00:00SPEAKERWe did a survey. We did. Yeah, we're doing a survey. There's a survey. It's not like
00:04SPEAKERthe survey ended. It is ongoing. It's going to go for at least one more week. If you want
00:07SPEAKERto continue responding to this thing, please do. Why do we have a survey? Because we like
00:13SPEAKERdata. Data is important. Analytics, numbers. This is a data driven podcast. We wanted to
00:18SPEAKERfind out what you guys thought about the podcast. And the good news is people seem to like us.
00:22SPEAKERI mean, I had planned to just go with my gut, but I mean, you seem to like this number driven
00:26SPEAKERapproach. Our gut was working, it turns out. If you would like to contribute to the survey,
00:32SPEAKERyou can go to survey.content.town and fill out. It'll take like five minutes. We'll learn
00:38SPEAKERa lot about you. You'll learn about us. You'll learn our undying affection. That's something
00:42SPEAKERwe promised. It was nerve wracking to put ourselves out there this way. It really was.
00:46SPEAKERBut they like us. Very polite. Yeah. People have a lot of good ideas and we're taking
00:51SPEAKERone of them for this very episode. So again, it would really help us out, but this isn't
00:55SPEAKERfor advertising. It isn't for anything other than letting us know how we're doing and helping
01:00SPEAKERus figure out the future of the pod.
01:01SPEAKERGenuinely just want to know what people like and what we should do more of and what they
01:04SPEAKERhate so we can stop doing that.
01:07SPEAKERI love one person. There's a question that's like, what would you like us to do less? And
01:11SPEAKERone person was like, I can't think of anything I want you to do less, but you made me fill
01:14SPEAKERout this question. So that's flattering. Yeah. Don't do that. Did we have a write-in? There's
01:19SPEAKERa bunch of... We maybe put too many write-in options. So yeah, there we go. That's it.
01:26SPEAKERWe can get into the... I don't want to get into results here, but there was one question
01:29SPEAKERthat is very important, I think. This banner section is going way long, but I don't care.
01:35SPEAKERThe question was on the subject of monitors, should Brad get new monitors? The answers,
01:40SPEAKERlet's say number four answer, it was a write-in. So there's like 200 answers, but the four
01:44SPEAKERanswer is, yes, his ancient era, 2003 era monitors are older than I am. We had nine
01:53SPEAKERrespondents that clicked that one. The number three response was no, if he waits a few more
01:58SPEAKERyears, he can convert those tiny displays into DIY VR goggles. 32 people liked that
02:04SPEAKERone. The number two response was no, he's happy. Leave him alone, tiny monitor haters.
02:09SPEAKERI'm not happy at all. Well, look, I'm just reading them. I don't write these. I'm just
02:14SPEAKERreading them. Actually, I did write that one. And then the number one answer with 334, 60%
02:19SPEAKERof the respondents said, yes. Oh, please. Yes.
02:21SPEAKERWell, I have good news. I am continuing down the road of my monitor journey. I moved on
02:27SPEAKERfrom TFC central to displayninja.com.
02:31SPEAKERThere's a better resource than TFT central.
02:33SPEAKERI think they're both pretty good.
02:34SPEAKEROkay. It's not a value judgment. Just a personal preference.
02:36SPEAKERYes. Display Ninja has a nice 2020 chart broken down by panel type, by like panel manufacturer,
02:42SPEAKERnot, you know, not a SUSE or Acer, but oh, like the people who make the panels for us
02:46SPEAKERwho's an Acer like in a Lux and a, you optronics who I've mentioned before and Panda. Yeah.
02:51SPEAKERThose are names that you love those Panda names. You will become acquainted with if
02:55SPEAKERyou want to learn who's making the actual screen in your monitor. So you're feeling
02:58SPEAKERgood about this. You feel like 2020 is your year. I mean, like you said, this is a data
03:02SPEAKERdriven podcast. I want to, I want to evaluate every single option before I make a decision.
03:06SPEAKERWe drive that data real hard. I've waited 15 years. You look very uncomfortable having
03:09SPEAKERthis conversation. We did 15 years for this. I'm going to make an informed decision. Listeners
03:14SPEAKERyounger than your monitor. I could have, if I was a normal person, I probably could have
03:18SPEAKERgone through like what three monitor cycles in that time. I so what's the average upgrade
03:24SPEAKERcycle or lifespan. I can tell you what he's monitored. Like how often do you buy a monitor?
03:27SPEAKERI went from a 24. I went from a CRT, like a Sony trinitron CRT that they were throwing
03:32SPEAKERaway at work. Cause nobody wanted anymore. Cause it was too heavy to a 24 Oh five, the
03:38SPEAKERbig, big brother of your, the first of the great Dell 24 inch panels. And then I got
03:44SPEAKERa 3000, like a 30 inch Dell panel at some point in there, like 2007, 2008. And I use
03:50SPEAKERthis as like a, as a pair. And then I had that 3000 until I got a wide LG, like four
03:56SPEAKERor five years ago. And then I got the G-Sync monitor when I, when I, yeah, so I've had
04:01SPEAKERprobably five monitors in the time you've had those two. That's pretty reasonable. Acer
04:05SPEAKERput out a brand new monitor. It's 24 inch. It's got free sync, 144 Hertz. Okay. It's
04:12SPEAKERalmost everything I want in a monitor except that it's only 10 ADP, but it's so cheap.
04:16SPEAKERIt's like 140. That's an e-sports monitor right there. It's IPS also. Like it's every,
04:23SPEAKERthe only thing I don't like about it is it's 10 ADP at 24 inches. Yeah. Like, okay. The
04:28SPEAKERdot is dot pitch. Even does that, does that make me sound old? I mean, everything we've
04:32SPEAKERtalked about so far. Should I say pixel density, pixel density, the pixel density of 10 ADP
04:37SPEAKERat 24 inches kind of rotten. It's pretty low. It's pretty, it's pretty, it'd be pretty chunky.
04:41SPEAKERYeah. So I that's a deal breaker, but it's so cheap. I'm thinking about just, you just
04:45SPEAKERget one of those and then get something nice for your main monitor and use that one for
04:47SPEAKERgames and you know, yeah. Should we start a podcast? Sure.
05:10SPEAKERHey everybody. Welcome to another episode of Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will.
05:26SPEAKERYou are Will. Who am I? You are Brad. Right. That's me. Yes. Hello Brad. It's been a little
05:30SPEAKERbit since we did this. It's an evening recording. Yeah. I'm, I'm the late in the day kind of
05:35SPEAKERsituation. Usually we do this first thing in the morning and it's like, it's like we
05:37SPEAKERget a, you know, get a cup of coffee, a pastry pod. The brain is, the brain is winding down
05:44SPEAKERat this hour. Today is I hope the brain's not winding down because we've got a lot of
05:49SPEAKERwork to do. We got to dip into the memory banks. This is, we're doing it, we're doing,
05:52SPEAKERthis is something that came from one of the survey results. They said, Hey, we like to,
05:55SPEAKERfor you guys to argue about things. I like to argue about stuff. I mean, in a, you know,
05:59SPEAKERa benevolent kind of, you know, jovial way. It's best to argue about things that don't
06:04SPEAKERmatter lightly to perfect for where we are. We're going to talk about, we're going to
06:09SPEAKERrank the windows ranking of windows. Nope. Nope. That's a registered trademark of CBS.
