If you go back to an older version of Windows, it becomes clear how bad Microsoft has become. Try Windows 95 and you’ll be surprised how clean it is. How few distractions the OS is showing into your face. How tidy the menus are and they also give you little hints for the keyboard shortcuts
I look forward to a glirchy vibe coded OS that uses embeded AI for everything, yet some people still manage to turn into a demented semi-functional ecosystem. Probably mostly run by seniors and computer illiterate consumers who just “want latest tech” for bragging rights.
Borked comes from Robert Bork, who was nominated to the US Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan. He was rejected by the Senate, with many of the opinion that he and Reagan made a mistake.
Bork also borked US agriculture as a federal judge. He’s literally the reason that there has been so much consolidation because of his ruling that corporate consolidation is, by default, magically both good for customers and somehow doesn’t violate anti-trust laws. To be clear, both are lies and he clearly knew that at the time of the ruling but, like all right-wing judges, loved money and imposing his right-wing values from the bench more than his constitutionally defined duties.
They’ll think that it’s totally normal for computers to get confused about whether it should open an app or start playing a documentary about how that app went to shit. And probably still not pay attention to the documentaries that constantly start to the point where ms just gives up on figuring out how to block them and instead just charges people for the views.
I knew that the Xbox 360 3RR, red ring of death problem… was so bad, that it actually would have been more cost effective for MSFT to give each buyer two 360s, instead of one, at the same price, because of how mismanaged the RMA process was… I knew a whole bunch of such details a almost a decade before the documentary on it came out.
Yay NDAs.
…
I was also there during the Windows 8 rollout.
Shut down basically everything for a month, because MSFT ‘dogfoods’ all their software: Every MSFT worker is beta/alpha testing all MSFT software all the time.
We spent weeks just, unable to have more than 3 windows open at a time, half the tools we used on a daily basis just not working.
We asked them to let us go back to 7, asked them if therr was some way to return to a 7 like GUI.
For weeks they said nope, impossible, Win 8 is an entirely new GUI, totally new OS, the Win 7 GUI isn’t there.
Oh then uh, weeks later, yeah, yeah it actually is there, you just have to follow this arcane override proceduren to see and use it.
… And then they just relented, put the non tablet UI fully back in, and called that Windows 8.1.
…
Windows is now layers upon layers upon decades of insane spaghetti code.
Even in Win 10, which was the last version I ever used… there are like 3 or 4 different eras of UI, for various settings menus, which people sometimes need to actually use… but they are considered legacy and thus not important.
Sometimes some newer era UI menus will have some of the options from some of the more buried stuff, but not all of them.
My favorite detail on the 3RL saga was when I took my second bricked unit to the local UPS store and they had a special bin for boxes that perfectly fit the 360 for shipping them back.
After a certain point, a bunch of the 360s… they weren’t even like, ‘fixed’.
They just … not sure of which exactly, this level of detail was basically rumors and contradictions from my POV…
But they were either just physically putting old hard drives in new units, that or just digitally transferring their contents over to new units…
And then they’d tell people ‘yup, your unit has been refurbished’.
Like, ship of theseus not withstanding… not really fixing them, no, rofl.
And then this would lead to other problems like… ooops, we didn’t correctly re register your new 360’s serial number to your Live account, or we didn’t deregister the old one, and now you’re unjustly banned because MSFT tech support fucked up.
…
Assuming my memory is still reasonably sccurate:
Though it did vary somewhat from team to team, the internal nomenclature my team was using was… 3RR.
Like, 1RR, 2RR, 3RR, 4RR.
While all of them were quite problematic, 3RR was the one that… basically 100% of the time, no over the phone, web instructions, or even RMA … could actually fix that one.
For the other codes, following over the phone / web instructions could actually fix it sometimes, or an RMA repair could actually fix it with a speific hardware component replacement… that or it was a problem with the actual cable connecting to the TV, or the Xbox was like, jammed in a little nook with no airflow, and dudes were chain smoking blunts in their apartment, rofl.
Oh how I miss the beautiful simplicity of Win95/98/NT UIs. It seems as our screens have become larger, they found more shit to put on them that I don’t want to see.
The initial release was a bit rough but holy shit that OS was basically magic when it was dialed in. 100% my favorite.
Next to no resource usage. Reasonably secure (for its time - especially compared to other offerings) … and all settings were right in reach.
No bullshit, no fluff. It played the os role perfectly. Run your shit and get the hell out of your way. I still believe they killed it off early to force people to switch. It was murdering the new os in performance benchmarks.
In my experience people were saying that about 98SE after ME came out. People didn’t really have many issues with XP until the internet got really popular, and by then we had some nice service packs to help with the security nightmares of ye ole internet.
