I believe I only had a Windows 98 'Upgrade' CD, which could not be used to install on a bare system. This meant I had to first install a previous copy Windows, which in my case was Windows 95 on floppy disks (and I feel like it was 20 disks, at least for my installation).

This worked fine until one re-install disk 15 decided to fail on me. I managed to hack it back together by copying the files that were still accessible to a different computer and then copying them to a blank floppy together with the missing files from the running system's Windows folder (I think it was a couple of dlls that were unreadable). I was surprised that it worked.

That being said, I feel like I install much less software than I used to. They used to hand out CDs with computer magazines that were basically dumps of random quality freeware/shareware. The amount of registry items and other such crap that kind of software left lying around is probably a large reason why a re-format was required so often.

1gb of ram on win 7 equals 4 times of 256 mb win 98 era. With 8gb it's 32 times larger. That's just ram though, not to mention processing power between pentium 3-4 with multicore i series.

The difference in ram caching and cpu processing is big that some additional process won't give much problem.

I was floored to realize how much faster things were. No wait time for a Windows Explorer window to open. Everything was snappy, even after reinstalling games and antivirus. It blew my mind.

I still think it helps, but with a much longer tail on the frequency required. Windows XP definitely grew slow over time though, whether that was due to installing programs, caches I could’ve cleared with CClearner, or more incremental updating. We leave a lot on the OS over time.

The very first time I reinstalled WinXP was shortly after I got my first computer of my own for my 12th birthday. I was tinkering with some of the files, and discovered that I could open .cur cursor files in MS Paint. I edited one of the cursor files, saved it as a bmp and renamed the file to .cur under the assumption that this would work. Set my custom cur file as cursor and logged out. When I tried to log back in I couldn’t. Whoops. Freaked out for a second thinking I had broken everything. Remembered that there was a red floppy disk with an ambulance on it that came with the computer. Rebooted the machine with the red floppy disk and reinstalled Windows. Lost my files but had nothing valuable at the time anyways. Have lost more valuable data since then. And expect to lose more data in the future still :p

So I put the disk in, and it says something like "Do you want to install Lindows?" with no options, no warnings or anything. So I hit Yes/Okay/whatever the single button on the screen was, and without zero warning, it proceeded to wipe my entire hard drive.

It's been 17 years and it still hurts :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linspire

But feel free to look at all the extensions and bullshit you have in your browsers and bash shell

...Hmm, probably undocumented API stuff :/

You had to unload it to play some games, though, otherwise they wouldn't fit into memory (DOOM on 4 MB systems, Duke Nukem on 8 MB systems).

God, I am old.

I guess you're limited to 3.5 GB of memory too what with Windows 98 being a 32-bit operating system which might be a pain, and perhaps a bigger problem is that no drivers have been written for a couple of decades.

> usually the system would get into some kind of bad state after several months of usage (or at least mine did)

Sometimes some part of the bad state would go okay again for me after some more months of waiting. E.g. the system would only go past the Windows 95 loading screen after opening and closing the CD-ROM drive but at some point that problem would disappear.

:)

I actually still do that with Windows 10, about once a year I start over. I have a chocolatey command to re-install 90% of my software.

As I recall it, there was actually a minimal set of files needed to trigger the CD to install and you didn't actually need a full 95 install. I worked at a shop at the time and remember doing a lot of reinstalls from those upgrade disks and we definitely didn't spend the time to reinstall both OSs.

I tried searching and the closest I could find was that win95 upgrade would do a full install if you told it to find the old win3.1 on the win3.1 install floppy. I vaguely remember doing something similar, so either it was those versions (unlikely, but possible) or later versions had the same trick.

We definitely did a lot of full windows installs from the upgrade disks without installing the full previous OS first.

Simplicity at the extreme. I miss those times where hacking and learning was as easy as breaking things and repairing them. But I think this also was a source of fear against computers for most people : if I click on the wrong place, it will break and cost money.

Nowadays systems are nearly unbreakable, and that’s cool, but o boy when they break, good luck finding why.

Good thing I had a copy of "PCs for Dummies" which told how to fix the catastrophe

And that was the day I learned how to reinstall an OS.

https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-2c5cd026959b010ad57e34...

Microsoft historically used the 21 512 byte sector, 80 track, double-sided DMF format for 3 1/2" Windows installation media, yielding 1,720,320 bytes per floppy.

Assuming this format, floppy requirements for the four Windows 10 21H1 variants currently on MSDN are

  x64 Consumer (Home/Pro): 3,398 floppies
  x64 Business (Enterprise/Education): 3,323 floppies 
  x86 Consumer: 2,416 floppies
  x86 Business: 2,361 floppies

  x64 Consumer: 3,965 floppies
  x64 Business: 3,876 floppies 
  x86 Consumer: 2,819 floppies
  x86 Business: 2,755 floppies

Assuming ideal 500 kbit/sec performance and two seconds per disk swap, reading 4,000 "1.44 MB" floppies (or DMF floppies with equivalent data) would take just under 28 1/2 hours.

So you could easily install any Windows 10 21H1 version from floppies in the course of a single work week, with enough time left over, perhaps, to check Windows Update over a 56 kbps modem (though you'd probably need the weekend, at least, to actually download the updates).

Fyi: that is as far as I know the reason for most oldy cab installation files being that size.

I raise your floppy disk install one OS/2 Warp install: https://twitter.com/jhegarty/status/1162326199445655552/phot...

I still feel that OS/2 Warp feels more valuable in ones hands, just because of the sheer weight of it… (compared to modern OSes that have no weight because I download them…)

I prefer your explanation, but I suspect it's also a chain of events from "Edison Disc Record" to "Compact Disc". The link is "Audio", absent from both product names.

Maybe it will just be called an "audio" someday! "Hey, I have an audio of that new band Named!" Hooray, it works in a sentence. Sold.

Diskettes, floppy disks etc were invented in the USA, where the standard spelling is "disk".

Compact discs were invented by Philips, who probably preferred the British spelling "disc", and Sony, who probably didn't care.

You can find the spelling "hard disc" in RISC OS, a 1990s British operating system: https://www.riscos.info/index.php/Introduction_to_RISC_OS#Us...

https://tinyapps.org/blog/200702250700_why_in_my_day.html

The solution was to put it in the fridge for a few minutes, read as much as possible off before the lube got thin again.

The tribal knowledge why we put very specific HDDs in the fridge got lost, but people still stick failing HDDs into fridges... go figure.

E: back when we had 28k and 56k dial up modems (think 2-6KB per second) the computer was more of its own universe. I learned Linux through info and man and internet resources for bigger concepts. O’Reilly books were great back then. I learned so much that is still with me today because it’s what I had available and it was still and expansive universe. How small and limiting it would feel by today’s standards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IBsTvWItY0

There is also Windows 98 install in real time from 39 disks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWuJxKtF3gk

Still, a godsend for multi installs and undoing the abuse from the youth.

$6.50/hr rotating diskettes around computer rooms >>> $4.35/hr sweeping hair and cleaning toilets at a beauty shop

Later I learnt you could customise the Windows CD, burn it yourself and include service packs, drivers etc. on it. That saved a lot of time (because back then, reinstalling every few months was a thing).

But you could be a little more scientific and try different parameters once you went back to disk 1. Maybe also remove some of the more questionable drivers or memory-saving tweaks from your DOS configuration while you were at it. Or perhaps it was just a flaky floppy drive that randomly flipped a bit somewhere.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hover!

I remember installing offie 4.3 and windows 95 from floppies - I assume office 95 at some point too. Dozens of floppies.

Yes, of course I had spare boot floppies. 8)