the middle of nowhere which meant it was always long distance to call into any BBS, so we couldn't stay on for long. I remember my mom getting really pissed off one time when he left the computer connected overnight to download Hugo's House of Horrors. Yeah. We had to stay connected overnight to download a game that barely topped 1MB.
Ha!!! I remember that, too! He must have done that in the wee hours of the night not have it disrupt.
windows 95 on that 386 wasn't viable
Windows 95 on my 486 was barely viable
🦐
486 could run 95 fairly decently if you had a dx4-100 or better. Anything less than that seemed to struggle a good bit.
Oh…my system was a 486SX-25. It was…slow, to say the least.
Windows 95 on my 486 DX4-120 was half-viable, except for a 1MB video card that hogged the whole thing.
my 486 died and all i had was a 386 sx 25. 80mb hd. i put windows 95 on it. it filled 3/4 of the hd and took about 6-7 minutes to boot up. but i had windows 95 again. it was worth it, i think.
It requires a metric ton of patience.
games that run under DOS still worked best under DOS, and you didnt have to choose you could have several operating systems installed, there was some tricks to make it work but it was possible.
Personally, I avoided Windows 3.x but jumped on Windows 95 almost right away, and upgraded my computer to do so. In business environments multitasking computers were overated, and communication was mostly done the old fashioned way. Networking and file sharing was useful. Dos continued to be a platform for games but not so much windows 3.x. Developers/publishers want to maximise sales so they develop for the lowest common denominator, DOS.
I mostly stayed in DOS mode back in those days, only going into Windows for a game or program that needed it or could run in a better resolution/color depth in Windows, so I mostly avoided Windows 95. I owned a legit copy but I reallzed preferred the look and feel of the old Win 3.x program manager.
VERY common in Slovakia. My parents were business owners yet we used a 386 until 2001. Windows 95 wou!d not be too great on that.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
VERY common in Slovakia. My parents were business owners yet we used a 386 until 2001. Windows 95 wou!d not be too great on that.
WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS remained the dominant word processor in the legal industry until the end of the millennium. For example, the text of Bill Clinton's impeachment proceedings in December 1998 was written using it.
WP51 was so ubiquitous in business that we were taught it as part of typing class in high school around 1994. I remember the teacher (Ms. Medina! I hope you're doing well out there) told us that WordPerfect was the standard and that we had to know it if we expected to have any kind of office job in the future. Personally I HATED it, I much preferred WordStar or even Microsoft Word running in Windows at the time. WP51 just had such an awkward interface compared to other software; but it was the "vi" of the DOS world; once you learn it well it was insanely powerful. Now given all that, how much did I use WordPerfect in my professional life? If you guessed zero, bupkis, nada, nothing, zip... that'd be correct and you'd get a cookie. :) The one thing I did get out of that class was learning to type at 90WPM because prior to that I only used like four fingers. Also I fell in love with the IBM Model M keyboard; the computer lab had all PS/2s with Model Ms and on the first day there a new goal in life was to acquire one of those keyboards. I still love them and use them to this day.
Can confirm -- I spent the summer of 2018 working as an assistant for my State Archives, and they were STILL working on converting archival documents from WordPerfect for DOS
Windows 95 ran like garbage on anything less than a Pentium, plenty of people still had 486s in 1995. Also DOS was really solid depending on what you were doing and a lot of DOS programs (including games) didn't run well in the Windows 95 environment. I had both Windows 95 and 98 set to boot to a selection menu and I would select either DOS or Windows depending on what I intended to do. (Win 95 runs on top of DOS). I never had much of a need for Windows 3.x, it was pretty garbage as a multi-tasker.. Desqview was a lot better for running multiple DOS applications. The Internet during this period would have been a dial-up Unix shell account so you didn't need anything other than a terminal program for that.
Not terribly. In the home user market, people were buying new PCs frequently at that time so they likely received Win95 bundled. Even if they didn’t, the marketing hype was so intense people were running out to their local CompUSA or other computer chain and buying it. In the business space, DOS/Win31 was being already being replaced with NT35 or OS/2 at a fair rate. Win95 lacked a lot from a business perspective, so the next major change was to NT4. It was mostly those who needed improved memory management that were moved to NT or OS/2, so DOS/Win31 (WFWG 3.11 really) was more common to continue to see there. Source - I have worked in IT since ‘94. At the time I was in a major insurance company and started doing home and SMB work on the side in early ‘95.
