Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for January 25, 2021

Windows 95 — I can hear the dial-up modem connecting.

But they are hacking it ?

What kind of chip do you have in that — A Dorito?

Wow, suddenly these flashbacks seem like a 100 years ago!

But it beat the pants off of Win 3.1!

Remembering that I upgraded my last desktop computer from Win 95 to Win Me to Win XP before the hard drive finally died. (Wouldn’t have even needed to take it to XP except I had too many peripherals plugged into it and ran out of IRQs.)

Is he trying to do this on a 286?

Ah! Back in the days when hard drives were measured in megabytes!

Gadzooks….it’s a nightmare ramble down memory lane!

My smart phone today probably has 100 times more RAM than that 1996 PC shown. And the PC was undoubtedly top of the line for it’s day.

Anyone have any idea if this was the first appearance of Hank?

Ahh, the days before there was a Terabyte on your phone. ;)

This brings back memories of rejoicing, the day our massive mainframe, in a refrigerated room with the tape drives, got an upgrade to 300 MEGABYTES!

‘95 was the first Windows that was worth the trouble. But at that time, HD prices were going down so fast that it made more sense to buy a new one instead of “clearing memory” to make room for it. Double the RAM would have been a good idea too. If there wasn’t room in the box for another HD or space to upgrade the RAM, new computers weren’t that expensive either.

As computer memory expands the bloat begins on OS and software – adding bells and whistles no one needs (but the developer has to add new features, even if they’re unwanted) to justify calling something that doesn’t work as well as the previous version an ‘upgrade’. I’d like security and stability to be the highest priorities.

Hey, but Bill got from the Stones the best theme music money can buy.

Last year, Microsoft made $29 billion in commissions on their browsers’ Notification Downloads.

My first copy of 95 was on 12 3.5 disks…lol

“You Make a Grown Man Cry…”(the OTHER lyric from the Windows 95 launch song)

Remember how excited we all were waiting for the new 386 processer, as we stared at our green Wang 9" dot matrix screens and thought of clever ways to write filenames using only eight characters in DOS?

I haven’t understood any windows 3.1

My first computer had a 386 chip, and a 20 MB hard drive. No idea how much memory, other than “not much.” Offhand, I’d love to see how it would have scored in Cinebench R15.

I remember having to push in about 20 floppy disks, one at a time, to get the OS loaded. I may still have them around somewhere.

It makes a grown man cry…

Yesterday we had a late Summer 1974 daily Doonesbury strip on a Sunday though daily reruns are in 1995.

I belatedly notice that Hank’s glasses are opaque, preventing us from seeing his eyes, implying that like Zeke, Jeff, and others, he too is a morally ambiguous character. I guess we’ll see.

“I am now telling the computer EXACTLY what it can do with a lifetime supply of chocolate!!!”

Win 95 was so different from loading Win 3.1, which was actually just a graphical shell over a DOS backend. I still remember the good old days of trying to free up memory under DOS to run games, deleting programs, moving things to HIMEM, etc.

Windows 95 died after many attempts to shoehorn one more feature into it. It looked like that pickup truck with 50 wooden pallets tied up in the back. What we are seeing now is NT 4.0 as it evolved into Windows 2000. MS had to keep working up to XP to pry out all of the old DOS and Windows code.

Actually, Windows 95 was a pretty good operating environment. Windows ME sucked so bad, I took it off and downgraded it back to ’98. The jump to Vista was an experience, to say the least, XP would run on 500MB of RAM, Vista wanted 2GB or you needed to be a REALE patient waiting for it to boot, as in turn it on, go to the bathroom, get a cup of coffee, eat a doughnut, go outside for a breath of fresh air, come back inside and it might be up by then.

Always was, and still is, an ill-secured bastardization of MacOS.

“Reboot” looks like “reboob”.

You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

I remember that back when we began upgrading to Windows 95, our McAfee antivirus software blocked it – gave us a message that it had detected Windows 95 as malware… we couldn’t dispute it…

My youngest was born in 1994. While taking a graduate class in child development the kid asked me for videos of themself as a toddler/preschooler. Later I got this comment: “Wow, mom, it was cool seeing myself with all of that vintage computer stuff!”

This is why the Star Trek franchise invented the word “kiloquad” for 24th century computer capabilities. No one in the real world knows how much a “kiloquad” is so no one can ever say that real-world technology has surpassed it. :-)

Windows 95 = MacIntosh 86.

The blue screen of death! The blue screen of death!

Drive space is storage, not memory. Except for the swap file or an advanced operating system like OS/400.

Older versions of Windows (XP? Vista?) used to crash (not my fault), then leave me no choice but to hold in the power button to force a shutdown. On rebooting, Windows would tell me that it didn’t shut down properly, and that I should always shut down the computer properly in order to avoid seeing this message. Talk about being dissed!

Windows 95 was Mac 84. Lol

I can not so fondly remember having ti install a “new Release” of Word.

The instructions said that the new version occupied 10 megabytes of disk space, but that it needed 30 Megabytes of free disk to Install it.

Once it was installed, we discovered that, although it could Technically run on that machine, in Practical Terms, it was so slow that typing a 12 word memo would take at least 2 Hours. More if you used more than one font in those 12 words.

The company ended up buying all new computers so they could install the “Update” to Word that they had just paid for.

Microsoft used IBM’s money to design Win95 instead of OS/2, which IBM was left with in totally unworkable shape. Win95 wasn’t really an operating system… just an awkward front-end to DOS. Microsoft has a long and successful history of ripping off partners and bringing garbage to market.

Yep. Still funny stuff.