00:00SPEAKERBrad, I did it again.
00:01SPEAKEROops, you did it again?
00:03SPEAKEROops, I did it, I made another podcast.
00:05SPEAKERYou played with someone's heart?
00:06SPEAKERI got lost in the game?
00:08SPEAKERYeah, I did definitely get lost in the game.
00:11SPEAKEROoh, baby, baby.
00:12SPEAKERNo, that's too far.
00:13SPEAKEROkay.
00:15SPEAKERI started a new podcast.
00:16SPEAKERReally, what?
00:17SPEAKERYeah.
00:18SPEAKERWhy would you do such a thing?
00:19SPEAKERI mean, congratulations.
00:20SPEAKERYeah, hi.
00:22SPEAKERIt aligns with your interests, I think.
00:24SPEAKEROh?
00:25SPEAKEROver on The Full Nerd,
00:26SPEAKERPC World's a podcast devoted to PC hardware
00:29SPEAKERand hardware enthusiasm.
00:31SPEAKERYes.
00:32SPEAKERWe have been at first joking,
00:34SPEAKERbut increasingly seriously calling 2025 the year of Linux
00:37SPEAKERbecause of the impending Windows 10 apocalypse
00:41SPEAKERthat's happening.
00:42SPEAKERI think it just is.
00:44SPEAKERI think that ship may have sailed.
00:46SPEAKERI think the year of the full Linux desktop has arrived.
00:49SPEAKERI think we're in it.
00:49SPEAKERSo we started, we were like,
00:52SPEAKER"Hey, we should do a Linux podcast
00:54SPEAKERabout running desktop Linux."
00:56SPEAKERAnd so we started it, started doing it.
00:59SPEAKERAnd it turns out it's real good.
01:01SPEAKERIt's real nice to not have your operating system
01:05SPEAKERalways trying to sell stuff to you.
01:06SPEAKERAds in your face constantly, upsells.
01:10SPEAKERI got one the other day.
01:11SPEAKERI logged in, I got up and turned on my computer,
01:13SPEAKERand first thing, as I often do-
01:15SPEAKERConsider using Windows backup.
01:17SPEAKERFrequently, I'm in here before the sun is up
01:19SPEAKERwith the computer on,
01:21SPEAKERand I've got everything tuned nice and dark
01:23SPEAKERfor the early hours, you know, dark UI and everything.
01:26SPEAKERFull screen, giant, bright white splash screen.
01:30SPEAKERHey, Office 365.
01:32SPEAKERHey, OneDrive.
01:34SPEAKERLike, dude, I'm not even awake yet.
01:35SPEAKEROperating system, like, get out of my fucking face
01:38SPEAKERwith these full screen, bright white ads.
01:40SPEAKERYou know what the best part about those ads is?
01:42SPEAKERYou get them if you're paying for Office 365.
01:45SPEAKERI bet you do.
01:46SPEAKERI bet you do.
01:47SPEAKERSo anyway, we started this podcast.
01:49SPEAKERIt's called the Dual Boot Diaries.
01:50SPEAKERYou can find it wherever fine podcasts are found.
01:53SPEAKERThat's a good name.
01:54SPEAKERAnd the idea is that we are going to set up dual boots
01:58SPEAKERon our work laptops, 'cause that's like,
02:00SPEAKERit's a little bit easier than a gaming desktop
02:03SPEAKERor something like that, at least to start,
02:05SPEAKERand run through the experience of learning
02:09SPEAKERto use Linux as a desktop OS.
02:12SPEAKERI have a little bit more experience
02:13SPEAKERjust from running servers and stuff for years.
02:16SPEAKERAdam is scared to death of the command line.
02:18SPEAKERIt's kind of cute.
02:19SPEAKEROh man, I gotta talk to him.
02:21SPEAKERYeah, yeah, but he's getting there.
02:23SPEAKERHe's into it and we're sharing what's working, what's not.
02:27SPEAKERWe have homework each week that we want the audience
02:30SPEAKERto kind of follow along,
02:31SPEAKERand folks in the full nerd discord are helping out
02:33SPEAKERand asking questions and doing it along with us.
02:35SPEAKERAnd I think it's been a lot of fun so far.
02:37SPEAKERAnd this is the best part.
02:40SPEAKERAt some point in the future,
02:42SPEAKERwe're gonna either remove Windows or Linux
02:45SPEAKERfrom our computers.
02:47SPEAKERIs that like a big reveal?
02:48SPEAKERIs that gonna be like you show up and it's like,
02:49SPEAKERall right, which one did you ax?
02:51SPEAKERThat's the end of the show.
02:52SPEAKERThat's the last episode.
02:53SPEAKERWe're gonna be like, well, I got rid of Linux
02:54SPEAKERand now the podcast is over.
02:56SPEAKEROkay, I have to know.
02:58SPEAKERYeah.
02:59SPEAKERHow did you choose your distros?
03:01SPEAKERAt least you're starting distros.
03:02SPEAKERSo Adam has gone, he called a bunch of hardware vendors
03:07SPEAKERand was like, hey, I wanna try Linux laptops.
03:09SPEAKERAnd they sent him laptops 'cause you know,
03:10SPEAKERit's the power of PC world.
03:12SPEAKERYes, of course.
03:13SPEAKERI took the laptop I had,
03:15SPEAKERwhich is a lunar Lake laptop and was like,
03:16SPEAKERwhat distros are gonna support this reasonably well?
03:20SPEAKERAnd then I was like, what if I run cashy?
03:23SPEAKERSo I'm running cashy on that.
03:24SPEAKEROkay, valid choice.
03:26SPEAKERYeah, it's just because relatively new hardware,
03:29SPEAKERit seems like a safer bet than like something
03:31SPEAKERwith a little more conservative approach.
03:34SPEAKERAnd I'm just doing like basic KDE plasma business,
03:37SPEAKERnothing complicated.
03:40SPEAKERBut yeah, the thing I'll say now,
03:43SPEAKERthis is a big giant asterisk 'cause like you and I
03:45SPEAKERhave both done a bunch of Linux server stuff at this point.
03:49SPEAKERAnd like, I'm pretty comfortable.
03:51SPEAKERI understand the basic metaphor of Linux
03:53SPEAKERand how stuff works.
03:54SPEAKERI'm bad on details, but like, I know enough
03:56SPEAKERthat I can find my way to an answer usually.
04:00SPEAKERLike I know what to ask to get to the answer that I need.
04:04SPEAKERIt's going really well, right?
04:05SPEAKERIt's like the early uptake is it's real fast.
04:09SPEAKERIt boots real good.
04:10SPEAKERI'm not seeing like terrible battery life or anything.
04:12SPEAKERAll of the buttons on the keyboard for the laptop
04:15SPEAKERand the trackpad work as I would expect and feel good.
04:17SPEAKERAnd like, I'm kind of blown away with this experience
04:22SPEAKER'cause the last time I really spent time running Linux
04:24SPEAKERon the desktop was probably like early 2000s,
04:27SPEAKERlike 2004, 2005.
04:29SPEAKER- I understand some things have changed.
04:30SPEAKER- We've come a long way, come a long way.
04:32SPEAKERIt's been a long road, but yeah, it's good.
04:35SPEAKER- That's exciting.
04:36SPEAKERI will have to keep up with that.
04:37SPEAKERI had a brief flirtation with desktop Linux
04:39SPEAKERearlier this year, tinkering with a few distros
04:42SPEAKERon this Raptor Lake refresh machine, 14th gen.
04:46SPEAKERAnd yes, like even on a live, even booting off
04:48SPEAKERof like a live USB, forget installing into your actual USB.
04:52SPEAKERI mean, your actual SSD.
04:53SPEAKERIt's crazy how fast and streamlined it like.
04:56SPEAKERWhen the thing is only running the things it needs to run
04:59SPEAKERfor you to use it and not a bunch of other services
05:02SPEAKERthat are doing who knows what.
05:03SPEAKERAnd I'm not even one of these big,
05:04SPEAKERlike Windows deep loaders or whatever.
05:06SPEAKER- Yeah.
05:07SPEAKER- But still the difference in just basic responsiveness
05:09SPEAKERand speed of operation when the thing is only doing
05:13SPEAKERthe things that it needs to do to be an OS
05:15SPEAKERand nothing else is like kind of crazy.
05:17SPEAKER- Well, and then the funny thing that you forget,
05:20SPEAKERlike in Windows, your UI choices are like,
05:22SPEAKERdo you want the start menu on the left
05:24SPEAKERor in the center of these days?
05:25SPEAKERThat's pretty much it.
05:27SPEAKERDo you want dark mode or light mode?
05:28SPEAKERDo you want to have words on your taskbar
05:31SPEAKERin addition to pictures?
05:33SPEAKERLike those are the choices you can make.
05:34SPEAKERWhen you can go between Gnome or KDE Plasma
05:38SPEAKERor like one of the bazillion other weird desktop managers
05:41SPEAKERthat exist now.
05:42SPEAKER- Cinnamon, XFC.
05:44SPEAKER- Yeah, you can get real wild.
05:45SPEAKER- Budgie.
05:46SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm just running KDE Plasma
05:48SPEAKER'cause I'm picking defaults just for sanity checks.
05:51SPEAKER- I think that's sensible.
05:52SPEAKERThe split I see generally and this aligns
05:54SPEAKERwith my brief experiences that Plasma is for Windows users
05:57SPEAKERand Gnome is for Mac users.
05:59SPEAKER- Yeah, that's my read as well.
06:00SPEAKER- I think I might end up being a Gnome guy.
06:03SPEAKER- It's funny, I haven't looked at it yet,
06:05SPEAKERbut yeah, I get the appeal.
06:08SPEAKERThe big thing for me, well, there's two things.
06:11SPEAKEROne, you have infinite choice on everything.
06:14SPEAKERLike everything is a choice.
06:16SPEAKERTwo, there's no safety net.
06:19SPEAKERSo like where Windows will sync your profile
06:22SPEAKERto your OneDrive account and if you're like,
06:24SPEAKERyour machine implodes, your desktop and downloads
06:26SPEAKERand documents will all be there.
06:29SPEAKERYou're on your own here, you know?
06:30SPEAKER- Yep, yep.
06:31SPEAKER- At the same time, there's nobody trying to sell you
06:34SPEAKER50 million services, which is pretty nice.
06:36SPEAKER- Pros and cons.
06:37SPEAKER- Yeah.
06:38SPEAKER- For the pros, I might be pretty pro in my experience.
06:41SPEAKER- I thought I had an idea of how this was gonna work out
06:43SPEAKERwhen we started and about, we just recorded
06:46SPEAKERthe third episode today and I don't,
06:49SPEAKERlike I kinda don't know where we're gonna go.
06:50SPEAKERI don't know where it's gonna end up at this point
06:52SPEAKERand I'm excited to see.
06:53SPEAKERIt's gonna be a fun ride.
06:54SPEAKER- Has it started running already?
06:56SPEAKER- So we literally, as we record this on Friday morning
06:59SPEAKERor Friday afternoon, we posted the kind of zero preview
07:02SPEAKERepisode and shared that with the audience today
07:05SPEAKERand then we'll start promoting, like we'll put episode zero
07:09SPEAKERin the full nerd feed, I think next week sometimes.
07:11SPEAKER- Okay, I look forward to checking that out.
07:13SPEAKERI will try to keep my mouth shut as much as possible.
07:16SPEAKER- But I was just saying, that's the other thing
07:19SPEAKERis we want feedback from listeners,
07:21SPEAKERboth from people who are going along with us
07:22SPEAKERthat don't know what they're doing and people who do.
07:25SPEAKERLike we're very much pitching this as we're not experts
07:28SPEAKER'cause neither of us are.
07:29SPEAKERLike I'm a dilettante, Adam's a complete noob.
07:32SPEAKER- I don't know where I fall these days.
07:34SPEAKERLike definitely on the desktop side,
07:36SPEAKERI've got like no experience at all.
07:37SPEAKERLike I know my Wayland from my X11 conceptually,
07:41SPEAKERbut not in practice at all
07:42SPEAKERin terms of working with those things.
07:44SPEAKERBut I've got like thousands of hours
07:46SPEAKERon the server command line at this point, so.
07:48SPEAKER- Somebody in the full nerd discord said this the other day
07:50SPEAKERthat they feel like there's, everybody has expertise.
07:53SPEAKEREven people who are really deep in Linux
07:55SPEAKERhave expertise in some core chunk.
07:57SPEAKERAnd then if you get outside of that area
07:59SPEAKERwhere they have expertise,
08:00SPEAKERthey're just as much of a noob as anybody else.
08:02SPEAKER- Totally, 100%.
08:04SPEAKER- That feels very real to me right now.
08:07SPEAKER- Very much so.
08:08SPEAKERLike all of my experiences is relevant to a headless system
08:11SPEAKERthat doesn't even have a monitor hooked up to it,
08:13SPEAKERnot a desktop system.
08:14SPEAKERI'll tell you one thing, and we should start this podcast
08:16SPEAKERand talk about a different operating system.
08:18SPEAKEROn the subject of not having a safety net,
08:20SPEAKERwhen I was tinkering with various desktop distros,
08:22SPEAKERI had them on a Butter FS partition earlier this year.
08:25SPEAKER- Yeah.
08:26SPEAKER- I might recommend giving that a shot
08:28SPEAKERonce you feel comfortable enough to try to transition
08:30SPEAKER'cause then you can just snapshot everything.
08:31SPEAKER- I'm running Butter FS.
08:33SPEAKER- Oh, you are?
08:34SPEAKER- Yeah, so I, Cashy defaults to Butter FS.
08:36SPEAKER- Oh, well, really interesting.
08:37SPEAKER- Okay, well then just get up to speed
08:39SPEAKERon how the snapshots work and then make snapshots
08:41SPEAKERbefore you do anything potentially catastrophic
08:43SPEAKERand then it's quite easy to just roll back.
08:45SPEAKER- That is a super duper good idea
08:47SPEAKERand I wish I had done that about two weeks ago.
08:49SPEAKER- Yeah, well, hey.
08:50SPEAKER- Listen to episode one, we get into it.
08:51SPEAKERAnyway, I guess we should probably start the show.
08:55SPEAKER- Okay.
08:56SPEAKER(upbeat music)
09:07SPEAKER(upbeat music)
09:24SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod.
09:27SPEAKERI'm Will.
09:27SPEAKER- I'm Brad.
09:28SPEAKER- Brad, the year was 1995.
09:32SPEAKER- Sure was.
09:33SPEAKER- It was a Thursday.
09:35SPEAKER- It was?
09:35SPEAKER- People were lined up outside CompUSA.
09:38SPEAKER- I remember it well, yes.
09:40SPEAKER- And I was sitting at the front door
09:42SPEAKERof my one bedroom apartment in Knoxville, Tennessee
09:46SPEAKERwaiting for the UPS guy to show up.
09:49SPEAKER- Really?
09:49SPEAKER- Yeah.
09:50SPEAKER- Is that how it went down?
09:51SPEAKERI think I may have mentioned this
09:52SPEAKERon this very podcast before.
09:54SPEAKERI distinctly remember coming home from school and running.
09:57SPEAKER- Is it there?
09:58SPEAKERBob, is it here?
10:00SPEAKER- I literally ran across the front deck to the front doors
10:04SPEAKERto see if the package was there and it was.
10:07SPEAKER- We are alluding to the fact that today,
10:10SPEAKERas we post this show, August 24th, 2025,
10:14SPEAKERit is the 30th anniversary of the release of Windows 95.
10:18SPEAKER- Yeah, still to my mind, probably the biggest,
10:21SPEAKERI mean, I don't know, maybe not by raw numbers.
10:24SPEAKERI don't know, there might be something bigger,
10:25SPEAKERbut in my mind, it's still probably the biggest release ever
10:28SPEAKERof a computing product.
10:30SPEAKER- It's definitely not by numbers, but in terms of like,
10:33SPEAKERfor me, Windows 95, and we'll talk about this more,
10:37SPEAKERbut Windows 95 to me feels like the start
10:40SPEAKERof modern computers.
10:41SPEAKERMy experience bridged the early days of DOS
10:44SPEAKERand basically pre-Microsoft computing,
10:48SPEAKERlike when you were using Commodores and TIs
10:50SPEAKERand Microsoft was just the people that made basic
10:52SPEAKERand maybe a disk operating system for your IBM PC
10:56SPEAKERto Windows 3.1 and all the kind of different
11:02SPEAKERGUI operating systems that were fledgling during that time.
11:05SPEAKERAnd then the modern internet age, like for me,
11:08SPEAKERWindows 95 feels like the beginning of modern computing.
11:11SPEAKER- Yeah, absolutely for me too.
11:12SPEAKERI mean, that's based on my experience, of course,
11:14SPEAKERbecause like you really get down to it.
11:16SPEAKERThere's nothing Windows 95 did
11:17SPEAKERthat some other more advanced operating systems
11:20SPEAKERhadn't done before, but you needed like a $10,000
11:23SPEAKERnext machine, for example, prior to that.