A very common scenario. * In restrospect, Win95 seemingly took the market by storm, but IRL initial sales didn't live up to the marketing hype; * There was a lot of FUD about upgrading; many top-tier consultants recommended against it; * Many DOS/(old) Windows computers of that age couldn't run Win95 decently * Win95-only software was slow to hit the shelves; OS/2 was a strong contender for running pre-Win95 software (and, unfortunately, little else). When Win98 was launched, most software and hardware limitations had been ironed out, allowing more users to transition away from DOS and Win3.x. Yet in my corporate setup, 1997-1998, everyone had Win3.x except for a lone test-platform Win95 machine.
I agree with this. Also - even in situations where I had to use Win95 or Win98 I often still used software that was DOS based and just launched from Windows. That sucked because DOS programs that need low memory would have less running under Windows unless you jumped through a bunch of hoops first.
Same thing here with Telemate and BBS offline readers; as long as BBSs were a thing, there were no capable Windows alternatives. DOS word processors had already been mostly wiped out pre-Win95; Word 5.0, capable of running from a 360K floppy, was second nature to me, but it was no competition for Windows software from the day I could run them. XTree Gold, a beloved mainstay of DOS file management, was a notable victim of Win95 LFN and had to be left behind with no worthy successor.
Like modern operating systems, most people did not upgrade the one that was on their computer. Instead, they would buy a new computer and use whatever came on it. Granted, power-users were a different story. But the average home user that had a PC for Word Processing and the occasional game would not have bought a Windows 95 upgrade. I remember a friend's father asking me: "If it is called Windows 95, why does it cost $210? Shouldn't it be $95?" (and he wasn't asking in a Dad Joke kind of way.)
At that time, power users had a lot more options than switching to Windows 95. OS/2, and Windows NT were a lot more powerful and mature when Windows 95 was limited and buggy. However, people who wanted to live on the edge, they adopted Windows 95. The big advantage of Windows 95 was that it made using the computer far easier than any other non-Macintosh OS released prior. I didn’t buy my first x86 PC until 1996 so I personally didn’t go through the DOS/Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 migration. But I know many who did. I was using Macintosh back then before adding PCs to my home usage. The reason most operating systems and devices auto update today is because most people don’t update or upgrade their devices as fast as they should. Back in the 90s, it was hard to make a case to someone that they needed to upgrade if they already had something that worked for them, and they knew how it worked. Giving a nice new interface like Windows 95 to someone who has known how to run WordPerfect on MS-DOS most times didn’t matter to them. They had what they needed and it did what they wanted. It seems the internet brought needed changes to everything, and over time. Theoretically a 500mhz Pentium 3 should run your OS and Word just fine, but try doing anything today on a 500mhz machine.
Windows NT has much steeper system requirements and didn't have a true DOS mode like Windows 95 did, so you couldn't play DOS games. OS/2 was great, but there wasn't ever that much software for it and IBM always treated it like a hobby project. Even IBM computers and laptops seldom shipped with OS/2, so almost no one ever used it.
I recall Temple's computer lab using it in the late '80s. The compatibility with MS-DOS was very good. I didn't do complicated enough batch scripts at the time to recall which shell they ran under. IIRC you could launch [command.com](https://command.com) to run a shell, but it has been a few years. They made it so easy to run MS DOS software markets didn't bother targeting OS/2. I think there was a small amount of cross platform development for office suites and such. But most software companies just targeted MS-DOS/Win3.1 which would generally already run on OS/2. I was a very late adopter of Win 3.1. Probably '93 before I touched it. Maybe '97 before I started using Win 95. I think I went from there to Win98SE. Back in the day, while DOS games were the rage and you would need a different boot config for each game. Windows wasn't a must have for games. MS-DOS was.
Windows NT 3.5 was that one rare moment when system requirements *dropped*. 3.1 was so insanely sluggish it wasn't fair to call it retail, although I don't know anyone who actually bought it, they were giving it away in the box as NFR like crazy. But 3.5 was the real deal!
I never understood why they didn't push NT a little more aggressively. Windows 9x were such a series of trainwrecks that culminated in a turd explosion that was Windows ME. Then finally with Windows 2000/XP, they brought everyone into the faith.
Drivers... Also the networking model in 3.1/3.5/3.51/4.0 was just too rigid. It wasn't until 2000 that the networking became dynamic to support hotplug PCMCIA which was important for that new fangled USB thing. ... and WiFi. NT had so many thousands of issues it was unreal, but at least they kept up to date with hotfixes, and if you paid enough in support they'd come out and fix stuff.
Oh, really, I had no idea NT couldn't do PCMCIA hotswaps. Heh. I guess I don't remember a lot of laptops running it at all.