It was a known rule that every second version of Windows was good. 95 was good, 98SE was good, XP was good, 7 was good, but sadly they never released Windows 9, so we’re still waiting for the good version to come after 8.
They were still good windowses for their time, especially when you compare them to DOS and Mac OS 9 which would have been the alternatives.
For a fair comparison with professional OSes with full memory protection like UNIX you’d have to look at Windows NT, but there the preimise is true as well (as far as I can tell by googling, I only ever used 2000 Pro): 3.1 was bad, 3.5(1) good, 4.0 bad, 2000 good, 2003 meh.
I’m with you. 8.1 was underrated. Yes the start screen wasn’t for everyone, but I didn’t mind it. It was the last native Windows start menu that would just find the apps you wanted to run. No Cortana, no web searches, no ads.
If you bought a top of the line computer in 1990, it would barely have been able to run Win95. It wouldn’t have been able to run Win98 at all. Conversely, even with Win11 obsoleting a lot of systems due to TPM, there are plenty of 7 or 8 year old systems that will still work with it just fine.
Win95 was a leap in complexity compared to Win3.1/DOS 6. It replaced a sloppy, manual memory management system with a sloppy, automatic memory management system. It created the registry system as we know it, and instantly got a reputation as a fast way to ruin your system.
Do you like files named “big long name.txt”? Because sometimes that will come out as “biglon~1.txt” or something like that. It was still using the same shitty FAT system, now with 32-bit extensions that technically allowed long file names, but had to shorten them for compatibility with older stuff.
Win98 added Active Desktop, which made your desktop part of IE. This meant that every time IE crashed, your whole desktop went with it. Didn’t necessarily need to reboot to fix it, but it cleared out your background and a toolbar thing. In a way, it was an attempt to do what Electron apps do now, except with Microsoft proprietary web stuff.
Oh, and once it got USB support, it sucked ass. It had to reinstall drivers if you plugged your keyboard into a different USB port than you usually did.
Neither Win98 or ME would fix its memory management issues. That had to wait for Microsoft to get off their ass and release a home version of NT with WinXP (sorta Win2k, but that’s complicated). This memory management issue was the root cause of most BSODs at the time.
People hated Windows at the time for exactly the same fundamental reason they hate it today: it’s a clunky piece of shit. Win 7/8/10 was actually an attempt to simplify things in many ways, but Microsoft has fallen back to what they did before.
Thank you for the blast of sanity. Older versions of windows were pretty shit, and the newer versions offer tons of improvements right next to the fresh horrors they bring along.
The original design philosophy of the PC was as a plug-in-play device. Everything was designed to be friendly to new software, new hardware, and new integrations. The whole point was to give you a device that was a programmatic multi-tool.
The advent of computers as a financial vehicle radically changed that design philosophy. Once you could extract money from a computer owner, the open and extremely mutable hardware/software became a massive financial liability.
Imagine getting handed a wad of playdough, having all sorts of fun with it, finding all sorts of useful household applications for it, and filling it into every crevass in your house. Then imagine someone showing up and saying “We’re going to use the thumb print you leave on the playdough to verify all your future payments and assignment of future debts.” Suddenly, a burglar can walk off with your entire bank account if they can scrap a bit of thumbed playdough out of a corner of your house. And - oh, whoops - all your door locks and window jams are full of playdough, too, because it was so damned useful for customized security.
I have a very feeble 25-year-old computer running Windows 2000 on a low-wattage CPU for embedded systems, and it feels far more responsive than Windows 11 on my desktop with an AMD 5950x. And I dual-boot Linux, which also feels much faster than Windows 11.
If you go back to an older version of Windows, it becomes clear how bad Microsoft has become. Try Windows 95 and you’ll be surprised how clean it is. How few distractions the OS is showing into your face. How tidy the menus are and they also give you little hints for the keyboard shortcuts
FYI, those are called menu mnemonics. 😊
Menumonics, got it
Money eunuchs, got it
My new Inuits, got it.
Boycott Intuit for taxes, got it.
Menu harmonicas
Johnny Mnemonics?
Where’s the junkie dolphins?
deleted by creator
No, those are different, I believe.
I look forward to a glirchy vibe coded OS that uses embeded AI for everything, yet some people still manage to turn into a demented semi-functional ecosystem. Probably mostly run by seniors and computer illiterate consumers who just “want latest tech” for bragging rights.
I love it when typos create new words that fit so well.
Any other good examples? Only one that immediately came to mind was “borken”, and even that usually gets used as “borked”
Borked comes from Robert Bork, who was nominated to the US Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan. He was rejected by the Senate, with many of the opinion that he and Reagan made a mistake.
Therefore Borked means fucked up.
