Ahh, Windows 98. How I've missed your stability and quality.
I tried to access a floppy drive, so naturally one of my explorer windows got drawn over the other one
@foone Who puts the Office bar on the RIGHT hand side of the screen, you heathen?
@foone it's hard to imagine today how computing was ok with loading 200 different hand rolled com objects from different teams and vendors into explorer's address space and that it even sometimes mostly worked for a while (usually until enough handles leaked).
@foone Did you have some left-handedness or regional feature enabled in the OS?
@foone In the UK tech press at the time, we nicknamed Win98 "GameOS."
If you had a job to do, you ran NT4, which was seriously flawed but *worked.*
It is highly instructive, about people and about the PC world, just how many people are nostalgic for that piece of junk.
It being considered ok by most people for things to be so crashy in those days was a major reason why I moved on to Linux...
@foone
- replies
- 0
- announces
- 0
- likes
- 1
@foone A magazine had a joke back then about the types of multitasking OSes: collaborative (eg. Win 3.1, TOS), preemptive (eg. BSD, Linux), and that Windows 95 (and 98 kept it) introduced a third type: "competitive multitasking" (in french they had named it "presquemptif" which would be "almostemptive", but the idea was that since it combined both modes, it was not quite either).
@foone As a regular user of Mac OS 9, 90s operating systems are such a unique kind of jank and I'm always happy when I see that every other OS from that era is just as Good
@foone this brings back memories.
As a child, at one point, I misconfigured the floppy controller in the BIOS, making the floppy drive inaccessible. Until I somehow managed to fix it, Windows 98 tended to lock up every time I opened Explorer.
@foone My next OS after Windows 95 was RedHat 4.0 Colgate. I struggled to compile kernel for 3 days... But then in went smooooothly :) Windows was just a platform for games after that, and now Steam/Proton entered the chat...
@foone
In fairness modern OSs have their issues. On my Linux PC, I once couldn't complete a backup because the IO wait went too high and some kind of oom-killer-type-thing decided it must jump in and kill processes. That took a bit of fiddling, and fundamentally all I was doing was copying a file.