11:26SPEAKERIt was like a lot of what we think of as modern computing
11:30SPEAKERcame to the masses via Windows 95.
11:32SPEAKER- And maybe it's not modern computing,
11:33SPEAKERmaybe it's mainstream computing, right?
11:35SPEAKERMaybe that's the- - Some of both.
11:36SPEAKER- Yeah.
11:37SPEAKER- I mean, I think like the desktop metaphor
11:39SPEAKERis still with us today and probably will be forever.
11:41SPEAKER- I think that, I think the idea that you can just plug
11:44SPEAKERsomething into your computer and it will just work
11:46SPEAKERkind of was birthed in Windows 95.
11:48SPEAKERIt didn't really come to fruition until a lot later.
11:51SPEAKER- Yeah, like desktop, plug and play, internet networking.
11:54SPEAKERLike, I mean, I think the timing on that
11:56SPEAKERis a bit coincidental, but this was the first Windows
11:59SPEAKERthat shipped with a TCP/IP stack in the box.
12:02SPEAKER- That's true.
12:03SPEAKER- And happened to be, in my case,
12:05SPEAKERI think you were already in college,
12:06SPEAKERso you probably already had some form
12:09SPEAKERof actual internet access, right?
12:11SPEAKERBut I was still on BBSs in 1995 when this came out,
12:15SPEAKERbut it was not that much longer
12:16SPEAKERbefore we got our first home PPP connection.
12:20SPEAKER- Yeah, so I had shell accounts,
12:23SPEAKERbut I was using everything,
12:24SPEAKERlike I was using the internet, the command line still, right?
12:27SPEAKERI was using links and hitting Usenet groups
12:30SPEAKERand reading them the old fashioned way in a text interface.
12:33SPEAKER- What was the, I don't know, not to derail
12:36SPEAKERwith my headless text-based perversions.
12:39SPEAKERDo you remember what the newsreader was,
12:41SPEAKERwhat the terminal newsreader was?
12:41SPEAKER- I think you just typed Usenet, if I recall.
12:44SPEAKER- Okay.
12:46SPEAKER- Like, it's weird 'cause like,
12:49SPEAKERyou learned about how to do that stuff by,
12:53SPEAKERlet's see, at that point I was on a Unix machine
12:55SPEAKER'cause I took CS 100 that year specifically
12:57SPEAKERso I would get access to the Unix machine
12:59SPEAKERinstead of the VAX, but to use the internet before then,
13:04SPEAKERand you could slip or PPP into a real shell connection,
13:10SPEAKERlike a real computer connection at that time,
13:13SPEAKERbut they kind of didn't tell you how to do it
13:15SPEAKERbecause everybody was on Windows 3.1 and you had to buy,
13:18SPEAKERlike that stuff didn't ship with Windows.
13:20SPEAKERSo you had to buy a package, a modem package from somebody
13:23SPEAKERthat had the dialer and the terminal program
13:27SPEAKERand all that stuff.
13:28SPEAKER- Wow, like did Windows 3.1 not have a terminal built in?
13:30SPEAKER- No, not built in.
13:31SPEAKER- Interesting.
13:32SPEAKER- And neither did 3.11.
13:34SPEAKER- Okay.
13:35SPEAKER- So yeah, and those packages were expensive.
13:37SPEAKERIt was like 100 bucks.
13:38SPEAKER- Yeah.
13:39SPEAKER- So yeah, like the basic thing that they gave you
13:44SPEAKERwhen you signed up for internet access at the university
13:47SPEAKERwhen I was a freshman in '93 was a floppy drive
13:51SPEAKERwith a dialer, a terminal.
13:54SPEAKERIt was all that stuff, like the open versions of those
13:57SPEAKERthat they just really distributed.
13:58SPEAKERYeah.
13:59SPEAKER- You said '93?
14:00SPEAKER- This was September of '93.
14:02SPEAKER- Oh my, dude, that is a full three years
14:04SPEAKERbefore we got our first home internet connection.
14:06SPEAKER- Yeah, but that was the eternal September.
14:08SPEAKERThat was the eternal, yeah.
14:10SPEAKERLike we ruined, I was the first group of people
14:12SPEAKERthat ruined the internet.
14:14SPEAKER- You were in the vanguard of ruining the internet.
14:16SPEAKER- Yeah, and I think I've talked about it before,
14:18SPEAKERbut there were, like in my freshman dorm,
14:21SPEAKERI went to Vanderbilt for a year before I transferred to UT
14:23SPEAKER'cause Vanderbilt was stupid expensive.
14:27SPEAKERAnd also I got terrible grades 'cause I really,
14:30SPEAKERanyway, mistakes were made.
14:34SPEAKERThe Vanderbilt freshman dorm, we had like a lounge
14:39SPEAKERat the end that was supposed to be like the common area
14:40SPEAKERfor the floor, but they overbooked students.
14:44SPEAKERSo they made these Malaysian exchange students
14:46SPEAKERlive in the lounge, like nine people lived in the lounge.
14:50SPEAKERIt was wild, like I can't believe they did it, anyway.
14:55SPEAKER- I assume it was no longer open as a lounge at that point.
14:58SPEAKER- No, it was their room at that point.
14:59SPEAKERBut it was also super weird that they put all these guys
15:02SPEAKERthat don't speak super good English
15:04SPEAKERand they made them live in the common area.
15:08SPEAKERBut they taught me how to use IRC
15:09SPEAKER'cause they would use IRC, like their family members
15:13SPEAKERwould go to cafes and they'd hop on IRC
15:15SPEAKERand they'd be on IRC at like one o'clock in the morning
15:18SPEAKERtalking to their mom and their uncles and their aunts.
15:20SPEAKER- Like IRC was like the proto WhatsApp, right?
15:23SPEAKERIt was the free means of international communication
15:26SPEAKERbefore when there was nothing else.
15:28SPEAKER- So I learned about FNet from those dudes
15:30SPEAKER'cause like computer nerds all the same nerds, it turns out.
15:33SPEAKERAnd it was like a very gradual learning.
15:39SPEAKERLike I learned how to search library collections
15:41SPEAKERby using Archie and Gopher and things like that.
15:44SPEAKERAnd you learned about Usenet 'cause you wanted to go
15:46SPEAKERhear people bitch about Wil Wheaton or Barney or whatever
15:49SPEAKERon the funny Alt.Binaries domains or newsgroups.
15:58SPEAKERBut other than that,
15:59SPEAKERyour computer was kind of an island, right?
16:02SPEAKERYour Windows 3.1 machine was just a thing
16:05SPEAKERthat like you had a word processor probably
16:08SPEAKERand you had maybe a spreadsheet
16:09SPEAKERif you were a science student.
16:12SPEAKERAnd you maybe had a couple of games that you'd bought
16:15SPEAKERand had discs for that you would put in
16:16SPEAKERwhen you wanted to play, but there wasn't a web browser.
16:20SPEAKERThere wasn't like, it wasn't easy to get information
16:23SPEAKERfrom outside the computer or even get new software
16:26SPEAKERon the computer, honestly.
16:27SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.
16:28SPEAKEROr even in my case, once we got a modem,
16:30SPEAKERwe got a 14.4 modem at home.
16:34SPEAKERThere were like three, I think, BBSs local to me
16:37SPEAKERthat I didn't have to pay long distance for.
16:38SPEAKER- Wild, we didn't have any BBSs.
16:41SPEAKER- It is crazy to me.
16:42SPEAKERLike I, you know, I didn't, I lived in a relatively small town
16:45SPEAKERin the mountains, but for whatever reason,
16:47SPEAKERwe had people around, it was a big county.
16:50SPEAKERIt was like, you know, it's a very large rural county
16:52SPEAKERthat encompassed like multiple townships, you know.
16:54SPEAKER- Yeah.
16:55SPEAKER- That kind of thing.
16:56SPEAKERSo we just happened to have a few BBSs around
16:58SPEAKERand I don't think, I think the biggest one had four lines
17:00SPEAKERto put it in perspective, like four phone lines.
17:04SPEAKERSo you generally could get on at some point in the evening,
17:08SPEAKERbut like, that's how, that's how I was downloading demos
17:11SPEAKERfor early PC games before we got internet.
17:14SPEAKERLike that's how I downloaded like the Dark Forces,
17:16SPEAKERthe Star Wars Dark Forces demo from one of those BBSs,
17:19SPEAKERlike the night it came out before I had internet access.
17:21SPEAKERBut even that was like a very limited way
17:24SPEAKERof interacting with people.
17:26SPEAKERLike I didn't really talk to people
17:27SPEAKERon whatever kind of boards they had on the BBS.
17:29SPEAKERIt was mostly for downloading.
17:31SPEAKERIt was mostly for playing door games and downloading stuff.
17:33SPEAKER- So what's funny is the, in Tennessee,
17:37SPEAKERthe like local calling range was really small typically.
17:40SPEAKERLike it was inside your town
17:41SPEAKERand maybe a little bit of the county surrounding.
17:44SPEAKERSo all of our BBSs were in Bluntville in Johnson City
17:47SPEAKERwhere their college kids lived
17:49SPEAKERand they were all long distance for us.
17:52SPEAKERSo my friend who lived just a little bit closer to Bluntville
17:56SPEAKERwas able to call into a BBS without getting long distance
17:59SPEAKER'cause he was in a different exchange than us.
18:02SPEAKERBut it was all based on like the middle,
18:03SPEAKERthe middle three numbers of your phone number,
18:05SPEAKERwhich ones would be long distance to who.
18:09SPEAKERI would have just been like rolling over there
18:11SPEAKERwith floppy disks constantly
18:12SPEAKERto like to download and take stuff home.
18:14SPEAKER- Well, so he was an enormous nerd
18:16SPEAKERand he would come back from high school
18:19SPEAKERwith a huge stack of three and a half inch disks
18:21SPEAKERthat people had handed him to download.
18:26SPEAKERI wanna say people in his high school
18:29SPEAKERpulled a bunch of money together
18:31SPEAKERto buy him a second floppy disk
18:33SPEAKERso you just do copy, copy.
18:35SPEAKER- Oh, that rules.
18:36SPEAKERComputers used to be so cool.
18:37SPEAKERI'm sorry to be that guy.
18:39SPEAKER- Yeah, it was wild.
18:41SPEAKER- I mean, there was kind of a like,
18:42SPEAKERwhat's the term, SneakerNet or WhisperNet,
18:44SPEAKERyou know, like what is the term
18:45SPEAKERfor sort of a human powered network?
18:47SPEAKER- Yeah, WhisperNet is a different thing.
18:49SPEAKER- Oh, okay, I don't know what that is,
18:50SPEAKERbut like, you know what I mean though?
18:51SPEAKERIt's like you didn't have ubiquitous internet access
18:54SPEAKERor even bulletin board access.
18:56SPEAKERSo you were just like a network of people
18:58SPEAKERtrading software around
19:00SPEAKER'cause you couldn't all download it or whatever.
19:01SPEAKERAnyway, I swear we'll talk about Windows 95 eventually.
19:04SPEAKER- But I mean, I think it's important context to understand
19:07SPEAKERthat computers were pretty isolated.
19:09SPEAKERLike it was a much less useful device
19:13SPEAKERand it wasn't a portal into the entirety
19:15SPEAKERof the world's knowledge until Windows 95,
19:17SPEAKERwhich I think answers the question
19:19SPEAKERthat I have lower down in here,
19:20SPEAKERwhich is why does this feel like the start
19:21SPEAKERof modern computers?
19:22SPEAKERAnd it's because it was the way you access the internet
19:25SPEAKERfor a lot of people.
19:26SPEAKER- Yeah, I think that's probably the big one.
19:28SPEAKERBut again, I think the graphical interface
19:30SPEAKERmoving to a desktop is a huge part of that.
19:32SPEAKERPlug and play was a huge part of that.
19:33SPEAKERDirectX, which came a little bit later.
19:36SPEAKER- Quite a bit later, actually.
19:38SPEAKER- It was, DirectX was within Windows 95.
19:42SPEAKER- They released it for Windows 95,
19:44SPEAKERbut it didn't roll out until like '98 era.
19:47SPEAKER- Yeah, I think that's right.
19:48SPEAKER- A later version of Microsoft
19:49SPEAKERwould not have released DirectX for Windows 95.
19:53SPEAKER- That's possible.
19:54SPEAKERAnyway, a lot of what is still with us
19:57SPEAKERin terms of the basic Windows experience
19:59SPEAKERstarted with 95 or like most of it did.
20:01SPEAKER- It was also the beginning of computers
20:06SPEAKERgetting easier to use.
20:08SPEAKERSo plug and play stuff started with Windows 95
20:11SPEAKERand it didn't really reach fruition until USB
20:14SPEAKERand actual plug and play hardware came down the line
20:19SPEAKERin like '98, '99, like Windows 98 and beyond timeframe.
20:24SPEAKERBut the idea that you, like prior to this,
20:28SPEAKERin order to add say a new component to your computer,
20:30SPEAKERyou'd have to open up some things.
20:32SPEAKERThere'd be a bunch of little dip switches or jumpers
20:34SPEAKERyou'd have to change.
20:36SPEAKERIt was really, really complicated and fraught with peril
20:40SPEAKERand not getting it right meant your computer
20:42SPEAKERwould no longer work and you have to take it
20:44SPEAKERto some nerd someplace for them to fix it.
20:46SPEAKER- Yep.
20:48SPEAKER- And then the, but like the idea
20:51SPEAKERthat we're basically using the same,
20:54SPEAKERso I set up a Windows 95 VM
20:56SPEAKERbefore we started working on this episode.
20:58SPEAKER- Yeah, or well, so I did too, we're both using 86Box,
21:02SPEAKERwhich this might actually just turn into like
21:04SPEAKERa stealth 86Box episode because if you used
21:07SPEAKERor enjoy old computers, 86Box is the best thing ever made.
21:11SPEAKER- It's pretty good.
21:12SPEAKER- I do think it's important to distinguish.
21:13SPEAKERI don't think, I don't know if it's accurate
21:15SPEAKERto call that a VM.
21:16SPEAKERI mean, I know for colloquial reasons, it's fine,
21:19SPEAKERbut 86Box is actually emulating the entire stack
21:22SPEAKERfrom the BIOS on down, like all the hardware in the computer.
21:25SPEAKER- Like even specific computer models,
21:27SPEAKERlike there's gateway computer,
21:29SPEAKERlike a gateway Pentium 200 in there that's like, yeah.
21:32SPEAKER- Like it's not using virtualization hardware on your CPU
21:36SPEAKERand doing a generalized like sandbox bootable machine.
21:38SPEAKERLike it is literally emulating every piece of the hardware
21:41SPEAKERfrom an era appropriate computer.
21:44SPEAKERSo it's a slightly different thing,
21:45SPEAKERbut it's a more accurate thing for this time.
21:48SPEAKER- Agreed.
21:49SPEAKER- Especially 'cause as we'll get into,
21:51SPEAKERit gives you the truest, most pure Windows 95 experience,
21:57SPEAKERwhich is hunting down drivers
21:58SPEAKERand trying to make them work for your stuff.
22:00SPEAKER- It's really true.
22:03SPEAKERI'm setting up a TCP/IP on my Windows 95 VM right now.
22:07SPEAKER- Yeah, so like this episode might be a little scattershot
22:11SPEAKER'cause there's so much to talk about here,
22:12SPEAKERbut that was one of the things that jumped out at me
22:14SPEAKERas I was, I had a Windows 3.1 86Box machine
22:18SPEAKERthat was sitting around,
22:19SPEAKERso I upgraded that to Windows 95 last night.
22:21SPEAKERAnd one of the things that jumped out at me
22:23SPEAKERin the upgrade process
22:23SPEAKERis when you go through the networking setup,
22:26SPEAKERthey do not include TCP/IP by default.
22:28SPEAKERYou have to dig through two layers of menus
22:30SPEAKERto flip that switch on to make it install that
22:33SPEAKERbecause I guess at that time
22:35SPEAKERthere just weren't enough people using the internet
22:38SPEAKERon a desktop for them to think
22:40SPEAKERit was necessary to install it.
22:42SPEAKER- It was, well, I mean,
22:44SPEAKERthey didn't ship a browser with Windows 95, right?
22:47SPEAKER- No, you had to buy Microsoft Plus
22:49SPEAKERto get Internet Explorer 1.0.
22:51SPEAKER- Or you bought a package for Windows 3.1
22:54SPEAKERthat had a dialer and all this other crap
22:56SPEAKERthat also included disks for Netscape Navigator.
23:00SPEAKERSo I was gonna say there's other stuff though too,
23:05SPEAKERlike the task bar and all that being,
23:07SPEAKERthe UI being essentially the same for the last 30 years
23:10SPEAKERis kind of wild when you think about it.
23:12SPEAKER- It really is.
23:13SPEAKERI mean, I'm sitting here looking at my Windows 11 interface
23:15SPEAKERand it is conceptually the exact same thing
23:18SPEAKERas is sitting in a window, an 86Box window,
23:22SPEAKERlike same, I know it's not called a system tray,
23:26SPEAKERbut same system tray, same start menu.