06:12SPEAKEROkay. You gotta be careful with that. Sorry. We're going to make a, an ordered list. We're
06:18SPEAKERordered listing the windows. What kind of pun can we come up with here for this? Like
06:21SPEAKERa window eyes on windows, blinds pain. What do we got in the window? Pain shade. Double
06:32SPEAKERpain. Man, windows are boring. There's really no good window terminology. There's a lot
06:38SPEAKERof them around which to build a pun. What was your first windows, Brad? Um, three one
06:43SPEAKERand me too. I had three. Oh, actually pretty little out of my way. Okay. Well, so that's,
06:48SPEAKERI mean, nothing against you, but that's a little disappointing. Cause I assumed when
06:51SPEAKERwe talked about this topic that you would have used like the early ass went like the
06:54SPEAKERreal first windows. I don't think many people use the first windows. It's just not that
06:58SPEAKERwidespread because you, cause you, you definitely predate me by like you were using stuff like
07:03SPEAKERwhat a late eighties. Like, um, like you were there at the time the windows one window was
07:08SPEAKERcoming out, right? So late eighties, I was playing games on like hand me down computers,
07:12SPEAKERbut it was basically just like a way for me to play games. Like I was playing M one tank
07:16SPEAKERplatoon or stuff like that. So is it the, I wonder if it's the case that windows one
07:20SPEAKERand two were just not popular enough for many people to have used them. So my dad was using
07:25SPEAKERact for his business act as a contact manager. It's like what sales force was before sales
07:30SPEAKERforce. Okay. Um, and he was using dos, like all of his productivity stuff was dos based
07:38SPEAKERuntil windows 3.0 came out or 3.1 really came out and then he upgraded cause up to that
07:43SPEAKERpoint he like wouldn't let me plug mice into the computer cause he's like, that's playing
07:46SPEAKERgames. Don't put that garbage on here. What did, what did his productivity stuff look
07:50SPEAKERlike in dos? Because I mean the reason I ask is, uh, like I've been, you know, I'm kind
07:55SPEAKERof, we're both in the Unix world to some degree at this point and I've been messing around
07:59SPEAKERwith tmux a lot lately. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but it's like a terminal,
08:03SPEAKERI think multiplexer is what you would call it. Yeah. So you don't have multiple one kind
08:08SPEAKERof physical quote unquote terminal window into multiple pains. Like, like was his dos
08:12SPEAKERbased stuff like that? Like I like kind of a quasi graphical sort of, do you remember
08:17SPEAKERthat file manager that was in dos five, the one that you legally, so like it had like
08:22SPEAKERit was probably four or 16 colors act was and like they use the colors for things that
08:29SPEAKERlooked like window bars, but you just couldn't, there was nothing to all tab to write. There
08:33SPEAKERwere no other windows running in the background and it was way lower resolution. It's probably
08:36SPEAKERCGA or GGA. It's not like a modular two 40 or something like that. I'm not doing multiple
08:41SPEAKERthings at one time. Well, no, no. Like he had, so like the contact man, so act, he used
08:45SPEAKERto contact manager, so it was like a weird thing where there was like a word processor
08:48SPEAKERthat you could use to write letters and then mail merge that to your contact list and you
08:53SPEAKERcould make like a mailing that would go out to subsets and then he would print it and
08:57SPEAKERfold it up and put it in envelopes and send it out to people with like, Hey, here's our,
09:01SPEAKERhere's our deals for this month or whatever paper. Yeah, it was weird. It was a weird
09:05SPEAKERtime and then windows came along and windows came along and immediately made it all better.
09:09SPEAKERRight. Oh yeah. Everything was better right out of the gate. Yeah. So yeah, windows three
09:13SPEAKERone or three one one. So three one was the first one. I think it was regular three one
09:19SPEAKERwas my first one. It's funny. We bought two wings at um, at Walmart on the day after Christmas
09:25SPEAKERand one of them identical computers. One of them had windows 3.1 and one of them has 3.1
09:30SPEAKERone or three points. What about 3.1 over the 3.1 3.1 one came later. That was when network
09:34SPEAKERcards, that was only for people that were networking. Three one one was windows for
09:37SPEAKERworkers for work groups. Yeah. Okay. Um, okay. I'm, I'm right. I'm making a list of all the
09:42SPEAKERwindows is, which I should have done probably before we started this. I mean, it's safe
09:45SPEAKERto assume. I mean, I could, you want me to try to rattle them off from memory in order?
09:49SPEAKERUh, okay. So three, one episode because the most recent one is clearly the best. So like
09:55SPEAKERwe can just hammer this out and be done. Well, we need to decide like, do you buy today's
09:59SPEAKERstandards or a historical context? How are we ranking them? Look, cause like if it was,
10:05SPEAKERif it's the former than windows 10 just wins by default because of course it's better than
10:09SPEAKERanything else. But like, is it though, Brad, maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. All right.
10:12SPEAKERAll right. Windows three, one, three, one, one. Yep. Uh, 95. Yep. Um, are we going to
10:19SPEAKERcount NT three point X? I don't know if we should. I never had, I don't have any experience
10:23SPEAKERwith this NT three point X. That was the one that was in tea, but had the windows three
10:27SPEAKERone interface. So yeah, windows NT three point whatever was windows NT one for all intents
10:32SPEAKERand purposes. Okay. But it was, it looked like windows three point one, but it was running
10:36SPEAKERthe windows NT kernel. Right. And basically none of your shit would work on it. It's the
10:40SPEAKERdefining characteristic. Probably a research OS basically. Right. Yes. Okay. So 95, uh,
10:44SPEAKERwe'll skip that NT, I guess 98 probably came before NT four or probably right around the
10:49SPEAKERsame time. I think NT four came out before nine. So maybe NC four, which I don't know
10:53SPEAKERabout you, but I definitely spent a good year or two on that. Yes. I used a lot of NT four.
10:58SPEAKERYeah. And then 98. Yep. And then windows ME and 2000 were probably around the same time.
11:03SPEAKERAbout the same time. Yeah. Okay. I reviewed both of those for maximum. Wow. Are those
11:08SPEAKERreviews findable or are they on a website? So we're dot google.com. Okay. Well, we'll
11:14SPEAKERcheck on that later. I would love to read those reviews. That's like, that's how I'd
11:18SPEAKERlike to spend my time. Um, all right. Uh, Amy 2000 XP would have been next, right? Yup.
11:26SPEAKERXP then Vista. I feel like XP OSR SP two is also like a separate window, right? Um, yeah,
11:33SPEAKERVista for sure. So Vista after XP, um, and then eight and then 10. Oh no, you forgot
11:39SPEAKERone. Oh, seven, seven. Sorry. Vista seven, eight, 10. Yeah. So that's, that is, I think,
11:44SPEAKERI think it's safe to bump off windows 3.0. I think we can get rid of windows for work
11:48SPEAKERgroups too. I don't think we have to include that on the, on the, the, the, what is our,
11:52SPEAKERwhat is our final output here? Do we want a list of the whole, like the whole list of
11:56SPEAKERwindows in order, like in a ranked order or do we just want like a top five or what are
12:00SPEAKERwe doing? Well, there's only 12. Okay. How long could this take? I don't know. It could
12:03SPEAKERtake a while. It's not like we have to go through and like list all of the windows is
12:07SPEAKERdescribed them a little bit over a period of like three or four days and then could
12:11SPEAKERtake break down into a 10 top top 10 list upwards of 20 hours. It seems like, I mean,
12:16SPEAKERI got the time. Let's go, let's do this. Be here all night. You want to just go in order?
12:21SPEAKERSure. Windows 3.1 wasn't very good. No, it seemed good at the time. I mean, it was what
12:25SPEAKERwe had. Yeah. I'm going to put it, unless you were on a Mac, which is a very different
12:30SPEAKERsituation. Yeah. Like it was compared to the people that had max windows, 2.1 garbage complete
12:37SPEAKERgarbage. Now it did. That was the first windows that I was able to use Photoshop on. Okay.
12:44SPEAKERPretty good. Photoshop was pretty good. Really? I didn't want to Photoshop three. I think
12:48SPEAKERis what I was using on that. I don't think I realized Photoshop was commercially available
12:52SPEAKERon windows 3.1. Yeah. I know it's old. I know it's cause I know it came out of Lucasfilm.
12:57SPEAKERYeah. Cause John Knoll. That's why John Knoll has credit on that and star Wars, the star
13:02SPEAKERWars. But I didn't know it was out for just people to buy at that point. So we had my
13:06SPEAKERparents business. We had a dye sub printer that you could print onto like iron-ons like
13:12SPEAKERhigh quality, high quality iron-ons. So we'd print t-shirts with photos on them and sell
13:16SPEAKERthem to people. And you made those for you. You had the only way you could scale the photos
13:20SPEAKERat the time was with Photoshop. It's like paint shop pro didn't exist. I think shop
13:24SPEAKERpro good times. Did you, uh, did you boot straight into windows? Did you put wind in
13:29SPEAKERyour auto exact not bad luck on that computer? Yes. Okay. On my computer, I had like, I was
13:34SPEAKERthe guy that you came to on the dorm floor. If you wanted like a boot disc that would
13:38SPEAKERmake tie fighter work on your computer. Sure. I could get, I could hook you up. I see. Yeah.
13:43SPEAKEROkay. Okay. So windows 3.1, like it didn't have a desktop. There was no start button.
13:49SPEAKERYeah. Like if you've never seen windows 3.1, go back and look at it. You wouldn't recognize
13:52SPEAKERit. It's basically like a window with some shortcuts to dos programs. Cause that was
13:56SPEAKERall that there was for when it launched manager. Remember that program manager, that was the
14:01SPEAKERshell, right? That was the graphical shell. Eventually we came explored on the XE. If
14:05SPEAKERyou can even call that a shell. Yeah. Like I'm trying to think. Cause like you, you pretty
14:10SPEAKERmuch ran everything in windows three, one full screen, right? Like there was kind of
14:12SPEAKERnothing you didn't maximize because you could maybe because of the tile button. Well, you
14:17SPEAKERcould. Yeah, sure. But yeah. But it didn't have a proper desktop. Like you weren't really
14:21SPEAKERworking with like objects, but there was no, like the like windows at that point, windows
14:30SPEAKERdidn't do anything weird with your file system of single user. So there's no like users meant
14:33SPEAKERthere was no users file with different users, different files for different users, no permissions
14:38SPEAKERon the machine. So anybody could do whatever the hell they wanted. Right. When you opened
14:42SPEAKERup file manager, you saw a C colon. And if you were lucky enough, you had two drives,
14:47SPEAKERyou saw D colon and then probably a little picture of a floppy disk and maybe a CD rom.
