Windows 95: Fixes itself when you aren't watching
Windows 11: Fucks itself up when you aren't watching

Oh, every windows has fucked itself up silently. 95 was famous for needing a reboot at every mouse movement and a reinstall regularly.

Being the guy who had to feed the whole 32 floppy disk stack to the wretched PC every time the user broke the Windows 95 installation pushed me to the *nix camp quite early, I can tell you that.

Each floppy had a good 10% chance of being faulty, so imagine the fun.

Even Windows 98SE gave me a long habit (only somewhat receded after moving to Linux) to, as much as possible, not even move the cursor without a clear purpose. Every event could be the last before everything hanging. Probably not as often as with 95 or plain 98, but.

What in the futhark is that ugly ass OS.

It was the first step up from Windows 3.11 which was basically a DOS GUI. It was rough, but definitely an improvement. Compare that to the latest "updated OS" from Microsoft now.

And 30 years ago it was quite easy to do dumb shit that completely ruined your system, be it in DOS, Win95, or OS/2.

Example from OS/2 - deleting the image file used for the desktop background in presentation manager (OS/2's core GUI) meant your system could no longer boot, and when you can't just google shit to sort things out, you were essentially up for a reinstall at that point.

Oh, I'd actually forgotten how flaky 3.5" floppies were. That's very true.

A 5.25" you could probably send in a letter and stick the letter on a fridge with a magnet so your remember to mail it and it would still work when it arrived.

Well, maybe not, but it was quite a difference.

Are you sure you're using the best version of 95?

Like 95a didn't even have out-of-the-box USB support.

You'll want to use B or C versions for optimal driver support, including USB.

I managed 100s of days of uptime on 95.

It really helped if you replaced the shell, imo.

OS/2 sorely lacked user rights management (but then DOS/Windows didn't have any either). Other than that, it was an amazing system at the time. It's a shame that the industry went with Windows.

3.5" was still better than zip disks. At least you couldn't break your floppy drive with a bad disk. Zip drives would break due to a bad disk such that they damaged any other disks you used. Then those broken disks would break any working drive, etc. First and maybe only communicable hardware bug.

That's the first time I've ever seen anyone say ME is better than anything.

Defragging monthly, fixing registry values and hoping windows 98 would fix things this time was all I remember about Win95.

But windows 98 came out about 3 months after I built my own first PC. It was still full of problems, but I eventually ended up ok NT/2000 and things got better. Then I quit windows for good when apple went to Intel.

What in the futhark is that ugly ass OS.

A ham-fisted attempt to drag the DOS world into the 32-bit era. Oh, and they needed to compete with OS/2 but Win3.11 and NT4.0 weren't going to cut it.

There never was any software for it, and they added a windows compatibility layer, ensuring there never would be. But it actually was a single user modern operating system with all the trimmings. Lost opportunity.

But we got Unix back, so it's not too bad.