For Those Interested In Direct3D Over Gallium3D

[mugginz]

So, what makes Windows an inferior product? Win95, were designed for home users, with a special interest for gaming. It managed to be great at its time. It could run games very well, it could run almost all DOS apps flawlessly, it had (primitive) plug n play support, it could connect to the internet etc. It could do almost everything a home user could ask for, and it was fairly easy for non-technical users to use. So what makes it a failure?

While I agree with the main thrust of your argument from the post with that paragraph, on the matter of the user friendliness of Win98/95 I think that doesn't hold true for your garden variety computer user.

As a tech in various computer outlets during that time period I can attest to the case of many, many users who had issues with even the basics of a Windows box. Windows and DOS didn't make a lot of sense to the lay person. To a tech, sure, but not to one untrained or unfamiliar with the MS ecosystem.

Those systems were decently learnable for those wanting to put the energy and effort into learning to drive and configure them properly though.

I get the feeling there could be some "rose coloured glasses" factor at play when looking back at how Win98 and Win98 was to use.

[V!NCENT]

Are you trying to create nostalgia, BlackStar? Pretty much everyone besides you on the planet still suffers from a blue square still printed on their retina...

The entire term 'computer rage' wouldn't have been invented were it not for Windows.

[BlackStar]

I remember trying to program a soundblaster on DOS. I also remember having to write my own blit functions in assembler to draw sprites. It boiled down to memcpying your data directly into the graphics memory. Not funny.

"OS does not matter" my ass.

Come on, VBE modes were fun! (when they worked on your graphics adapter)

Sound sucked big time, however. Funnily enough, that was one of the biggest improvements of Win95 vs MS-DOS for game developers. Big enough that they started porting stuff despite video performance being worse at first.

[pingufunkybeat]

I remember trying to program a soundblaster on DOS. I also remember having to write my own blit functions in assembler to draw sprites. It boiled down to memcpying your data directly into the graphics memory. Not funny.

"OS does not matter" my ass.

[pingufunkybeat]

Look, Microsoft has always managed to corner the market through a combination of marketing, great business decisions, purchasing know-how, disgraceful underhanded tactics, and products which were just barely good enough.

They are the masters at this, and they would still be as dominant, if the EU hadn't slapped them around for anti-trust violations repeatedly.

But I can't accept people telling me that they won because their products were better. Their products were never better. They were good enough. It's other things that put MS where they are.

EDIT: Funnily, we had pretty much the same road. I switched to Linux in 1999 and haven't looked back since.

[BlackStar]

The funny thing is, we actually agree. You say:

Win95 was a huge improvement over Win 3.1, but it was not superior to a Mac from that time, nor was it superior to OS/2. It was definitely superior to Linux of that time in many ways (especially graphical interface), and superior to commercial Unices in a couple (and vastly inferior in others, like stability, security, etc.) What it had was a HUGE company behind it, an advertising campaign worth hundreds of millions of dollars, ability to run on cheap IBM compatibles, and compatibility with DOS and Windows 3.1 programs. And MS OFFICE (!!!), the business standard which did not run on anything else, because it was made by the sme company. THAT is what made it big, not superiority, or ability to play games.

Exactly! Unlike its competitors, it had the right combination of features, applications, price and backwards compatibility to be adopted by the masses. The more advanced OS/2 was wrapped into WinNT which had higher hardware requirements, BeOS and MacOS didn't work on IBM compatibles and Unices weren't really designed with the desktop in mind. Add DOS/Win3 compatibility (which also means games!), add some marketing blitz and it's no wonder things turned out as they did.

The thing is, technical superiority means very little, especially for desktop users. Very very little. Take Mac OS X for instance: its kernel is in many way inferior to both NT 6.x and Linux 2.6.xx but does anyone actually care? Or take the original GameBoy: black-and-green monitor, z80 CPU, two-channel audio and it completely obliterated Game Gear and Lynx in sales (a story we've seen again and again with GameBoy Advance, the DS and now the Wii).

That said, I'm not sure that Win95 was that inferior back then. I recall publications comparing it to MacOS and finding it superior in the details (memory management and such) and it generally did get the job done. (Unfortunately, I was too young and didn't have the chance to visit the other side of the fence back then: I went from MS-DOS -> Win3.11 -> Win95 and only met Linux around 1999-2000. By that time, Microsoft had dominated everything).

[pingufunkybeat]

Be was an OS far ahead of its time. It is a perfect example of superior technology going down the drain.

[BlackStar]

Hm, seems BeOS was released for x86 on '98, a couple of months before Win98. Unfortunately, it failed to make an impact.

[pingufunkybeat]

Sorry to hear about your bad Win98 experience but this was far from universal.

Well, most people didn't have it THAT bad, but most people have legitimate gripes with Win95 and Win98. Only after switching to the NT/2k basis (which happened with XP) did Windows start approaching stability and decent filesystem performance (NTFS).

Besides, I didn't write any of those things you seem to be replying to.

You attacked me for being anti-Microsoft and said that he had a point.

I replied to his points, since you were obviously unhappy with my original reply.

[BlackStar]

Does BeOS and Mac OS ring a bell? Know what made Windows suck? When you used it for all this greatness it totaly crashed. General Protection Fault. Oops. Not to mention the technical side of how it worked.

It was because of the tactics that made it have all these apps in the first place.

MacOS didn't get preemptive multitasking until 2000 and was technically inferior all around to Win9x. Mac OS X fixed that but it ran on an inferior platform until 2005. BeOS faced the same problem (before the x86 release in '99) and was basically obliterated by Apple's monopolistic tactics.

Sorry, no cookie for you.

1) No, it didn't work, that's why I switched to Linux (from Win98) Long story, involving a logitech mouse which crashed the whole OS and required a reinstall (!!!) every time you plugged it in. Safe mode didn't work either (!!!). This is not an invisible OS which lets you run your apps.

2) "Win95, were designed for home users, with a special interest for gaming." Fsck NO!

3) "People" do not only care about running apps, they also care about how these apps are used on an OS. Read: multitasking, stability, security, viruses, maintainability, a sane filesystem, etc. Windows95 was not very good at any of these

4) An OS is not "simply an intermediate software layer", although this is obviously the most important aspect of an OS. A modern OS must also provide an interface for interacting with the filesystem, basic accessories, a shell for starting and manipulating applications, a windowing system, and a number of other things. Win95 had most of those, even if they were quite rubbish.

5) DOS does not "manage hardware resource allocation, provide APIs and some additional utilities". The programmer had to take care of all of that, including talking directly to the hardware (no drivers).

6) "The OS is irrelevant. It could even be DOS, why not?" Ask any major website why they're not running their database on DOS. Or Win95.

Sorry to hear about your bad Win98 experience but this was far from universal.

Besides, I didn't write any of those things you seem to be replying to.