14:52SPEAKERIf you had, if you had a five and a quarter and a three and a half, you didn't know. Really?
14:57SPEAKERI never, I don't know. I don't think I ever had a five and a quarter. Yeah. Our first
15:02SPEAKERfamily computer had both. Wow. Yeah. Fancy. First and only, I should say like we just,
15:06SPEAKERwe did that one. We were just DD HD is what we were. Yeah. 3.5 inch. Sure. Okay. So what
15:13SPEAKERis your point on top of the list? Also bottom of the list for right now, I started to say
15:18SPEAKERgood first effort, but no, it's really wasn't very good at all. I mean, like it, it was
15:24SPEAKERmissing some, like it didn't have font managers. There was all sorts of weird stuff that you
15:27SPEAKERdidn't have a, do you remember trumpet windsock? Oh yeah. I paid a hundred dollars for a copy
15:32SPEAKERof Trump. It did not have its own built in TCP IP stack. Yeah. I might. It's funny that
15:37SPEAKERanybody was getting on the internet at that time. Well, the box that I got, I got a, like
15:42SPEAKERthis company would package up that software, trumpet windsock navigator, all the dialer,
15:47SPEAKERall the stuff that you needed to get online. And I ordered that and windows 95 at the same
15:51SPEAKERtime and windows. They both showed up on the same day and I was like, shit, I inside, like
15:59SPEAKERI installed windows. This is awesome. I put this wind sock stuff on here, get on the internet.
16:03SPEAKERI installed it and immediately jacked up the entire a dialer system on windows 95 and had
16:09SPEAKERto reinstall windows as the second thing I did on windows 95. Yeah. So, okay. So windows
16:15SPEAKER95. Yeah. This is a big deal. Yes. Are we just passing three, one, one, like it's kind
16:21SPEAKERof the same thing. It's the same thing. Three, one, one, basically three point one with some
16:25SPEAKERnetworking built in probably just group those together. I'll be output. I'll put slash three
16:30SPEAKERpoint one one. I spent months reading about windows 95 and computer magazines. I was so
16:35SPEAKERexcited for that thing. It was a big deal. Yeah. Like people lined up. I mean, I remember
16:39SPEAKERlike the cultural zeitgeist, like they bought that rolling stone song. Yeah. Then Brian
16:42SPEAKERdid the startup sound. It was the most expensive commercial music ever made. Yeah. He got paid.
16:50SPEAKERHe got, he, I think he got royalty. I can't remember. There was an article about it and
16:52SPEAKERrolling stoners about, but I feel like he got royalties on every copy of when there's
16:56SPEAKERa fucking Weezer video on the disc. There was, there's the Weezer. I think it's a buddy
17:01SPEAKERHolly, but I get, there's an Edie Brickell video on there. That's only on the later versions.
17:08SPEAKERI got a day one. You got a day one. We bought a day one. Did you get a CD or discs? Oh,
17:14SPEAKERI doubt if I'm sure the floppy version didn't come with any of this stuff. No, I'm sure
17:18SPEAKERit was a Weezer. It was Edie Brickell. I believe there was like a sword fight or there was
17:21SPEAKERsome kind of clip from Rob Roy. Yeah. Yeah. Then these, just to be clear, these videos
17:28SPEAKERwere maybe 120 by 200 pixels or something like that. They were real low res. Yeah. Yes.
17:34SPEAKERBad stuff. I don't even know what codec that might possibly have been using, but okay.
17:38SPEAKERSo here's things that windows 95 didn't have a web browser. Yeah. But you didn't know.
17:46SPEAKERI'm just saying there was nothing built in. You're right. I'm just, but I'm already in
17:50SPEAKERjudgmental mode here. I don't know that I can hold that against them. Oh no, I don't
17:53SPEAKERthink I'm just, this is just a novelty historical novel for me. Can you imagine firing up a
17:59SPEAKERnew operating system on a computer and not having a web browser? No, I definitely can't.
18:03SPEAKERBut also how did I get Netscape onto that machine? You've grabbed an FTP client from
18:07SPEAKERyour shell using Kermit or something like that. I don't remember doing that or used
18:11SPEAKERlinks or I don't think I was that savvy at that time. I don't know. Maybe you got a floppy
18:15SPEAKERIP from somebody down the street. Maybe my ISP gave me, gave us a, yeah, that's all of
18:20SPEAKERNetscape navigators for kids. You download it from AOL before you switched over to a
18:25SPEAKERreal ISP. Yes. Windows 85 was a big deal. I I'm going to, yeah, I, you know, cultural
18:32SPEAKERzeitgeist aside, like you had a desktop. Yeah. So you had a place to store file was the thing
18:38SPEAKERthat I was so excited about was the idea that you could drag a file right onto a desktop
18:42SPEAKERand just move it around wherever you wanted to. I was easily amused, but also like there
18:47SPEAKERwasn't an option to boot straight into DOS anymore. Right. With windows 3.1, you had
18:50SPEAKERto actively choose by putting win in the auto exec dot bat file to launch windows with this.
18:56SPEAKERIt just, there's no windows. It had that little shutdown screen. It was like, Hey, it's safe
19:01SPEAKERto power up PC now because PCs used to have physical clicky buttons on the front and the
19:05SPEAKERback gross and low res that shutdown screen looked in the startup screen because they
19:09SPEAKERwere both just like running in what probably VGA mode. Probably it was before less than
19:13SPEAKERVGA mode. Probably because I must've been before the graphics card driver loaded in.
19:19SPEAKERYeah. It was like whatever flow res VGA mode they could draw to the screen. Do you remember
19:27SPEAKERpeople used to argue about whether windows 95 was a shell or an operating system? I don't
19:31SPEAKERthink I was in quite fat. Oh yeah. Level of nerdiness to be exposed to that kind of argument.
19:37SPEAKERSo when you went to like the screwdriver shop, they're always just, this is just, this is
19:41SPEAKERjust a shell that runs on top of doses. Microsoft bullshit. I wish I had known those gray beards
19:46SPEAKERback then. Oh, that was not a good time. My life may have might've taken a very different
19:49SPEAKERturn. You're you look, you're, you're so, okay. I'm going to put something controversial
19:56SPEAKERout here. I think windows 95 better than windows 3.1. I think I'm fine with that. Okay. I think
20:04SPEAKERI can get down with that. I I'm going to, I'm going to say upfront that nostalgia is
20:08SPEAKERgoing to weigh fairly heavy in my judgment. I mean, when was the last time you used windows
20:13SPEAKER85? I'm sure it felt fast too. That was the other thing. Sure. Sure. I guess so. I was
20:19SPEAKERon like a Pentium 60 or something. And I was like, this is, this is pretty speedy. Yeah.
20:23SPEAKERI was on a, let me think, I think I spent most of my time on a Pentium 75 in windows
20:28SPEAKER95. So it's a nice computer. Yeah. Okay. 16 megabytes of ramp, 16 megabytes, 16 Meg. I
20:36SPEAKERthink, I think that's right. Or maybe it was eight. I had eight. It might've been eight.
