Did Microsoft deserve its success in the 90s?

[Keatah]

3 hours ago, zzip said:

I was excited for W95 for a few reasons.   One was I always found Win 3.1 to be awkward and not much more than a glorified app launcher that I didn't even need to use half the time.   Since I was used to GEM on the ST,  Win95 was more familiar in hour it worked than Win31.

I didn't see it that way. Win 3.1 was Wind 3.1, and DOS was DOS. I vaguely viewed it as a glorified launcher. It was fun and made me feel at the forefront of technology. Clicking on boxes rather than typing at the DOS prompt.

 

But it was cool upgrading from MS-DOS 5.0 to 6.22. The then mysterious magic of disk compression. Let me put off purchasing a new drive for some 6 months! Today I think I hate it. I've imaged my vintage HDDs to modern system. But I still can't find a way/procedure to de-compress them and restore the system to the way it was when I first got it - WHILE KEEPING THE FILE & FOLDER TIMEDATE STAMPS INTACT. Ignoring that requirement there are 10 different ways. HELP!

 

3 hours ago, zzip said:

Also the promise of 32-bit Windows applications removing all that nasty memory segmentation and low memory requirements that still haunted DOS apps.

Plus a single environment that could launch everything, including your games, which were usually not launched from Windows previously.   It was all exciting.   But by the time Win98 came out, I had soured on Windows/MS quite a lot!

I didn't give a rat's ass about memory segmentation. It was part of the landscape and that was that.

 

3 hours ago, zzip said:

Windows 95 ran pretty well on my 486,  it was either a DX4-100 or I may have upgraded it to a 5x86-133 by that point (still a 486 despite the name).  It might be not having enough RAM, or else it's swapping to virtual memory all the time.

I have some of the PowerStacker AMD-based 5x86 133 chips that look like they would plug right into the 486 socket. Indeed that's what they're for and I've been meaning to try it out. It would run at 100MHz on my vintage 25MHz board.

 

3 hours ago, zzip said:

Back in the 90s I made a joke that in the future people would not be able to make toast because their toaster had a blue screen of death.   Sadly it's become way too true, and worse.  All this for what?  So you don't have to push a button on your coffee maker to make coffee? 

Pushing a button is a complex operation to figure out. Seemingly for social media types it easier to plod through an APP to activate an appliance than it is to develop an understanding of what a physical button or control knob might do - like turning on the power or starting a cycle or something.

 

A panel with a couple of discrete controls doesn't seem to be engaging enough. Or engaging in the wrong way. Somehow.

 

3 hours ago, zzip said:

It's too hard to look through a peephole to see who's at your door?   Radio signals are not good enough for your baby monitor, it has to be streamed through the cloud?   I don't get it.

I can understand a CCTV for a door camera - that displays on a remote monitor at a few locations in a big house. And then optionally transmitting it to your phone. But to have to require the internet for it all to work? F-that..

[zzip]

11 hours ago, Keatah said:

I didn't give a rat's ass about memory segmentation. It was part of the landscape and that was that.

I was coding in C, and to me segmentation was a pain in the ass, especially coming from a 68000 that didn't have to worry about such things. 

 

But it was also an issue for DOS users, you had to set up your "Extended Memory" and/or "Expanded Memory" (and I still can't explain what the difference is), and all those TSR programs that had to be at least partially resident in the lower 640K, and this meant they often didn't leave enough of the lower 640K available for the app/game you intended to run.  So the end user needed to learn more than they ever wanted to know about memory management when setting up autoexec.bat or config.sys, or use a tool like memmaker and trust that it did the right thing.

 

This isn't entirely MS's fault, it was a legacy of the Intel 16-bit architecture, but the way it was implemented in DOS seemed kind of hacky and inelegant. 

 

Windows 95 was an attempt to put that all behind and move into the 32-bit era.

11 hours ago, Keatah said:

I have some of the PowerStacker AMD-based 5x86 133 chips that look like they would plug right into the 486 socket. Indeed that's what they're for and I've been meaning to try it out. It would run at 100MHz on my vintage 25MHz board.

IIRC,  if your board doesn't have a 4X jumper, you are supposed to jumper these chips at 2X and it will do 4X mode instead.   Your BIOS may not report the CPU correctly, but you will still see the speed boost.   

 

11 hours ago, Keatah said:

I can understand a CCTV for a door camera - that displays on a remote monitor at a few locations in a big house. And then optionally transmitting it to your phone. But to have to require the internet for it all to work? F-that..

There have been security systems that can stream over your home network since at least the early 2000s.   There's absolutely no reason this needs to go through the cloud, unless you are paying for remote monitoring.   The fact that it does makes it less secure since its possible for hackers to expose your streams, or data breaches making them public.

Edited December 14, 2021 by zzip

[IntelliMission]

I'm not sure if others had the same experience, but my dad never had or loaded Windows 3.x from 1992 and 1995 and barely even loaded Windows 95 from 1995 to 1998.

[mr_me]

I remember when Windows 3 came out.  I had a 386 and enough ram but not enough free space on my 40MB hard disk.  I freed up enough room to install it, checked it out and soon deleted it.  I hated the windows 3.x interface; wasn't worth the disk space which was expensive at the time.  By the time Windows 95 came out I had upgraded my computer and jumped on that operating system with its menu interface.

[Keatah]

On 12/14/2021 at 8:57 AM, zzip said:

Windows 95 was an attempt to put that all behind and move into the 32-bit era.

IIRC,  if your board doesn't have a 4X jumper, you are supposed to jumper these chips at 2X and it will do 4X mode instead.   Your BIOS may not report the CPU correctly, but you will still see the speed boost.

This is an identical & functional spare board for my 486 rig. Has a 168-pin socket which happens to allow a 169-pin chip to be installed. The "169th pin" is essentially a no-connect position for physical keying. Otherwise known as the Original 486 Socket. The blank socket shown below is for an Abacus, and is not for a CPU-upgrade whatsoever.

https://web.archive.org/web/20141017214351/http://artofhacking.com/th99/m/M-O/32131.htm

 

And this is the PowerStacker from PNY. Loved it that these "kits" would work in a surprising amount of early 486 machines. The earlier the better it seemed. IMHO.

http://web.inter.nl.net/hcc/J.Steunebrink/amd5x86.htm

http://web.archive.org/web/19981205133545/http://www.trinityworks.com/support/support.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20031207002659/http://webpages.charter.net/dperr/micronics/gw2k_faq.htm#Q15

 

Gotta love those tiny micro-sized dip switches! And the fact that products of this nature were sold in festive department stores was just too cool for school.

 

Edited December 18, 2021 by Keatah

[zzip]

On 12/17/2021 at 9:12 PM, Keatah said:

 

Gotta love those tiny micro-sized dip switches! And the fact that products of this nature were sold in festive department stores was just too cool for school.

 

No fan?  Every 486 I've seen had a fan and a larger heatsink (though small compared to today's CPU heatsinks)

[Keatah]

No fan. Every 486 I've seen had at least a heatsink, in many setups pretty puny. Lots of fins, but low-profile. There is a location on the interposer PCB to place a fan connector, but this particular design never stuffed that option.

 

This particular chip, AM486DX5-133W168BHC (AM5X86-P75), has a Tcase of 85C for commercial and Tcase 100C industrial. The datasheet says it can work without a heatsink depending on airflow

 

As far as I can tell this chip was used for both the PNY QuickChip and Trinity Works PowerStacker. Identical products except for the silkscreen logo on the interposer.

PNY QC-133.pdf

AMD_Enhanced_Am486_(March,_1997).pdf