Windows 95 was a big deal it gave us the start button featured usb support and
made people who weren't alive in the 1960s aware of who the rolling stones
are but despite all that let's be real Windows 95 and its successors Windows 98
and especially me collectively referred to as Windows 9x were buggier than a
roach motel it might be tempting to lay the blame on the less powerful hardware
of the time especially considering that many of Windows vista's problems were a
result of pc makers installing it on below spec computers but it turns out
the main reason Windows 9x was so maddening was that the operating system
was built like a house of cards you see all three of these os's were based on
ms-dos which was released all the way back in 1981 and even though Windows
looked very different it shared lots of the code with dos under the hood and as
a metaphor well putting an infotainment system and some heated seats in an 81
bonneville isn't exactly going to make it run the same as a modern car the
reason that microsoft built Windows 95 this way was because they wanted users
to be able to run familiar dos programs and wanted the os to run well on older
hardware and to be fair to microsoft Windows 95 largely achieved these goals
but doing so came at an unavoidable cost we'll tell you exactly what they gave up
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the stability problems ultimately boiled down to the fact that dos was not meant
to be a true multitasking operating system although a big part of
microsoft's marketing was how well the new Windows taskbar would make it super
easy to switch between programs that underlying dos code was built more for
something called cooperative multitasking what this meant was that
dos relied on programs voluntarily relinquishing CPU time if the user
wanted to switch to a different program this wasn't a big problem in dos because
users were nearly always just trying to use one program at a time not only were
there hardware and software limitations that kneecapped how many programs you
could conceivably run and an interface that steered you toward exiting a
program rather than minimizing it but early users largely thought in a single
task paradigm Windows 9x though was supposed to allow you to have lots of
things open simultaneously to enable this Windows 95 introduced preemptive
multitasking which is the same scheme we use today in preemptive multitasking the
os has much more control over programs because it steps in and divvies up CPU
time on its own rather than waiting for the programs to do it but the problem
back in the Windows 9x days was that this was really only implemented for
newer 32-bit programs and there were plenty of old 16-bit software people
were still using that didn't exactly play by the rules a huge problem that
you would run into was that older code would often access another program's
memory space or even the memory space of Windows itself 16-bit programs and
especially dos mode device drivers were especially notorious for doing this as
during the dos days programs and drivers were allowed to access far more of the
system's hardware directly than they are today so when you try to get those
pieces of software to work in an environment where there are lots of other programs running at the same time
it often wasn't a pretty picture there were other problems as well even
newer 32-bit device drivers actually shared memory space with the Windows
kernel itself meaning that the entire operating system was vulnerable to
poorly written software in more ways than one Windows 9x also did itself no
favors by doing a poor job of freeing up memory that was no longer being used by
a program a problem called a memory leak which reduced the amount of memory
available to other programs resulting in slowdowns and eventually a crash of
course the Windows versions of today aren't perfect but they're a heck of a lot more stable than the battle days
we've been talking about in this episode so what changed well even before Windows
95 came out microsoft already had an alternate version of Windows called
Windows nt this version didn't have the old dos code that made 9x so buggy was
built from the ground up for seamless multitasking support and crucially had
the ability to isolate each program's memory space much more effectively but
as an operating system intended for more professional and workstation use nt had
higher system requirements and wouldn't support a lot of the older programs and
hardware most users still needed however in 2001 microsoft released Windows xp
the first version of Windows based on the nt kernel that was aimed at home
users they were able to do this because the Windows 9x family flawed as it may
have been steered developers toward coding for 32-bit operating systems
compatible with newer hardware after a few years of this microsoft finally felt
confident enough to ditch those weird dos Windows hybrids and the antique
kernel continues to power Windows to this day but if you really miss Windows
95 there's nothing stopping you from changing your desktop background to cyan
hooking up a cd-rom drive and playing some space cadet pinball in your browser
you can even kick your tower once in a while if you missed the instability yup
gotta love that sometimes i kicked mine to get it to start working again uh
usually i just had to unplug it though so thanks for watching like the video if
you liked it dislike it if you didn't check out our other videos like um the
one i did on redbox that was fun and comment with video suggestions down
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