23:29SPEAKER- My icons are centered now.
23:31SPEAKER- Mine, I'm still, I'm a lefter for life.
23:35SPEAKERI'm a lefter lifer.
23:38SPEAKER- Wow.
23:40SPEAKERIt's a 32-bit was another thing that was new here.
23:44SPEAKERThat was a big change and like-
23:46SPEAKER- And the supposed stability that came along with that.
23:49SPEAKERI mean, in practice, maybe it was not exactly bulletproof,
23:53SPEAKERbut I do in my mind,
23:55SPEAKERI do remember it being a pretty vast improvement over 3.1.
23:59SPEAKER- It was generally better, I would say, yeah.
24:01SPEAKER- Yeah, like I read about, I went through the Wikipedia page,
24:03SPEAKERthere's a ton of info on the Windows 95 Wikipedia page
24:08SPEAKERabout dependence on MS-DOS is the name of the section.
24:12SPEAKERAnd the best I can gather DOS,
24:16SPEAKERI always understood that DOS was still running
24:18SPEAKERunderneath Windows 95, but I don't think that's quite
24:20SPEAKERaccurate. It was kind of a cooperative situation.
24:24SPEAKERLike the terminology they use is demoted after boots.
24:29SPEAKER- Yeah.
24:30SPEAKER- After boot, MS-DOS is demoted to a compatibility layer
24:33SPEAKERfor 16-bit drivers is how it puts this.
24:35SPEAKERSo DOS is still hanging around under the hood of Windows 95,
24:38SPEAKERbut I think any like pure win32 programs that you're running
24:42SPEAKERare basically not touching it at all is my understanding.
24:46SPEAKER- That seems, seems right, yeah.
24:48SPEAKERIt's like that was the kind of thing that people used to
24:52SPEAKERargue about on the internet a lot in the early,
24:54SPEAKERin the early internet days of Windows 95.
24:56SPEAKER- Well, especially cause I was reminded going through this
24:58SPEAKERWikipedia page,
24:59SPEAKERyou could tweak things to boot into MS-DOS 7 on the Windows
25:02SPEAKER95 install.
25:04SPEAKERYou could actually have it bypass or not,
25:06SPEAKERnot start the graphical shell and just boot to a DOS 7
25:09SPEAKERprompt, which I think probably led to a lot of people
25:13SPEAKERbelieving that it was still just DOS under the hood.
25:15SPEAKER- I mean, I like one of the things that you used to do,
25:17SPEAKERespecially if you had a low RAM machine back then was you
25:20SPEAKERwould, you would install,
25:22SPEAKERyou would build floppy disks that were boot disks with the
25:25SPEAKERWindows 7 command doc. I mean the, sorry,
25:27SPEAKERthe DOS7 command.com and use those to make a bootable,
25:32SPEAKERessentially turn your PC into a console.
25:34SPEAKERYou just jam the TIE fighter disk in and able to launch
25:36SPEAKERTIE fighter right off of the disk.
25:39SPEAKERIt was, it was, but, but for me,
25:43SPEAKERthe defining moment was installing this. I got a,
25:46SPEAKERI got a whole buttload. I, even though I had a CD-ROM drive,
25:48SPEAKERI got a whole buttload of floppy disks when I ordered it.
25:51SPEAKER- Really?
25:52SPEAKER- Yeah.
25:53SPEAKER- By choice?
25:54SPEAKER- I think so.
25:55SPEAKERCause I want to say I bought a full install rather than
25:58SPEAKERupgrade.
25:59SPEAKER- Oh, you know, so I was, you know,
26:01SPEAKERthere's a plethora of information out there about this stuff,
26:03SPEAKERbut it's all fairly poorly documented.
26:05SPEAKERSo I was reading a debate about this very subject the other
26:08SPEAKERnight.
26:09SPEAKERAnd it seems like the common belief is there was no CD-ROM
26:12SPEAKERfull retail release of Windows 95.
26:16SPEAKER- Yeah. I, I don't, I believe that to be the case.
26:18SPEAKERYes.
26:19SPEAKER- That it was like a full retail,
26:21SPEAKERlike you don't need to own any other Microsoft product
26:23SPEAKERrelease was only on floppy.
26:24SPEAKERAnd the upgrade was only, or CD was only upgrade.
26:28SPEAKERBasically like you can only get the quote unquote upgrade
26:30SPEAKERversion that you needed a Windows 3.1 copy to kind of
26:33SPEAKERvalidate.
26:34SPEAKER- And I think with the upgrade version,
26:36SPEAKERit wasn't even that you needed to validate it.
26:37SPEAKERIt's that you had to start the upgrade process from inside
26:40SPEAKERWindows 3.1.
26:41SPEAKER- So you can do it from the command line,
26:42SPEAKERbut I just went through this last night.
26:44SPEAKERSo you can do it from, from the DOS shell, but it will,
26:47SPEAKERbut it tells you when you do that, it says,
26:49SPEAKERwe're going to check your hard drive for a valid previous
26:51SPEAKERWindows. If we can't find one,
26:53SPEAKERyou're going to be required to put in floppy disk one of
26:55SPEAKERWindows 3.1.
26:56SPEAKER- Oh, okay.
26:57SPEAKER- So they, they,
26:58SPEAKERthere's probably ways these days to even defeat that.
27:01SPEAKER- I'm sure. Yeah, but they, but they did,
27:03SPEAKERthey did go out of their way to check for valid Windows on
27:06SPEAKERthe upgrade CD.
27:07SPEAKER- But it wasn't, I mean, I guess there was a key,
27:09SPEAKERbut it's not like they checked with the key online or
27:11SPEAKERanything like that. That came, that came later.
27:13SPEAKER- Yeah.
27:14SPEAKER- The, the thing from, okay.
27:16SPEAKERSo they were going through the install process for the first
27:18SPEAKERtime in 30 years, 25 years, probably was, was wild.
27:23SPEAKER- How many, how many times total in your life now,
27:26SPEAKERdo you think you've installed Windows 95?
27:28SPEAKER- Well, I sold a bunch of PCs to people in college.
27:31SPEAKERSo I did it a lot.
27:32SPEAKER- Okay. That, that, that kind of pollutes the,
27:34SPEAKERthe tally a good bit. I couldn't, I couldn't even guess,
27:37SPEAKERbut it's like probably it's double digits.
27:41SPEAKERI would have to assume like I've definitely like hosed
27:44SPEAKERinstalls or thought they started feeling clunky and wiped
27:47SPEAKERand reinstalled numerous times back in the day.
27:49SPEAKER- I'm definitely high, high double digits.
27:54SPEAKERCause I, I, I didn't sell a ton of PCs, but I built,
27:56SPEAKERI probably built a dozen more than two dozen PCs over five
28:01SPEAKERyears, four years of college and sold them to people.
28:05SPEAKERThe, yeah, it was, it's, it was, it was the thing that
28:10SPEAKERstruck me was the stuff that they were selling on the splash
28:13SPEAKERscreens during the setup process.
28:15SPEAKERCause on Windows 3.1 you install, it's just a command mode,
28:17SPEAKERa command line text mode installer.
28:20SPEAKERThere's no opportunity to advertise.
28:22SPEAKERThis is very clearly the Dawn of the M dollar sign
28:25SPEAKERMicrosoft era. Cause like, Hey man,
28:29SPEAKERdid you know that we have the Microsoft network?
28:31SPEAKERIt's an affordable and easy to use online service.
28:34SPEAKERThat connects you to the world of electronic information.
28:37SPEAKER- I'm looking at the icon right here on my Windows 95
28:39SPEAKERdesktop.
28:40SPEAKER- Yeah.
28:41SPEAKERDid you know that Windows 95 is the easiest Windows yet?
28:45SPEAKERYou can click the start button to quickly open programs,
28:47SPEAKERfind documents and use system tools or use the task bar to
28:50SPEAKERswitch between programs as easily as changing channels on
28:53SPEAKERyour TV.
28:54SPEAKER- That's right.
28:56SPEAKERLook, they wanted a return on that billion dollar marketing
28:58SPEAKERcampaign.
28:59SPEAKER- Well, but, but like the stuff that they're advertising is
29:01SPEAKERreally like, it's the most basic table stakes for using a
29:04SPEAKERcomputer. Hey, you can switch applications.
29:07SPEAKERYou can watch programs. You can find your documents.
29:10SPEAKERYou can use long file names to make your files easier to
29:12SPEAKERorganize and find it's, it's really like,
29:16SPEAKERit's really wild how rudimentary the whole thing is.
29:19SPEAKER- Yeah. Fair. Although, I mean, the MSN stuff is a,
29:22SPEAKERis a pretty big milestone in the embrace, extend,
29:24SPEAKERextinguish, you know, like that was,
29:28SPEAKERI was like this was basically the beginning of Microsoft
29:30SPEAKERtrying to insert themselves into news media and all kinds
29:33SPEAKERof stuff.
29:34SPEAKER- Well, I mean like MSNBC just stopped being MSNBC the other
29:37SPEAKERday, right?
29:38SPEAKER- It did. Although they kept the MS part.
29:40SPEAKER- Yeah.
29:41SPEAKER- They dropped the NBC part.
29:42SPEAKER- They kept the MSN part.
29:43SPEAKER- MS now I think is what it's called now.
29:46SPEAKER- But it's still MSN, but yeah, it was, it's,
29:50SPEAKERit's weird traveling back in time. Okay.
29:53SPEAKERSo people lined up at stores to buy this.
29:56SPEAKERPeople were lined up comp USA.
29:58SPEAKERPeople were lined up at best buys.
29:59SPEAKERThey had midnight events.
30:01SPEAKER- I think Bill Gates went to a midnight event, didn't he?
30:03SPEAKERI think there's,
30:03SPEAKERyou can find news footage out there still with him,
30:05SPEAKERlike handing out the first copy or whatever.
30:07SPEAKER- Redmond probably.
30:08SPEAKER- Probably.
30:10SPEAKER- It's probably all Microsoft employees knowing what I know
30:11SPEAKERnow, but.
30:12SPEAKER- Yes.
30:14SPEAKER- They, they, they had an upsell.
30:15SPEAKERIf you wanted to give Microsoft more money,
30:17SPEAKERthey'd sell you a plus.
30:18SPEAKER- Yeah, of course.
30:19SPEAKER- On the moment, on the day there,
30:20SPEAKERyou get a bad internet explorer pre it's not even called
30:23SPEAKERan internet explorer, it's called internet, the browser.
30:26SPEAKERYeah. It's called the internet.
30:28SPEAKER- I mean, the hype for this thing was like real,
30:30SPEAKERlike say what you want about maybe they seeded some midnight
30:33SPEAKERevents with employees or whatever.
30:34SPEAKERLike the hype for this thing was unfucking believable.
30:36SPEAKER- Jay, Jay, Jay Leno bits about it, right?
30:39SPEAKER- Like, like they, you know, there's the,
30:41SPEAKERthere's the whole rolling stones start me up thing,
30:44SPEAKERwhich at the time I remember in the news being reported as
30:47SPEAKERMicrosoft buying that song Lock, Stock and Barrel.
30:50SPEAKERDo you remember that?
30:51SPEAKER- No, they didn't.
30:52SPEAKERThey just might be,
30:53SPEAKERthey could not possibly bought the song or Lock,
30:55SPEAKERStock and Barrel.
30:56SPEAKER- I could have sworn I remembered N95,
30:59SPEAKERthe news reports being that Microsoft had literally bought
31:01SPEAKERthe rights to that song, but maybe that's not the case.
31:04SPEAKERI can't find any evidence of that.
31:05SPEAKERSo maybe I inflated that a bit in my memory,
31:09SPEAKERbut like there was the Matthew Perry, Jennifer Aniston,
31:12SPEAKERlike sitcom advertisement thing.
31:14SPEAKERDo you remember that?
31:15SPEAKER- That was later, wasn't it?
31:16SPEAKER- No, that was around launch, I believe.
31:18SPEAKER- Really?
31:19SPEAKER- Yeah. I'm pretty sure that was pretty close to or at
31:21SPEAKERlaunch. I'm fairly, fairly certain.
31:25SPEAKER- Yeah. Yes. That was, that was right around launch.
31:29SPEAKER- Oh, it was, I forgot Friends started before Windows 95.
31:32SPEAKERWow. That ran for a long time.
31:34SPEAKER- Yeah. Point being like the hype was huge.
31:36SPEAKERAnd also like I was fucking burning for this thing by the
31:39SPEAKERtime it came out because I was so tired of Windows 3.1.
31:42SPEAKERLike I wanted the desktops so badly. I don't know.
31:45SPEAKERDid you have much like desktop experience?
31:48SPEAKERHad you touched Macs much or anything else?
31:51SPEAKER- Yeah. Cause I lived in a dorm. So there were four or five
31:55SPEAKERkids on the,
31:56SPEAKERmost people had Windows PCs with Windows 3.1 and on my
31:59SPEAKERfreshman year and a handful of people had Macs and the Mac,
32:04SPEAKERthe ability to dump shit on your desktop.
32:07SPEAKER- That was it. That was it.
32:08SPEAKER- Really, really powerful, which is hilarious.
32:11SPEAKERCause I I've actively stopped doing that as of like 10 years
32:14SPEAKERago.
32:15SPEAKER- I've still, I've still got icons all over the place.
32:17SPEAKERLike that was it. That was the thing I wanted was to be able
32:20SPEAKERto just put a file right there on the desktop whenever I
32:22SPEAKERfelt like it.
32:23SPEAKER- It seemed, it seemed really, well, I mean, it's funny.
32:25SPEAKERCause like on Windows 3.1,
32:27SPEAKERthat background space was basically useless.
32:29SPEAKER- It did nothing. I didn't, I never,
32:34SPEAKERI never had program manager,
32:35SPEAKERanything but maximized in Windows 3.1.
32:38SPEAKER- Yeah, that seems right.
32:39SPEAKER- Like what was the point? I mean,
32:40SPEAKERthe only thing you ever got out of minimizing program manager
32:42SPEAKERwas a way to see what else was running,
32:44SPEAKERbut computers were so weak at that point that your ability to
32:47SPEAKERrun a bunch of different things at one time was very limited
32:49SPEAKERanyway.
32:50SPEAKERSo like Windows 3.1 was just full screen program manager.
32:54SPEAKERIt was just a big menu full of icons to launch stuff.
32:56SPEAKERAnd that was kind of it, you know,
32:57SPEAKERlike getting a full desktop felt like just expanding the
33:02SPEAKERscope of how you use the computer to me in a way that felt
33:05SPEAKERreally futuristic. And again,
33:06SPEAKERI had very limited experience with Mac and Macintosh and
33:09SPEAKERcertainly had never seen anything more powerful than that.
33:13SPEAKERDid you, did you touch anything before launch akin to like a
33:17SPEAKERdemo or sampler thing?
33:20SPEAKER- For Windows 95? No, I didn't see any of that stuff.
33:23SPEAKER- Cause I would swear I bought a magazine at some point a few
33:26SPEAKERmonths before launch that had like kind of like an
33:30SPEAKERinteractive demo of how the desktop was going to work.
33:32SPEAKERIt wasn't like fully, obviously it was not like an OS run.
33:35SPEAKER- Well, there were, there were definitely previews in like,
33:38SPEAKERI remember picking up a PC mag or a PC world or something
33:41SPEAKERthat was, Hey, here's, here's the like screen by screen
33:47SPEAKERpreview, all the stuff that changes in Windows 95.
33:49SPEAKERLike I definitely knew what was coming and was excited
33:54SPEAKERabout it.
33:54SPEAKER- Maybe that's all it was in my, in my memory,
33:56SPEAKERit was like some kind of little sandbox,
33:58SPEAKERlike artificial environment where you could kind of play
34:00SPEAKERaround with what the graphical shell was going to be like.
34:02SPEAKERI can't remember anyway,
34:04SPEAKERbased on stuff like that and magazines and just wanting a
34:07SPEAKERbetter operating system. I was like,
34:08SPEAKERI was like jumping out of my skin,
34:11SPEAKERtrying to get my hands on Windows 95 by the time it came out.
34:15SPEAKER- It wouldn't surprise me if they did, did something like
34:17SPEAKERthat, like that,
34:18SPEAKERthat absolutely seems like a thing they would have done.
34:21SPEAKERThe, okay, so you get it, you install it,
34:26SPEAKERyou suddenly have access to the internet,
34:28SPEAKERinternet kind of like, like,
34:31SPEAKER- Well, some people do like, like you did, right?
34:34SPEAKERI mean, did you, is that what happened in the dorm?
34:36SPEAKERDid you immediately get online with it's built in?
34:38SPEAKER- Well, so I was not in the dorm by the time Windows 95
34:43SPEAKERcame out, I'd moved off campus by then.
34:45SPEAKERYeah, but also our dorm didn't have TCP/IP
34:48SPEAKER'cause I went to Tennessee.
34:49SPEAKER- Okay.