Bork also borked US agriculture as a federal judge. He’s literally the reason that there has been so much consolidation because of his ruling that corporate consolidation is, by default, magically both good for customers and somehow doesn’t violate anti-trust laws. To be clear, both are lies and he clearly knew that at the time of the ruling but, like all right-wing judges, loved money and imposing his right-wing values from the bench more than his constitutionally defined duties.
Huh, TIL - it just works so naturally as a typo that I assumed it started there.
That’s the way it started for many of the tech people that I’ve known (typo).
And every small and large organization who uses enterprise software that doesn’t work on any other OS.
That OS already exists. Why do with AI vibe-coding what Microsoft already got paying shitty programmers to make a slapshod OS?
Microsoft was ahead of its time.
They’ll think that it’s totally normal for computers to get confused about whether it should open an app or start playing a documentary about how that app went to shit. And probably still not pay attention to the documentaries that constantly start to the point where ms just gives up on figuring out how to block them and instead just charges people for the views.
This is functionally just the modern incarnation of Apple.
Looks like we aren’t too far off from that.
I used to do V Dash contracts for MSFT.
I knew that the Xbox 360 3RR, red ring of death problem… was so bad, that it actually would have been more cost effective for MSFT to give each buyer two 360s, instead of one, at the same price, because of how mismanaged the RMA process was… I knew a whole bunch of such details a almost a decade before the documentary on it came out.
Yay NDAs.
…
I was also there during the Windows 8 rollout.
Shut down basically everything for a month, because MSFT ‘dogfoods’ all their software: Every MSFT worker is beta/alpha testing all MSFT software all the time.
We spent weeks just, unable to have more than 3 windows open at a time, half the tools we used on a daily basis just not working.
We asked them to let us go back to 7, asked them if therr was some way to return to a 7 like GUI.
For weeks they said nope, impossible, Win 8 is an entirely new GUI, totally new OS, the Win 7 GUI isn’t there.
Oh then uh, weeks later, yeah, yeah it actually is there, you just have to follow this arcane override proceduren to see and use it.
… And then they just relented, put the non tablet UI fully back in, and called that Windows 8.1.
…
Windows is now layers upon layers upon decades of insane spaghetti code.
Even in Win 10, which was the last version I ever used… there are like 3 or 4 different eras of UI, for various settings menus, which people sometimes need to actually use… but they are considered legacy and thus not important.
Sometimes some newer era UI menus will have some of the options from some of the more buried stuff, but not all of them.
It is a gigantic fucking mess.
My favorite detail on the 3RL saga was when I took my second bricked unit to the local UPS store and they had a special bin for boxes that perfectly fit the 360 for shipping them back.
It was a mess.
After a certain point, a bunch of the 360s… they weren’t even like, ‘fixed’.
They just … not sure of which exactly, this level of detail was basically rumors and contradictions from my POV…
But they were either just physically putting old hard drives in new units, that or just digitally transferring their contents over to new units…
And then they’d tell people ‘yup, your unit has been refurbished’.
Like, ship of theseus not withstanding… not really fixing them, no, rofl.
And then this would lead to other problems like… ooops, we didn’t correctly re register your new 360’s serial number to your Live account, or we didn’t deregister the old one, and now you’re unjustly banned because MSFT tech support fucked up.
…
Assuming my memory is still reasonably sccurate:
Though it did vary somewhat from team to team, the internal nomenclature my team was using was… 3RR.
Like, 1RR, 2RR, 3RR, 4RR.
While all of them were quite problematic, 3RR was the one that… basically 100% of the time, no over the phone, web instructions, or even RMA … could actually fix that one.
For the other codes, following over the phone / web instructions could actually fix it sometimes, or an RMA repair could actually fix it with a speific hardware component replacement… that or it was a problem with the actual cable connecting to the TV, or the Xbox was like, jammed in a little nook with no airflow, and dudes were chain smoking blunts in their apartment, rofl.
I guess at this point it’s served its function. It’s made its money. Most people use mobile OSs/web nowadays anyway.
Oh how I miss the beautiful simplicity of Win95/98/NT UIs. It seems as our screens have become larger, they found more shit to put on them that I don’t want to see.
XP was the last good Windows.
I remember when people were saying this about Windows 95 because XP was so cursed
Everybody who did know what they were doing were using Windows 2000. That was a really, really good one.
The initial release was a bit rough but holy shit that OS was basically magic when it was dialed in. 100% my favorite.
Next to no resource usage. Reasonably secure (for its time - especially compared to other offerings) … and all settings were right in reach.
No bullshit, no fluff. It played the os role perfectly. Run your shit and get the hell out of your way. I still believe they killed it off early to force people to switch. It was murdering the new os in performance benchmarks.
In my experience people were saying that about 98SE after ME came out. People didn’t really have many issues with XP until the internet got really popular, and by then we had some nice service packs to help with the security nightmares of ye ole internet.