20:39SPEAKERI can't remember. We were still in the backlash of the Taiwanese memory manufacturer fire
20:42SPEAKERthere. We were still digging out of that hole. I remember, I'm trying to think, I feel like
20:48SPEAKERmy overall impression of windows 95 was pretty positive in comparison to 95. And then just
20:53SPEAKERlike a generally the things that it lets you do. Well, so there were some problems with
20:56SPEAKERwindows 95 out of the box, the OSR one version, whatever the initial release was right. Didn't
21:03SPEAKERsupport fat 32. That's right. So two was the big windows 95. It was our two was like the
21:09SPEAKERactual good windows 95. That's exactly right. Yeah. Cause God, I totally forgot. You're
21:13SPEAKERright. They didn't add fat 32. There was something else that, that added and I forget what it
21:18SPEAKERwas. Uh, inner explorer came with it with OSR two with OSR two. Okay. That was the first
21:24SPEAKERthing that was the first version and you couldn't get OSR two at the store. So Microsoft, if
21:28SPEAKERyou went and bought a boxed copy of windows 95, you would get the old version. There was
21:32SPEAKERno windows update at this point. Oh no, totally. Yeah. You couldn't update, like use download
21:36SPEAKERpatches. You had to go to a knowledge base article and click a download button. Do you
21:39SPEAKERremember? Do you remember? And I think it was on 95 that they bundled OS updates with
21:43SPEAKERthe web browser with internet Explorer. Oh yeah. Like cause literally you would install
21:47SPEAKERthe new internet Explorer and reboot or whatever. And your shell would be different. Like literally
21:52SPEAKERthe behavior of the desktop itself would change because they would update the operating system
21:55SPEAKERalong with the install of the, of the web browser. Well, I want to say windows update
22:04SPEAKERwas that a thing you could download eventually for windows 95. Are you sure? I'm not, it
22:09SPEAKERturns out this is a thing that's possible to search for. I feel like I remember the
22:13SPEAKERsystem pro update process being very scattershot for a long time. It may have become a, I know
22:19SPEAKERwindows update was in windows 98. Was it really? Yeah. Okay. Maybe you're right. When did windows
22:25SPEAKERupdate come out? June, 2005. Wait, but it only supported. Oh, Hey, there's a Wikipedia
22:34SPEAKERarticle for windows update. I should have known a windows update came out in June of
22:39SPEAKER2005. It was a web app for XP with the launch of windows 98. Oh, wait, what? Sorry. Sorry.
22:46SPEAKERSorry. Sorry. Sorry. This is bad information. It was 1998. 2005 must have been an XP thing.
22:54SPEAKERIt was sorry. 98. Did I say 2008? So 2005. Hmm. Wow. So windows update. Yeah. Windows
23:03SPEAKER98. And it was supported the windows 90 X and the entire windows NT family. And so we
23:08SPEAKERcame out way later for 98. Is that what you're saying? I'd say it was backported to windows
23:12SPEAKER98. So yeah, at the time when 95 and 98 were new, that didn't exist. No, I thought, I thought
23:19SPEAKERit shipped with the windows 98. I don't think so. I really don't. It may have just been
23:22SPEAKERa web app. Yeah. It was introduced as a web app with the launch of windows 98 and offering
23:25SPEAKERadditional desktop themes, games, device drivers, and things such as net meeting. But it probably
23:30SPEAKERwasn't automated in any way. It was not automated. You had to go hit a button. It was just like,
23:34SPEAKERhere's all the stuff you need. Download this and run it. You can get some, you get a, what
23:37SPEAKERwas that? The tools thing. Uh, plus no, no, no. Wow. Plus remember plus, yeah. You got
23:43SPEAKERpinball talking about power tools, power tools, power tools was great. Um, it was, so it was
23:47SPEAKERbackported to windows 95 and NT four. Okay. So no, no way to update basically except for
23:53SPEAKERmanually update. It was 95 was a mess. I don't remember which internet Explorer it was, but
23:57SPEAKERthere was one that would, and it was subtle. It wasn't a big change, but it was like just
24:01SPEAKERthe little things around it. Put the search bar on your task bar, the internet search
24:04SPEAKERbar. Yeah. You could, you could, you could put, you could type a URL into the bar in
24:09SPEAKERyour task. The internet was very important. You know what it was, was HTML on the desktop.
24:13SPEAKERThere was a period desktop. There was a period where you could like, man, the desktop was
24:18SPEAKERtechnically a webpage. We got to talk about widgets at some point, man. This is what was
24:23SPEAKERthe, what was the 95 and 98 are rapidly falling down my list as we talk about 98 was the one
24:29SPEAKERthat had active desktop stuff that came out with it was built into 98, but it also got
24:37SPEAKERcrafted onto 95. If you installed like I E six, five, it was probably earlier than that.
24:44SPEAKERProbably earlier than three, three might've been three. Yeah. Wow. Okay. So that stuff
24:49SPEAKERwas bad. So even with all that windows 95, better than windows 3.1, no doubt in my mind,
24:56SPEAKERit was 98 better than 95. Well, hold on. We can jump in ahead on October 24th, 1996 windows
25:04SPEAKERNT 4.0 was released came out that early. Yes. I didn't run it until like 98. That was a
25:09SPEAKERgood choice because there was no driver support before that point. Yeah. So NT four shipped.
25:15SPEAKERIt was the first looked like windows 95 running the NT kernel, 32 bit software, really stable
25:22SPEAKERmulti-user stuff. It was the first windows that had permissions. Did you really? Yeah.
25:27SPEAKERI guess I did have user accounts. You had user accounts. You could run multiple people
25:30SPEAKERon the same terminal. Yeah. All the computer labs at my university use that almost immediately
25:34SPEAKERbecause they could lock us out from doing anything fun. Great. We couldn't install any
25:38SPEAKERviruses by accident by downloading weird shit. And they could make us not be able to use
25:42SPEAKERthe web browser on the computer in the lab. Cause you know, why would you need a web browser
25:46SPEAKERthat all that aside you could, there was open, it supported OpenGL. So you play games while
25:52SPEAKERsome we're talking about this a little out of order. Cause like I said, I ran 98 before
25:57SPEAKERI ran NT, even though NT came out before 98. So I guess NT was a little more mature. What
26:03SPEAKERI remember is that the DirectX support was really bad in NT four. Yeah. You'd lose like
26:09SPEAKER30% of your frames. Not only that, I think it was, I think it only supported like, I
26:13SPEAKERwant to say DX five might've been happening on 98 at that point, but I think NT only went
26:19SPEAKERup through like, I think DX three was the highest that NT went. I don't think DirectX,
26:23SPEAKERI feel like DirectX was, I'd swear there was like a primitive version of DirectX that would
26:27SPEAKERwork on NT and you could get some support, but not much. I remember not being able to
26:31SPEAKERplay Tom Clancy's SSN on windows NT for like newer games did not work. Newer DirectX games
26:35SPEAKERdefinitely did not work, but yeah. Anything OpenGL did. So all the quake quake and derivatives
26:40SPEAKERwere fine, which was most of what I was playing at that point. Wow. The first version of DirectX
26:44SPEAKERwas released in 95. Yeah. Huh? Okay. So like most normal people didn't run windows NT,
26:53SPEAKERbut it was great if you were doing it in a work environment. I don't, I don't know where
26:56SPEAKERto put this one. This one's tough for me. I mean, multiple users, very important. I
27:01SPEAKERremember there was a little starry sky, like night sky motif on the login window. And I
27:06SPEAKERthought that was very cool. It had a really good startup sound test. It had some good
27:09SPEAKERstartup sounds or some good system sounds. Yeah. Um, I felt really cool running windows
27:15SPEAKERNT. It was kind of ridiculous. Well, you know what? I, I used a windows and so I dual booted
27:20SPEAKERat that point and I used NT. It also supported NTFS, which was the first place we probably
27:25SPEAKERsaw that, um, I dual booted windows 95 and NT four because I could get NT four from the
27:31SPEAKERschool for basically nothing. And, uh, I did work like I did my schoolwork on NT four and
27:38SPEAKERplayed quake. And then all the other games were on windows 95. That makes sense. I think
27:44SPEAKERthis is better than windows 95. Ah, you're probably right. I mean, I am thinking back
27:49SPEAKERon all the limitations it had, but I mean, I remember having trouble getting a sound
27:54SPEAKERblaster to work. Yeah. Like the hardware support was a little spottier. Not that it was great
27:59SPEAKERin windows 95 or 98, like plug and play. It was a very slow start, but there was no plug
28:04SPEAKERand play in windows 95. Really? They advertised it. They said there was. I know that's what
28:10SPEAKERI'm saying. I'm not, I'm not saying it worked well. I'm just saying that they claimed it
28:13SPEAKERwas a feature. Oh, you know what? OSR two added to USB support. Are you sure about that?
28:18SPEAKERCause I know that it shipped 90% on that one. I know it shipped in 98. Yeah. 98 definitely
28:23SPEAKERhad USB support, but I feel like I feel like 95 OSR two had had USB support. I think you're,
28:29SPEAKERI think you might be right. Yeah. 95 was too, had too big an install base for them to not
28:35SPEAKERsupport USB on it. Right. They must have. Yeah. The problem was you couldn't, here's
28:40SPEAKERa thread from ours. Technica from 2001 that says, Hey, can you actually get a USB on windows
28:47SPEAKER95 OSR two to work? It says it supports it, but I can't get anything to work. So this
28:52SPEAKERold tissue, the laptop, I think NT four, I look, I don't even know if we've said it,
28:58SPEAKERwe should, might as well point out it had basically the same shell as 95. Yeah. Same
29:02SPEAKERinterface. Yeah. It was actually, it was more like windows 98. Oh, well yeah. Cause it had
29:06SPEAKERall the I E enhancements, all that stuff built in. So I guess the question is, are we looking
29:09SPEAKERat like our personal preferences? Are we looking at historical legacy? I would lean toward
29:15SPEAKERpersonal. Okay. Like I guess I like NT better. Like I just, I was just a big nerd and liked
29:21SPEAKERthe idea of running like a high performance, slightly more secure operating system. Okay.