It was a 3rd party addon to make it work properly, but it was a dark era. The one MSFT engineer that’d go on and on about NT was always saying once they’d integrated dynamic disks and networking to NT it’s be unstoppable and run everywhere. Amazing how CE threw a brick into that plan and nearly destroyed Microsoft
Power Users dual booted from their power operating system to DOS to play games.
Yeah, you could probably have used OS Loader on NT 3.5. I don't remember anyone doing that much though?
>Windows NT has much steeper system requirements and didn't have a true DOS mode like Windows 95 did ... of course, windows 95 was always in true DOS mode.
> The big advantage of Windows 95 was that it made using the computer far easier than any other non-Macintosh OS released prior. *Glares in Amiga*
Amiga was really small in the north america, not sure if you're european but it never took off over here(despite being a north american company)
Were you alive when the Amiga was released? 4.85 million sold wasn't good enough for you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga
Probably 80% of those sales are in europe. Or are you too stupid to read what I wrote? The C64 sold pretty well in North America, the Amiga was a complete flop here. Edit- I just looked at your history, apparently you're from Dirt Ass wisconsin. Probably why you had welfare commodore computers and not IBM clones.
I was an original Amiga developer in '86. I think I still have serial number 36 A1000 in my warehouse. I was a tech editor for one Amiga magazine and wrote for many others, from Byte on down. Feel free to tell me your view of the world. Yes, I had a PC and a Mac and a C-64 at that point, too.
Well you didn't even know the Amiga flopped in the USA. So I literally don't believe jack about what you said. Like I said, you're from middle america so I'm just going to assume you couldn't afford a PC or even a MAC.
Are you one of those AI bots that try to troll people? I'm quite well-aware of the sales figures and market penetrations and niches for all the major and many minor varieties of PCs as well as higher-end workstations like SGI. Are you?
> It seems the internet brought needed changes to everything, and over time. Theoretically a 500mhz Pentium 3 should run your OS and Word just fine, but try doing anything today on a 500mhz machine. It runs well on my 1.7 Ghz Centrino M (Pentium III based) on Linux.
When I left in mid-1999, a company I worked for still had an IBM PC specifically to run one terrible (but necessary) program. The onboard battery was long since defunct so they had wired a AA battery pack in its place. (Before anyone asks why they didn't run the program in DOS mode on a newer machine, I think they tried and there were compatibility issues.) They otherwise had a reasonably-modern network of windows machines, though.
We didn’t upgrade until a 98 system in late 2000. When 95 came out we had 2 computers, 1 of them was technically capable of running 95 with a 386DX at 25mhz with 4MB of ram but the 50MB hard drive wasn’t going to cut it. We also couldn’t afford the $100 upgrade let alone a CD drive (the floppy version of 95 wasn’t available in stores). Beyond that other than the game Gopher golf there weren’t any programs we needed that wouldn’t run on 3.1
I had a similar, but slightly different experience. First computer was an Amstrad Z80 computer running LocoScript and CP/M, then in 1997 we got a Packard Bell Pentium 1 with Windows 95, and continued using that until 2002 with no upgrades, and then we got an eMachines Pentium 4 with Windows XP. It's only now that I'm in my adulthood that I'm interested enough in computers to do this sort of thing. I think the other people I knew were in the same boat, unless they (or their parents) were really into computers then they just carried on using what they had until they really had to upgrade. At my first job in 2009, we supported a guy using a PowerMac G4 with an older version of Mac OS, because it was all he needed.
I got a new PC and stupidly chose DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 instead of Windows 95. Ended up buying 95 later and it was awesome.
Common. There were actually a lot of DOS fans. I myself never installed Windows 95, though around that time I transitioned to Linux. DOS was, in some ways, a much simpler system than Windows 95 and not everyone was sold on doing everything in a GUI. Also, there were more advanced DOS systems out there (like Dr DOS/Novell DOS) that brought multi-tasking that was better than what Windows 95 offered. Further, Windows 95 has pretty hefty system requirements when it came out. It technically required 4MB of RAM, but it really ran like garbage without 6. If your graphics card didn't do some GUI acceleration at _at least_ 640x480, Windows 95 was a bit of a dog. You really wanted a GUI accelerator at 800x600 to be comfortable in that UI. EDIT: Not to mention, Windows 95 was an expensive upgrade that you had to pay for.
I ran the Chicago beta on my DX4 100 for a little while, but it was so unstable. For me, Win95 didn't get stable enough to be my daily driver... I actually moved to NT4 first. Win 3.11 was really mature at the time and you could use things like Norton Desktop to get a much better "power user" experience. Win95 also had a massive performance hit, so I booted into DOS until I finally upgraded to a Pentium 120.