34:50SPEAKER- So nobody had bothered, like,
34:52SPEAKERthe thing is prior to having internet, like real internet,
34:56SPEAKERthere was no like,
34:57SPEAKERthere wasn't a push from students to get internet until all
35:01SPEAKERof a sudden we're all dialing into the 12 modems or
35:04SPEAKERsomething that the university had and everybody's like,
35:06SPEAKERhey man, I can't dial, like, let me put it this way.
35:11SPEAKERMy first two,
35:13SPEAKERit wasn't until probably the September of '96
35:19SPEAKERthat we could register for classes online.
35:21SPEAKERLike we still went to the gymnasium and put up,
35:25SPEAKERput the classes we want on a bunch of three by five cards
35:28SPEAKERand then put them in the right folders.
35:29SPEAKER- Okay, yeah, so you're four years ahead of me.
35:32SPEAKERSo I think, yes, by the time I got to college,
35:34SPEAKERit was all online registration all the time.
35:37SPEAKER- Like the first year they did online registration,
35:39SPEAKERit was super easy because nobody knew about it.
35:42SPEAKERAnd the next time they did online registration,
35:44SPEAKEReverybody knew about it and they didn't want to have to go
35:45SPEAKERto the thing and getting jacked up internet,
35:49SPEAKERdial up internet on the campus for a week as a result of
35:52SPEAKEReverybody trying to log in and select their classes
35:55SPEAKERon the VAX.
35:56SPEAKER- Great, so does your dorm have a residential network
35:58SPEAKERof any type?
35:59SPEAKER- No, not when I lived on campus.
36:02SPEAKER- Okay, interesting.
36:03SPEAKER- Oh, that's not true.
36:05SPEAKERWhen I was a freshman at Vanderbilt,
36:06SPEAKERthe computer lab in the basement had a LAN,
36:09SPEAKERwas like plugged into the school LAN.
36:11SPEAKER'Cause we went down there to play Doom.
36:13SPEAKER- So was that like a night?
36:14SPEAKER- The Doom share where it dropped.
36:15SPEAKER- Right, was that an IPX?
36:17SPEAKER- It was IPX, yeah.
36:17SPEAKER- IPX might work, okay.
36:19SPEAKER- And I mean, they had TCP/IP on them too,
36:22SPEAKER'cause you could open up the terminal,
36:24SPEAKERlike the terminal and connect to the Unix machine
36:30SPEAKERacross campus or alternately use net and IRC
36:34SPEAKERand stuff like that.
36:35SPEAKER- Got it.
36:36SPEAKER- So the school, at UT, the school computer labs
36:40SPEAKERwere all wired up as well, but there was no,
36:43SPEAKERlike they didn't, the network for the school
36:48SPEAKERwas mostly confined to like offices and labs,
36:52SPEAKERclassrooms I don't even think had network
36:53SPEAKERuntil much later than that.
36:55SPEAKER- So do you remember, or just as you were on dial up,
36:58SPEAKERI guess when Windows 95 came out?
37:00SPEAKERDid you just immediately set up a dial up internet connection
37:04SPEAKERas soon as you got it?
37:05SPEAKER- So I had dial up before, 'cause I could dial into the,
37:07SPEAKERI would dial into the shell.
37:09SPEAKER- Okay.
37:09SPEAKER- But I didn't know how to do slip or PPP.
37:12SPEAKER- That's what I mean, that's what I mean is a,
37:15SPEAKERI struggle with the terminology here,
37:17SPEAKERbut like a generalized PPP connection
37:19SPEAKERwhere you're holding this as a TCP/IP stack running
37:23SPEAKERand can run any application over the network
37:25SPEAKERand not just like a serial terminal over like a shell.
37:29SPEAKER- So for folks who don't know before you had,
37:33SPEAKERbefore your computer could get on the internet,
37:35SPEAKERyou could dial in and have like a text mode interface
37:38SPEAKERfor the internet, which is what we talked about earlier.
37:40SPEAKER- The distinction there is that whatever the computer
37:42SPEAKERyou're dialing into is the one
37:43SPEAKERthat's technically on the internet,
37:44SPEAKERyou're just dialing into a serial
37:46SPEAKERor whatever type of terminal to access
37:48SPEAKERwhat it is doing on the internet,
37:50SPEAKERversus what we're talking about here
37:51SPEAKERis putting your actual Windows 95 machine
37:53SPEAKERon the internet itself.
37:54SPEAKER- Yeah, and prior to Windows 95,
37:56SPEAKERyou could do a thing where you typed the right command
37:59SPEAKERin that terminal and it would negotiate
38:01SPEAKERthe direct PPP or SLIP connection,
38:05SPEAKERwhich would put your computer online,
38:07SPEAKERwhich would basically pipe all the data
38:10SPEAKERthat your computer was asking for over TCP/IP
38:13SPEAKERacross that serial connection, which is what the modem was.
38:16SPEAKERAnd so post Windows 95, the school sent a note
38:19SPEAKERto everybody that was like, hey, if you wanna do this,
38:21SPEAKERyou can by doing this, and then that was all over
38:24SPEAKERat that point.
38:26SPEAKER- That was the beginning of modern computing?
38:28SPEAKER- Yeah, that was the moment.
38:29SPEAKERAs soon as I fired up,
38:31SPEAKER'cause I had paid for a package when I bought Windows 95.
38:34SPEAKERI bought Windows 95 from, I can't remember,
38:37SPEAKERone of the early retailers, just pre-Amazon
38:40SPEAKERand pre-Newegg, so it was, who knows?
38:44SPEAKERAnd I got, with it, it was like, hey,
38:46SPEAKERdo you wanna get this other stuff?
38:47SPEAKER'Cause they were feeding frenzy.
38:50SPEAKERAnd I bought a copy of Plus,
38:51SPEAKERwhich we'll talk about in a little bit,
38:53SPEAKERand I bought a modem package
38:55SPEAKERthat included Netscape Navigator.
38:58SPEAKER'Cause I was like, hell yeah, I have internet access.
38:59SPEAKERI would love to have a web browser
39:00SPEAKERlike in the computer lab, that's dope.
39:02SPEAKER- Man, you paid for Netscape?
39:04SPEAKER- Look, I don't wanna talk about it, I didn't know.
39:06SPEAKERSo I--
39:08SPEAKER- To be clear, just to be clear for people
39:09SPEAKERwho were not alive then or don't remember,
39:11SPEAKERthey gave away Netscape Navigator.
39:13SPEAKERI'm not talking about pirating it.
39:15SPEAKERI mean, they gave it away free, kind of forever.
39:17SPEAKER- Well, it was also like six disks or six floppy disks.
39:22SPEAKERIt was big, so it would've taken a fair amount of debt.
39:24SPEAKERAnyway, the point is, you did the,
39:29SPEAKERI saw I did this, I installed all that stuff,
39:32SPEAKERand it tried to install a bunch of windsock crap
39:34SPEAKERthat jacked up the Windows windsock implementation
39:36SPEAKERin Windows 95, and I had to reinstall Windows
39:39SPEAKERas a result of that almost immediately,
39:40SPEAKERwhich is a really grim foreshadow
39:42SPEAKERof the rest of my Windows experience.
39:46SPEAKERAnd then I fired up Netscape, and it was like,
39:49SPEAKERwell, you don't have an internet connection, dog.
39:52SPEAKERI was like, what the hell do you mean I'm connected?
39:53SPEAKERI'm looking, I see, it's right here.
39:54SPEAKERIt's in this text window, is the internet connection?
39:56SPEAKERWhat do I do?
39:58SPEAKERAnd then you called the help desk,
40:00SPEAKERand they were like, oh, you gotta type slip
40:01SPEAKERand then type your password and your username,
40:03SPEAKERand it'll just work.
40:04SPEAKERI was like, oh!
40:05SPEAKER- Interesting. - Yeah.
40:06SPEAKER- Okay. - So for a long time,
40:07SPEAKERit was manual, until the PPP stuff hit.
40:11SPEAKER'Cause there were, as I recall, there were like,
40:16SPEAKERyou basically, if you had a slip connection,
40:18SPEAKERyour ISP would hand you a script
40:20SPEAKERthat would do the login for you,
40:21SPEAKERand those were probably ISP-specific.
40:23SPEAKER- Interesting.
40:24SPEAKER- PPP had the authentication protocols built in,
40:27SPEAKERwhich was the advantage of PPP.
40:29SPEAKER- That's exactly what I'm all excited to talk about here.
40:31SPEAKERSo we got our first connection in '96,
40:33SPEAKERand it was a commercial local internet provider.
40:36SPEAKERAnd yes, that was a PPP connection,
40:37SPEAKERand that was all built into Windows 95.
40:39SPEAKERLike, you set the connection up
40:41SPEAKERin kind of what everybody knows of as the network dialogue.
40:45SPEAKERAnd then every time you would connect,
40:46SPEAKERyou put in your name and password
40:47SPEAKERin a little Windows provided pop-up.
40:49SPEAKER- Yep.
40:50SPEAKEROr you can save it if you wanted.
40:52SPEAKER- Or yeah, I mean, probably did that eventually.
40:54SPEAKERBut you were dialing through the operating system,
40:56SPEAKERand it was all built in.
40:58SPEAKER- But you never had to look at that terminal window again.
41:01SPEAKER- Yes.
41:02SPEAKER- Which was a bummer.
41:03SPEAKERThe terminal window was fun.
41:05SPEAKER- Yes, I mean, at this point,
41:06SPEAKERI wish I had done more terminal back then.
41:08SPEAKERAlthough, I know this podcast is kind of careening
41:11SPEAKERleft and right all over the place.
41:12SPEAKERI was reminded installing Windows 95 last night
41:15SPEAKERthat hyperterminal, I think,
41:17SPEAKERis the terminal I use to access BBSs in '95.
41:20SPEAKER- Is hyperterminal built into Windows 95?
41:22SPEAKER- It's right here, it had to have been, I assume.
41:24SPEAKERIt's right here in my fresh Windows 95 upgrade.
41:27SPEAKER- Oh, sure enough, accessories.
41:29SPEAKER- Unless it carried hyperterminal over from 3.1?
41:32SPEAKERHyperterm TRM?
41:34SPEAKER- I don't think there was a terminal built into 3.1.
41:36SPEAKERI think you had to get a terminal from your ISP.
41:38SPEAKER- I don't think so.
41:39SPEAKERI can't run hyperterminal.
41:40SPEAKERIt's by Hillgrave from Monroe, Michigan.
41:43SPEAKER- Oh, wow.
41:44SPEAKER- I guess Microsoft must have licensed it
41:45SPEAKERfor Windows 95, I guess.
41:47SPEAKER- That makes sense.
41:48SPEAKERYou have to install a modem
41:49SPEAKERbefore you can make a connection, sadly.
41:51SPEAKER- I do not have a fake virtual modem set up in 86Box,
41:54SPEAKERso I can't actually do anything
41:55SPEAKERwith hyperterminal right now.
41:57SPEAKER- I also love that they shipped a CompuServe MCI mail
42:00SPEAKERand AT&T mail clients out of the box for this.
42:03SPEAKERThat's wild.
42:03SPEAKER- I sure did.
42:05SPEAKER- It was a real moment.
42:06SPEAKERWhen you first connected to the real internet,
42:10SPEAKERand it's like, the closest thing I can think about
42:13SPEAKERin pop culture is when Neo takes the red pill in the matrix
42:18SPEAKERand wakes up in the real world,
42:20SPEAKERwas the closest analog I recall from mass media.
42:26SPEAKERAnd I apologize for that reference,
42:27SPEAKER'cause I know it has a ton of terrible fucking baggage now.
42:30SPEAKER- Yeah, well.
42:31SPEAKER- But it was wild sitting in front of a computer
42:38SPEAKERin my apartment looking at a web browser that was graphical.
42:43SPEAKER- Totally.
42:44SPEAKER- Like, I was like, oh, right,
42:45SPEAKERI understand why people like the web now.
42:46SPEAKER- You had, and you had way more context for that than I did,
42:49SPEAKER'cause, well, I had BBS, I did have some text mode,
42:51SPEAKERsome ANSI graphics experience under my belt
42:54SPEAKERto contrast with what the modern web was becoming.
42:56SPEAKERBut I mean, it was also,
42:58SPEAKERthis is becoming as much a early internet episode
43:01SPEAKERas it is a Windows 95 one, but.
43:02SPEAKER- They're kind of intertwined, right?
43:04SPEAKER- Yeah, right.
43:04SPEAKERBut it was also mind blowing from the perspective
43:06SPEAKERof just being able to connect with like-minded people
43:08SPEAKERout there, especially being in a small town
43:11SPEAKERwhere there were not that many of those around.
43:14SPEAKERThat was right around the time that I was extremely,
43:16SPEAKERextremely into like Squaresoft 16-bit RPGs,
43:20SPEAKERJRPGs and stuff.
43:21SPEAKER- You're gonna talk about Aerith again?
43:24SPEAKER- No, no, look, we've read enough of my old Usenet posts.
43:27SPEAKER(laughing)
43:28SPEAKERBut like, you know, being able to like go out
43:30SPEAKERand find information about imports and stuff.
43:32SPEAKERLike I knew nobody that was importing games
43:34SPEAKERfrom Japan at that point.
43:35SPEAKER- Yeah.
43:36SPEAKER- So being able to like go out and find information
43:38SPEAKERthat I otherwise would have had zero access to
43:40SPEAKERwas so invaluable.
43:41SPEAKERI mean, like, might sound a little grandiose,
43:44SPEAKERbut I like, I basically owe everything I am
43:47SPEAKERand everything that I have to get it on the internet
43:49SPEAKERwhen I did in terms of the skills that I built up,
43:52SPEAKERthe connections that I made, like the, you know,
43:54SPEAKERwhere has led me in my work life and everything.
43:57SPEAKERAnd like Windows 95 was kind of like the gateway
44:00SPEAKERto all of that.
44:01SPEAKER- Well, it was a super, it was a super powerful skill
44:04SPEAKERthat not a lot of people had at that time.
44:06SPEAKERLike I paid for college by running networks
44:09SPEAKERfor small businesses, right?
44:10SPEAKERLike I literally would leave school at the end of the day
44:14SPEAKERand then I would run a 10 base two cable around people.
44:18SPEAKERPeople, look, there was another thing that happened
44:20SPEAKERas a result of Windows 95, which was the internet
44:25SPEAKERbecame a thing that every business felt like
44:26SPEAKERthey had to have, even if they had no idea
44:28SPEAKERwhy they needed the internet.
44:29SPEAKERThey were like, oh, I'm a plumber,
44:33SPEAKERI gotta get on the internet.
44:34SPEAKERIn 2025, 100% true.
44:36SPEAKERIn 1995, absolutely unnecessary.
44:38SPEAKER- Probably unnecessary.
44:39SPEAKERI mean, as a goofy aside, or maybe it's not so goofy,
44:42SPEAKERit's kind of dire, you can see the same patterns
44:44SPEAKERplaying out today.
44:45SPEAKER- Yeah, with the artificial intelligence.
44:47SPEAKER- Like everybody needs AI.
44:48SPEAKERWe don't know what AI does exactly,
44:50SPEAKERbut we know we need to have it
44:51SPEAKERbecause everybody else has it, right?
44:52SPEAKER- Yeah, exactly.
44:53SPEAKER- Except the internet actually was extremely useful.
44:56SPEAKER- Yeah, and so I would run cable
44:59SPEAKERand install network cards in people's computers
45:01SPEAKERand I charged them like 40 bucks an hour,
45:03SPEAKERwhich was a fortune back then.
45:04SPEAKER- Wow, that is a fucking lot.
45:06SPEAKERI did a little bit of, I did a little bit in high school,
45:08SPEAKERI did a little bit of like tech support,
45:10SPEAKERkind of helping some elderly folks
45:11SPEAKERunderstand word processors and mail.
45:13SPEAKER- Why wouldn't I charge elderly folks 40 bucks an hour?
45:15SPEAKERI charge businesses 40 bucks an hour.
45:17SPEAKER- I charge either five or 10 an hour.
45:19SPEAKERI can't remember which.
45:20SPEAKER- That was not enough, Brett.
45:21SPEAKER- I think it might've been 10 an hour.
45:23SPEAKER- Okay, 10 seems right.
45:25SPEAKER- It was never more than an hour or two, you know?
45:27SPEAKERSo it was just kind of pocket change, spending money,
45:29SPEAKERor you know, you'd save up for a couple of months
45:31SPEAKERto get a new game.
45:32SPEAKER- Well, I would, running in the networks was a,
45:35SPEAKERI show up at six o'clock when the doors close
45:37SPEAKERand then they open the door at three o'clock
45:39SPEAKERand then like I leave at three o'clock in the morning
45:40SPEAKERwhen it's done.
45:41SPEAKER- Yikes, well, also you're working for a business,
45:43SPEAKERyou know, they've got money, they've got money to spend.
45:46SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, like, yeah, it made sense.
45:48SPEAKERAnd along the way, I would do like Windows 95 upgrades
45:50SPEAKERfor folks and I helped build a bunch of file servers
45:54SPEAKERand stuff like that.