29:25SPEAKERIt felt like you were, you had a pickup truck instead of like a civic. Yeah, but it did.
29:29SPEAKERIt had its drawbacks. It wasn't, I mean, if it's, if we're talking about historical, there's
29:33SPEAKERno doubt. Yeah. But I, I tend to agree with you. I think this should be personal. I liked
29:38SPEAKERwindows NT four. I vote to put it above the windows 95 on the list. Okay, sure. I could
29:44SPEAKERget behind that. What about 98 though? Well now, now we're getting into a sticky situation
29:49SPEAKERand this is when the dual booting question got difficult because windows 98, pretty good.
29:55SPEAKERThis is like windows 98. I had a K six that had USB ports on the motherboard for the first
30:00SPEAKERtime. You can actually use the USB ports in windows 98. Oh, not an NT, not an NT. Oh no,
30:07SPEAKERyou could use them in. That's a good question. It probably supported USB, but I don't know.
30:13SPEAKERI don't know what we're done. Direct X on windows 98 really hit some strides. That's
30:18SPEAKERwhen we hit like as like a, just a game playing platform, which is really what I used computers
30:23SPEAKERfor at that time. I mean, the thing about, the thing about windows 98 is most of the
30:29SPEAKERthings you think about windows 95 is being good. You're really thinking about windows
30:33SPEAKER98. I actually, this hot, this thought just hit me as you were saying that, like that's
30:36SPEAKERkind of the history of windows, right? Like major new version kind of sucks. Follow up
30:41SPEAKERmature version is the one that's actually good. We, we, we, this is a theme that we
30:44SPEAKERcan continue talking about the rest of this episode. 98 to 95. Yeah. 95 was cool. XP to
30:51SPEAKER2000, 2000 was my bad. 2000 was great. You know, seven to Vista, 10 to eight. Like it's
30:57SPEAKERkind of, they're basically on a leaf frog schedule, right? Of bad windows, good windows.
31:02SPEAKERIt's like, it's like the same people made me from the same people who brought you star
31:04SPEAKERTrek. Yeah. So, so yeah, I would argue that windows 98, probably the best windows we've
31:11SPEAKERseen yet here. Cause look, I mean, I love the idea of a 30, like a nice unified 32 bit
31:17SPEAKERkernel, even though like that doesn't, it didn't really affect what I was doing that
31:20SPEAKERmuch, but I just liked the idea that the resources were more efficiently managed and you know,
31:25SPEAKERX, Y, and Z windows. I needed stuff like ACPI. You're right. 98 had better support for stuff.
31:30SPEAKERYou actually wanted to have fat 32 was built in. You went to the store, you bought a copy
31:35SPEAKERoff the shelf. He knew it was going to work with your hardware. Yeah. If you had a USB
31:39SPEAKERprinter, probably that's all the devices. Like I would say at that point we probably
31:42SPEAKERhad USB printers and maybe USB modems, but I feel like those were mostly serial USB modems.
31:47SPEAKERI'm trying to think, God, really? I don't know. What was the, like, what was the first
31:51SPEAKERUSB device? Like at that point, remember this is around the time I got the first, that first
31:55SPEAKERRio MP3 player and it connected with the parallel port. I'm trying to think. I cannot remember
32:00SPEAKERlike what early USB devices I was even using. I remember when I got to maximum PC, I saw
32:04SPEAKERthe first thumb drive I ever saw. I was like, Oh my God, this is going to be amazing. Okay.
32:08SPEAKERYou were 64 megabytes in 2000. Like you, you were seeing that stuff in the workplace. You
32:12SPEAKERprobably got exposed to a lot more, like a much broader range of devices than I did.
32:16SPEAKERLike I was still limited to like what I couldn't afford to buy and what they had at the Walmart.
32:20SPEAKERSo one of the first things they, one of the things that they did in the last step, last
32:24SPEAKERcouple of issues before I started at maximum PC was try to connect 255 devices to one USB
32:30SPEAKERbus. Wow. Cause like that's the theoretical, theoretical maximum. They wanted to see what
32:34SPEAKERhappened. It didn't go well. Pretty good experiment. It was really hard for them to find 255 distinct
32:42SPEAKERUSB devices. I could see that for sure. Cause everything, you know, like, like your game
32:45SPEAKERpad used a game port or really the serial, the game port on the back of your sound card.
32:50SPEAKERYeah. Uh, printers use parallel ports. Uh, keyboard and mouse had PS two ports, PS two.
32:55SPEAKERIf you were lucky. Yeah, I guess so. Cause they had this fat, right? The gigantic ports
32:59SPEAKERor whatever earlier than that. My motherboard now has PS two ports on it. I don't know why.
33:05SPEAKERI don't know why they keep putting those things on there. Huh? Like, cause they've had adapters
33:09SPEAKERfor, they've had adapters to USB for years. Like, I don't know why you can't just devote
33:12SPEAKERthat, you know, back panel space to more USB ports. Well, so the hardcore game people,
33:17SPEAKEROh, if it's tied directly in the PS two is tied directly into the arts or something into
33:21SPEAKERthe DMI bus. Doesn't it pull at a much lower rate though? It pulls a lower rate, but there's
33:25SPEAKERlower latency. I think. I don't know. I don't know. That's that may or may not be like,
33:29SPEAKERI remember using third party utilities around this time, like right around the time of like
33:32SPEAKERwindows 98 and 2000, where you could increase the polling rate on your PS two port, get,
33:37SPEAKERget better mouse sensitivity. Yeah. But you're playing quick two at that point. It didn't
33:39SPEAKERmatter. It's 10 Hertz no matter what. Yeah. Yeah. So that, so that's where like, I feel
33:43SPEAKERlike windows 98, pretty good windows. Yeah, you're right. Maybe the best of the 16 bit
33:48SPEAKERwindows. Oh, for sure. Oh yeah, absolutely. Cause I, I didn't want to know if it's time
33:53SPEAKERto skip ahead to me or me. What do you prefer? They said millennium edition is what it's
33:58SPEAKERdone for. Well, I know what it stood for, but I mean, how did they pronounce it? Well,
34:02SPEAKERalways, I talked to my branding people. Okay. They don't talk about it anymore. I barely
34:07SPEAKERuse it. I think I might've installed a pirated copy once. So, okay. Let's say windows, windows
34:12SPEAKER98, top of the list. So I went back to my actually legit copy of windows. Yeah. Top
34:17SPEAKERof the list for windows 98. That seems fair of those three. Yeah. We're like right now
34:21SPEAKERour order, if you're following along at home, you mean the whole deal? Like I'm just the
34:25SPEAKERfull list. I'm slotting these in as we go. As of right now, windows 98 is the best windows
34:29SPEAKERever made. That's that's what I'm, that's, that's my, that's my proposition. You're right.
34:33SPEAKERIt's the right call. I mean, like I, again, I don't like the underpinnings of windows
34:36SPEAKER98, cause it was that same messy clutch of Dawson, the weird hybrid kernel, but you're
34:43SPEAKERright. It did so many more things. It was not a reskin. Like it, it pulled all of the
34:48SPEAKERstuff that went into later OEM only versions of windows 95 into a commercially available
34:53SPEAKERreasons enthusiasts could make a good, well-rounded way. Yeah. You're right. So 98, I can, I can,
35:01SPEAKERI'm okay with 98 over NT. Now the thing I'm having trouble. And then this was the first
35:06SPEAKERI reviewed windows ME in like October of 2004, maximum PC. I have no idea. I can't remember
35:13SPEAKERat all what it added. Windows ME? Yeah. I'm going to be useless here. Cause like I said,
35:18SPEAKERI, I think I tried it for like a weekend or something and I was like, ah, fuck this. I
35:21SPEAKERwindows 2000. Yeah. So it had all the, it had, oh, it had the quick launch bar. Actually.
35:27SPEAKERCan you just to make sure I'm not misremembering. What are the, what are the release dates for
35:30SPEAKERME in 2000? So a windows ME is June 19th, 2000. Oh yeah. Windows 2000 might be before
35:36SPEAKERit actually. Okay. I want to, I want to make sure I'm, I'm right about that, that I was
35:40SPEAKERalready running 2000 at that time. Windows 2000 came out in February of the same year.
35:45SPEAKERSo yeah. Okay. So I didn't review windows 2000. I messed it in that for Ars Technica.
35:48SPEAKEROkay. So that's the, I guess I do remember more or less accurately that that's why I
35:52SPEAKERcompletely like disregarded windows ME because I was like, why the hell would I run another
35:56SPEAKERbolt on DOS? Everything's better over here. So 2000 is an actual usable version of NT.