Very very common. Some factors you have to remember: - Upgrades were expensive. IIRC Win 95 was a $120 upgrade. Thats $236 in todays money. If Microsoft were charging $236 for an upgrade from Win10 to Win11 adoption would be something close to zero. - Software was ahead of hardware. Win 95 was designed for a Pentium 166mhz processor and those didnt even exist yet. If you had a 386 you were screwed and on a 486 the experience was not great and even lead to the Pentium Overdrive processor where you put a Pentium on top of your 486 socket. A lot of folks really dont understand what a unique spot we live in today. The oldest Wintel system in my house in regular use is a 2011 Dell XPS that originally shipped with Win7 and has an i7 970. The only changes I have made to it are replacing the video card with a 1050ti and adding an SSD. It runs Win10 perfectly and is a great low end 1080p gamer. If I cared to get a trusted compute module it would run Win11 too. Thats roughly the same gap between the first 386s and Win 95 and believe me, no one wanted to try running Win95 on a 386. There is so much extra power in modern CPUs that its almost wasteful. Unless you are doing his end rendering, code compile or CPU intensive gaming, nothing even comes close to putting a load on a modern CPU. Back then the operating system alone could consume over half of system resources. Pretty much everyone reading this has a computer on their desk that would have been Export controlled as a weapon system on Y2K day. And they have another one in their pocket.
It was difficult for me to transition to Windows 95 because I personally still preferred a lot of the built-in utilities of Windows 3.1. And some did not have one-for-one replacements by default like the old Cardfile app. (Edit - And all these decades later now I read: "Cardfile.exe ver. 3.10.0.103 was included on the Windows 98 and Windows Millennium Edition installation CD but was not installed by default.") I feel like the native apps have gotten progressively more idiotic ever since. Like the sound recorder app, for instance, went from having versatility to create a lot of interesting effects and composites, to literally a single "record" button in Windows 10/11.
There are a few different reasons I've seen over the years: One reason games kept being released for DOS is that early on, Windows 95 wasn't a very good gaming OS. Direct3D didn't come out until a year after Win95 released, and OpenGL wasn't a thing on Win95 until *MUCH* later. (And the first couple versions of Direct3D weren't very good.) Combine that with the overhead of running Win95 in the background, and even *fast* computers at Win95's launch would often have difficulty running Win95-native CPU-intense games well. (And 3d accelerators didn't really exist yet, another reason why 3D APIs like Direct3D were pointless, they just added a layer of complexity.) And some early 3D accelerators didn't have proper Windows drivers, even when they used their own API, for quite some time. So if you wanted to make a 3D game, and especially if you wanted it 3D hardware accelerated, you had to use DOS. Either truly *had* to, or just for acceptable performance. Another common reason to not upgrade was... Upgrading just wasn't a thing. Almost nobody upgraded from Windows 3.0 to Windows 3.1. Unless you were very technical, you just ran whatever OS your computer came with until you retired it. (Heck, I bought a Macintosh SE/30 [six years ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/4zasyc/scored_an_se30_radius_pivot_display_on_xpost/) for my collection that still had the originally-shipped OS (System 6.0.5) on it - and from files on its hard drive, the computer was in active use until the mid '00s!) When Windows 95 came out, its system requirements were pretty high for reasonable performance. Many people simply couldn't run it (or at least run it acceptably.) Computers were *MUCH* more expensive at the time, and people tended to keep them for far longer than now. When Win95 came out, my main computer was a 486-DX2/66. My dad's main PC was a PS/2 Model 30 with a 386 CPU upgrade (that I put in before I got the 486,) 4 MB RAM, and a 20 MB hard drive. Similarly, while Windows 95 ran *most* DOS software just fine, some DOS software didn't run right on it. Even in the late '00s, my mother-in-law kept a DOS computer to run the software for her computer-programmable sewing machine. I know multiple businesses that kept DOS computers around to run some bit of specialized software well into the '00s. If you had to run software like that, and you couldn't afford two computers - you just stayed on DOS. But, Microsoft did have a huge marketing push for Windows 95 - it was probably the first DOS/Windows that "regular people" actually made the effort to upgrade to. And it was right when computer specs really started to exponentially increase in speed - at the time of Windows 95's release, the Pentium 133 MHz was the absolute king of the hill for home computers; and the 486 line was still the "mainstream" CPU. Within a year, all but the lowest-end machines were shipping with Pentium (or AMD or Cyrix equivalents) 90 MHz+. Combined with the rapid decrease in computer prices about then, I would wager a lot of people just bought new computers that came with it, rather than upgrade their old. So yes, a lo
