Teens react to Windows 95
 

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I so remember being excited to upgrade to Win 95.

At home I still have my Windows 386 software box and the floppies. I still have my Microsoft mouse that has two huge green buttons and it says Patent Pending on the bottom.

It still astonishes me that my cell phone has 129 Gig of memory.

I remember using DOS, Win 3.0 and 3.1 and ordered my first Gateway with Win 95 the week it came out (not by choice and learned a valuable lesson that first release is final beta...). To really go way back, my first machine was a Commodore 64 and used a B&W 13" TV for a monitor.

I still use a monitor just like the one pictured. Didn't buy a new one when I got Vista. IMO the clarity is better than most flat screens.

Glen, did you keep a floppy drive as well?

I still have my original copy of DOS 1.1 on low density 5.25 inch floppy.

170k, why would you need more than a few of those for storage?

I was in a college computer class in the mid 80's and the instructor was going on that he had 40mb hard drive, showing the math and telling us it was more storage than anyone will ever need. :)

Owned a IBM PC-Junior 5" floppy's I upgraded it to 31/2 NO Hard drive. I go back to punch cards and 8" floppy disks! Dam I'm OLD!!

I have a 8" floppy at my desk (for display purpose only)... until recently we still had exhibits on the floor running 95, heck we are just now switching out the old Pioneer laser disk players with solid state video players!

Actually I have a fancy dual drive unit that is the same thickness as a single floppy. It reads 3.5 & 5.25 inch floppies. New motherboards don't even have a connection on the motherboard for floppy drives.

I still have my original floppies and the manual for my Compaq 2.1 DOS that came with my Compaq "portable" or luggable computer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable

Twin floppies, no hard drive and 256K memory originally. I upgraded it to 640k of memory and a 10 MB hard drive and a 1200 Baud modem.

Hmmm...

I'm 25 and used to play around with dos when I was a kid. Loading up nhl 94 and 95. Tweaking settings and messing around.

I'm trying to think at what age complete ignorance of older operating systems became the norm?

My first computer was a broken 286 that I had upgraded to a 386DX40. Ran Win 3.0 with only 2mb's of RAM. I remember paying $200 for a 40mb hard drive, and it was a bargain at the time.
Sheesh, I just bought a 1TB drive over the weekend for $54. My how times change.

Got my degree in Computer Science some 35 years ago....what the heck are you you youngins talking about with this PC nonsense...and 64K of memory was a LOT back then...and a decent dial up was 4800 baud. Got into networking when 56K connections were absolutely state-of-the-art and only mega-corporations had THAT kind of money :D

We were so poor that a floppy drive was a luxury. We were lucky to score a cassette tape drive for mass storage.

My physical chem lecture prof uses windows 95.....

My first computer ran Windows 95. Went from that to 2000 Pro. Still have a box that runs 2K Pro.

We couldn't afford binary....all of our coding was either all 0s or all 1s ...you had to pick one or the other but we couldn't afford to use both :D

god 95 was junk.

2GB hard drive partition limits .... rediculous

i still have an old IBM PS/2 in my closet, it had windows 3.1 but frankly it was easier to use DOS to navigate.

4800?!?! Damn, son...I still have my 300 baud acoustic coupler around here somewhere...

a few fun links for old computer aficionados:

magnetic flux core memory on eevblog: https://youtu.be/ofCXpIuFhno?t=24m59s

the entire lazy gamer reviews channel is about old computers and games: https://www.youtube.com/user/phreakindee

Well....I was referring to state-of-the-art corporate networks :D

Would've loved to have a string and two cans myself....couldn't afford all three at the same time SmileWavy

I still have my Apple IIe, and it works.

I also have my college edition of MS Word 2.0 and windows whatever from 1990.

OK,you may be an old geezers if:
You ever used punch cards?
You remember programming in Basic and Fortran?
Do you remember using Edlin for DOS?

Bonus question:
Do you use a cradle modem to connect to a remote computer? My high school had one that connected to a room size computer at Hofstra back in 1972. We thought it was cool to print pics by programming "x"s to print out on a teletype. Anything older than that and you were using an abacus.

Yea Win95 was hyped like mad and it sucked - essentially a DOS overlay that was prettier than 3.1 but then again so was a horse's azz so it ain't saying much.

I remember in college learning FORTRAN, BASIC and having a lot of punch cards.

Same here...but I absolutely kicked butt with the low level machine languages....
360/370 Assembler anyone :D?