36:02SPEAKERForget it. We're not talking about ME yet. Back in your box. Windows ME. Does ME just
36:06SPEAKERlike at the bottom of the list or what are we doing? No, we're doing this in chronological
36:10SPEAKERorder. I see. Here is what we got. They added NTFS 3.0 encrypting file system, accessibility
36:21SPEAKERtools support for multiple language, more languages active. This is where active directory
36:28SPEAKERmade its first appearance. Everybody loves active directory. It's the first one that
36:33SPEAKERthey had multiple versions of. So you get by pro server, advanced server and data center
36:37SPEAKERserver. Interesting because it was to be clear, I mean it was the successor to NT four. Yeah.
36:42SPEAKERWindows 2000, the long legacy from windows 3.5 NT 3.5, one to four to this. And it was
36:48SPEAKERkind of, it was, it was that interesting transition where they went from, you know, NT was the
36:53SPEAKERbusiness oriented, the enterprise OS and 95 90 X was the home OS. But then they transitioned
36:59SPEAKERto NT into their unified like consumer. Well, I guess that's why they had the tiers, right?
37:04SPEAKERThis is yeah. Instead of having the 90, the dos based 90 X stuff and the NT 2000 for business,
37:09SPEAKERthey just had one branded product, but tiers that catered to different markets. Well, and
37:14SPEAKERI think it was becoming clear that the 16, sorry, the 32 bit, 16 bit, 32 bit hybrid OSS,
37:22SPEAKERwhich is what windows, windows 95, 98 and Emmy were probably didn't have legs for sure.
37:27SPEAKERCause like, cause like, remember, I think you could do four, what was it? Four gigs
37:31SPEAKERof memory was the theoretical max on a 16 bit OS. I think you're right. But in reality,
37:36SPEAKERyou only got like 2.5, eight or something like 2.62 or something like that because of
37:41SPEAKERthe way the DMA, I wish I remembered that stuff better. I want to say there weren't
37:46SPEAKERthere limitations around the way that like virtual memory worked and like the way you
37:50SPEAKERcould address memory or I forget, I'm not speaking out of my depth. Your total amount
37:56SPEAKERof memory plus system memory. Is it really four gigabytes? I'm not talking about physical
38:01SPEAKERplus virtual, like maybe it was just the legacy of dos that there, they were locked into like
38:08SPEAKERa outdated sort of virtual memory scheme or some, I remember something along those lines.
38:13SPEAKERWell, yeah, the problem was this, this is from why I should be keeping these tabs open
38:20SPEAKERso I can dump the links in the show notes. But the point was windows had a four gigabyte
38:24SPEAKERmemory limit, which meant 32 bit applications could only address four gigabytes of memory.
38:31SPEAKERThis was published in 2004, so this wasn't really a problem probably in 99 or 2000, but
38:36SPEAKERmore 2002, 2003, 2004. I'm like, I'm reaching through a bunch of dusty cobwebs right now,
38:42SPEAKERbut was there something about protected memory? Does that make sense? That is a different
38:47SPEAKERthing as I recall. I don't remember what that was. There's just a jumble of terms in my
38:51SPEAKERhead that I remember there were like significant limitations on the memory system as a legacy
38:56SPEAKERof being kind of bound to dos, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah. Well, so that's why they needed
39:01SPEAKERto get on the native 32-bit kernel. The thing that you're, the thing you're thinking about
39:04SPEAKERis the, the memory manager is high mem dot SIS and EMM 386 could only handle certain
39:09SPEAKERamounts of memory because they were based on, they were based on processors that you
39:13SPEAKERcould only do 640 K memory. So they needed to get away from that, that archaic, I think
39:17SPEAKERthat's what it was. I'm every scheme. Yeah. So, but that, that stuff was taken care of
39:21SPEAKERby windows 98. Presumably the problem was the 32 bit operating systems could only address
39:27SPEAKERup to four gigs of memory because 32 bits is a like two to the power of 32 is 4.2 billion
39:34SPEAKERand change. There had to be some other limitation besides that. Right. Because even 2000. Yeah.
39:38SPEAKEREven 2000 XP were 32 bit for years. Right. Oh yeah. That's right. I don't think, I don't
39:43SPEAKERthink we moved to 64 bit with windows XP. There wasn't, there wasn't a system at windows
39:47SPEAKERuntil, yeah, like XP 64. And that was like later in XP. It was late. It was almost about
39:53SPEAKERthe time Vista came out. So even those first couple of NT releases were okay. So there's
39:57SPEAKERa different memory limitations. That's what I was going to add is that I feel like there's
40:01SPEAKERthere's whatever we're lost in the weeds here. We don't have to, the memory, there were problems
40:05SPEAKERwith memory. Point is like windows me. Oh, did you find it? Windows 98 is not designed
40:10SPEAKERto handle more than one gigabyte of Ram without challenges. There it is. There was one at
40:14SPEAKERleast. Yeah. And you could buy memory compressors that would compress the Ram. Right. Cause
40:19SPEAKERyeah. Did you ever use one of those like Ram doublers? Remember like it didn't work. They
40:22SPEAKERdidn't do anything. I never try. Like of course I never tried one. It sounded like digital
40:26SPEAKERsnake oil. It was digital snake oil. We tested them at maximum PC. They did not do anything
40:30SPEAKERand made your computer to lower in many cases. That's what I assumed it would. Okay. Anyway,
40:35SPEAKERthe reason I bring all that stuff up is arguably when does any shouldn't have existed or is
40:40SPEAKERit too aggressive to think that everybody could have gotten on the windows 2000 at that
40:43SPEAKERtime? I think that it was the hardware requirements were maybe a little too stiff for some people.
40:47SPEAKERSo the thing to remember at windows is that at the time, the commercial retail sales of
40:53SPEAKERwindows were an insignificant fraction of the total sales of windows PCs. They were
40:57SPEAKERjust because they were selling so many PCs back then every year that like the manufacturer,
41:04SPEAKERmy understanding is that the manufacturers wanted a new version of windows because when
41:08SPEAKERwindows 90 K came out, all these people with two year old computers came to the best buy
41:12SPEAKERand were like in compact and HP and gateway. And we're like, Hey, we heard there's a new
41:15SPEAKERwindows. We've got to get a new computer. Yeah. I wonder how many people back then didn't
41:19SPEAKEReven realize like that they just kind of their conception of windows was that to get the
41:23SPEAKERnew windows, you needed a new computer. Almost all of them is the answer. Yikes. So here
41:28SPEAKERwe go. Windows ME came out, HP compact, all those guys dumped on their computers, fresh
41:34SPEAKERnew logos on the boxes at, at, at, at best buy USA and all that stuff from a consumer
41:39SPEAKERstandpoint that doesn't, I don't know that that refutes my argument that it shouldn't
41:43SPEAKERhave existed. Well, I mean, the, the hardware was advancing at that point so fast that like
41:48SPEAKERthese were probably the first machines that people got 3d accelerators with like at retail.
41:53SPEAKERSo you get like a ATI radion would ship in some of these machines, those name at that
42:00SPEAKERtime. Yeah. They, that launched in June of 2000, really. Or it may have launched a little
42:05SPEAKERbit later, but they, they were, that's when I reviewed that it was the June 2000. I'm
42:09SPEAKERtrying to think probably the very first 3d accelerator for like 95 and then three effects
42:13SPEAKERreally blew up in 96, 96 is when the voodoo got big, when GL quake came out, the voodoo
42:20SPEAKERgot big. So, and then T Viva TNT TNT and TNT two or like 98, 99 ish. Yeah. So yeah, you're
42:25SPEAKERprobably right about the time that they were getting actually bundled into retail. Yeah.
42:29SPEAKERSo we would see people in 20 eights and TNT twos in commercial and commercially available
42:35SPEAKERmachines, like starting in 98 rather than integrated. So there's probably an argument
42:40SPEAKERthat like, there was a hardware spec that it, windows me made sense for, I mean, I don't,
42:44SPEAKERI don't know how demanding windows 2000 was at the time. It wasn't, it wasn't maybe you
42:49SPEAKERneeded more memory. So that would, that was probably the defiant, like probably they were
42:52SPEAKERselling like, like I want to, I can't even remember what I'm, what the amount of memory
42:57SPEAKERa machine would have had at that point. It would probably been like 256 megs. That sounds
43:01SPEAKERright. Gosh, I should have brought old maximum PCs over for this. This would have been fun.