45:54SPEAKERAnd like, it was good, honest work, honestly.
45:59SPEAKERLike I've helped a lot of people,
46:01SPEAKERlike they were really grateful
46:02SPEAKERto get their businesses online
46:03SPEAKERand we helped them figure out stuff like ISDN connections
46:07SPEAKERand all that, so they could have real internet
46:09SPEAKERat their offices, slow the way it might be.
46:12SPEAKER- All right, Windows 95.
46:14SPEAKER- Yeah.
46:15SPEAKER- I have to say when I got it installed last night,
46:17SPEAKERI think I mentioned this earlier.
46:18SPEAKERSo I had an existing three, one, eight computer in here
46:22SPEAKERthat I cloned.
46:23SPEAKER- I did not.
46:24SPEAKER- And did the upgrade on, a couple things.
46:28SPEAKERFirst, just a point of order, I'll tell you what's in it.
46:31SPEAKERIt was a Pentium 75.
46:33SPEAKER- So for folks who don't know, x86 box,
46:35SPEAKERyou're basically emulating a specific computer.
46:38SPEAKER- Yeah. - Oh dude.
46:39SPEAKERIf you grew up with computers in the '80s and '90s
46:42SPEAKERand you have not touched this thing,
46:44SPEAKERfucking turn off this computer, this podcast
46:45SPEAKERand go download x86 box because-
46:47SPEAKER- It's pretty good.
46:48SPEAKER- It is the most kid in a candy store experience
46:50SPEAKERyou can possibly have if you're a nerd of a certain age.
46:54SPEAKER- Uh-huh.
46:55SPEAKER- Because you're literally sitting here
46:55SPEAKERwith dropdown menus picking from,
46:57SPEAKERthere must be 150 different graphics cards
47:01SPEAKERto pick from here.
47:03SPEAKER- It's too much choice in a lot of ways.
47:05SPEAKER- Like 50 different sound cards, network cards.
47:08SPEAKERYou know, hard drives.
47:09SPEAKERI mean, I think they will actually emulate
47:10SPEAKERspecific types of hard drives, if I'm not mistaken.
47:13SPEAKERYou can pick like what types of CD-ROMs and floppy drives
47:16SPEAKERand zip drives and all kinds of stuff to attach to it.
47:19SPEAKERYou're like, you're picking specific motherboards.
47:21SPEAKERI am using, I am using an Asus TX97 from,
47:25SPEAKERwhich is a Socket 7 board from 1996 for my motherboard.
47:29SPEAKERLike you get the appropriate BIOS and everything.
47:31SPEAKERI mean, it is exactly, exactly as you remember it.
47:34SPEAKERSo I had an S3, oh gosh.
47:40SPEAKER- S3 Verge?
47:41SPEAKER- No, it was not a Verge, it was before.
47:43SPEAKERI had, it was a 2D card because remember
47:44SPEAKERthis was a Windows 3.1 machine.
47:46SPEAKERSo there was no point having a 3D card.
47:48SPEAKERIt was an S3 Trio of some kind, I forget which, anyway.
47:52SPEAKERWindows 95 did not seem to love the S3 Trio very much.
47:56SPEAKER- That makes sense. - From a driver standpoint.
47:58SPEAKERSo after I did the upgrade,
48:00SPEAKERI basically shut down your fake computer,
48:03SPEAKERgo to the dropdown and pick a different graphics card.
48:05SPEAKERSo I put a Matrox Millennium in post Windows 95 install.
48:09SPEAKER- Okay.
48:10SPEAKER- And got to have the fun of booting back into Windows 95,
48:15SPEAKERhaving traded from one card to the next
48:18SPEAKERand having it think there were still two,
48:19SPEAKERlike they basically thought
48:21SPEAKERthere were two graphics cards present still,
48:24SPEAKERwhich is how I was reminded that device manager
48:26SPEAKERwas a thing as of Windows 95.
48:28SPEAKER- Oh, was it?
48:29SPEAKER- Yes, it's in control panel.
48:30SPEAKERIt's, it's like--
48:32SPEAKER- Oh, I think that came later.
48:33SPEAKER- No, go to start, settings, control panel,
48:37SPEAKERand it's in the, it's in the system applet.
48:41SPEAKER- Oh. - They don't even,
48:43SPEAKERthey don't even call it device manager at the icon level.
48:45SPEAKERYou open system properties
48:47SPEAKERand device manager is just one of several tabs.
48:50SPEAKERSo I had to go into device manager
48:51SPEAKERwhere it thought I had both the S3 card
48:53SPEAKERand the Matrox card.
48:55SPEAKER- Man, I got a lot of exclamation points in here.
48:58SPEAKER- I bet you do.
48:59SPEAKERSo I had to like manually remove the S3 card
49:01SPEAKERbefore it would switch over to the Matrox card,
49:03SPEAKEReven though it had drivers for the Matrox card.
49:05SPEAKER- That is really funny.
49:07SPEAKER- Like that's just, there's your fresh 1990,
49:09SPEAKERAugust 1995 plug and play experience.
49:13SPEAKERReal quick, do you know where I got those Matrox drivers?
49:17SPEAKER- No, where?
49:18SPEAKER- Matrox.
49:19SPEAKER- What?
49:21SPEAKER- Matrox still has drivers for all of their cards
49:23SPEAKERgoing back to Windows 3.1.
49:26SPEAKER- What? - Up on their website.
49:29SPEAKER- That is wild.
49:30SPEAKER- Shout outs to Matrox.
49:31SPEAKER- Shout out to, seriously.
49:33SPEAKERI was like, I bowed down to Matrox when I found that.
49:37SPEAKER- That is freaking unbelievable.
49:39SPEAKER- It really is amazing.
49:40SPEAKERLike it's like a time capsule.
49:42SPEAKER- So you put that in there, I saw that in the notes
49:44SPEAKERand I thought you were talking about like,
49:47SPEAKERyou went to the Matrox website on archive.org or something,
49:52SPEAKERnot that you went to Matrox's website in 2025.
49:55SPEAKERThat's rad.
49:56SPEAKER- Their live functional 2025 website
49:58SPEAKERstill hosts all these drivers for download.
50:00SPEAKERSo I was gonna say, for folks who don't know,
50:02SPEAKERthe way I'm getting software into this VM,
50:04SPEAKERthe easiest is by mounting it as a CD-ROM drive.
50:07SPEAKER- Yeah, you can mount.
50:08SPEAKER- You can mount a folder basically, or a file.
50:10SPEAKER- Yeah, you can mount virtual CDs and floppies
50:12SPEAKERand all that kind of fun stuff.
50:13SPEAKERBut it was fun to be reminded the device manager
50:16SPEAKERwas in there that early.
50:18SPEAKER'Cause I guess like you in my mind,
50:20SPEAKERdevice manager came along later.
50:22SPEAKER- Yeah, I assume so.
50:24SPEAKER- But here it is and like, you know, slightly different UI,
50:26SPEAKERbut like kind of conceptually unchanged
50:29SPEAKERfrom what it is today.
50:31SPEAKER- It's, it's, it's walkers.
50:34SPEAKERThe other thing that, like, so I installed a, so, okay.
50:37SPEAKERSo you have the Matrox card.
50:39SPEAKER- Yep.
50:40SPEAKER- What else, what else did you put in there?
50:41SPEAKER- I've got a regular Sound Blaster 16,
50:43SPEAKERnot the plug and play version.
50:44SPEAKERI don't really know what the,
50:45SPEAKERI never knew what the difference was.
50:46SPEAKER- One had dip switches and one just had
50:48SPEAKERthe plug and play hardware.
50:49SPEAKERSo it's like the BIOS could talk to it
50:52SPEAKERand pick hierarchies and stuff.
50:53SPEAKER- We had, and if I recall,
50:55SPEAKERwe had the pretty plug and play version.
50:57SPEAKERThere's a standard ISA.
50:58SPEAKER- Yeah, I had a Sound Blaster 16 CD technically,
51:01SPEAKERwhich had a plug for a special CD on the back of it.
51:06SPEAKER- Ours, we also had that.
51:07SPEAKERIt's kind of a weird, this is getting off topic again.
51:10SPEAKERIt was kind of weird to me that sound cards came to ship
51:13SPEAKERwith CD-ROM controllers so regularly.
51:15SPEAKERI don't know why, I guess that was-
51:16SPEAKER- It was an easy upgrade.
51:18SPEAKER- And it was so they could sell multimedia bundles
51:20SPEAKERwith a CD-ROM.
51:21SPEAKER- So you could make your PC MPC 1.0 compatible.
51:25SPEAKER- It's just like, here's your bundle with the sound card
51:27SPEAKERand a CD-ROM and they work together
51:29SPEAKERand now you're multimedia.
51:30SPEAKER- Exactly.
51:34SPEAKERWhat else you got?
51:36SPEAKER- Oh, let's see.
51:37SPEAKERYou know, I mean, actually, okay,
51:38SPEAKERso the main thing I was going to say
51:40SPEAKERonce I got past fiddling with graphics card drivers
51:42SPEAKERand stuff is just how kind of like small in scope
51:47SPEAKERand maybe a little barren this whole thing feels,
51:50SPEAKERwhich kind of like aligns with what you were talking about,
51:52SPEAKERthat when this thing is not connected to the internet,
51:54SPEAKERthere's like almost nothing to it.
51:55SPEAKERYou know, like you've got your graphical shell,
51:58SPEAKERyou've got Windows Explorer,
51:59SPEAKERwhich is basically your file manager,
52:01SPEAKERbut there's not a lot in here, you know?
52:03SPEAKERThere's notepad and WordPad and hyper terminal
52:05SPEAKERand a calculator and that's about it.
52:08SPEAKER- That's pretty much the whole thing.
52:09SPEAKER- A couple of, you know, Freecell, Hearts,
52:11SPEAKERMinesweeper and Solitaire and some fax software
52:14SPEAKERand then all the system utilities.
52:15SPEAKERLike there's really not a lot to Windows 95,
52:18SPEAKERlike original 1995 edition fresh out of the box.
52:21SPEAKER- It's wild how little stuff there is to do.
52:24SPEAKERActually, I would say.
52:26SPEAKER- Yeah.
52:26SPEAKER- Like it's why I think the plus pack
52:28SPEAKERwas so important, honestly.
52:31SPEAKER- So you could install those themes.
52:32SPEAKER- So you can install themes.
52:33SPEAKERYou can install a game, that pinball game.
52:35SPEAKER- Oh, actually, sorry.
52:36SPEAKERI should say hover comes with base Windows 95.
52:39SPEAKERI did play some hover.
52:40SPEAKER- Only if you have the CD version.
52:41SPEAKERIf you have the floppy disk version, you get fucked.
52:44SPEAKER- And yeah, in fact, you can't even install it.
52:46SPEAKERYou have to run it off of the CD.
52:47SPEAKERYou have to put the CD in and open a menu
52:49SPEAKERand run it from there.
52:50SPEAKER- Yep.
52:52SPEAKER- I'm, you know what, I'm an executive decision.
52:54SPEAKERI'm going to auto run this plus CD that I have mounted
52:56SPEAKERand install it while you talk.
52:58SPEAKER- Oh, I did that.
53:01SPEAKEROh boy, so.
53:03SPEAKEROkay, so I have, I did a Matrox Millennium 2
53:07SPEAKERas my graphics card.
53:09SPEAKER- 2 as well, not a Roman Numeral 2.
53:11SPEAKER- Roman Numeral 2 is what I chose.
53:13SPEAKER- There is a Millennium 2.
53:15SPEAKER- Yeah, the Millennium 2 was the banger 2D graphics card
53:20SPEAKERat the time I was building PCs at the beginning.
53:22SPEAKERLike no lie, the Millennium was known, as far as I knew,
53:25SPEAKERwas known as like the cleanest, best looking,
53:28SPEAKERhighest performance graphics card out there.
53:30SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, but also if you compared it side by side
53:34SPEAKERwith a Verge on the kind of monitors that we would have had,
53:36SPEAKERyou would have not been able to tell the difference.
53:37SPEAKER- Probably.
53:39SPEAKER- I did a Socket 7 board.
53:41SPEAKERI picked an i430FX Intel chipset,
53:44SPEAKERwhich was the one I picked was the Asus P55TP4XE.
53:49SPEAKER- Yeah.
53:50SPEAKER- They didn't have any 8-bit boards
53:51SPEAKERor I would have done an 8-bit board because-
53:54SPEAKER- For later chipsets, they will.
53:56SPEAKER- Oh, okay.
53:57SPEAKER- I'm pretty sure the BH6 is in there.
53:59SPEAKER- Okay, I did a Pentium 200.
54:02SPEAKER- Really?
54:03SPEAKER- Yeah.
54:04SPEAKER- I was afraid to go that high.
54:04SPEAKERWell, so I did a Pentium 75 'cause that's what we had.
54:09SPEAKER- I started with a Pentium 60
54:11SPEAKERand the board that I chose was complicated,
54:12SPEAKERso I switched to the Pentium 200 and the FX board.
54:15SPEAKER- I was a little afraid to go to something
54:17SPEAKERlike a Pentium 200 with a later chipset
54:19SPEAKER'cause I was worried Windows 95 would flip out.
54:22SPEAKER- I wanted it to be fast, man.
54:24SPEAKER- I get it, I get it.
54:25SPEAKERSo I did upgrade this to a Pentium 120
54:27SPEAKERafter the install was done.
54:29SPEAKER- Okay, well, that was much easier upgrading these days
54:31SPEAKERthan it was back then, it turns out.
54:33SPEAKER- Just a drop-in, just a drop-in upgrade.
54:35SPEAKER- I did a Logitech Microsoft bus mouse,
54:37SPEAKERwhich was like the PS/2 mouse, I assume.
54:40SPEAKERThe SoundBlaster 16 PNP.
54:42SPEAKERI tried the AWE32, but the drivers were a pain in the butt,
54:45SPEAKERso I switched to the 16 'cause it's built into Windows 95.
54:48SPEAKER- I wonder if it is that bus mouse, a serial mouse?
54:51SPEAKER- Oh, no, bus mouse is PS/2, I believe.
54:52SPEAKEROr it could be a card that's,
54:55SPEAKERoh, no, a standard PS/2 mouse would be PS/2 mouse.
54:57SPEAKER- Yeah, I think that is a serial mouse
54:59SPEAKERthat you're talking about.
55:00SPEAKER- Weird, or I wonder if it's a separate thing
55:02SPEAKERthat has a card or something goofy.
55:04SPEAKER- I am using a PS/2 mouse in here,
55:05SPEAKERand I can tell you it doesn't feel any smoother,
55:07SPEAKERso you're not missing much.
55:08SPEAKER- There you go.
55:09SPEAKER- I tried to install the classic PS/2 rate utility.
55:14SPEAKER- Yeah, that doesn't work.
55:16SPEAKERNo, it's not gonna work, probably.
55:17SPEAKERThe thing that increased the polling rate
55:19SPEAKERof your PS/2 mouse in Windows to make your mouse smoother,
55:21SPEAKERbut it did not work in here for some reason.
55:24SPEAKER- I did a Novell NE2000 network card,
55:28SPEAKERwhich is just a bog standard.
55:30SPEAKERI was looking for the 3Com EtherLink 3,
55:32SPEAKERbut they don't emulate that, unfortunately.
55:35SPEAKERSeems like PCI stuff's a little thinner.
55:37SPEAKERAnd then I did a 420 gig hard drive
55:44SPEAKERbecause I couldn't remember what the weird limits were.
55:46SPEAKERI knew that there was some jumping points
55:48SPEAKERwhere you had file system problems
55:51SPEAKERor different drive size limits, rather.
55:56SPEAKER- Yeah, I looked some of that stuff up.
55:57SPEAKERAccording to Wikipedia,
55:59SPEAKERWindows 95 will fail to boot on a 2.1 gigahertz processor
56:02SPEAKERor with more than 480 megabytes of RAM.
56:06SPEAKER- Oh. - But I couldn't find any info
56:08SPEAKERabout a hard drive being too big.
56:10SPEAKER- I only did, I think I did eight megabytes of RAM,
56:12SPEAKERand I felt like that was really gratuitous for Windows 95.
56:16SPEAKERI've got two hard drives in this machine,
56:18SPEAKERboth 512 megabytes.
56:20SPEAKER- Wild.
56:23SPEAKERJust really, really splurge in there, Brad.
56:26SPEAKER- That's the magic of this thing.
56:27SPEAKER- I remember the computer that had Windows 95 on it,
56:30SPEAKERmy Pentium 60, I remember getting a one gigabyte hard drive
56:33SPEAKERfor it and feeling like the most luxurious motherfucker
56:36SPEAKERon earth. - Oh yeah.
56:37SPEAKER- It's like, this is really, really changing things here.
56:41SPEAKERAnd okay, so to answer your question,
56:43SPEAKERcan you drag Windows and still see what's in them
56:46SPEAKERin Windows 95? - Yes, we talked about that
56:48SPEAKERbefore we started recording.
