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Windows 95 was a big deal it gave us the start button featured usb support and

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made people who weren't alive in the 1960s aware of who the rolling stones

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are but despite all that let's be real Windows 95 and its successors Windows 98

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and especially me collectively referred to as Windows 9x were buggier than a

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roach motel it might be tempting to lay the blame on the less powerful hardware

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of the time especially considering that many of Windows vista's problems were a

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result of pc makers installing it on below spec computers but it turns out

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the main reason Windows 9x was so maddening was that the operating system

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was built like a house of cards you see all three of these os's were based on

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ms-dos which was released all the way back in 1981 and even though Windows

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looked very different it shared lots of the code with dos under the hood and as

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a metaphor well putting an infotainment system and some heated seats in an 81

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bonneville isn't exactly going to make it run the same as a modern car the

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reason that microsoft built Windows 95 this way was because they wanted users

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to be able to run familiar dos programs and wanted the os to run well on older

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hardware and to be fair to microsoft Windows 95 largely achieved these goals

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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

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to be a true multitasking operating system although a big part of

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microsoft's marketing was how well the new Windows taskbar would make it super

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easy to switch between programs that underlying dos code was built more for

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something called cooperative multitasking what this meant was that

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dos relied on programs voluntarily relinquishing CPU time if the user

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wanted to switch to a different program this wasn't a big problem in dos because

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users were nearly always just trying to use one program at a time not only were

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there hardware and software limitations that kneecapped how many programs you

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could conceivably run and an interface that steered you toward exiting a

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program rather than minimizing it but early users largely thought in a single

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task paradigm Windows 9x though was supposed to allow you to have lots of

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things open simultaneously to enable this Windows 95 introduced preemptive

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multitasking which is the same scheme we use today in preemptive multitasking the

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os has much more control over programs because it steps in and divvies up CPU

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time on its own rather than waiting for the programs to do it but the problem

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back in the Windows 9x days was that this was really only implemented for

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newer 32-bit programs and there were plenty of old 16-bit software people

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were still using that didn't exactly play by the rules a huge problem that

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you would run into was that older code would often access another program's

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memory space or even the memory space of Windows itself 16-bit programs and

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especially dos mode device drivers were especially notorious for doing this as

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during the dos days programs and drivers were allowed to access far more of the

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system's hardware directly than they are today so when you try to get those

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pieces of software to work in an environment where there are lots of other programs running at the same time

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it often wasn't a pretty picture there were other problems as well even

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newer 32-bit device drivers actually shared memory space with the Windows

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kernel itself meaning that the entire operating system was vulnerable to

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poorly written software in more ways than one Windows 9x also did itself no

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favors by doing a poor job of freeing up memory that was no longer being used by

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a program a problem called a memory leak which reduced the amount of memory

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available to other programs resulting in slowdowns and eventually a crash of

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course the Windows versions of today aren't perfect but they're a heck of a lot more stable than the battle days

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we've been talking about in this episode so what changed well even before Windows

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95 came out microsoft already had an alternate version of Windows called

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Windows nt this version didn't have the old dos code that made 9x so buggy was

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built from the ground up for seamless multitasking support and crucially had

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the ability to isolate each program's memory space much more effectively but

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as an operating system intended for more professional and workstation use nt had

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higher system requirements and wouldn't support a lot of the older programs and

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hardware most users still needed however in 2001 microsoft released Windows xp

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the first version of Windows based on the nt kernel that was aimed at home

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users they were able to do this because the Windows 9x family flawed as it may

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have been steered developers toward coding for 32-bit operating systems

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compatible with newer hardware after a few years of this microsoft finally felt

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confident enough to ditch those weird dos Windows hybrids and the antique

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kernel continues to power Windows to this day but if you really miss Windows

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95 there's nothing stopping you from changing your desktop background to cyan

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hooking up a cd-rom drive and playing some space cadet pinball in your browser

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you can even kick your tower once in a while if you missed the instability yup

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gotta love that sometimes i kicked mine to get it to start working again uh

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usually i just had to unplug it though so thanks for watching like the video if

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you liked it dislike it if you didn't check out our other videos like um the

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one i did on redbox that was fun and comment with video suggestions down

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below and don't forget to subscribe and follow follow like ring the bell you

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mean yeah ring the bell click the little bell yes thank you bye