Modems and external dialers.

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, 12 Jun 2019 at 20:33, Noel Chiappa via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> Great rant.

:-D Thanks!

> I myself much prefer my Windows98 machines to my Windows 10 laptop, which
> I had to buy because i) many Web sites won't work without the latest and
> greatest browser (in many cases because of the nitwitted craze for not
> just HTTPS, but the latest and greatest security option for it - but let
> me not get derailed into that rant into lemming-like stupidity), and those
> are only available for the latest and greated bloatware OS.

Wow. Well, I strongly agree on bloatware OSes and that, but I'm not so
sure about Win9x, especially 98SE, which I regarded as quite bloated
for the 9x series myself!

I did run 95 from choice for a brief time. I moved from Acorn RISC OS
to OS/2 2 on my home computer, in pre-internet times. It did me fine
for some years, although I failed to get Warp 3 to install -- my kit
at the time was very low-end: a laptop with onboard SCSI, a 486DX/50
(*not* DX2, the rare full-speed 50MHz 486) with 8MB of RAM, a ProHance
PowerMouse (also an external keypad) and a Logitech SoundMan
parallel-port sound card.

Warp 3 didn't work with the SoundMan or the PowerMouse or my SVGA
driver (800*600 in 16-bit colour), all of which worked on Warp 2 --
after I had _bought_ the drivers.

Then I got a slightly newer machine from work -- a cast-off 486DX2/66
Gateway desktop. The hardware was now a bit too new for OS/2 2 and yet
not new enough for Warp 3, so I fell between two stools. I tried a
beta copy of Windows Chicago and was amazed at how well it worked,
even Just Worked™. Parallel-port kit, SCSI cards, whatever -- if there
wasn't a Win95 driver, a DOS driver would usually do. It had proper
internal sound card, proper SVGA graphics, an ATAPI CD-ROM, and Win95
just worked with all of it. No editing CONFIG.SYS, no additional
drivers, no modifying the boot disk so you could install the OS
already aware of your new kit.

It was a dream of simplicity and functionality compared to OS/2, I'm
sorry to say. So I switched.

And my flatmate had a PC too, so we networked them over a parallel
cable so we could play Doom against each other. Home Ethernet was
still fanciful for me in 1995.

A bit later, my home cast-off PC got upgraded to a Pentium/90 and I
switched to NT 3.51, and later NT 4, and I never used 9x (or OS/2) as
my main OS on my desktop again.

I did run it on my laptops until about 2001, though.

I didn't like 98's built-in IE, IE-based desktop and things like that,
and customised it to remove that stuff with 98Lite for years. But 98
supported lots of IP addresses, which became useful. 95 supported a
maximum of 4, and with a modem, PCMCIA Ethernet, Firewire and a
direct-cable-connection link all configured, that was it. No new IP
connections for you.

There was a certain simplicity and understandability about Win9x, yes,
but NT was far more reliable, even back in the NT 3 era. DOS and
16-bit apps worked. Drivers, no. So I moved to NT as soon as my kit
could run it, and never looked back.

Until XP, which was a bit bloated for me, so around 2002 I started
exploring full-time Linux and Mac OS X as viable alternatives. I'd
been dabbling with Linux for years but mainly as a server or firewall,
not as a desktop.

-- 
Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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