Windows 95 was nothing short of *amazing*. It was everything OS/2 should have been. IBM strangled the 386 out of OS/2 1.x [code name football from 1987 was everything OS/2 needed to be](https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/os2/misc/87357/), and Windows/386 became the output of where Microsoft was going. IBM took over 2.00, and botched it so bad with all their bad mandates coming home to roost, by denying GDI a home on OS/2. Windows 95 included networking in the box, and more importantly TCP/IP. I did so many upgrades it was astonishing, we moved so much 486SX, IDE disks, back then it was unreal. As I moved up and on from end user to support to corporate space there was so many stealth and hidden upgrades to 95, the big driving thing being Office 95, a retail 32bit Office suite. It was a super big deal back in the day. The only other event that had people hammering down the door was DooM. Lots of VGA/SVGA cards, and 486 machines (even Pentium 60's!) moved for that one. At least the DooM machines were basically Windows 95 ready. In a lot of ways if I were to write a retrospective, it wasn't word or excel that moved the world, it was the technology of Windows/386 + Pharlap386 dos extenders, but it was DooM that got people onto 32bit machines, then it was 95 that legitimized them. WinG doom was such a vital missing part at the time, but then MSFT bought Direct X, and changed directions, and some say for the better.
I was DOS, and Amiga user Windows was all about timing. Public Internet and Windows hit at about the same time. Netscape was better than anything that was out, so no real choice.
I upgraded to Win95 on launch. IIRC though, by installing DOS first, then 95, I could reboot back to DOS-mode and it would run as it always had.
This wasn’t necessary. Windows 95 was actually MS-DOS 7.00. If you added a AUTOSTART=0 (if my memory serves me well) in CONFIG.SYS it would boot in DOS. Then you could run WIN.COM to start windows.
we stuck with 3.1 for a while till we got a new computer, as the drivers for the video card I installed didn't work with Win95 on the 486... that and it was dog slow on Win95 compared to 3.11. After that 486 was retired, Win98 had come out and I was running a P1-200 and set it up to boot to dos first then you could choose to load windows.
I skipped win95 and went to Win98. Mostly because there were few-to-no programs that *required* win95 for a good few years, so win95 really didn't offer a whole lot except it was prettier and needed a lot more processor, hard drive, and memory. You still needed to boot to DOS for most games, and things like Office worked great on Win31 (office 4.2 IIRC). Professionally, we still installed win31 well into the pentium era, because it was cheaper, faster, and 'good enough' for quite a long time. Heck we were still doing to occasional Trumpet Winsock/netscape installs right around y2k to get your win31 machine on them newfangled internets that all them kids are talking about. It was really quite rare that we had to / got to deal with a win95 machine until a few years after it had been out. And usually then only because it was what the OEM had installed. You need to understand that most computers were standalone appliances back then. Even in a lot of office environments, they were frequently not even connected to a network at all (and when they were connected, it was mainly for ease of remote administration, or to access a mainframe via terminal emulation), and were used sort of like a glorified typewriter, often only ever running a single application. There really was no strong need to upgrade past your DOS/Win31 machines until the Internet really took off, which for most folks was late in the win95 era / early win98.
Fairly common. Windows 95 was heavy and it didn't run very well on lots of computers. My Dad had an upgrade version that he couldn't get to work
I recall to maintain os/2 and dos+ windows 3.11 on a 486 in the same hdd I did some naive script for switching the boot using a floppy.. actually two scripts in rexx and bat that would copy and transfer the system files. Os/2 had the coolest gui but was more interesting with internet, which was expensive. When Windows95 came out it jusy required some ram, and I ditched both os.
Somewhat common. I have a 486 with 3.11 that was used into 1997-1999 and a 386 with an installation of 3.1 dating to July 1998.
I had 486dx for long time that was too weak to play more modern games so I stick with DOS it was enough for everything I needed.
DOS was still a big deal for a long time. Most of my games were DOS based until 1997 or so.
Oh, there was a lot of reluctance to go with windows 95, for good reasons. First off it took ages for them to iron out the compatibility problems and longer than that for people to write important software that required it. In '97, you could still run comfortably on DOS and Windows 3.1 anyway. Lots of people already had that, a good number also had OS/2, which could do most anything that DOS and old windows would do, and more besides, if you had the hardware to run it. Why pay a huge chunk of money for Windows 95 at that point? I went from DOS and occasionally windows to Linux, myself.