56:49SPEAKER- Oh, I can remember that.
56:50SPEAKERSo I got my, I got my Matrox Millennium 2 drivers installed.
56:55SPEAKERI can see the contents of the window and I drag now.
56:58SPEAKER- So Windows 95 has show contents while dragging?
57:01SPEAKER- Yeah. - Really?
57:01SPEAKER- Yeah. - I was thinking
57:02SPEAKERthat might not have happened until Windows 98.
57:04SPEAKER- Nope, Windows 95 works. - Man, okay.
57:07SPEAKERI might have to put a Millennium 2 in this machine.
57:09SPEAKER- God, this Matrox display properties app
57:11SPEAKERthat they installed with the driver,
57:13SPEAKERit has the normal gray, but then it also has
57:17SPEAKERjust a close-up macro shot of a Matrox video card
57:22SPEAKERon the gray, it's a nightmare.
57:24SPEAKERIt's almost completely illegible.
57:26SPEAKER- Yep. - Yeah.
57:27SPEAKER- 'Cause, I mean, this might,
57:29SPEAKERI'm sure this varies by card and drivers,
57:31SPEAKERbut mine booted up to 16 color mode.
57:33SPEAKER- Yep. - After install.
57:36SPEAKER- It worked, I'm 16 bit now, baby.
57:38SPEAKER- Yeah, and so this was also a reminder
57:39SPEAKERthat Windows 95 made you reboot for absolutely everything.
57:42SPEAKERI was gonna say, wow,
57:43SPEAKERthey really did make you reboot for everything.
57:45SPEAKERIt's like-- - Change your color depth,
57:47SPEAKERchange your desktop resolution,
57:48SPEAKERlike literally any setting that involves a hardware mode
57:51SPEAKERand you were going to reboot the machine.
57:53SPEAKER- I think you could eject a CD probably.
57:55SPEAKER- Yeah, yes, definitely.
57:56SPEAKER- And a floppy disk you could eject, that's pretty much it.
57:59SPEAKER- Yeah. - And also,
58:01SPEAKERif you had a floppy disk in that wasn't bootable,
58:04SPEAKERit would complain every single time you reboot.
58:06SPEAKER- Yeah.
58:07SPEAKER- So I have the internet working,
58:08SPEAKERI got my Novell driver working.
58:10SPEAKER- Yeah, so that was one thing that I didn't realize
58:12SPEAKERuntil you told me this when we were starting this up,
58:14SPEAKERthat 86Box will connect your real,
58:17SPEAKERcurrent host computer networking
58:19SPEAKERto the virtual networking adapter in this thing.
58:21SPEAKER- Yep.
58:22SPEAKER- So you can straight up take
58:23SPEAKERthat Windows 95 machine online if you want.
58:25SPEAKER- I got bad news about how useful that is.
58:27SPEAKER- Yeah.
58:29SPEAKERSo in the course of this,
58:30SPEAKERdo you remember this probably made headlines
58:31SPEAKERthree or four years ago when this happened?
58:33SPEAKERSomebody put out Windows 95 in JavaScript.
58:36SPEAKER- Oh, yeah, yeah.
58:37SPEAKER- Or actually, sorry, Electron, Electron, I should say.
58:39SPEAKERSomebody put out an Electron app that is the entirety
58:41SPEAKERof Windows 95.
58:42SPEAKER- It's like an emulator for Windows 95, right?
58:44SPEAKER- So I was tinkering with that this morning too.
58:46SPEAKERAnd that does have networking enabled by default.
58:48SPEAKERAnd in fact, has Windows,
58:50SPEAKERsorry, it has Internet Explorer 5.5 in it.
58:53SPEAKER- Oh.
58:53SPEAKER- Which was the final IE release for Windows 95.
58:58SPEAKERNothing loads in Internet Explorer 5.5 anymore.
59:01SPEAKERI mean nothing.
59:03SPEAKER- Yeah, I was gonna say, I don't know anything.
59:04SPEAKERThis is Internet Explorer 4 on this one that I have now.
59:08SPEAKER- Yeah.
59:08SPEAKER- Like nothing's also installing with that.
59:11SPEAKERSo yeah, it's, I don't know what you do
59:18SPEAKERto get new browsers on here, I guess.
59:20SPEAKER- Like honestly, I don't know what you could do with,
59:23SPEAKERon the internet with this thing
59:24SPEAKERbesides the terminal program at this point.
59:26SPEAKERLike you could certainly shell into some stuff from there.
59:30SPEAKERBut beyond that, like, you could get like a news reader.
59:34SPEAKERYou could go get Forte free agents,
59:35SPEAKERwhich was my news news reader of choice.
59:38SPEAKER- Wow.
59:39SPEAKER- In the Windows 95 era, that would probably still work
59:42SPEAKER'cause I assume that would still connect
59:44SPEAKERto Usenet servers just fine.
59:46SPEAKERBut as far as the web goes,
59:48SPEAKERI don't think an internet enabled Windows 95 install
59:50SPEAKERis going to do much for you at this point.
59:52SPEAKER- When I go to, so I tried microsoft.com,
59:55SPEAKERwhich just throws an error.
59:57SPEAKERGoogle throws a bunch of script garbage
1:00:00SPEAKERwhere the scripts don't show.
1:00:05SPEAKERBut if you scroll down, you do get to a Google search
1:00:09SPEAKERand the old school buttons that say I'm feeling lost.
1:00:12SPEAKER- Really? - Really lucky.
1:00:13SPEAKER- Okay.
1:00:14SPEAKER- But it's all black other than that.
1:00:16SPEAKERSo Windows 90, let's see if it works.
1:00:20SPEAKERWeb browser.
1:00:23SPEAKEROkay, I got a bunch of script garbage again.
1:00:25SPEAKERThe little clouds moving in the background.
1:00:27SPEAKERI really never used Internet Explorer at all,
1:00:29SPEAKERI'm realizing. - Really?
1:00:31SPEAKER- Hardly ever. - No kidding.
1:00:32SPEAKERAfter Netscape started to fall off,
1:00:34SPEAKERit was my browser of choice for a very long time.
1:00:37SPEAKER- These results are completely useless.
1:00:41SPEAKER- Well agreed.
1:00:42SPEAKER- Yeah, so anyway, it's, look,
1:00:46SPEAKERyou can't go home again, you know?
1:00:48SPEAKER- No, you kind of can't.
1:00:49SPEAKER- That's the lesson here, I guess.
1:00:50SPEAKER- My plus install just finished
1:00:52SPEAKERand it wants to restart Windows.
1:00:53SPEAKER- Yeah, you had to, well, it installed Windows components.
1:00:56SPEAKERYou got your drive smart,
1:00:57SPEAKERyou got your drive compression in there, you know?
1:00:59SPEAKER- Yep, that's true. - It also installed
1:01:01SPEAKERsome TCP/IP stacks, so I had to get,
1:01:04SPEAKERlet me tell you, installing Windows 95 in 2025
1:01:07SPEAKERoff of a bunch of virtual floppy disks,
1:01:10SPEAKERmaybe the most annoying thing I've done
1:01:11SPEAKERin a decade with a computer.
1:01:13SPEAKER- And why would you do that to yourself?
1:01:14SPEAKERI mean, I know why, 'cause the alternative
1:01:16SPEAKERwas you would need to go put together a boot disk
1:01:17SPEAKERthat would have CD-ROM drivers for DOS in it
1:01:20SPEAKERso you could boot with the CD version.
1:01:21SPEAKER- Yeah, which I don't,
1:01:23SPEAKERI knew how to do that at one point or another,
1:01:25SPEAKERbut I don't have that knowledge anymore.
1:01:27SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:01:29SPEAKER- It took forever, and it keeps changing back and forth, too.
1:01:33SPEAKERYou have to, I'm trying to pull from the memory banks here.
1:01:35SPEAKERYou have to set MSCDEX to something.
1:01:38SPEAKER- Yeah, but you also have to install the driver
1:01:40SPEAKERfor your controller and all that stuff first.
1:01:42SPEAKERIt's a pain. - Yes, it's a lot.
1:01:46SPEAKER- Anyway, it seems to be working pretty well, though.
1:01:49SPEAKERWell, the version of Samba that Windows 95 uses
1:01:54SPEAKERis no longer supported by anything in my network,
1:01:56SPEAKERso I can't browse the network, sadly.
1:01:58SPEAKER- Yeah, I need to look up how old is the SMB protocol,
1:02:01SPEAKERand it's, well, it launched with 3.11 and-
1:02:05SPEAKER- '83, originally developed- - Oh, wow, it's that old?
1:02:07SPEAKER- In '83 at IBM.
1:02:09SPEAKER- Wild.
1:02:10SPEAKER- So in 1987, Microsoft and 3Com implemented SMB
1:02:13SPEAKERfor OS/2, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
1:02:15SPEAKERAnyway, yes, SMB had been around for a while by the time.
1:02:18SPEAKEROh, okay, I think what we know of as current,
1:02:22SPEAKERmodern-day SMB 1.0 was published in 1996 by Microsoft.
1:02:26SPEAKER- Yeah, it was, yeah, so predates, post-dates this even.
1:02:30SPEAKER- Yes. - Weird.
1:02:32SPEAKER- Yep.
1:02:34SPEAKER- Yeah, this has been a fascinating
1:02:37SPEAKERwalk down memory lane for me.
1:02:40SPEAKERI don't, like, it's funny, looking at it now,
1:02:45SPEAKERwell, I mean, okay, I guess I can watch the videos now,
1:02:47SPEAKERwhich I couldn't do before,
1:02:49SPEAKERthe videos that are on the install CD, the Weezer, and-
1:02:54SPEAKER- You wanna talk about this thing feeling futuristic,
1:02:56SPEAKERnothing compares to opening up that CD
1:02:59SPEAKERand watching that E.D. Brickell video,
1:03:01SPEAKERor the Weezer Buddy Holly video, or that Rob Roy trailer.
1:03:04SPEAKER- The autoplay when you put the Windows 95 upgrade CD
1:03:08SPEAKERin your computer is, hey, we have a Windows 95 tour,
1:03:13SPEAKERwe have Microsoft Exposition,
1:03:15SPEAKERwhich I think was the, what became Encarta, right?
1:03:18SPEAKER- I mean, that sounds right.
1:03:19SPEAKER- It's the, it's the encyclopedia.
1:03:21SPEAKERThere's Hover, which is a game,
1:03:23SPEAKERa fast-paced game of bumper cars in a huge 3D maze,
1:03:27SPEAKERand cool video clips.
1:03:29SPEAKERCool video clips.
1:03:30SPEAKERI'm clicking on cool video clips.
1:03:31SPEAKER- So now I have a HiPerf, which is a folder.
1:03:35SPEAKEROh, those are the good versions.
1:03:36SPEAKER- Yeah, so the HiPerf is where the better versions
1:03:38SPEAKERof the same videos are, slightly better codecs,
1:03:41SPEAKERand these were like, I don't even know,
1:03:42SPEAKERthese are all like CPU software-only codecs,
1:03:44SPEAKERlike, I think it might be like Intel Cinepak
1:03:47SPEAKERor something like that,
1:03:47SPEAKERlike some very, very early video compression,
1:03:50SPEAKERand uncompressed audio, if I recall,
1:03:52SPEAKERbecause I have tinkered with these video files before,
1:03:54SPEAKERbecause of course I have, and if I'm not mistaken,
1:03:56SPEAKERthe audio in these predates audio compression
1:03:59SPEAKERit's just uncompressed, like wave, you know, PCM audio,
1:04:03SPEAKERbut they're all like 11 kilohertz because they have to be.
1:04:06SPEAKER- It's fit to play on the CPUs at the time, yeah.
1:04:09SPEAKERThe, is, "Good Time" is the Edie Brickell video, right?
1:04:12SPEAKER- Yep.
1:04:13SPEAKER- Wild!
1:04:14SPEAKER- Like, listening to that song still feels like
1:04:16SPEAKERthe future of computing to me.
1:04:18SPEAKER- Yeah, it's PCM 22 hertz, 22,000 hertz.
1:04:21SPEAKER- 22 kilohertz, okay.
1:04:22SPEAKER- 16-bit stereo.
1:04:24SPEAKER- Yep.
1:04:25SPEAKER- And it's 320 by 240, 24-bit color,
1:04:29SPEAKER2,000, it tells you how many frames it is,
1:04:31SPEAKER2,912 frames, and 15 frames a second Cinepak.
1:04:37SPEAKER- I don't even know what the name of this video player is.
1:04:39SPEAKER- I think it's just video.
1:04:41SPEAKER- Like, it doesn't have a name.
1:04:43SPEAKERLike, the title bar is just the name of the file.
1:04:45SPEAKER- It's, wow, you're not wrong.
1:04:48SPEAKER- And the controls are play and stop, and that's it.
1:04:51SPEAKER- You can drag the bar and scrub.
1:04:54SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:04:55SPEAKER- I don't think I realized this was Edie Brickell
1:04:56SPEAKERat the time, for what it's worth.
1:04:58SPEAKER- Extremely, extremely nascent digital video playback
1:05:02SPEAKERon a computer.
1:05:03SPEAKERI mean, this is like the year after the Sega CD came out,
1:05:05SPEAKERyou know, this is like not long after the first time
1:05:08SPEAKERI ever saw full motion video on anything.
1:05:10SPEAKER- Well, I was gonna say, like, if you wanted to do video
1:05:13SPEAKERon a computer prior to this, you kind of had to have,
1:05:16SPEAKERlike, dedicated hardware to handle the video rendering.
1:05:18SPEAKER- Right, right.
1:05:20SPEAKER- There's a Rob Roy movie trailer.
1:05:22SPEAKER- Yep, there sure is.
1:05:23SPEAKER- Featuring, I guess, is that a young Liam Neeson?
1:05:26SPEAKER- Oh, yeah, oh, absolutely.
1:05:27SPEAKERI think this movie was, like, quite well respected.
1:05:29SPEAKER- Yeah, it won an Oscar, or was nominated at least.
1:05:32SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:05:33SPEAKER- You have the Weezer, is just the name of the next file,
1:05:36SPEAKERwhich is the Buddy Holly music video directed
1:05:40SPEAKERby young Spike Jones featuring young Weezer.
1:05:43SPEAKER- Yeah, it's the entirety of the Buddy Holly video,
1:05:45SPEAKERwhich was, like, pretty contemporary at this point.
1:05:46SPEAKERI think the blue album had just come out,
1:05:48SPEAKERlike, the year before.
1:05:49SPEAKER- And they, like, this is the one that they superimposed
1:05:51SPEAKERthemselves in, like, old Happy Days clips, is that right?
1:05:55SPEAKER- This was, like, this video was huge on MTV at the time.
1:05:58SPEAKER- Yeah, it was a tour de force for 1995.
1:06:01SPEAKER- Fun stuff.
1:06:04SPEAKER- And then there's Welcome 1, 2, and 3 had his fun stuff.
1:06:07SPEAKER- Those are dumb, I can tell you from experience.
1:06:09SPEAKEROh, no, actually, I'm sorry,
1:06:10SPEAKERthose are Bill Plimpton animated cartoons.
1:06:12SPEAKER- Yeah, these are dope. - Those are not dope at all.
1:06:15SPEAKERI was thinking this was just some stupid
1:06:16SPEAKERMicrosoft motion graphics stuff,
1:06:18SPEAKERbut no, these Welcome videos are actually, like,
1:06:20SPEAKERthere's actually, like, something to these.
1:06:22SPEAKER- Oh, these are fabulous.
1:06:23SPEAKER- Yeah, although they may not all be Bill Plimpton.
1:06:26SPEAKER- The first one is?
1:06:27SPEAKER- No, these are all different animators, actually.
1:06:29SPEAKEREach one of these is entitled Windows,
1:06:31SPEAKERbut by a different animator.
1:06:33SPEAKER- They spent kind of a lot of money on art, it turns out.
1:06:36SPEAKERI wonder if these were originally gonna be, like,
1:06:37SPEAKERa thing that played when Windows starts
1:06:39SPEAKERand then they decided it was annoying,
1:06:40SPEAKERso they just chucked it in, fun stuff.
1:06:42SPEAKER- Yeah, 'cause, oh, Welcome 3 is the one I was thinking of,
1:06:44SPEAKERthat's just, like, a stupid Windows 3 one desktop,
1:06:47SPEAKERlike, with a little video morph into clouds from Windows 95.
1:06:51SPEAKER- That's pretty good.
1:06:52SPEAKER- Speaking of spending money on stuff, Brian Eno sound.
1:06:56SPEAKER(Brian singing)
1:07:01SPEAKER- Yeah, most expensive single piece of sound ever made,
1:07:03SPEAKERis my understanding.
1:07:05SPEAKER- Yeah, have you ever read about
1:07:06SPEAKERhis composition process for that?
1:07:08SPEAKER- No, I assumed he just, they wrote a really big check
1:07:11SPEAKERand then he cashed it.
1:07:12SPEAKER- But he's talked about composing that thing before.
