This was an odd half article. It's nice you spoke to Dave Plummer. It would have been interesting if you wrote down what he said.

He will probably put a vid up on his channel on the topic, one of the few youtubers out there ive watched all their uploads of, but yeah cant argue with half article here cmon el reg, i expect better clickbait from you guys!

While technically shit, Windows 95 was "good enough" to keep customers with Microsoft. Previously, Microsoft had added disk compression, better memory management and proprietary extensions to DOS to stop customers jumping ship to things like DR-DOS. Windows 3.11 including enough working networking for small customers. All this, and the work on NT, gave Microsoft to stop working on OS/2, forcing IBM to do the work itself and finally fix some annoying if trivial restrictions (single-threaded Presentation Manager) but took too long to do so. By making OS/2 "the better DOS than DOS, the better Windows than Windows", IBM had allowed companies to keep investing in DOS and Windows software rather buying OS/2 specific versions. This kept the market small and deterred developers from the considerable work of porting GUI applications to a completely different OS. We still see this in OS markets today with a not inconsiderable amount of MacOS only software alongside the mountain of Windows only stuff. In fact, only by adding support for Android to Windows is this changing.

OS/2 had a single input queue that still could lead to all application freezing because a single one didn't process messages. That was already avoided in Windows 95. Windows 3.x application support was good enough (but not for all applications) - but a lot of software quickly moved to 32 bit, well, because 16 bit. Anyway Apple OS was still worse without pre-emptive multithreading at all. Just it had the applications, at least for a specific sector of users.

Moreover OS/2 lacked "newer" development environments that were appearing on Windows like Visual Basic and Delphi (or even PowerBuilder!) - which made writing a lot of custom GUI application quicker and easier to take advantage of the then new Client/Server world- with all the defects of their approaches, maybe, but they made Windows the platform you could easily code for - and Visual Age couldn't really compete.

Maybe Borland (and others) made a mistake not supporting quickly enough a non-Microsoft OS, but probably IBM didn't inspire much trust too - remember when it tried with PS/2 and Microchannel to close the PC market? Yet most companies back then were not large enough to be able to invest on parallel product lines at the same time.

Anyway even after acquiring Lotus IBM kept on investing in Windows applications and not OS/2 ones. It looks IBM didn't trust itself too....

95 was awful at launch, particularly if you were on average hardware. I reverted back to 6.22/3.1 almost immediately; not least because the vast majority of software was just so much better on the older platform - and you didn't have to live with 10 minute boot times.

I only really took 95 on properly 3 years later to make use of a 3dfx card, and even then, kept around DOS for 99% of that machines use.

NT4 by comparison, while not the "easiest" system to administer, was recognisably modern and nice to use "comparatively few BSODs".

How the hell IBM got OS/2 so wrong is quite beyond me - it was clearly the far superior product of the day. Oh yes, "pricing/bundling". And legacy DOS stuff being in demand by most of us (certainly me!)

Same story here, though I did manage to run Win95 on that (then) ancient machine with SP2. Though its tendency to "rot" was upsetting to say the least - a clean install was necessary every now and then... I did play around with OS/2 (jokingly referred to OS-half) a bit, felt sleek and modern, almost sci-fi-like (though my memory _is_ muddled, I am sure), but the overhead when running software was quite noticable, and I think OS/2 was not working all that well with applications that required lots of free low memory, i.e. under the 640k boundary (think about tweaking load order in autoexec.bat and config.sys, with himem.exe and all that stuff - $(deity) how I still hate that carp!).

Oh, yeah, the 6 monthly reinstalls were painful, but better than the instability & slow downs you got after a few months. XP was the first version which I managed to leave for over a year between reinstalls I think.

As for shenanigans with autoexec - my first PC (DOS/Win 3.11) had to have the boot interrupted to run Doom, otherwise it didn't have enough memory (a measly 4MB). I have vague recollections of tweaking both files at different times, but generally just left them well alone as far as possible...

Ah, the joys of writing BAT files with SET SOUND and SET BLASTER and then trying to work out which of your .sys drivers were required and which weren't so you could play Carmageddon or Doom or NFS2/3. Then the joys of re-writing them when you got a 3DFX card which required a different executable to be called just to play the same game.

Also the joys of IRQs before we had PCI.

A network card AND a SoundBlaster.

Hmm, ok.

I'll see your SoundBlaster PCI (or Soundblaster Awe 64?), and raise you a SoundBlaster ISA, which had its default IRQ set to 7. As everyone knows (now-a-days, anyway), your parallel port is set to 7. I believe the SB documentation recommended to change it to 5, and just run the setup/install/config for each app to point it to that location. Trouble, to be sure, but better than no POST what-so-ever. Why not change the default printer IRQ? In that day and age, most stuff was hardcoded to 7, with nary a way to change it. Printer usage on PC was (and ever shall be) a dark art of the lowest order. Has anyone ever met a print driver programmer? Anyone who has worked on the spooler in Windows? Perhaps a long time ago. I suspect these days they've been assimilated into/replaced with AI (or at least a near sentient collection of macros).

There was also a SB16 SCSI that could drive one's SCSI CD-ROM (50-pin) and provide one's SB sound needs, all on one card - assuming one terminated that chain properly and set one's SCSI IDs correctly. It doesn't help if one sets the drive ID to 7 - that's the SCSI Adapter's ID (by convention). Too bad if one was running an IDE hard drive with said CD-ROM, some game copy protection schemes would flip out and refuse to work at all.

SCSI is/was a dark art. I remember by Iomega Jaz drive. Amazing - a fast removable disk that could hold as much as 1GB! Bigger than my hard disk at the time.

And the joys of having to switch off your computer, taking the sound card out and physically move the jumper to change the IRQ and then cross your fingers that it worked.

SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1

How come I can remember that but not my nieces' birthdays??

No problem. Create a boot menu once you’ve found the right combination of loading DOS high in the UMBs and tried Memmaker to optimise everything…

"(though my memory _is_ muddled, I am sure)", yes muddled. OS/2 did'nt (itself) care about memory under 640Kb but it did really require 8Mb (16Mb if you were doing serious stuff like development). The DOS sessions in OS/2 generall had a lot of under 640Kb memory available (it made good use of virtual memory).

Went from Dos 4.x to OS/2 and then Solaris/Linux. Did'nt do much with windows at all. But OS/2 years ahead of the competition, maybe just a bit too far ahead.

NT4... comparatively few BSODs.

Not in my experience. Several a day was normal doing programming, because the fool thing didn't have very good memory protection at all, and some of the flakiest device drivers ever known to mankind.

Without the Win95 gaming engine, Microsoft would have been a pale shadow of what it is now, because it was games that got people to buy it instead of other flavours of Windows or OS/2.

I worked with OS/2 for one client doing development. Very elegant system compared to NT; far more logical and coherent. And it only crashed on me once during the six months I was there, unlike Windblows NT.

I disagree with the assertion of when it was awful.

At launch Windows 95 on a 486 with enough RAM (at least 5MB, but preferably 8) from a fresh install was fine, with 32 bit and DOS software.

Using a Pentium was not. Upgrading Win 3.x was not. Using 16 bit Windows software was not (in most cases).

DOS programs were fine.

Eventually Pentiums were OK running it.

I had 12MB RAM on my DX2-50. Windows 95 stayed on that machine for less than a week.

95 offered no functionality improvements for the use case of that machine at that time. The poor performance of Office / Works / CorelDraw simply weren't worth the overhead when they did the same thing, faster under 3.1.

By the time dial up was mainstream and IE / Netscape fully ubiquitous, better hardware and 16MB RAM were commonplace. For that use, I accept 95/98 were much nicer than 3.1.

There were a number of reasons that conspired together to work against OS/2.

1 - Microsoft had a deal (very much a deal one could not say no to) with PC manufacturers. You need to pay MS for a license, even if you ship a PC sans OS. The best deals went to the manufacturers with that particular tie-up. Manufacturers NEEDED Microsoft, so no one said no. If you wanted OS/2 you needed to purchase it outright.

2 - If you did purchase it outright, it was expensive. Now the memory is being clouded by a few thousand pints but I recall that (a) it was double or more the price of Windows 95 (boxed version). (b) if you wanted to buy OS/2 with the Windows compatibility, that was another cost on top - a full retail license, again.

3 - The Windows compatibility in OS/2 was with 16 bit applications and only some 32 bit applications via the Win32 library. (now the hamster on the memory wheel is working overtime). Windows 95 was 32 bits but obviously a perfect win16 implementation. It was relatively easy to programmatically upgrade many programs at the time to be fully 32bit. So many Windows programs could not actually run on OS/2 Windows layer as the 16 bit versions became bitrot.

4 - Hardware. Apart from IBM's own hardware, driver compatibility was a real problem. Mostly, drivers just didn't exist. I think it was networking and graphics cards that were my biggest bugbear, but i am sure there were others. Probably printers as well but most printers emulated something very basic as well.

5 - The workplace shell was very powerful but the icons and desktop in Windows 95 just blew it away. As far the the "oh pretty" from the non-technical crowd, there was no competition.

It is just around this time that a Finnish kid made an announcement that his barely working Unix-like kernel was available to download appeared. With source code! It wasn't Minix but was inspired by it ...

I think however flawed the underlying OS was, Windows 95's strengths was its fantastic UI. Not only very powerful but also very user friendly.

Compare it to what we have today, it is more featureful than i.e Gnome3/KDE4 but also easier to use. Microsoft were on to a real winner back then which did raise them to "the defacto consumer OS". When people mention PC, they basically mean consumer Windows.

Now all we have is... well, whatever, I returned to the command prompt long ago. Life is to short to faff with broken UI systems.

I think however flawed the underlying OS was, Windows 95's strengths was its fantastic UI. Not only very powerful but also very user friendly.

It was fantastic if you came from Windows 3.1... everyone else wondered what the fuss was about. Still, thanks to the economies of scale in PC hardware every other platform was dead or dying apart from Mac, so all MS had to do to not screw this one up was release a stepping stone on to NT which was compatible with games and older software and have an improved GUI (by copying and pasting ideas from those same other platforms).

In the late 1990s and early 2000s before I switched to Linux I used Windows 95 plus a few service packs ... well, maybe more than a few ... 25 or so as I recall. It ran fine. Really. Better than Windows 98 which crashed a lot, was prone to trash the Registry, and often refused to shut down. I had to reboot WIn95 every few weeks. And it didn't support USB -- which wasn't important as USB back then rarely worked on any OS. I'd still be using it if (largely dubiously necessary) changes to application software hadn't made keeping Win95 impractical. In point of fact, from a user viewpoint, Win 95 was just fine. Office workers could use it. Scientists could use it. Six year olds who were still a bit hazy on that alphabet thing could use it. What more do you need?

Of course, Win95 wasn't really an appropriate OS for a server in most cases. But why the heck anyone would want a Windows server when Unix is so much less obtuse has always eluded me.

I've seen industrial flow computers as late as 2013 that were still running on Windows 95.

They might have been meticulously maintained mechanical components & instrumentation but tied into that OS. WTF does not do weird decisions like that justice.

Hopefully we would have got Windows 2000 as the standard product. Pity there isn't an option for consumer Windows with the simpler UI in Server.

"whatever might have happened, we bet we'd still be waiting for the year of Linux on the desktop."

As a diehard penguinista, I had to nod sheepishly at that one. So true.