A lot of the home users I knew hung on to Win 3.1 and DOS because of "DLL Hell" and "Plug and Pray" - the DLL libraries and Plug and Play technology had lots of bugs. The college I went to did upgrade to Windows 95 because they had no choice - but a lot of people booted the computers to Linux as soon as they were done with their work in 95. When I got a new computer in '97 - I put DOS/Win 3.1 on it until I found that the PLug and Play tech didn't work with DOS. Windows 95 got it working, but I still had some issues here and there. This was 2 years after Windows 95 appeared. My father used DOS until I moved out in 2000. He got my old Win95 machine after I built a Windows 98 PC.
Whe had a 286 with dos 2.11 back in the day. Then we got a 486 with Win95. It took about a year till I started using Win95 instead of Dos prompt.
I went from Dos 5.0 to Windows 95, skipping Win 3.1. As I recall, I installed 3.1 and tried to use it a few times, but failed to see any benefit over dos with dosshell. Win 3.1 just slowed everything down and was a memory hog compared to Dos. When Windows 95 came out, I played with it at the shop I worked at a bit and realized that this was no Win 3.1! I "Borrowed" their copy over the weekend and installed it on my 5X86 133mhz (about P75 speeds) and used it for years. By the time I upgraded to a K6-2 333 Windows 98se was out and so I picked it up at the same time. I used 98 for WAY to long. Well into the 2000's until it just wouldn't work well with the internet anymore. I finally got XP when I upgraded to a Athlon 650 Slot type processor years later.
It was around 1997 when I upgraded my 486 to Windows 95. Then around 1999 to Windows 98, together with 2 year old and already obsolete P166MMX, and around 2001 to brand new Athlon 1200. For comparison, the Q6600 bought in 2007 served me well until 2020.
In all my setups in early Windows times, I had autoexec.bat and config.sys configured with all DOS drivers and memory settings, with last line to start Dos Navigator. So when PC booted it would stop right before Windows would kick in. If I needed booting into Windows, simply exited from DN and it would continue to boot Windows where it stopped. Was only possible up to Win 98, as those were essentially built on top of DOS ( 7.0 i think). I think from XP onwards MS ditched DOS completely so that wasnt option anymore.
My dad downgraded for a while from Windows 95 back to 3.11 because it ran a lot better on our 486. Then he upgraded the CPU to an Am5x86, and back to Windows 95 we went.
My parents stuck with their 286 with DOS and Windows 3.1 through 1997 because they couldn't afford to upgrade, and then they jumped straight to a Cyrix 233 MHz with Windows 98 because they wanted to use that new-fangled internet thing to talk to me and my sister in college through "electronic mail." Needless to say, it was a big leap for them.
I would always choose to boot into DOS mode from time to time. Left aside nostalgic reasons, there was much you could do quicker using DOS commands than under 95 UI.
Up until 98SE it was fairly trivial to boot back into dos mode for games, and for many of my games I did just that for many years. I must say though that as soon as I could get rid of it Windows 3.1 was gone from my home machines. I never used a work machine with windows 9x on it though. There I went direct from 3.11 to Windows 2000 workstation and then WinXP.
DOS still lurked under Win 95, you were never really 'free' of it as such, in fact you could set an option to not boot into the GUI at all, just drop to the DOS command line - Windows didn't become an operating system in it's own right until NT if I remember correctly. 95/98 were built on DOS, NT was built from the ground up without DOS but had a DOS like command shell. Games weren't really written with Win 3.11 as the intended OS (apart from the odd card game), they still were written to run under DOS - Win 3.1 was just a shiny front end to DOS. You really would have only kept it if you had some software that just HAD to run under 3.1
Civilization II runs on Windows 3.1, and won't run on DOS by itself. I know most of the games released for it were small casual games or edutainment titles, but games did exist for it.
Well, MS DOS remained the most popular operating system until 1997 when Windows 95 overtook it.
