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little hints for the keyboard shortcuts

FYI, those are called menu mnemonics. 😊

I look forward to a glirchy vibe coded OS that uses embeded AI for everything, yet some people still manage to turn into a demented semi-functional ecosystem. Probably mostly run by seniors and computer illiterate consumers who just "want latest tech" for bragging rights.

I used to do V Dash contracts for MSFT.

I knew that the Xbox 360 3RR, red ring of death problem... was so bad, that it actually would have been more cost effective for MSFT to give each buyer two 360s, instead of one, at the same price, because of how mismanaged the RMA process was... I knew a whole bunch of such details a almost a decade before the documentary on it came out.

Yay NDAs.

...

I was also there during the Windows 8 rollout.

Shut down basically everything for a month, because MSFT 'dogfoods' all their software: Every MSFT worker is beta/alpha testing all MSFT software all the time.

We spent weeks just, unable to have more than 3 windows open at a time, half the tools we used on a daily basis just not working.

We asked them to let us go back to 7, asked them if therr was some way to return to a 7 like GUI.

For weeks they said nope, impossible, Win 8 is an entirely new GUI, totally new OS, the Win 7 GUI isn't there.

Oh then uh, weeks later, yeah, yeah it actually is there, you just have to follow this arcane override proceduren to see and use it.

... And then they just relented, put the non tablet UI fully back in, and called that Windows 8.1.

...

Windows is now layers upon layers upon decades of insane spaghetti code.

Even in Win 10, which was the last version I ever used... there are like 3 or 4 different eras of UI, for various settings menus, which people sometimes need to actually use... but they are considered legacy and thus not important.

Sometimes some newer era UI menus will have some of the options from some of the more buried stuff, but not all of them.

It is a gigantic fucking mess.

Oh how I miss the beautiful simplicity of Win95/98/NT UIs. It seems as our screens have become larger, they found more shit to put on them that I don't want to see.

Boiled lobster effect at work.

If you bought a top of the line computer in 1990, it would barely have been able to run Win95. It wouldn't have been able to run Win98 at all. Conversely, even with Win11 obsoleting a lot of systems due to TPM, there are plenty of 7 or 8 year old systems that will still work with it just fine.

Win95 was a leap in complexity compared to Win3.1/DOS 6. It replaced a sloppy, manual memory management system with a sloppy, automatic memory management system. It created the registry system as we know it, and instantly got a reputation as a fast way to ruin your system.

Do you like files named "big long name.txt"? Because sometimes that will come out as "biglon~1.txt" or something like that. It was still using the same shitty FAT system, now with 32-bit extensions that technically allowed long file names, but had to shorten them for compatibility with older stuff.

Win98 added Active Desktop, which made your desktop part of IE. This meant that every time IE crashed, your whole desktop went with it. Didn't necessarily need to reboot to fix it, but it cleared out your background and a toolbar thing. In a way, it was an attempt to do what Electron apps do now, except with Microsoft proprietary web stuff.

Oh, and once it got USB support, it sucked ass. It had to reinstall drivers if you plugged your keyboard into a different USB port than you usually did.

Neither Win98 or ME would fix its memory management issues. That had to wait for Microsoft to get off their ass and release a home version of NT with WinXP (sorta Win2k, but that's complicated). This memory management issue was the root cause of most BSODs at the time.

People hated Windows at the time for exactly the same fundamental reason they hate it today: it's a clunky piece of shit. Win 7/8/10 was actually an attempt to simplify things in many ways, but Microsoft has fallen back to what they did before.

Clean and usable. It's not like Windows 3.1 or 68K-era Mac OS - or modern Windows - where everything's flat. Undifferentiated. Lacking visual hierarchy, despite necessary functional hierarchy. Windows 95 managed relief shading and instant on-click skeumorphism in sixteen colors.

Nowadays they're afraid to put text on buttons. The buttons don't even depict things! You get a field of abstract squiggles, all with the same color and weight.

And it's not like Windows 95 was built for experts. There's a "click Start" animation on first boot, it offers a "Windows tour" on every boot, and everything sprouts a tooltip if you hesitate. They treated users like distracted idiots - unlike today, where they treat you like a child.

Not to mention the memory leak and how the "Start" process in Task Manager increase RAM usage every time you click that.

LOL