43:07SPEAKERBut the point is they got rid of DOS with windows me. So you couldn't do they, you couldn't
43:12SPEAKERexit out of windows at that point anymore. Okay. And go to a DOS prompt. You could just
43:16SPEAKERrun a command line from inside windows. Maybe I'm being a little too hard on him even cause
43:20SPEAKERI thought it was still bound up and all that stuff. Well, that was kind of a not feature
43:24SPEAKERbecause like it didn't hurt. Dawson doesn't hurt anybody. Brad, it wasn't a bad guy. I
43:29SPEAKERwas under the impression that running on top of dos is part of what was constraining. No,
43:33SPEAKERthey just, that was just shit. They said none of that mattered. The point is you couldn't,
43:37SPEAKERyou couldn't shell out and play tie fighter anymore. You had to load it inside a window
43:40SPEAKERinside windows. I mean, so that stuff all went away and I think that's around the time
43:43SPEAKERDOS box development started. That would make sense. With that and XP coming. I don't, I
43:48SPEAKERjust don't know much about Amy. So it shipped with a IE 5.5 windows media player seven,
43:54SPEAKERand you got windows movie maker with it, which was the first free video editor that I ever
43:59SPEAKERsaw. I don't know how you got video onto the computer, but you know, that's a different
44:04SPEAKERproblem for a different day. Map is a matrix card and it incorporated some of the stuff
44:09SPEAKERthat they learned. Like it was designed to be an easier onboard than windows 98 was basically.
44:18SPEAKERAnd windows 2000 was a nightmare install process. It was really hard. Was it really? Yeah. It
44:22SPEAKERwas like they asked you a bunch of questions. Well, you got to repartition your hard drive
44:25SPEAKERbecause it needed empty. Yeah. I guess that's the type of stuff I've always enjoyed the
44:30SPEAKERmost because you're a huge nerd. Makes you learn a bunch of new stuff. Yeah. I would
44:36SPEAKERput Amy pretty low. So we got, we got to put windows 2000 down first. You think windows
44:41SPEAKER2000 is above 98 or above? And for me, yes, absolutely. I could not, I could not get onto
44:47SPEAKERit fast enough because it was what I liked about NT four, but in a mostly usable consumer
44:52SPEAKERoriented iOS and it, and it supported full direct X. That's what I'm saying. It was usable
44:57SPEAKERas a full company. It could be your own only windows for the most part. Basically. I feel
45:02SPEAKERlike when windows 2000 came out, it became my primary windows and I started booting over.
45:06SPEAKERThat's exactly it. Yes. I don't think I even do it at that point. I think, I think windows
45:11SPEAKER2000 was it for me. So I had windows 98 cause I still had games that wouldn't run right.
45:16SPEAKERYou know why I had windows 98 because EA's copy protection for review games didn't run
45:22SPEAKERon windows 2000. I'm pretty sure if I remember I was aggressively enough, I was aggressive
45:26SPEAKERenough about wanting to get off of the old windows and get onto this NT based stuff that
45:31SPEAKERI just gave up on whatever didn't work. Pretty sure is the direction that I went. Okay. You're
45:36SPEAKERmaking a strong argument here. I'm going to say like I wanted the performance. I wanted
45:40SPEAKERthe efficient use of resources that a modern us could provide. So, so far not to not feel
45:45SPEAKERlike I was like, you know, bound to this archaic old platform. So far we're trending toward
45:50SPEAKERevery new version of windows is better than the one that came before my concern is kind
45:54SPEAKERof how this list is going to net out. Yeah. You know what? We have Vista coming. I think
45:59SPEAKERwe're going to be okay for sure. And the eight for that matter. Yeah. Eight. You know what?
46:04SPEAKERI maybe don't love XP as much as some people, but we'll get through it. Wow. Wow. Yeah.
46:10SPEAKERLike windows 2000 was, I didn't, it had windows updates. So when I had to make it Y two K
46:14SPEAKERcompliant, I could just, Oh no, it was already why it came out after Y two K. Yeah. I must
46:19SPEAKERhave been running betas beforehand. Probably illicitly obtained betas. If I had to guess,
46:24SPEAKERoops, don't tell anybody. I, you know what I can, I can put, yeah, let's put windows
46:30SPEAKER2000 above windows 98. And then I'm going to like jump straight ahead to windows me.
46:36SPEAKERAnd I think that should be below windows 3.1. Wow. Yeah. Whoa. Huh? I don't know. I could
46:43SPEAKERsee it below 95. Okay. Why, why would you put it above windows 3.1? The first good windows
46:50SPEAKERkind of the first windows period. Yeah. There were windows before, but you know, I mean
46:55SPEAKERany at least had all of the sort of interface evolutions and like kind of incremental improvements
47:01SPEAKERof the previous two. Yeah. Like it cost a hundred dollars. Did it really? Yeah. They
47:05SPEAKERcharged money for OSs back then. Remember, I guess that's kind of rough. Well, they still
47:08SPEAKERdo kind of like Amy. What I'm saying is Amy in a vacuum is a better 98, right? Like it's
47:13SPEAKERnot a bad thing. It's just that 98 was still just fine. It had windows update. I guess
47:18SPEAKERyou're right. It had all the direct Xs. Well, if they die fighter, well, that's true. Yeah.
47:23SPEAKERTie fighter was still good back in my mind. Getting off of DOS is an advantage, but when
47:26SPEAKERyou put it that way that there were DOS cause you're right. You couldn't just run DOS stuff
47:29SPEAKERand windows very well. No, it was bad. Especially, especially God forbid you wanted to try like
47:34SPEAKERa DOS thing that ran in a, I think, I don't think you could play quake on a windows, any
47:39SPEAKERmachine cause it was a DOS game. It was a DOS forge for GW game. Well, GL quake was
47:43SPEAKERa windows application though. Oh right. Yeah. You could play jail quick cause that's what
47:46SPEAKERyou would have been played by them. I mean, I was a lunatic who kept playing software
47:49SPEAKERquake even after I had a voodoo faster. I had a way higher forever. Yeah, of course.
47:54SPEAKERI played better. Totally. Um, no transparent water though. Yeah. Yeah. You're kind of selling
48:00SPEAKERme when you, when you put it in the context of me not needing to exist and potentially
48:06SPEAKERmaking everything worse. Well, it'd be being a cash grab. Like if you're saying, if you're
48:10SPEAKERsaying me was cranked out, God, you're right. Like of course it was, it was cranked out.
48:14SPEAKERIt came out six months after windows 2000. Not only that, but only what a year and a
48:18SPEAKERhalf after 98, two years after 98. Yeah. Yeah. There's absolutely no way they couldn't have
48:25SPEAKERjust kept updating 98. Okay. So it had some hardware support improvements. Let's see if
48:29SPEAKERthis changes your mind. Um, I'm not sure if you're advocating for or against it. I'm just
48:34SPEAKERgiving you information. I'm stirring the pot. All right. Uh, it added a support for faster
48:38SPEAKERboot times, uh, by getting rid of config dot SIS and auto exec dot bat treasured legacies
48:44SPEAKERof the Doss era. It, uh, added support generic support for a five button mice as standard.
48:52SPEAKERIt's added the windows image acquisition API for scanners and digital cameras. Uh, it improved
48:58SPEAKERpower management suspend resume operations. So it included support for the ACPI S for
49:04SPEAKERsleep state. So probably save some power. It's not a bad thing. And it had USB and firewire
49:09SPEAKERsupport improvements. Okay. It's the only windows 98, the windows 90 X that included
49:15SPEAKERgeneric drivers for USB mass storage devices and USB printers. Okay. Those sound like more
49:21SPEAKERthan just an update to windows 98. Like that does kind of justify itself, I guess. I still
49:28SPEAKERthink it's worse than windows 3.1, 3, look 3.1, 3.1. It introduced a file manager. That's
49:34SPEAKERa big, that's a big thing. Think about all the time. Think about all the good times you've
49:37SPEAKERhad with file manager, Brad, nostalgia is like the one and only argument I have for
49:41SPEAKERwhat is three one. I can't think of a single thing that's actually objectively good about
49:45SPEAKERit. Um, you could, you could print. Nope. Sorry. You can have two windows open at the
49:50SPEAKERsame time. That was pretty good. Corel draw. I used Corel draw a lot. I did like the windows
49:57SPEAKERversion of King's quest six because it had the higher, it had higher res character portraits
50:02SPEAKERand have super VGA character port. I've never played a King's quest game. Really? No, man.