7 was decent too; I personally feel like 8 is where things went off the rails.
It was a known rule that every second version of Windows was good. 95 was good, 98SE was good, XP was good, 7 was good, but sadly they never released Windows 9, so we’re still waiting for the good version to come after 8.
I liked Vista and 8.1.
Vista was fucking terrible on launch, it got better towards the end it it’s life, much like 8.1 was to 8, but it was still a mess when 7 came out.
No problem, we don’t kinkshame here.
Prior XP they were really bad at memory management and isolation.
They were still good windowses for their time, especially when you compare them to DOS and Mac OS 9 which would have been the alternatives. For a fair comparison with professional OSes with full memory protection like UNIX you’d have to look at Windows NT, but there the preimise is true as well (as far as I can tell by googling, I only ever used 2000 Pro): 3.1 was bad, 3.5(1) good, 4.0 bad, 2000 good, 2003 meh.
There was also OS/2. But yes, for the time they were running decently on “cheap” hardware.
8.1 was ok. Fight me.
I’m with you. 8.1 was underrated. Yes the start screen wasn’t for everyone, but I didn’t mind it. It was the last native Windows start menu that would just find the apps you wanted to run. No Cortana, no web searches, no ads.
98 for me. Was good stuff.
… or less. For some reason they think desktop PC operating systems need to look like modern websites that are 90% whitespace.
Ugh true, it’s really the worst of both worlds somehow.
Boiled lobster effect at work.
If you bought a top of the line computer in 1990, it would barely have been able to run Win95. It wouldn’t have been able to run Win98 at all. Conversely, even with Win11 obsoleting a lot of systems due to TPM, there are plenty of 7 or 8 year old systems that will still work with it just fine.
Win95 was a leap in complexity compared to Win3.1/DOS 6. It replaced a sloppy, manual memory management system with a sloppy, automatic memory management system. It created the registry system as we know it, and instantly got a reputation as a fast way to ruin your system.
Do you like files named “big long name.txt”? Because sometimes that will come out as “biglon~1.txt” or something like that. It was still using the same shitty FAT system, now with 32-bit extensions that technically allowed long file names, but had to shorten them for compatibility with older stuff.
Win98 added Active Desktop, which made your desktop part of IE. This meant that every time IE crashed, your whole desktop went with it. Didn’t necessarily need to reboot to fix it, but it cleared out your background and a toolbar thing. In a way, it was an attempt to do what Electron apps do now, except with Microsoft proprietary web stuff.
Oh, and once it got USB support, it sucked ass. It had to reinstall drivers if you plugged your keyboard into a different USB port than you usually did.
Neither Win98 or ME would fix its memory management issues. That had to wait for Microsoft to get off their ass and release a home version of NT with WinXP (sorta Win2k, but that’s complicated). This memory management issue was the root cause of most BSODs at the time.
People hated Windows at the time for exactly the same fundamental reason they hate it today: it’s a clunky piece of shit. Win 7/8/10 was actually an attempt to simplify things in many ways, but Microsoft has fallen back to what they did before.
Thank you for the blast of sanity. Older versions of windows were pretty shit, and the newer versions offer tons of improvements right next to the fresh horrors they bring along.
And the consistent ui.
After watching Brutalmoose use a native Windows 98 machine to play old 98 games for like 20 hours, I long for the simpler times of Wandows…
A new coat of paint and a spotlight style search and that’s a mighty fine OS.
Though it does need a lot of work for security, they really underestimated the internet on that one.
The original design philosophy of the PC was as a plug-in-play device. Everything was designed to be friendly to new software, new hardware, and new integrations. The whole point was to give you a device that was a programmatic multi-tool.
The advent of computers as a financial vehicle radically changed that design philosophy. Once you could extract money from a computer owner, the open and extremely mutable hardware/software became a massive financial liability.
Imagine getting handed a wad of playdough, having all sorts of fun with it, finding all sorts of useful household applications for it, and filling it into every crevass in your house. Then imagine someone showing up and saying “We’re going to use the thumb print you leave on the playdough to verify all your future payments and assignment of future debts.” Suddenly, a burglar can walk off with your entire bank account if they can scrap a bit of thumbed playdough out of a corner of your house. And - oh, whoops - all your door locks and window jams are full of playdough, too, because it was so damned useful for customized security.
This is why my house is dumb.
I’ve got some ikea remote lights that does not run on wifi, and a pin coded garage door button, and that’s it.
A lot of tech is a vulnerability surface.
I have a very feeble 25-year-old computer running Windows 2000 on a low-wattage CPU for embedded systems, and it feels far more responsive than Windows 11 on my desktop with an AMD 5950x. And I dual-boot Linux, which also feels much faster than Windows 11.
Oh man, thank you for this nostalgia trip your image sent me on!