No load times?! I seem to remember Win 95-XP era involved almost comically long boot times especially if you waited for your hard drive to stop churning after getting to the desktop, but maybe I am misremembering. It wasn't so much the OS's fault, though.

It depends on if you're talking boot times, or program loading times. I agree, every computer I had until 2007 had terrible boot times.

But I've compared how long it takes to start Word on my Pentium II 450 MHz running Windows 98, with Word 2000, to my Core i5 2500 K (3.3 GHz) running Windows 8.1, with Word 2010. The Pentium II wins.

I don't how much of the difference was Windows versus Office, but it's a sad indication of the slowdown in software outpacing the speedup in hardware.

Office has become way way slower, I would mostly put it down to that. Lean applications can still start pretty fast. One other thing making it slower is antivirus software scanning every binary you run before it opens, including Defender. Turning off Defender is a reliable way to improve app load times.

Yah 95-Me era ran pretty slow and horrible.

Though 95 was pretty revolutionary when it came out.

The actual revolution came with Windows Game SDK (later known as DirectX) which allowed Windows to finally surpass MS-DOS as a gaming platform.

Yeah... imagine if they would have shipped that in a single task version, sort of like a DOS / XBOX1 hybrid. Games would have rocked, even on frugal hardware.

Well, DirectX ran games better than DOS.

> Microsoft's best OS of all time was Windows 2000. Imho, Snow Leopard was Apple's best.

Windows 2000 was very good, but I'm also fond of Windows for Workgroups 3.11. It had a certain simplicity and directness that they lost in the move to Windows 95. (And WfWG could run both 32-bit drivers and 32-bit software, as long as Win32s was installed.)

Not all Win32 software ran on Win32s, as Win32s didn't support things like memory protection and multithreading, right?

I believe it supported memory protection, but not preemetive multithreading and multiprocessing. It was still cooperative multiprocessing underneath. If the program was written correctly (most were initially, since Win 3.1 was more common for a few years still), it would function on both just swimmingly.

Not at all.... The best way to think of Win32s was that it was analogous to a "DOS Extender", but for Windows. The main point of what it did was to allow the use of a different memory model under an existing operating system. In the case of Windows 3.1x, this really meant eliminating the notion of segments, by widening segment offsets from 16 to 32 bits. In 16-bit Windows, accessing linear structures >64K requires additional pointer arithmetic, which Win32 eliminated.

The way it did this was to hook into the executable loader to add support for the PE binary format used by Windows NT. It also provided a set of shim libraries that took the existing 16-bit Windows API and projected it into the 32-bit address space. The underlying implementation was still 16-bit, but it could now be called from 32-bit code. This essentially meant that Win32s was the subset of Win32 that was in common with Win16 (and so was missing lots of features from Windows NT).

So think about where this puts WfWG3.11:

* So Win32s added a 32-bit executable loader and shim Win32 API libraries.

* Down in the foundation of Windows (since Windows/386) was VMM, which provided 32-bit OS services

* WfWG 3.11 introduced something called "32 Bit File Access", which was a natively 32-bit implementation of the file system running in VMM.

So the original line of Windows development has already made major strides towards being a 32-bit OS, even before Windows 95. What Windows 95 does is build out that 32-bit shim layer, so there are more full fledged 32-bit implementations of more of the Win32 API, and to do that, it also expands VMM to provide the necessary 32-bit services. (For threading and the like). So far more evolutionary than the 'full 32-bit rewrite that it was once viewed to be.

One easy way to see the impact of all this is in Notepad. Notepad is essentially a wrapper around the standard Windows edit control, which stayed implemented in 16-bit code through all of what I've described above. This is why Notepad was always limited to 32K (IIRC) files on these older versions of Windows, and does not have that limitation on versions of Windows that were fully implemented in 32-bit code.

I also tend to think this is a good engineering solution to a tricky problem. Windows 95 was originally intended to run on very small machines... think 8MB or so in a world where you needed 32MB to run Windows NT. Even if they'd had the engineering resources to fully rebuild consumer Windows as 32-bit, there's no way they'd have come close to meeting their memory budget (or their sales targets).

Correct. win32s was mostly a shim layer that let you access 32 bit registers and the win32 API. But the actual OS was still the 16 bit windows/dos hybrid

ah, just thinking of Snow Leopard makes me swoon... I don't know if the rose-tinted glasses are too strong, or if that OS was really as snappy, simple, and polished as I remember.

I'm almost certain that Snow Leopard woke up from sleep on a 2010 Macbook Pro faster than Mojave wakes up on a 2019, but I don't have proof. It was definitely more reliable.

I learned Python on a white MacBook running Snow Leopard. Those were the days. I don't remember a single instance where it crashed. Super reliable.

The wake from sleep behavior is really bad on modern MBPs, feels like it takes an eternity, too much black screen then the password screen just isn't responsive for a good 10 seconds sometimes.

Actually the power on behavior is bad too, without the chime you can never really tell if the thing is working or not.

10.6 was also Apple's peak server OS. Open Directory + Workgroup Manager set my standard for how OpenLDAP ought to be managed.

Notably, it was also their last server os. OS X server lived on, but as just an app.

Snow Leopard was an entire release dedicated to making Leopard faster and more stable ... so at first glance it makes sense your memory of it is so positive.

> No load times, even back then.

Somebody at Disney seems to have had a different experience:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBctBJ3mKNg&feature=youtu.be...

Load times were terrible. Time makes you forget the bad and glorify the good.

Wrong era.

The OS in the cartoon was called "Doors 2000". Seems pretty squarely targeted at this.

Everything in the 90s had 2000 in its name.

I didn’t use 200 much, but I feel this way about windows Xp. It just worked. It seemed super stable and not bloated.

Windows XP is Windows 2000 with a theme. Though the difference in resources was Win2k could run on 32MB of ram, and XP ran on 256, despite being the same OS with the same functionality, even the same drivers.

If you had beefy enough hardware, which we all eventually did years after XP came out, it ran as fast and almost as stable as 2000.

If you didn't mind the bland theme, and wanted higher FPS while gaming, with more responsiveness (less of a delay when double clicking on a window, for example) then running Windows 2000 over XP was a no brainer. In competitive first person shooter circles at the time, people preferred Win2k to XP for these reasons.

xp ran under 64 and 128 too. But with 128 was a bit slow.

Really? My experience was driver nightmares and having to reinstall the OS every 6 months with XP. It wasn't til 7 that most of that went away.

Yes Win2000 was perfect from the start, xp really was a nightmare until sp2 and got really stable when sp3 came. But W2k is still my favorite windows version.

Interestingly, 'bloated' was exactly the word used most often to describe XP on forums back then.

That Fisher Price colored theme though...

Not sure why so many people complain about it when it was trivial to enable a classic theme to make it look like Win2K.

It was also commonplace to use the UXTheme patcher to enable third-party custom window themes. I used the Watercolor theme, which was modeled after the Whistler beta builds before they (bafflingly) switched it out for Luna.

I have a soft spot for Windows 2000 because I was very impressed with it when it first came out (coming from Win9x), but there wasn't much point to using it over XP after XP came out. Windows XP is just an improved version of 2000, and it was updated for much longer. Windows 2000 doesn't even support wi-fi without third-party utilities.

I did the same but I recall there was a few elements that remained - the windows logo on the start menu was a bit colourful, and a few other bits couldn’t be changed too

The Windows logo in the Start menu was a bit colorful in Windows 95 and NT 4.0 as well. I'll grant you that the logo itself is slightly different in XP, but it had been colorful for years by that point.

XP's classic mode looked somewhat like Windows 98/2000.