1:07:16SPEAKERHe did something like 80,
1:07:17SPEAKERover 80 different separate pieces of music.
1:07:21SPEAKER- Wow.
1:07:22SPEAKER- Before they finally picked one.
1:07:23SPEAKER- Do you think Bill Gates was standing over his shoulder
1:07:25SPEAKERthe whole time being like, no, not that one?
1:07:26SPEAKER- I don't think so.
1:07:27SPEAKER- No, not that one.
1:07:28SPEAKER- No, he actually has talked really positively
1:07:30SPEAKERabout the experience.
1:07:30SPEAKERHe talked about how kind of creatively invigorating it was
1:07:33SPEAKERto have such an incredible constraint
1:07:35SPEAKERas having to compose a piece of music in three seconds.
1:07:38SPEAKERSo I think he made it sound like
1:07:40SPEAKERhe actually, like, loved doing it
1:07:41SPEAKERand that's why he did so many different pieces,
1:07:43SPEAKERbecause it was just, like, really fun.
1:07:45SPEAKERWhich I could kind of see.
1:07:46SPEAKER- I mean, they just call it the Microsoft sound.
1:07:49SPEAKER- Yes, they literally called it the Microsoft sound.
1:07:52SPEAKER- It really is.
1:07:53SPEAKERThis was really the moment that Microsoft
1:07:54SPEAKERbecame the bad guy, right?
1:07:56SPEAKER- Well, this is getting there for sure.
1:07:57SPEAKERNot quite.
1:07:58SPEAKERWe're not quite in antitrust land yet,
1:08:00SPEAKERbut we're getting close to it.
1:08:01SPEAKER- I mean, MSN was antitrust land, Brad.
1:08:03SPEAKER- Well, I mean, in terms of the government
1:08:04SPEAKERactually taking action,
1:08:05SPEAKERwe're a few years out from that still,
1:08:07SPEAKERbut I have always been bummed
1:08:09SPEAKERthat Microsoft has never released
1:08:10SPEAKERa higher quality version of the Microsoft sound.
1:08:12SPEAKER- 'Cause it's only 16-bit?
1:08:14SPEAKER- It's like, it is also, it might be 11 kilohertz
1:08:17SPEAKERor maybe 22, but you know, it sounds like shit.
1:08:19SPEAKERIt's very scratchy.
1:08:20SPEAKERIt sounds like very old, low sample rate audio.
1:08:23SPEAKER- Yeah, it definitely does sound kind of gnarly.
1:08:25SPEAKERWhat the hell is hover?
1:08:26SPEAKERI don't think I ever played this.
1:08:28SPEAKER- It's the little first person like hover tank game.
1:08:30SPEAKER- Oh, I have to use the arrow keys.
1:08:33SPEAKER- Anyway, if anybody from Microsoft
1:08:35SPEAKERor formerly of Microsoft who's listening
1:08:37SPEAKERand has the power to do so,
1:08:39SPEAKERplease find a way to put out the Microsoft sound
1:08:41SPEAKERin a higher quality.
1:08:42SPEAKER- That would be dope.
1:08:43SPEAKER- Like you can find like sound clouds out there
1:08:45SPEAKERof people who have tried to use,
1:08:48SPEAKERI don't know, Pro Tools or Fruity Loops
1:08:50SPEAKERor whatever the hell to like recreate it.
1:08:51SPEAKERSome people have gotten very close
1:08:53SPEAKERto recreating the real thing in higher quality,
1:08:55SPEAKERbut nobody's ever quite nailed it.
1:08:56SPEAKER- Yeah, it's not, it never sounds quite right.
1:08:59SPEAKERI've definitely listened to those before
1:09:01SPEAKERand been kind of bummed.
1:09:04SPEAKERI don't know that there's a way to wrap up
1:09:06SPEAKERand sum up this in a like tidy bow
1:09:09SPEAKERother than to say we wouldn't be where we are now
1:09:13SPEAKERif it weren't for Windows 95 in both good and bad ways.
1:09:16SPEAKER- Yep, absolutely.
1:09:17SPEAKERIt made computing a thing that everybody could do
1:09:20SPEAKERand everybody, and like they spent a bunch of money
1:09:22SPEAKERto tell everybody that they could do computing.
1:09:24SPEAKERIt's funny, there's a thing going around Blue Sky right now
1:09:26SPEAKERabout AI that people, somebody's explicitly said,
1:09:30SPEAKERI wish I remember who it was,
1:09:32SPEAKERbut somebody said, look, remember this next time
1:09:35SPEAKERthat some company is trying to push something
1:09:37SPEAKERon you so mercilessly
1:09:39SPEAKERthat you don't really have to advert,
1:09:41SPEAKERlike if something's really good,
1:09:42SPEAKERyou don't have to advertise it.
1:09:43SPEAKERAnd that was true for phones.
1:09:46SPEAKERI feel like phones went from something
1:09:48SPEAKERthat was like a weird niche enthusiast thing
1:09:51SPEAKERto something that everybody had
1:09:52SPEAKERin like a five to six year time period
1:09:56SPEAKERfrom the dawn of the iPhone until like the iPhone 4, 4S
1:09:59SPEAKERwhen everybody had them all of a sudden,
1:10:01SPEAKERat least in the Bay Area.
1:10:02SPEAKERBut like Microsoft spent an insane amount of money
1:10:05SPEAKERpushing Windows 95.
1:10:06SPEAKER- They did.
1:10:07SPEAKER- And pushing this as here's how computers work
1:10:11SPEAKERfor lack of a better--
1:10:12SPEAKER- Or here's how they're going to work.
1:10:13SPEAKER- Yeah, like this was Bill Gates wrote a book
1:10:16SPEAKERnot long after this called "The Road Ahead."
1:10:19SPEAKER- I've read that book.
1:10:21SPEAKER- Me too.
1:10:22SPEAKER- When it came out.
1:10:23SPEAKER- Yeah, it was wasted time.
1:10:24SPEAKERIt wasn't super, it wasn't as what I was expecting.
1:10:29SPEAKERBut it was like, they definitely pushed Windows.
1:10:34SPEAKERLike they were definitely selling,
1:10:35SPEAKERhey, Windows is your way to the internet,
1:10:39SPEAKERwhich was like--
1:10:40SPEAKER- They sure did.
1:10:41SPEAKER- They spent a bazillion dollars advertising Windows
1:10:44SPEAKERis your way to the internet.
1:10:45SPEAKERMatthew Perry and Jennifer Anson did not come cheap.
1:10:48SPEAKERThe Weezer video did not come cheap.
1:10:49SPEAKEREdie Brickell maybe came cheap, but I don't think so.
1:10:52SPEAKER- I think she was at the start of her career.
1:10:54SPEAKERThat Rolling Stones song didn't absolutely--
1:10:56SPEAKER- No.
1:10:56SPEAKER- I looked, accounts differ,
1:10:59SPEAKERbut it looks like they spent somewhere
1:11:00SPEAKERbetween like three and $11 million on that song.
1:11:02SPEAKER- Yeah, that seems right.
1:11:04SPEAKERBrian Eno didn't come cheap.
1:11:05SPEAKER- No.
1:11:06SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:11:07SPEAKER- No, they wanted this thing to be a thing.
1:11:08SPEAKERI've talked about this before
1:11:09SPEAKERand we should dig into this more in the future.
1:11:11SPEAKERIf you go back and read, there's a lot of evidence
1:11:13SPEAKERthat it almost didn't turn out this way.
1:11:17SPEAKER- How so?
1:11:18SPEAKER- Because Windows was floundering
1:11:20SPEAKERright up until Windows 3.1.
1:11:22SPEAKER- Oh yeah.
1:11:24SPEAKER- And in fact, Microsoft was selling a Unix
1:11:27SPEAKERthroughout the '80s,
1:11:28SPEAKERparallel to their sale of DOS to PC OEMs.
1:11:32SPEAKER- Oh yeah.
1:11:33SPEAKER- It was called Zenix, Z-E-N-I-X and--
1:11:36SPEAKER- POSIX compliant.
1:11:37SPEAKER- It was a full-on, it was licensed from AT&T.
1:11:40SPEAKERIt was a proper Unix.
1:11:41SPEAKERLike Microsoft was selling a proper-ass Unix
1:11:43SPEAKERwith all of the built-in advantages
1:11:45SPEAKERcompared to DOS that Unix had in that time,
1:11:48SPEAKERwhich was like preemptive multitasking.
1:11:49SPEAKERLike it was a more proper multi-user,
1:11:53SPEAKERmultitasking operating system like we are used to today.
1:11:57SPEAKERThe thing that forms the basis
1:11:58SPEAKERof like every modern operating system.
1:12:00SPEAKERAnd then Windows basically,
1:12:02SPEAKERlike kind of at the last minute,
1:12:03SPEAKERlike Windows 3.1 sold well enough
1:12:05SPEAKERthat they decided to put all of their eggs
1:12:08SPEAKERin the Windows basket.
1:12:09SPEAKER- Well--
1:12:10SPEAKER- And that's what led to the creation of Windows 95
1:12:11SPEAKERand the 98 and on and on.
1:12:13SPEAKERAnd like, but I don't think it was ever like guaranteed
1:12:15SPEAKERthat DOS and Windows were going to be the future of Microsoft
1:12:19SPEAKERuntil things turned out the way they did.
1:12:21SPEAKER- This was kind of the kickoff
1:12:23SPEAKERfor the success of closed software, honestly.
1:12:25SPEAKER- Right, yes.
1:12:26SPEAKER- 'Cause up until this point, stuff was by default open
1:12:29SPEAKERand it was unusual if it was closed, like with the Mac.
1:12:32SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, you know, like in the case of Unix,
1:12:34SPEAKERyou did have to license the code from AT&T,
1:12:36SPEAKERbut there were lots of companies doing that
1:12:37SPEAKERand there was like, you know, BSD existed
1:12:39SPEAKERand there were like nascent open software efforts happening
1:12:43SPEAKERat that time.
1:12:44SPEAKER- Well, they weren't programatized
1:12:46SPEAKERin the same way that they are now.
1:12:48SPEAKERJust to be clear,
1:12:49SPEAKERLinux was kind of starting to bop around at this point,
1:12:51SPEAKERbut it wasn't something that like people knew about, right?
1:12:53SPEAKER- Well, 91.
1:12:54SPEAKER- 91, yeah.
1:12:55SPEAKER- Yeah, you're right.
1:12:56SPEAKERSo yes, maybe Linux had been out for some time
1:12:58SPEAKERby the time 95 came out.
1:13:00SPEAKER- But like there weren't multiple distros
1:13:03SPEAKERand like there were a handful, it was small.
1:13:07SPEAKERSo yeah, like I would encourage anybody
1:13:11SPEAKERwho wants to spend, like it was very instructive for me
1:13:16SPEAKERto spend some time with x86 box and set this up.
1:13:18SPEAKERIt was kind of a pain in the butt.
1:13:19SPEAKERThere's a couple of really good guides
1:13:21SPEAKERon how to do it on Vogons.
1:13:23SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, so Vogons,
1:13:24SPEAKERif you get into deep into the stuff as a site,
1:13:26SPEAKERyou will end up on regularly looking for drivers
1:13:28SPEAKERor just like tweaks and like how-tos on various old things.
1:13:32SPEAKER- Yeah, but I don't actually remember the URL
1:13:33SPEAKERoff the top of my head.
1:13:34SPEAKERIs it just vogons.net?
1:13:36SPEAKERIt's vogons.org.
1:13:37SPEAKERI knew it was not.
1:13:39SPEAKERBut yeah, they have a thing, if you search for it,
1:13:41SPEAKERit's Windows 95 setup guide for the 2020s,
1:13:44SPEAKERwhich ironically has a post date of 2013,
1:13:47SPEAKERbut it's basically they're running updated guide
1:13:50SPEAKERfor how to set up Windows 95 on old hardware.
1:13:54SPEAKERThey also have a similar guide for x86 box,
1:13:58SPEAKERwhich is what I would recommend, or 86 box.
1:14:00SPEAKERJust 86 box, yeah.
1:14:02SPEAKER- Which is what I would recommend.
1:14:04SPEAKERAnd 86 box, just for folks wondering
1:14:07SPEAKERhow much modern computer horsepower it takes
1:14:10SPEAKERto run an 86 box instance for Windows 95 on my machine,
1:14:16SPEAKERit looks like it's running like 3/10 of a percent at idle.
1:14:23SPEAKER- Yeah, and it's basically single-threaded too.
1:14:25SPEAKERIt's like runs on one core basically,
1:14:27SPEAKERbut I'm like, mine is sitting at basically 0% CPU right now
1:14:31SPEAKERto run Windows 95, to run a Pentium 120 at full speed.
1:14:35SPEAKER- Yeah, we have the horsepower.
1:14:37SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, for sure.
1:14:38SPEAKERThis thing will go up to like a Pentium Pro,
1:14:41SPEAKERPentium 2 basically.
1:14:43SPEAKERI don't think it'll do a Pentium 3, but it might.
1:14:45SPEAKER- Does it slow down the machine if it gets overloaded?
1:14:47SPEAKERIs that what happens?
1:14:48SPEAKER- Yeah, yes.
1:14:49SPEAKERSo there's, if you look in the top right,
1:14:51SPEAKERyou'll see the speed rating or the speed percentage.
1:14:53SPEAKER- Where it says 100%?
1:14:54SPEAKER- Yes, so when I've put basically the fastest CPU
1:14:57SPEAKERand like you can put 3D effects cards and stuff,
1:14:59SPEAKERyou can get early 3D graphics in here as well.
1:15:02SPEAKERI basically built like the fastest machine I could
1:15:05SPEAKERwith the available configuration
1:15:07SPEAKERand was no longer hitting 100% speed.
1:15:10SPEAKER- That makes sense.
1:15:11SPEAKERIt's a pain in the butt to install it with a traditional VM.
1:15:15SPEAKERLike I tried with VirtualBox in the past and it's a hassle.
1:15:18SPEAKER- It's not worth for old, especially old,
1:15:21SPEAKERlike pre UEFI, pre GPT operating systems,
1:15:25SPEAKERI think especially of this era,
1:15:28SPEAKERI think you're better off with 86Box or PCEM or one of those.
1:15:32SPEAKER- But Vogons also hosts on vogonswiki.com
1:15:36SPEAKERand vogonsdrivers.com, yeah, vogonsdrivers.com,
1:15:41SPEAKERold drivers and old builds of like,
1:15:44SPEAKERabandonware builds of '95 and '98 and all that stuff, so.
1:15:50SPEAKERWindworld.com is another good resource for stuff like this.
1:15:53SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:15:54SPEAKER- They've got, although you'll see in the comments
1:15:56SPEAKERon some of their archive,
1:15:57SPEAKERlike some people questioning the provenance
1:15:59SPEAKERof some of the disc images they have,
1:16:01SPEAKERsome of them might be cobbled together from different things
1:16:04SPEAKERand not like direct images of retail releases,
1:16:06SPEAKERbut archive.org of course has a lot of disc images
1:16:09SPEAKERand stuff as well.
1:16:10SPEAKER- Yeah, and like, it's kind of useless.
1:16:15SPEAKERLike there's not a whole lot you can do with it.
1:16:16SPEAKER- Yeah, it's fun to go back and remember.
1:16:19SPEAKER- Yeah, that's pretty much it, but.
1:16:21SPEAKER- I don't think you're, you're not going to like,
1:16:22SPEAKERdo your daily work stuff in a Windows 95 box
1:16:25SPEAKERat this point. - Oh God.
1:16:26SPEAKER- Probably. - I hope not.
1:16:28SPEAKER- Well, you could do some basic word processing
1:16:29SPEAKERin email, I guess.
1:16:31SPEAKER- That's true.
1:16:33SPEAKER- I know.
1:16:34SPEAKER- I think maybe run WordStar.
1:16:35SPEAKERIf you want to run WordStar, there you go.
1:16:37SPEAKER- Maybe do.
1:16:39SPEAKER- I guess that'll do it for us this week, Brad,
1:16:40SPEAKERunless you have anything else.
1:16:41SPEAKER- No, Windows 95, a landmark product.
1:16:44SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:16:45SPEAKER- For good and ill, I think probably mostly good.
1:16:47SPEAKER- Should we have made this a important product
1:16:52SPEAKERthrough history?
1:16:53SPEAKERProbably not, this is just an anniversary, right?
1:16:55SPEAKER- Yeah, this is an anniversary.
1:16:57SPEAKER- I don't know, I remember spending a lot of time
1:17:03SPEAKERlearning how Windows 95 worked.
1:17:06SPEAKERBut when I actually get into Windows 95,
1:17:08SPEAKERthe things that I remember most, I think,
1:17:10SPEAKERare probably Windows 98 or Windows 2000 would be my guess.
1:17:15SPEAKER- Yeah, we barely even got into the OSR releases
1:17:18SPEAKERand the features they added to Windows 95 over time.
1:17:21SPEAKER- Yeah, actually, we should hit that real quick
1:17:23SPEAKER'cause they did two big major releases to Windows 95.
