The only thing I miss about Windows is that exact downloading information. XP also had a very nice one. GNOME is nice, but man, I liked that animation.
When I was in college, in network class, the teacher was talking about level of service, package reordering and the challenges of streaming videos through a network. Internet was starting and we were still using 14400 modems (which, by the way, was already considered fast). Throughout that class I was thinking why the hell I was studying that king of problems with our speeds.
NGL: the download animation was peak.
Give me back my flying papers
It got slightly better then worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. I miss the win9x days, they should have gone with longhorn build, that was cool that one.
2.5MB in 14 seconds, don’t think I’ve seen such a high download speed on Windows 9X in my life
I don’t miss those times, the 9X series was so bad, MS was right to ditch it after canning ME. Bluescreens, a shitty filesystem, no concept of security, dll hell, every time someone comes along with “remember how simple / great computing was back in the day” I want to scream in their face
i was on a T3 back in those days. it was peak
Getting retroactively jealous here. I was in 56 kbit/s until ADSL hit. But hey, had full duplex gigabit Ethernet Internet at University from 2007 until 2011 to make up for it. It’s never been the same since
I was already running linux then, but I booted windows to run games and got to experience its laughable “multitasking” and poor networking stack. It really wasn’t great, but it worked, I suppose.
it worked
From ~windows 2000 to windows arguably either 7 or 8, kinda, for some things.
What surely is interesting is that Microsoft was somehow somewhat visionary with their usage of browser technology for the desktop. We see Windows Update running in the browser, there was Active Platform which included Active Desktop (very prone to crashes), they had ActiveX (shudder). In a way all ideas they abandoned but that were implemented somewhere else later and better. Not saying these ideas were good.
Windows never got any better then this. Just worse with every release.
I think Windows 2000 was the high water mark. Compared to the NT based operating systems, the 9x versions were pretty rinky-dink in retrospect and not terribly reliable. 2000 was the best truly modern Windows that supported all the stuff we expect: NTFS, real user accounts, actual security, group policy management, the modern disk management utility that’s still in use today, the management console, native USB support (including 2.0 as of Service Pack 4), native ACPI hibernation support without reliance on janky vendor bullshit, etc.
Yeah, USB support. Everyone forgets that Windows 95 didn’t support USB at all out of the box and 98 barely accomplished it. 95 required the “OSR2 USB Supplement,” and 98 didn’t even support mass storage devices without third party drivers until the “SE” second edition. Those days really were that terrible.
XP was where the bloat really started setting in, but since XP was basically 2000 with extra shit duct taped to it you could still do all the same stuff with it vis-a-vis gaming and DirectX support, and by and large it could still use the same hardware drivers as XP even if vendors didn’t bother to officially support it.
Remember the port that usb device was in, in w98, otherwise you needed to reinstall it…
And if you go anywhere with your shiny new flash drive, also carry a floppy disk around with you with the damn driver on it. Because you can’t trust anyone else’s computer to already have it installed.
Server '03 was also pretty solid, didn’t have some of the weird aspects of xp.
Remember when Bill Gates made Windows 98 BSOD during a key note by plugging in a USB device? Good times
I would have done shameful things for that dl speed in 1998.
95-XP was peak
We went from “Wow It’s doing a lot of things right there!” to “Ugh… it’s doing a lot of things right there”
hey, that version had a working control panel
Omg, a Control Panel that I actually knew how to use!
Much nostalgia
We were right. It didn’t get better.
modem lag. even at 56kbs. no wonder average user never updated.
And we were right.
14sec 13sec 12sec 11sec 9sec 8sec 7sec 60sec 61sec 62sec 61sec 33years 1sec (Pause for 12minutes) Done
Windows 8 invented “searching by typing”
Back the you could not search for the application you wanted to open, you had to search it by clicking start - programs - the app itself
That was actually added in Vista!