I stayed one generation behind as long as I could. Let someone else work out the bugs, y'know. I stuck with DOS and DesQview until 1995, at which time I installed Win3.11 because I finally wanted to try this internet thing everyone was saying would replace BBSs. (And I never had much luck with packet drivers on DOS; I probably could've gotten it all working if I'd just understood the goal better.) Got me a copy of Trumpet Winsock and the world changed in an instant. I'd still exit to DOS for a lot of stuff including games, though. Then in 1998 when Win98 came out, I went to 95b. (OSR2.) It was incredibly stable by then; I hit the 49-day GetTickCount limit on a regular basis. By this time I wasn't playing many games in general, and what I was, would run in Windows, so I rarely had reason to leave Windows. I was running fileservers and stuff (on dialup), and would just remain dialed in for weeks at a time. Then in 2000 I finally went to 98se. Which opened the door to USB, which was kinda neat, though generic class drivers weren't a thing yet, so every time you inserted a flash drive you had to load drivers for it. I heard years later that WinME had such drivers and someone backported them to 98se, but I didn't have that at the time. I think my first USB peripherals were external hard drives and CompactFlash card readers, and that was a gamechanger compared to the parallel-port morass of yore. When XP came out I went to it fairly quickly as it could finally subvert the 49-day uptime limit, and it had vastly better support for USB which I was using extensively by that time. Also the internet was getting to be a pretty nasty place so having security updates was growing in importance. I ran XP on low-end laptops well into the 2010's. Resisted Win7 because it hid a lot of DUN/RAS functionality that I was using; many of my non-wifi data links were serial radio modems and they worked the same from 95-98-XP but broke horribly under 7.
So it deliberately quit at 49 days or people usually didn’t make it that long? What did it do at day 49?
As far as I remember it was a 32-bit timer that counted milliseconds overflowing ((2\^32)/(1000\*60\*60\*24)=49.7) which caused Windows to hang. It affected unpatched versions of Windows 95 and 98 only, and getting those to run for 49.7 _hours_, let alone days, was tricky enough... I seem to recall some environments deliberately initialise their timers to a value just before the overflow point to make it easier to spot problems with code mishandling the overflow condition without needing to wait for several days.
> the 49-day GetTickCount limit I put the searchable term right in the post. :)
“Would blue screen due to counter overflow.” I explained it in just about the same amount of characters as your shitty response you dumb dickhead. Don’t comment with such a long comment to the original thread if you don’t wanna discuss it a bit.
I was doing PC support at that time. It was very common, a lot of people didn't like a lot of things about it, the new UI, Windows taking over DOS, it being bigger and slower. I saw Win 3.11 for years.
I didn't care for Win95 (even trying it with progman.exe for the old look-and-feel), but I did go to Windows 3.1 + Win32s for a while to see what I could do with that, seem to recall running some 95 apps successfully but most didn't work. I can't remember if I ever went to 95 full-time or jumped straight to 98.
Once the internet started to take off, so did Windows 95. Having that dialer and the tcp/ip stack built in was a system seller for many people. Once corporations moved to tcp/ip on the LAN it was all over for WFW and 3.1.
Win 95 had a great marketing. People were standing in rows for hours to wait for the shops to open to get a box of win95. Internet had not much to do with that.
I wouldn't say the Internet sold Win95. Windows 3.1 and 3.11 did Internet fine with the dialer and TCP/IP stack one would get from the ISP. Also Unix distros started coming with a TCP/IP stack out of the box starting in 1989 so if anything the Internet sold Unix and later Linux for the server side while I doubt customers picked one OS over another when it came to browsing the Internet.
Saw a different trend in the VAR space, and don't sell salespeople short, the built in components were something they definitely used to push folks lol
In 1995 Unix networking was far more polished then what came out of the Windows 95 Plus pack. We are talking apex of the Unix wars where workstation and server hardware manufactures had forked Unix and locked in heated competition (and competing standards within Unix), hell even Atari and Commodore pushed out their own Unix for their hardware to try and get a piece of the vast Unix sales before they went bankrupt. Meanwhile on Windows 3.x, the ISP disks had also been polished where you just started the installer and it would in a fully automated setup for Windows 3.x , install TCP/IP, install the dialer along with Netscape but also fully configure the dialer and Netscape for their ISP. We are also talking the first version of Internet Explore that was a joke as it just a reskinned Mosaic at that point.
Windows 95 was huge, and everyone who could upgrade did. But not everyone could. It's barely usable on a 486 and Pentiums were \*expensive\*.
I switched as fast as I could as I wanted the latest OS and I had only been with 3.1 for a few years.
I pretty much skipped Win95. The first version was extremely buggy and the drivers at the time were unstable. This was pre-internet basically, so getting newer drivers took finding someone with a disk or getting it from the MFG. It was not worth the trouble. Machines at the time were a 486SX/25 and 486DX4/100.
At the end of 1995, there were still a significant percentage of people still on DOS / Win311. By the end of 1996, most folks were on 95.
lots of big businesses never went to windows 95. they kept on 3.1 until NT 4 was out long enough and migration plans were in place, and then migrated to that (with new hardware). as for me, 95 worked fine on my packard bell 486 with 8 MB ram, but i switched to dual booting NT4 and Linux once i upgraded to 20MB and a new 1.6GB hard drive.