1:17:28SPEAKER- Yeah, so OEM service release one and two.
1:17:31SPEAKER- Yeah, service release one was available to everybody.
1:17:33SPEAKERYou could just download it and then install it
1:17:35SPEAKERon top of Windows if you had a Windows license.
1:17:37SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:17:39SPEAKER- It didn't add a ton.
1:17:40SPEAKEROSR two added stuff like USB support.
1:17:43SPEAKERSo I've got the list actually between the two OSRs.
1:17:46SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:17:47SPEAKER- The list here that was added to Windows 95.
1:17:50SPEAKERInternet Explorer, drive space compression,
1:17:53SPEAKEROpenGL, DirectX, FAT32 file system support,
1:17:58SPEAKERUSB support, IEEE 1394 or FireWire support.
1:18:03SPEAKER- Oh, wow.
1:18:03SPEAKER- AGP support or accelerated graphics port,
1:18:07SPEAKERwhich was the PCI express of the day.
1:18:10SPEAKERSome other stuff, ultra DMA mode for hard drive
1:18:12SPEAKERfor disk drives.
1:18:13SPEAKERI mean, like it was a lot of foundational stuff
1:18:15SPEAKERthat was being added to Windows 95 as in its lifespan.
1:18:18SPEAKER- Well, so in the builder community,
1:18:20SPEAKERthe fact that you couldn't, unless you were an OEM,
1:18:23SPEAKERbuy an OSR two disk to install Windows
1:18:27SPEAKERto support that newer hardware
1:18:29SPEAKERwas a real problem at the time.
1:18:31SPEAKER- So do you remember the term slipstreaming?
1:18:34SPEAKER- Yeah, that's when IT folks still do that.
1:18:38SPEAKERIt's when you bundle your patches into your installed disk.
1:18:42SPEAKERYou could bundle, oh, Windows 95A.
1:18:44SPEAKERI don't remember how that got out there,
1:18:45SPEAKERbut I'm looking at a list now.
1:18:47SPEAKERWindows 95A was Windows 95 with OSR one slipstreamed into it.
1:18:51SPEAKER- Yeah, but the OSR two was the beginning
1:18:55SPEAKERof them selling OEM copies on the gray market basically.
1:18:59SPEAKERSo you couldn't buy a retail copy of Windows 95
1:19:03SPEAKERthat would support USB and FireWire and AGP
1:19:06SPEAKERand all that stuff.
1:19:07SPEAKERBut you could go to your gray market screwdriver shop
1:19:10SPEAKERand buy a copy of Windows 95 OSR two.
1:19:14SPEAKERWindows 95 OSR two also noteworthy
1:19:16SPEAKERbecause it was the first one
1:19:17SPEAKERthat did an online check for the key.
1:19:19SPEAKEROr when you typed in your key, it would authorize it
1:19:25SPEAKERand you had to call a phone number.
1:19:27SPEAKERSo you would call an 800 number for Microsoft.
1:19:29SPEAKERYou'd type in, let's see, how did it work?
1:19:32SPEAKERYou put your code into Windows.
1:19:34SPEAKERIt would pop up a screen that said call this 800 number.
1:19:36SPEAKERYou'd call the 800 number.
1:19:37SPEAKERIt'd give you a challenge code that wasn't the key.
1:19:40SPEAKERIt was just something that was generated
1:19:42SPEAKERbased on a hash from the key.
1:19:44SPEAKERAnd then it would give you an unlock code after that.
1:19:46SPEAKERAnd you couldn't install Windows if you didn't do that.
1:19:48SPEAKER- Why? - It was a pain in the butt.
1:19:49SPEAKERAnd people were really pissed off about it.
1:19:50SPEAKERIt turns out in retrospect, probably a bad idea.
1:19:53SPEAKER- Yeah, probably.
1:19:56SPEAKER- It was very easy to pirate at that point still
1:19:58SPEAKERbecause you just saved the hashes and like, yeah.
1:20:02SPEAKERAnyway, mistakes were made.
1:20:04SPEAKER- Now, actually that was one thing I meant to,
1:20:05SPEAKERsorry, this episode's just gonna go on forever.
1:20:07SPEAKERThere's one thing I meant to touch on
1:20:08SPEAKERwhen I finished my upgrade last night
1:20:09SPEAKERand just kind of booted into the desktop
1:20:11SPEAKERand sat there looking at it.
1:20:13SPEAKERThe idea of this operating system
1:20:14SPEAKERthat's kind of like set in stone
1:20:16SPEAKERand can't just go online and check for updates for itself
1:20:19SPEAKERreally made me feel like weirdly vulnerable.
1:20:22SPEAKER- Windows 98 added the ability
1:20:25SPEAKERto do Windows update if I recall.
1:20:27SPEAKER- So did they add?
1:20:28SPEAKERSo I got on the Windows update Wikipedia page last night
1:20:31SPEAKERand was reminded that if I'm not mistaken,
1:20:33SPEAKERWindows update started as a website.
1:20:35SPEAKER- Yeah, you went to a website.
1:20:36SPEAKER- Right, so did they not,
1:20:38SPEAKERthey just put the OSRs out for download
1:20:40SPEAKERif you already had Windows 95, right?
1:20:44SPEAKER- I don't think so.
1:20:45SPEAKER- They not?
1:20:47SPEAKER- Well, so on Windows 98, you'd go to the Windows update
1:20:51SPEAKERwebsite in a browser and it would use an ActiveX thing
1:20:54SPEAKERto just update your stuff.
1:20:56SPEAKER- I remember, I distinctly remember going to the website,
1:20:59SPEAKERyes, like you just described
1:21:00SPEAKERand having the site directly funnel the Windows 98 updates
1:21:03SPEAKERfrom the website into the operating system.
1:21:06SPEAKER- Some of the Windows 95 stuff got dumped as patches,
1:21:09SPEAKERlike the OSR1 update got pushed out as an update.
1:21:12SPEAKER- Yeah, I swear I remember downloading OSR stuff
1:21:14SPEAKERon Windows 95 and installing it, but maybe not all of it.
1:21:17SPEAKER- But quite specifically, they did not make
1:21:19SPEAKERan OSR1 to OSR2 patch path.
1:21:23SPEAKERYou had to do a clean install with a special disk
1:21:25SPEAKERthat you had to buy from them
1:21:26SPEAKERand you couldn't just download those updates
1:21:28SPEAKERif you had a pre-OSR2 version of Windows 95.
1:21:31SPEAKER- I wonder if OSR2.5 was so close to Windows 98
1:21:35SPEAKERthat I just didn't care and just went to Windows 98 instead.
1:21:38SPEAKER- That was the, their solution to this problem
1:21:40SPEAKERwas just buy Windows 98.
1:21:41SPEAKER- Right, and in fact, now that you mentioned it,
1:21:44SPEAKERI guess a lot of the final additions of 2.5
1:21:47SPEAKERwere kind of back ports from Windows 98
1:21:49SPEAKERin the first place probably.
1:21:51SPEAKER- Yeah, OSR2 rolled out, I think in 97.
1:21:56SPEAKER- Okay, yeah, I don't have dates in front of me
1:21:57SPEAKERfor these unfortunately.
1:22:00SPEAKER- Maybe it was late 96, but yeah,
1:22:02SPEAKERpeople were profoundly upset about it.
1:22:04SPEAKERThat was maybe the first wave of the M dollar sign.
1:22:09SPEAKER- Okay, that makes sense.
1:22:11SPEAKERI mean, especially if they were basically
1:22:12SPEAKERlike charging money for USB support and stuff like that.
1:22:15SPEAKER- OSR2 came out basically a year later.
1:22:17SPEAKERIt was August of 96.
1:22:19SPEAKER- Oh, interesting.
1:22:19SPEAKER- And Windows 98 came out in October of 98, if I recall.
1:22:25SPEAKERSo it was a while.
1:22:26SPEAKER- I have no idea how I was getting my hands on.
1:22:28SPEAKERMaybe I just never did install those OSRs
1:22:30SPEAKERand just waited until 98.
1:22:32SPEAKER- Or were you building PCs or were you using a...
1:22:35SPEAKER- No, I was building.
1:22:36SPEAKERWell, no, no, we had a pre-built machine.
1:22:38SPEAKER- So you probably, if you didn't have new hardware,
1:22:41SPEAKERit didn't matter.
1:22:43SPEAKER- Yeah, we sure as hell didn't have USB at that time,
1:22:45SPEAKERso I guess we didn't really need USB support.
1:22:47SPEAKER- Yeah, it was if you had, at that point,
1:22:50SPEAKERthe boards that, it was socket seven stuff
1:22:52SPEAKERhad AGP slots at that point, I think, if I remember right.
1:22:55SPEAKERSo like, and maybe not even until later, AGP,
1:22:59SPEAKERI feel like there was a boot magazine
1:23:01SPEAKERthat had an AGP slot on the cover in like 97.
1:23:04SPEAKER- So I did build a Pentium 200 in 97.
1:23:07SPEAKER- That would've had AGP probably.
1:23:09SPEAKERIs it a Pentium 200 or a Pentium 2?
1:23:10SPEAKER- No, it was a Pentium 1 200.
1:23:12SPEAKER- That depends on the chip set you had.
1:23:14SPEAKER- This is why I will never, for the rest of my life,
1:23:16SPEAKERforgive myself for junking those old computers,
1:23:19SPEAKERso I can't just go back and refer to them.
1:23:21SPEAKER- I do wish I still had my Wang.
1:23:23SPEAKER- Yes, and tell you exactly what I had,
1:23:24SPEAKERbut what did I install on that Pentium 200 then?
1:23:26SPEAKER'Cause that was before--
1:23:27SPEAKER- You had to do OSR2, you probably bought a copy of OSR2
1:23:30SPEAKERwith the hardware. - I guess so.
1:23:32SPEAKERI guess so.
1:23:33SPEAKER- 'Cause that was the thing,
1:23:34SPEAKERin order to be able to buy the OSR2 OEM edition,
1:23:37SPEAKERyou had to buy either a motherboard, a hard drive,
1:23:40SPEAKERor maybe a CPU, I can't remember.
1:23:42SPEAKERMicrosoft had specific requirements.
1:23:44SPEAKER- Pentium 200 was the first machine
1:23:46SPEAKERI built from parts myself.
1:23:47SPEAKER- That was the era I built a K6-2 200 at the same time.
1:23:51SPEAKER- Nice.
1:23:52SPEAKER- Weak floating point performance, but very fast otherwise.
1:23:54SPEAKER- Yeah, you were like one upgrade ahead of me
1:23:57SPEAKERon the switch to AMD at the time.
1:23:58SPEAKER- Not great for Doom, it turns out.
1:24:00SPEAKERI ended up ditching it pretty shortly and--
1:24:03SPEAKER- For Quake.
1:24:03SPEAKER- Yeah, for Quake, yeah, and building a Pentium 200,
1:24:06SPEAKERa Pentium 2, 266 rather.
1:24:11SPEAKER- Those were the days.
1:24:12SPEAKER- Yeah, those were the days.
1:24:13SPEAKERI think that's as good a place as any to wrap it up.
1:24:15SPEAKERAs always, Brad and Will made a tech pod,
1:24:17SPEAKERis listener supported.
1:24:18SPEAKERWe would not be here without you, the listeners,
1:24:22SPEAKERand we appreciate each and every one of you.
1:24:23SPEAKERBut if you wanna find out how to support the show,
1:24:27SPEAKERyou can go to patreon.com/techpod.
1:24:29SPEAKERAgain, it's patreon.com/techpod.
1:24:31SPEAKERI apologize.
1:24:33SPEAKERMy room is carbon dioxide as fuck right now.
1:24:36SPEAKERIt's like, I'm sitting here, I'm like,
1:24:38SPEAKER"Man, I could totally go for a nap.
1:24:39SPEAKER"It's like three o'clock in the afternoon."
1:24:41SPEAKER- Gotta open that window.
1:24:42SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm gonna turn the fan on
1:24:44SPEAKERas soon as we finish recording the episode.
1:24:45SPEAKERBut thanks to everybody who supports the show,
1:24:48SPEAKERand an extra special thank you to our executive producer,
1:24:51SPEAKERtier patrons, including Jason Lee, Andrew Slosky,
1:24:55SPEAKERJordan Lippett, Bunny Fiend, Twinkle Twinkie,
1:24:57SPEAKERDavid Allen, James Kamik, and Pantheon,
1:25:01SPEAKERmakers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer.
1:25:03SPEAKERThank you all so much.
1:25:04SPEAKER- Thank you.
1:25:05SPEAKER- And again, if you wanna learn how to support the show,
1:25:08SPEAKERyou can go to patreon.com/techpod.
1:25:10SPEAKERAnd I guess that'll do it for us this week.
1:25:13SPEAKERNext week, it's the 27th anniversary of Windows 98.
1:25:18SPEAKER- Wait, is it actually?
1:25:20SPEAKER- No, I think it's probably around this time, actually.
1:25:25SPEAKERIf you told me that Windows was August month.
1:25:27SPEAKER- It was for a long, long time.
1:25:29SPEAKER- Did I just say Windows is August month?
1:25:31SPEAKERWe were recording this at the end of Friday.
1:25:34SPEAKERAugust is Windows month, that's what I meant to say.
1:25:37SPEAKER- General availability, June 25th, 1998.
1:25:40SPEAKER- That's right, I remember that,
1:25:41SPEAKERbecause I remember coming out during summer vacation
1:25:44SPEAKERwhen I was on break from college.
1:25:45SPEAKER- It's interesting, October was Windows released
1:25:48SPEAKERfor a long time, 'cause Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7,
1:25:52SPEAKERI think all came out in October.
1:25:54SPEAKERBut anyway, that'll do it for us this week.
1:25:57SPEAKERI guess the next big Microsoft milestone
1:25:58SPEAKERis probably Memphis, remember Memphis?
1:26:01SPEAKER- Memphis?
1:26:02SPEAKER- That was the code name.
1:26:03SPEAKERWalking in Memphis was a-
1:26:05SPEAKER- Which Windows was that?
1:26:06SPEAKER- That was 98.
1:26:07SPEAKER- That was 98, okay.
1:26:10SPEAKERAnd I'll say, I mean, we probably covered some of this
1:26:12SPEAKERin the ranking of Windows years ago.
1:26:14SPEAKER- Windows 95 was Chicago, by the way.
1:26:16SPEAKER- Chicago, yes, was the code name for that.
1:26:18SPEAKERBut I found in doing this Windows 95 upgrade
1:26:22SPEAKERand thinking about old Windows,
1:26:23SPEAKERthe one that I keep coming back to
1:26:24SPEAKERand feeling nostalgic for is 2000.
1:26:26SPEAKER- I can see that.
1:26:27SPEAKER- That might be my actual favorite Windows
1:26:30SPEAKERin respective of whatever ranking we came up with.
1:26:33SPEAKER- Wow, I can't believe you're throwing
1:26:35SPEAKERour extremely scientific ranking system under the bus, man.
1:26:39SPEAKER- That's an objective ranking.
1:26:40SPEAKERThis is my subjective preference
1:26:42SPEAKERor what I was the most excited for at the time.
1:26:44SPEAKERBut getting on a proper Windows NT that could run games
1:26:47SPEAKERwas the best of all possible worlds, but anyway.
1:26:50SPEAKER- I was running a BP6 with two processors on Windows 2000
1:26:54SPEAKERand it was some hot biz.
1:26:55SPEAKER- You needed Windows 2000, man.
1:26:57SPEAKER- It was great right up until the moment
1:26:58SPEAKERI needed to fire up that Sound Blaster
1:27:00SPEAKERand then everything crashed
1:27:01SPEAKER'cause their drivers with multi-threading were bad.
1:27:03SPEAKERBut if you want to hear more of this,
1:27:07SPEAKERplease subscribe to the show and if you can't,
1:27:09SPEAKERleave a review 'cause we appreciate all of those as well.
1:27:12SPEAKER- We do.
1:27:13SPEAKER- I'm gonna go tell you, a friend of the show
1:27:16SPEAKERand Tool Boot Diaries co-host, Adam Patrick Murray,
1:27:18SPEAKERtold me that people can leave comments on podcasts
1:27:21SPEAKERon Spotify the other day and I was like,
1:27:24SPEAKER"Oh God, we have comments on podcasts on Spotify?"
1:27:26SPEAKER- That's terrifying.
1:27:27SPEAKER- And I went over there and everybody was really nice.
1:27:29SPEAKERIt was very sweet.
1:27:29SPEAKER- Oh right, thank you, well thank you.
1:27:30SPEAKER- So thanks for the comments, everybody.
1:27:32SPEAKER- Thank you, listeners, Spotify and otherwise.
1:27:33SPEAKER- And we will be back next week
1:27:35SPEAKERwith another edition of the Tech Pod.
1:27:37SPEAKERUntil then, thanks for listening
1:27:39SPEAKERand please consider the environment
1:27:42SPEAKERbefore pitching this podcast.
1:27:48SPEAKER[BLANK_AUDIO]