50:06SPEAKERI was, I was way into Sierra adventure games, which I was into Sierra. I played like Tex
50:10SPEAKERMurphy and phantasmagoria and Gabriel Knight and all those later ones, but I didn't play
50:15SPEAKERthe early ones. Okay. So, so you think it should be above windows 3.1. I could go either
50:20SPEAKERway. You're you're saying maybe you should be at the bottom of the list. I mean, I reviewed
50:23SPEAKERit. I, okay. Okay, sure. You've you definitely have gotten a more authoritative view on it
50:29SPEAKERthan I do. Let's see. Let's see what past me said about windows ME cause I find that
50:34SPEAKERreview. Uh, here we go. Google books. Um, maximum PC, January two th it'd be October
50:41SPEAKER2000 I think. Okay. I found it. This is my review. It's the first windows review I did
50:46SPEAKERfor maximum PC. Exciting. I actually had to tell how many pages you got one page wait
50:51SPEAKERin the magazine, in the magazine. It was only, wow. Look, we had to, we only had 50 pages
50:55SPEAKERof content. I'm on fair. Also, it was the third of these windows. Yeah, it was not exactly
50:59SPEAKERthe windows 95. I did a whole, you know what? It's not true. I did the windows 2000 review
51:03SPEAKERas a freelancer. Okay. And that was in like six months before this. Okay. So here's the,
51:08SPEAKERoh, I'm sorry. Go ahead. Did you, did you score these reviews? Yes, they have, they
51:11SPEAKERhave a number attached. You want to, this is back when I still believed in numbers.
51:13SPEAKERYou want to drop that? Do you want to drop that at the top or it's like, what do you
51:16SPEAKERthink is better? Do you think this is a tie? You think lead with the actually characterize
51:20SPEAKERyour review? And then I'll see if I can guess windows. This is on page 82 of the October
51:26SPEAKER2000 maximum PC windows millennium edition. We did not call it when Emmy not much more
51:33SPEAKERthan a windows 98 refresh. Wow. The pluses are easier to use than windows 98, almost
51:39SPEAKERimpossible to break. It added a system restore for people who like to break their computers.
51:45SPEAKERMovie maker, better hardware support, minuses, no new interface, face changes, no faster
51:50SPEAKERthan windows 98. I gave it a six out of 10 out of 10. Yeah. That sounds about right.
51:56SPEAKERAnd it was 60 bucks for an upgrade. It wasn't a hundred bucks. That's not too bad. Yeah.
52:00SPEAKERThat's a reasonable upgrade fee, but that is also kind of an underwhelming upgrade.
52:05SPEAKERIt said windows me might tempt power users, but the new OS doesn't improve boot times
52:09SPEAKERor benchmarks. We recommend the wait for Emmy until your next new system purchase. If you
52:13SPEAKERdo plan to purchase Emmy, make sure you pick it up before the introductory upgrade price
52:17SPEAKERof $60 expires in January. I think I good advice. I may have come around to your argument.
52:23SPEAKERYeah. Bottom of the list, man. Are you, are you, are you pushing for that? Let's give
52:26SPEAKERthis one a big flusher. So I think the thing that brought me around is just the, the very
52:30SPEAKERknowledge that windows 2000 was already on the market for a long time to like the fact
52:34SPEAKERthat you could be running a much better, more modern operating system before this thing
52:37SPEAKEReven hit the market. Yeah. I'm fine. Why would you, why would you buy, why would you get
52:41SPEAKERthis when you could get something good? That's what I say. Yeah. So, okay. Bottom of the
52:46SPEAKERlist, you put it in like the sort of business or a like value proposition context of should
52:51SPEAKERpeople have paid money for that thing? Yeah. No, the answer is probably no. No, absolutely
52:55SPEAKERnot. So next up on our list, this capital, Oh, hold on. How are we doing on time? We
52:59SPEAKERdone with 2000. Have we, have we, it's currently the top of the list, right? It's the, is there
53:04SPEAKERanything else we need to say about it? I think we, I guess pretty good. It pretty well like
53:07SPEAKERit was the first, it was the first like commercial NT. It was the first like NT for regular people.
53:12SPEAKERSo the good news is we're almost halfway done with the list of potential windows. Huh? The
53:16SPEAKERbad news is we've been talking for about an hour. It seems like, okay. Um, is this, are
53:20SPEAKERwe going to take an unprecedented step here? Do you want to, do you want to, do you want
53:23SPEAKERto tackle windows XP first? Cause I have a novel take on windows XP. Huh? Well, now that
53:29SPEAKERyou've said that, I believe that we're going to have to break for the week. Oh man. Oh,
53:34SPEAKERwe're going to be so upset. I've watched enough cable television to know how this works and
53:37SPEAKERthen come back after the break. If you have something novel to say, well, like I said,
53:41SPEAKERI don't know that I'm as strong on XP as I think most people are. Cause I bet there's
53:44SPEAKERa bunch of people who would say XP was their favorite windows. I think really at release
53:48SPEAKERXP was pretty bad. Would it be my take? Okay. We should get into that next week. Oh boy.
53:55SPEAKERAll right. Uh, I'm so sorry. Oh, it's fine. Uh, we will be back next week with the continuation
54:01SPEAKERof the ranking. Oh, sorry. No, the creating an ordered list of windows. That's right.
54:06SPEAKERThis is an orderly, orderly. Uh, so what do we have right now? So right now, the standings
54:10SPEAKERas we are right now, windows 2000 number one with a bullet, like hard number one real good.
54:17SPEAKERThis is basically windows prehistory. Cause I don't think windows history really starts
54:20SPEAKERuntil XP. Not in it's like modern form. Like that's kind of what I was saying about, you
54:24SPEAKERknow, 2000 was when they transitioned to this newer platform into being something normal
54:28SPEAKERpeople could use. Yeah. So windows 98, number two, also pretty good. I think. Yeah. Windows
54:33SPEAKERNT for 98 did a lot with a little, I think that's a good way to sell it for as sort of
54:39SPEAKERlike archaic as it's it's innards were thinking about plucky. It was, you could go out by
54:43SPEAKERa printer with USB port. It's one port to rule them all, but also you only used it for
54:47SPEAKERprinters and maybe mice. Yeah. You could play quake and unreal. Do we feel, we feel good
54:53SPEAKERabout NT for being below windows 98. Well, you made the, I think you made the push for
54:57SPEAKERthat. Yeah. I, I, you know, you won me over that. Like I, as much as like NT four was
55:03SPEAKERsort of superior technology, you could just straight up do more with 98. That's true.
55:07SPEAKERI'm very persuasive. You could do way more with 98. Like I, I am personally, my preference
55:12SPEAKERis all about like sexy, efficient future technology. Yeah. But I know the sensible approach is
55:17SPEAKERlike, what can you do with this operating system? You know what it was? It was practical
55:21SPEAKERsense NT four only supported DirectX three. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying.
55:26SPEAKERYeah. Just you were missing out on a lot with NT. So I think 98 is fine by throwing my words
55:31SPEAKERback at me. You've convinced me, Brad. That's yup. Okay. So windows, 2000 windows, 98 windows,
55:37SPEAKERNT four windows, 95 coming in at number four windows NT, sorry, windows 3.1 at the number
55:45SPEAKERfive slot and bringing up the rear windows millennium edition came out after the millennium.
55:52SPEAKERWhy would they like by that point? Like if they had named it, it was like July or something.
55:57SPEAKERLike if they had named it millennium edition in 1999, before they realized what a debacle
56:01SPEAKERthe millennium bug was going to be, I could see like calling him, but why would you call
56:05SPEAKERit millennium edition? Also? Yeah. Like the turn of the century just happened six months
56:09SPEAKERago. Like who cares at this point in the past, it's the new millennium, man. We're drinking.
56:13SPEAKEROkay. Cola over here. Even the name of windows ME was an afterthought. You know what else
56:17SPEAKERsucked about what does ME the opening startup sound? It was bad. I don't remember. It was
56:21SPEAKERtoo short. It wasn't too short. Did those startups sound for no, man. That'd be pretty
56:25SPEAKERgood. It might've been okay. The one for windows XP. So that was pretty, uh, you know what else
56:30SPEAKERsucked about what does ME the logo? It was like a script M and E you're right. It looked
56:34SPEAKERlike it was drawn with a crayon by a small child, pastel and really good handwriting.
56:38SPEAKERLike I, yes, you're right. It was too fucking friendly. When does ME you are bad garbage
56:43SPEAKERgarbo. Sorry. Okay. The spin of operating system history. So that's it for us this week.
56:48SPEAKEROkay. We'll be back next week with the rest of the windows. Hey, thanks for bearing with
56:53SPEAKERus as we split this thing into two. We still have surveys up. So if you haven't done it
56:58SPEAKERyet, go to survey.content.town. Fill that thing out. Let us know how we're doing. Complain.
57:03SPEAKERIf you've already done it, don't do it again. We only needed one from each of you. You get
57:06SPEAKERour undying affection either way. Um, but if you haven't filled it out yet, we'd love
57:10SPEAKERto hear how you think, what you like, whether you like the podcast, whether you don't. Yeah.
57:13SPEAKERIt's uh, it's, it is both encouraging and instructive. Yes. Very good. And on that note,
57:20SPEAKERsee you next week.