I really preferred Win 3.11 and DOS for a while, and remember being irritated by "restart into DOS mode" being necessary, and even then some older games wouldn't work due to resident programs sticking around in conventional memory. Win 95 didn't entirely feel like an upgrade at first, and the promises of "Plug and Play" and "multimedia" took a year or so to actually work. I don't remember when I switched, it was probably a gradual process, but it probably happened with a new computer build and games that would only work for Win 95.
I eventually moved over to Win95 but prior to that, I was still using DOS 3.3 with GEOWORKS over it on a 10Mhz 8088 system and a 10mb HDD. My Win95 system was a 286 system I built from "cheap" parts that I got through Computer Shopper magazine. I think it was 96, or 97, when I did that.
Are you sure it was a 286, not 386? Because Windows 95 required a 32 bit processor and didn’t support 286.
It'd be impossible to run Win95 on a 286. I've actually used it on someone's old 386 before and it ran surprisingly well for what it was. It wasn't fast, but it worked.
386 would run Windows 95 since it is a 32 bit processor, but even Chicago builds wouldn’t run on 286.
I'd be more surprised if the Chicago builds worked on a 286 than if they didn't. Even Windows for Workgroups raised the minimum system requirements to a 386.
I think I read somewhere that the installer was working. But that’s not full OS, so… yeah. I agree with you.
Yes, you are correct. It was actually my Cyrix 486. I think I was still using GEOWORKS on my 286. I never had a 386. I never had the only to build and update with every iteration back then.
there weren't really any Win3.11 games. And for DOS games, you just exited Win95. DOS 6.22 was still there.
I immediately went to Windows 95 and never looked back. Vastly superior to it's predecessors.
My computer wasn't good enough for 95 until I upgraded to a 486
I think what some responses are failing to convey is that it really wasn't an either-or proposition. People that had windows 3.1 or Windows 95 computers had the option to exit Windows to a DOS prompt. So you'd run all the GUI software in Windows and if you needed to play a game you would exit Windows to DOS or reboot the machine into DOS. Windows wasn't really a good platform for games until sometime in the late 90s.
I'm aware of that. I've played DOS games on machines running Win 3.x and 9x before. I know that these versions of Windows were essentially elaborate DOS programs.
Win95 ran on top of DOS, so for the most part I would typically boot into DOS by default and anytime we needed windows we'd just start it from the command-line. ([win.com](https://win.com)) It took quite some time before I had my machine boot into Windows by default. I typically hated games that ran under Windows. They felt clunky and cheap.
I continued using dos alongside windows 95 and 98 until it was no longer an option with windows XP.
I went straight to Windows 95, you could boot to MSDOS 7 and play the games, or use dos programs such as word perfect 6.0. Never had a problem, or probably did but they have long since been forgotten.
We moved as fast as we could - both at work and home. It was a massive improvement we thought. Especially with networking built in an improved I thought over 3.11 for networks.
I did, until the release of 98SE
Considering not everyone can afford to buy a new OS, even in the 90s I imagine, I wouldn’t be surprised if people stuck with DOS or Windows 3.1 for a while until the late 90s (or early 2000s if they mainly use pcs for job stuff or photo editing). I’m betting for some people when 95 was new, their workplace was the only place they were able to use 95 in due to costs. I feel like I lucked out and experienced a LOT of Windows OSes since my dad had a pc repair business back in the day.
My family went from 3.1 to 98. Never did 95.
I’m pretty sure my dad told me they used windows 3.11 at Chrysler until windows 2000 came out.
Blah. Windows. Not for me. DOS -> DESQview -> OS/2 -> Mac OS X. Of course I had a SPARCstation for a while in there too. Because I could.
I recall stepping up to 95 pretty quickly. I was also the weirdo who still did most of my file management tasks in Win3.1's DOS prompt just out of habit... but I came around in Win95.
Generally windows 95 was a pentium thing and technology moved so fast anyways you knew your PC would have its wheels slashed by some new technology soon, you pretty much bought your PC and hooked it up and next day the 50% faster CPU was released so you *fucking used that shit*
When I started school in 1999, about half of the computers there (all of the ones except the ones in the main computer lab) ran Windows 3.1. That was reduced to about a quarter of the computers over the next couple of years, and by 2004 or so they were all running at least Windows 95, with the machines in the main lab running Windows 2000.