What the Internet looked like in 1995

[CorporalClegg]

When I got Windows 7, my simmies won't run as well.

There are some Win7 work-arounds for Sims2. I've never played it, so I have no idea how well they work. But I do know they exist.

^^ I have Windows 8 which is tolerable if you get a start menu replacement. There's some free ones but I use Start8 from Stardock which for $5 makes my experience much more pleasant. Basically I never see the tiles and just stick to the desktop underneath.

That seems like a total conceptual fail. A person shouldn't have to buy third-party proprietary software just to get-back some basic functionality.

I switched to Windows 95 on day one just because I always wanted long filenames lol.

I still use truncated filenames for a lot stuff.

Okay, kiddies, I bought my first computer, a Tandy 2000, in 1983. I remember using Word 4.2, Lotus 1-2-3, and some dial-up bbs.

My parents bought me one for my fourth birthday, which would have been 85. Really, I think my dad just wanted one for himself.

It was used and didn't last very long. So we got and one of the IBM 8086s not long after. I was pretty well-versed in DOS by the time I was eight.

Even Slackware 2.1 offered you more at the time as far as Internet is concerned. Microsoft did not have a clue that the Internet was a thing.

Suffice it to say, Pat Volkerding won the interwebz.

 

[lurok]

What is this Windows of which you all speak?

I do have a nostalgia though for OS9 (such a pretty GUI) and my old Powerbook with its crappy 56k modem.

 

[Amaris]

I think 95 was a big year because Win 95 made it so much easier to get on the net than before. I remember wrestling with Trumpet Winsock under Win 3.1 with a 2400 baud modem and somehow got it to work.

I don't think Windows 95 made it any easier. It did not even install with Internet support, let alone a browser. OS/2 Warp, released an year earlier, had both. Star Trek fans ought to know about this as not only were the series a great inspiration inside the team behind it, Kate Mulgrew was there when the release was announced.

Sadly, OS/2 was not pirated here back then, so I only heard about it on TV and felt jealous of its users.

The only thing Windows 95 ever did was sabotage OS/2 and turn around Microsoft's agreement with IBM by backstabbing them and obliterating an otherwise better operating system.

Even Slackware 2.1 offered you more at the time as far as Internet is concerned. Microsoft did not have a clue that the Internet was a thing.

Actually, while it didn't initially ship with a browser, Windows 95 did incorporate Internet Explorer on a subsequent release. On it's initial release, you could still buy the Win95 Plus! pack, which came with IE as well.

 

[RAMA]

I think 95 was a big year because Win 95 made it so much easier to get on the net than before. I remember wrestling with Trumpet Winsock under Win 3.1 with a 2400 baud modem and somehow got it to work.

I don't think Windows 95 made it any easier. It did not even install with Internet support, let alone a browser. OS/2 Warp, released an year earlier, had both. Star Trek fans ought to know about this as not only were the series a great inspiration inside the team behind it, Kate Mulgrew was there when the release was announced.

Sadly, OS/2 was not pirated here back then, so I only heard about it on TV and felt jealous of its users.

The only thing Windows 95 ever did was sabotage OS/2 and turn around Microsoft's agreement with IBM by backstabbing them and obliterating an otherwise better operating system.

Even Slackware 2.1 offered you more at the time as far as Internet is concerned. Microsoft did not have a clue that the Internet was a thing.

Actually, while it didn't initially ship with a browser, Windows 95 did incorporate Internet Explorer on a subsequent release. On it's initial release, you could still buy the Win95 Plus! pack, which came with IE as well.

I remember having both, but using the MSN Network when I first got online...made sense at the time. I hated it and switched not long after.

 

[GalaxyX]

^^ I have Windows 8 which is tolerable if you get a start menu replacement. There's some free ones but I use Start8 from Stardock which for $5 makes my experience much more pleasant. Basically I never see the tiles and just stick to the desktop underneath.

I switched to Windows 95 on day one just because I always wanted long filenames lol.

I just bought Windows 8 for my PC, and I was weary of that Metro interface. Thank you for the heads up on the Start8 utility, for $5 it sounds like a winner and I will try it out.

I think 95 was a big year because Win 95 made it so much easier to get on the net than before. I remember wrestling with Trumpet Winsock under Win 3.1 with a 2400 baud modem and somehow got it to work.

I don't think Windows 95 made it any easier. It did not even install with Internet support, let alone a browser. OS/2 Warp, released an year earlier, had both. Star Trek fans ought to know about this as not only were the series a great inspiration inside the team behind it, Kate Mulgrew was there when the release was announced.

Sadly, OS/2 was not pirated here back then, so I only heard about it on TV and felt jealous of its users.

The only thing Windows 95 ever did was sabotage OS/2 and turn around Microsoft's agreement with IBM by backstabbing them and obliterating an otherwise better operating system.

Even Slackware 2.1 offered you more at the time as far as Internet is concerned. Microsoft did not have a clue that the Internet was a thing.

Unfortunately OS/2 simply suffered the fate of being too powerful an OS for the hardware it was trying to run in.

I remember running OS/2 2.1 on my 486 SLC33 with 4 megs of Ram, and man that was an experience.

I upgraded that same computer (meaning new motherboard, CPU, Video Card and RAM) to a 486DX4-100, and got rid of the Trident junk Video and replaced with an ATI 3D Rage II and 8 megs of RAM (this was all over $1000 at the time, yikes! ) and I ran OS/2 Warp 3 on it, and it was soooo much better. Sadly it never took off (Windows just was stripped enough to run faster on slower hardware) so very few companies ended up supporting it, and I think it pretty much died after version 4?

What is this Windows of which you all speak?

I do have a nostalgia though for OS9 (such a pretty GUI) and my old Powerbook with its crappy 56k modem.