I was a systems programmer/networking guy for years....

This was funny but really familiar.

I've still got my last Windows machine, which I replaced with a Macbook (the one I'm still typing on now) in 12/2007. This and my dad's last computer I've kept around until I get around to extracting the HD contents.

My dad was a huge computer nerd and built them for us as hobbies. Our first computer was an Apple I in ~1981 when they cost a zillion dollars. In the US we had many years' worth of PC machinces, all homebuilt by dad. Everyone in the family had their own and it got upgraded or replaced whenever he felt like it. But my last one was Win95 or whatever was in around ~8 years ago. It is amusing how clunky it looks, but at the same time it is more or less the same interface we are still using today (granted, one that was originally created by Apple.)

Owens Illinois (Toledo car glass for Detroit) hired my Dad in the late 50's because he had an English major for programming. Who else you gonna hire?

In the early 80's in college I told him about learning COBOL. I asked "Did you ever have to do that Assembler stuff"? He said "OMG, I have simply raised a pussy". :D

Yep. Windows 95 was monumental (as far as catching up to Apple). It is the same today.

A computer geek told me that it all had to do with funneling data through some portal. MAC's portal was bigger than IBM's and allowed their cool functionality earlier. MS developed a work around to provide the same functionality with the existing IBM X number of bits portal size limitation. Just talking. Don't know for sure.

Start me up.

Windows look was stolen from Apple who stole it from Gem at AT&T from PARC.

I was in junior high and begged my mom to drive me 1 hr north to Santa Maria to, I believe Computerland, to see this

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1457497754.jpg

In high school we programmed PET computers with audio cassette storage. Middle school computer programming class was a teletype hooked up to the UCSB mainframe. We uploaded our programs at the end of the day and got results the next morning.

^this


But making those movies they have to act like this, otherwise nobody would watch them.

at my first job they used IBM cards [ paper punch cards ]
then they up-graded to paper tape !

after getting a Commodore 64, then a IBM 8088 box not 8086
for home use

I still do all of my coding in Fortran! That's because I'm a stupid lazy coder and don't know anything newer, but it does the job for me, which is 99% array manipulations.

I had my first e-mail in 1991, U of Illinois was the center of the Universe at the time for computing and internet and such.
in 85/86 we were writing programs to connect an Apple GS to a laser disk player, you could use the computer to print overlays on the screen to annotate stuff. You know, like Powerpoint :D

I think that the kids now don't think in terms of DOS, they know it as DOSBox. That being some strange environment that they need to emulate to run Doom :)

I also used punch cards to write Fortran code in 1978. In 1984 I worked at the USGS and used ARPANET, the precursor to the internet. I didn't know it was cool at the time.

In 1985 I upgraded to my Commodore 64 from my Commodore Vic-16. I paid several hundred dollars for a 300 baud modem that was not even auto dial. Back in those days a modem user was supposed to get permission from AT&T and get a business line to hook any equipment to the phone system. AT&T was the phone company and the ONLY phone company. I could not even own my phone, I had to rent it monthly from AT&T.

Anyway I set up a Compuserve account and logged in. At 300 baud the text (no graphics at all) would scroll across at a pace you could read as it came in. Up comes a menu and you make your selection with the keyboard. There was a charge by the minute for access.

I poked around and finally decided to order some Livi Jeans. At the end of the month I saw the charge to Compuserve for the connect time and it was over 30 bucks. I killed my account right then.

The jeans came in and were just what I wanted. I have been shopping on-line since 1985. Amazon.com is many orders of magnitude better than the old ways.

Edit: Whoops, my memory was off. Change 1983 to 1985. I remember the store I bought my modem at was playing MTV back when MTV played music. The song "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits was on and that was released in 1985.

Actually it is still respected used in some very high powered systems because it is such a pure numbers cruncher.
Snoball Cobol and PL1 were a pain in the caboose.

Anyone else use a cradle modem and teletype?

Good stuff

I spend way too much time in the 80's with the vic 20 and commodore 64. Looking back it taught me a lot and sparked an interest. Later in on of my first desktop support jobs I remember replaceing a bunch of full size ~20mb hard drives. Those things weighed a ton. I think I had 3-4 formatting at a time with a a/b switch at my desk. Ah, the good old days.

Win95 was such a step forward but what a POS. Networking finally started to work w/o carrying around a box full of floppies. One thing I remember about that time? 3 com, 3c509. I must have installed 1000 of those damn cards, still have some of the drive names in my head. Weird.