Why did people rush to buy windows in the 90s? Why was it so much better than linux?

why did people rush to buy windows in the 90s? Why was it so much better than linux?

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hmm do i want a graphical user interface or a fuckin black screen with a >

>why did people rush to buy windows in the 90s?
Because it was actually good back then. Well, there were vast improvements with each incrementing version of Windows. Win95 was a huge improvement on 3.1, and Win98 was gold dust compared to Win98.

>Why was it so much better than linux?
Quite frankly Linux sucked back then, and didn't run ANY commercial software required or desired by the masses.

Recommended viewing, Triumph of the Nerds:
vimeo.com/124201377
vimeo.com/124201870
vimeo.com/124201871

hmm do i want to do work on my computer or stare at a bluescreen

>Win98 was gold dust compared to Win98
Freudian slip. Win98 was gold dust compared to Win95.

only game in town, also doom

>why did people rush to buy windows in the 90s?
It was okay back then. Now MS has to force upgrade for free and still fails

Don't act like you used Linux before you came to Sup Forums in June.

Win98 SE was

the first one was as bad or worse than 95

>why did people rush to buy windows in the 90s? Why was it so much better than linux?

Uh, are you forgetting that Linux wasn't invented until 1993? Are you forgetting that Linux was pretty fucking hobbyist until 1998-99-ish?

Windows 95 was fucking GROUNDBREAKING. I cannot emphasize this enough. I'd say that it was easily the greatest leap in usability since the first introduction of a GUI. It was extremely approachable, simple, and very consistent.

Ignoring the UI, it was also a huge leap forward in home computing. Windows NT had proper process isolation and preemptive multitasking. Windows 3.1 (the consumer OS), on the other hand, had cooperative multitasking and effectively no process isolation. If one application hung on Windows 3.1, every application hung.

Windows 95 improved that situation immensely. IIRC, it introduced pre-emptive multitasking to the Windows consumer world.

Windows NT 4.0 was even more awesome, since it was the 95 UI on top of the excellent Window NT kernel.

Everything after that paled in comparison. Vista introduced annoying-but-long-overdue UAC and pointless translucency effects. You probably know the history after that.

At the time that Windows 95 was released, Linux was an exciting project for academic types. It was ridiculously difficult to install. I had a Sound Blaster with some kind of proprietary SCSI port on it that gave CD-ROM support. Worked under DOS and Windows, but Linux couldn't install off it. You had to have somewhat pricey hardware that was the same as the hardware used by the Linux devs in order for it to be plausible to even install it.

>I want to spend the day on Xfree86 config file and compiling my kernel in hope on finding drivers for my hardware

thank you.

I can't imagine a product like that being released today.

>comparing WIndows 95 to NT
Windows 95 was a clusterfuck and its "hurr durr processes should share memory space" made it notorious for contracting all sorts of viruses.

NT 4.0 and above was the masterpiece, Windows 9x sucked donkey balls.

Windows 3.0 and 3.1 was basically just glorified shells over DOS, with some added functionality.

I'd say the first several releases of the iPhone were about on-par in terms of cultural meaning and shift in user experience.

>NT 4.0 and above was the masterpiece

>sacrificed stability for performance

Compared to Win95, which is the king of compromising security and stability for some misconception of "usability", I'd say NT 4.0 is fucking good, yes.

>do I want to work with actual software like autocad photoshop after effects office and drivers that actually work or do i want to rice a facebook machine?

>MS backed down from the purity of their original NT design to speed it up
>moved graphics in to kernel space
>scroll bars in windows are still in kernel space
>the design hasn't been corrected since

feels bad man

> >comparing WIndows 95 to NT

>proceeds to compare Windows 95 and NT

Idiot, I talked about both. Window 95 was more important because it was, by far, THE consumer OS. Windows NT was very expensive and only professionals ran it. I only had it because of a school discount package with Visual Studio.

Windows 95 still had very little process protection, but it did have pre-emptive multitasking. This was HUGE, as I already explained.

Now take your moronic, snarky drivel and cram it up your potato-man ass.

>>moved graphics in to kernel space
Blame gamers for this

>, but it did have pre-emptive multitasking. This was HUGE, as I already explained.
Uh, Unix had this since the fucking 70s. Not a HUGE deal at all.

98 SE was the only good Win32 Windows. Microsoft's marketing team was so good, they could sell anything. Even hot garbage like 95. They literally convinced people Windows would suck their dicks, and they believed it.

Because they didn't know about NeXT

How many times do I have to type "consumer" before you autists start understanding the context?

The Amiga had preemptive multitasking in 1985, but it meant little to the 1990s consumer OS space compared to Windows.

It's like you believe the Macintosh didn't exist or something

>Microsoft's marketing team was so good,

youtube.com/watch?v=sPv8PPl7ANU

Like the Amiga, the Mac had a *tiny* market share. Also, Mac OS was a piece of shit. Shared memory and round-robin multitasking through, I believe OS 9.

Mac was for hipsters, just like today.
Windows 95 was the first OS to have Mac OS features with a huge software and game library.

You're off by about 11 years there, bud.

> Shared memory and round-robin multitasking through,
Sounds like Win95

>I believe OS 9.
Nope.

>Mac was for hipsters, just like today.
There once was a time were all home computer enthusiasts had an Apple computer, being an Apple II, the Liza or a Macintosh.

The only reason why 8086 became predominant was because it had big blue pushing it and Microsoft using all sorts of OEM tactics.

Linux was nothing like it is today. In the mid-90's you had Red Hat and you had Slackware.

Imagine setting up Arch, but without a neat little wiki guide to follow, and close to zero hardware support. Then after days of fighting, you end up with something resembling pic related, but with a fraction of the Linux software that's available today.

Yep, not worth it unless you were running a server. Linux was never really worth it as a desktop OS until the mid-early 2000's, when Fedora Core and Ubuntu were becoming more mature.

Using an old rock song with stock footage video clips is as bland as you can get with advertising.

youtube.com/watch?v=chTftktWmto

youtube.com/watch?v=EtuDS0ntaJY

The first Linux I had, I compiled my kernels and fixed a wifi bug with a absolute hacker guy. Not your average os back than.

Don't forget Yggdrasil!!! My first distro

>Imagine setting up Arch, but without a neat little wiki guide to follow, and close to zero hardware support.
It was even worse than that, more like building your own LFS

>The only reason why 8086 became predominant was because it had big blue pushing it, meaning that a shit load of software was going to be written for it, eclipsing everything else.

FIXED

>Sounds like Win95

You don't know what you're talking about.

>Nope.

Yep.

>Although there were plans to upgrade the cooperative multitasking found in classic Mac OS to a preemptive model (and a preemptive API did exist in Mac OS 9, although in a limited sense[4]), these were abandoned in favor of OS X that, as a hybrid of the old Mac System style and NeXTSTEP, is an operating system based on the Mach kernel and derived in part from BSD, which had always provided Unix-like preemptive multitasking.

>mid-early 2000's
>ubuntu becoming mature
the first version of ubuntu came out it 2004, and people only started noticing it existed around 2006/7

>tfw those days are never coming back

There wasn't much else to do in the 90s