I have 2 PC's and 2 Macs, One PC is an older Thinkpad T60 running Windows 7, and the other is my main super duper gaming PC on which I just installed Windows 8.

Then I have an older MacBook Pro 2009 and my main laptop, a 2011 MacBook Air with an OWC SSD drive

I frankly see no difference now in the way either OS works, but I find I need the PC for serious video editing or games.

 

[Amaris]

I don't think Windows 95 made it any easier. It did not even install with Internet support, let alone a browser. OS/2 Warp, released an year earlier, had both. Star Trek fans ought to know about this as not only were the series a great inspiration inside the team behind it, Kate Mulgrew was there when the release was announced.

Sadly, OS/2 was not pirated here back then, so I only heard about it on TV and felt jealous of its users.

The only thing Windows 95 ever did was sabotage OS/2 and turn around Microsoft's agreement with IBM by backstabbing them and obliterating an otherwise better operating system.

Even Slackware 2.1 offered you more at the time as far as Internet is concerned. Microsoft did not have a clue that the Internet was a thing.

Actually, while it didn't initially ship with a browser, Windows 95 did incorporate Internet Explorer on a subsequent release. On it's initial release, you could still buy the Win95 Plus! pack, which came with IE as well.

I remember having both, but using the MSN Network when I first got online...made sense at the time. I hated it and switched not long after.

Yeah, when I first got onto the Internet, it was with IE 3.0, and I used IE exclusively until 5.0, where I started using Netscape. Soon thereafter, however, I returned to IE with 6.0, and stuck with that until Firefox 0.8. I've been with FF ever since, though I play back and forth between FF and Chrome.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

^^ I have Windows 8 which is tolerable if you get a start menu replacement. There's some free ones but I use Start8 from Stardock which for $5 makes my experience much more pleasant. Basically I never see the tiles and just stick to the desktop underneath.

I switched to Windows 95 on day one just because I always wanted long filenames lol.

I just bought Windows 8 for my PC, and I was weary of that Metro interface. Thank you for the heads up on the Start8 utility, for $5 it sounds like a winner and I will try it out.

I think it depends on what kind of user you are. If you use MS's recommended directories and run simple tasks the Metro interface can be really nice. My mom bought a touch screen laptop and it's OK for what she does.

I'm more of a power user, constantly running multiple tasks and switching between them and use a mouse and for that I found the familiar start menu/desktop to be much more useful.

 

[Amaris]

Yep. Power user here, too, and Windows 8's Metro/Modern UI just gets in the way.

 

[Santaman]

Between 1989 and 1993 we used a Philips NMS 9100 XT which was getting on the obsolete side so in 1994 we bought a real powerhouse of a computer... a 486 DX2 running at a staggering 66 Mhz, it has a 420Mb harddrive a Trident 9400 series VESA graphics card and a 14" colour screen! DOS and 3.11 for workgroups for an OS.. I still have both machines..


As for Win8 this will fix everything: http://www.classicshell.net/

 

[RAMA]

I still remember that big vanilla colored box I got. It was noisy and had far less RAM than my cell phone does now. I studied hard before buying it, I had plenty of money and wanted the one that had specs slightly above the norm. I was shocked not long after to learn my then GF had a sleek black box with 220mhz intel chip and double my RAM. Ugh. Still I was happy with my $2,200 purchase. Alas the way of the PC is obsolescense.

Dell outlines the death of the PC:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/adriank...wittersf&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

 

[B.J.]

Netscape? Pft. I started on the web with NCSA Mosaic. Of course, by the time it came out (January 1993), I already had an online presence for about 9 months. Of course, I don't count the time before that when I went on dial-up BBSes, since those didn't connect to the actual internet at the time.

As for our family's first computer, we had a TRS-80 Model 4. I don't remember when we got it, but it first came out in April 1983. That monster was actually still running up until ~2005!

 

[137th Gebirg]

^^^ Ah, Mosaic! That was my first browser as well. Brings back fond memories of waiting 5 minutes for a page to load on a fractional-T1. Was still faster then a dial-up connection, though.

 

[Trekker4747]

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khpov8rLa3k[/yt]

Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry try to sell us Windows 95.

 

[Amaris]

Hey, Windows 95 was awesome! Also, this video is adorable.

 

[lurok]

I remember the IE for Mac sucked. Though it did have a cool feature which allowed you to offline cache linked webpages. Thank god Firefox came along.

As for selling Macs, these were my idols:

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9HupO2S_wA[/yt]

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

I saw Mosaic at NIH in 1993 or '94 - someone in an office where I was working as a contractor was trying to talk some skeptical higher-ups into the notion that their office should have a webpage.

 

[Amaris]

The only thing about the Mac vs PC commercials is that I always sympathize with the PC, and the Mac always seems a bit douchey. I say this as a Mac fan.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Those Mac vs. PC ads don't quite rise to the level of this kind of awesomeness.

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otq1BXoW0wo[/yt]

 

[lurok]

The only thing about the Mac vs PC commercials is that I always sympathize with the PC, and the Mac always seems a bit douchey. I say this as a Mac fan.

Understandable . I always preferred Umberto Eco's take on Mac vs PC from 1994.

 

[GalaxyX]

The only thing about the Mac vs PC commercials is that I always sympathize with the PC, and the Mac always seems a bit douchey. I say this as a Mac fan.

Ironically Macs tend to get super bloated with junk, and uninstalling software may or may not be a nightmare (if the developer was nice enough to keep their packages self contained instead of spamming your Library folders, etc etc.)

And my Macs have crashed just as often as my PC's. Maybe that's due to my PC's hardly crashing as I am a nut for buying the best hardware, and always keeping the software up to date.