Bill Gates: Windows 95 Was 'A High Point'

[Fred Cisin]

>  I remember BSOD after BSOD when

Well, Windoze 3.00 was swamped with UAE ("Unexpected Application Error")
One of the design goals of 3.10 was to "eliminate UAEs".
Not as hard as it sounds!  By 3.10, they were EXPECTED application errors.

> 98 SE  got  better
> me  got  worse
> XP was outstanding

A few days ago, a friend handed me ANOTHER Sony Vaio TR3 (I now have about 
a dozen).  It will not work well past XP, so that is what is on them.  I 
always configure all of them with IE, Firefox, Chrome, Open Office, and 
Putty.
The Google site will no longer download Chrome for XP!  They've been 
saying for a while that there would be no further patches, etc., but the 
actual availability of the old browser is gone!  Fortunately, slimjet.com 
has a page for download of old Chrome versions!  The installer is flawed, 
but it can be coerced into working.
Firefox 404s on its XP download, but they have an alternate page that 
works.

There are also currently available, a couple dozen free Dell Inspiron 5150 
and 5160 laptops, which also can't go past XP.  (I have seen one ALMOST 
working with 7)  (Dr. Marty is attempting to regain a living room)
(Contact info available on request)

> I did  fine  with vista...

I used to teach at "Vista College"!  In summer 2006, the college changed 
its name to "Berkeley City College", which coincidentally, was right when 
Vista was coming out.  In the CIS department, we begged them to keep the 
old name, at least in parallel just for the ability to advertise, "THE 
best place to learn Vista!"

> 7 was better  yet.

The more that I use it, the less that I dislike it.

> skipped 8 bought never installed   and used
> to up to 8.1  then used to up to 10 on one system.
> I am happy  with 10 just a  few things to get used to.

My Win7 Thinkpad X220 upgraded to 10, against my will!
I tried to accept it, but it just wouldn't work the way that I needed when 
I needed it.  It really munged my Handbrake queue of Doctor Who DVDs
So I rolled it back to 7.


> In the archive  area we  keep at least  one...
> dos 6
> 3.1
> 95
> 98se
> xp
> vista
> 7

DOS 1.00 was almost as good as CP/M   (and NEWDOS80, etc.)

1.10/1.25 at least supported double sided drives, and patched a few 
things.

2.00 brought sub-directories, and API for unix-style file access, 9SPT

2.10 slowed down floppy step for that F'ing Qumetrak 142  (AKA "maybe, if I skew FOUR sectors, . . . ")

2.11 there were some fascinating customizations by OEMs

3.00 1.2M flop and

3.10 network redirector and CD-ROMs!

3.20 720K flop

3.30 1.4M flop

3.31 >32M drives and more OEM customizations

4.00 large drives, and incompatability with Norton fUtilities

4.01 desperate patches

5.00 first major RETAILing of DOS by MICROS~1

Windows 3.10 was first to demand HIMEM.SYS (and A20), and therefore, first 
not usable on 8088 5160s. Also,  seemed to be the first that DEMANDED 
SMARTDRV, and made it obvious that Microsoft was going to have BIG 
troubles from it.
(UNRECOVERABLE data loss in the event of a disk error during write, that 
otherwise previously could be solved by trying agin on another disk or 
location)

6.00 not much changed INSIDE, but oh, what a pile of bundled stuff!


DOS 6.2x (0|1|2 according to compression) was the first version of DOS in 
which improving reliability was the most important design criteria.  (due 
to problems with SMARTDRV, that were blamed on the compression)

--
Grumpy Ol' Fred     		cisin at xenosoft.com