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Happy birthday, you lumbering MS-DOS-based mess: Windows 98 turns 20 today


steven36

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Rose-tinted spectacles ON. Nope, not doing anything

 

https://img20.pixhost.to/images/327/73936809_nofriendsbirthday.jpg

 

Windows 98 turns 20 today. However, rose-tinted spectacles still don't make a hybrid 16 and 32 bit OS tottering on top of MS-DOS any more appealing.

 

While Windows NT 4.0 pointed to a future free from MS-DOS, the majority of the Windows user base simply did not have the hardware to run much more than a jumped-up version of Windows 95. Thus Windows 98 appeared to bridge the gap.

 

Codenamed Memphis, the first beta of Windows 98 arrived in 1996 with the final Release To Manufacturing (RTM – remember those?) version appearing two years later. USB support came as standard (and memorably exploded live on stage) along with a range of functions intended as a nod to that World Wide Web thing. Applications such as Outlook Express, FrontPage Express and a personal web server appeared as part of the installation.

 

Windows 98 customers were also treated to the joy that was Internet Explorer 4.01, along with the Active Desktop, which allowed HTML content (such as news headlines) to be shown on the user's desktop at the cost of prodigious amounts of CPU and RAM. This integration of Internet Explorer with the operating system would come to haunt Microsoft in later years as anti-trust litigation kicked off in earnest the month before the OS launched.

 

Microsoft also quietly introduced the Windows Driver Model (WDM) in Windows 98 as a way to create drivers that would work over the software giant's disparate operating systems. Unlike the previous VxD model, which allowed a driver to stomp all over kernel memory, WDMs were somewhat better behaved and lived on to see the release of Windows Vista.

 

Windows 98 is regarded as the pinnacle of the Windows 9x era, with an update shipping the following year in the form of Windows 98 SE (Second Edition) including a number of minor enhancements such as the inclusion of Internet Explorer 5. The final iteration, the much derided Windows ME, arrived in 2000.

The best of Java, the worst of Java

The Windows 98 era also serves as a timely reminder that Microsoft was not always the caring, sharing behemoth it purports to be today. At the time, Microsoft trumpeted its Java implementation as being the fastest for Windows. However, a failure to implement the Java 1.1 standard to the satisfaction of Sun Microsystems, the creator of Java, led to a sueball being lobbed in 1997.

 

Evidence of Microsoft's attempts to kill off competition by polluting Java was also cited in the anti-trust case that would come to dominate Redmond's thoughts over the coming years.

 

As part of the eventual settlement with Sun in 2001, Microsoft agreed to kill off Windows 98 and Windows ME. Support finally ended in 2006.

 

With Windows 98, Microsoft cemented its position as the dominant player in the personal computing industry. However, in the midst of its self-congratulatory antics and self-inflicted legal troubles, it entirely failed to notice something else happen in 1998. A company, operating out of a garage in California, was incorporated. Its name was Google.

Bootnote

Longtime readers will also note that 1998 saw The Register lumber online. El Reg has continued to bite the hand that feeds IT ever since.

 

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Ohh Happy Birthday Windows 98 :D !!! 

 

[ This post goes to the OP/Main Topic not for Egocentric and Looser People !! ]

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No love for the OS today, but was highly loved  when Windows Me  came out and when XP 1st hit the market . People swore they never use XP , Just like they swore they never use windows 7 and just like they swore they never use windows 10 . .  Windows 2000 is still loved and many still use it in there VMs .

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1 minute ago, steven36 said:

No love for the OS today, but was highly loved  when Windows Me  came out and when XP 1st hit the market . People swore they never use XP , Just like they swore the never use windows 7 and just like they swore they never use windows 10 . .  Windows 2000 is still loved and many still use it in there VMs .

 

Totally agree bro, there were times when Windows (XP) was solid, stable and really fast :( That times there was no Insider Program, Donna N1gga Sarkar, and other bullsh1t that today are irrelevant !!

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Inside the Windows 95 file system

This book will walk you through the inner workings of the Windows 95 file system. The standard file systems which ship with Windows 95 include: VFAT, the virtual FAT file system; VREDIR, the Microsoft Networks client; and NWREDIR, the Microsoft Netware client. These and other file systems supplied by third party developers register with the Installable File System Manager, or IFSMgr, to make their services available to the system. IFSMgr manages the resources which are currently in use by each file system and routes client requests to the intended file system.

This book anticipates some of the changes to the file system which will appear in the successor to Windows 95 (code-named Memphis). These new features include FAT32, support for volumes up to 2 terabytes in size, and WDM (the Win32 Driver Model). The Microsoft Networks file and printer sharing protocol-the SMB (Server Message Block) protocol-is also undergoing some changes to make it suitable for accessing the Internet. SMB's future extension to the Internet as CIFS (the Common Internet File System) is also examined.

 

this book was published in 1997.

 

PDF

http://www.tenox.net/books/Microsoft_Windows/Inside_the_Windows95_File_System.pdf

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Off topic and unnecessary comments have been removed, 

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Windows 98 was OK.  I skipped right over Windows 95 LOL.  Installed it then went right back to 3.11 Windows for Workgroups.   I was very impressed with Windows Me, and consider it the epitome of the Windows 98 collection.

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On 6/25/2018 at 12:27 PM, steven36 said:

Happy birthday, you lumbering MS-DOS-based mess: Windows 98 turns 20 today

 

Actually, sounds weird to wish a "happy birthday" to this long defunct system. We never use to celebrate the 20th birthday of someone who died at 10!  It's more like an "anniversary". It was a fine advance over Windows 95; I installed the beta version of it on my Windows 95 computer and later bought a new Pentium MMX computer with the final Windows 98 pre-installed. Updated it to Win98 SE and later installed and quickly uninstalled ME. When Windows XP appeared, I started to use it but I was not really convinced. I even degraded to Windows 98 SE but again, reinstalled XP SP1 and found it really better! For some time Windows 98 was still used for older computers but disappeared fast. By the time Windows XP SP3 appeared in 2008, with a 70% of PC market share, Windows 98 was almost nonexistent, dead; I couldn't find exact numbers but if my memory won't fail I remember it was far below 10%., mostly used on obsolete computers.

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