My comment in another post about how there are really two versions of Windows 95, and most of the things you describe didn't exist until the later versions, not available until 96/97:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29545152

As an addition to this, it's worth remembering that the retail version of Windows 95 did not enable TCP/IP out of the box. While it was included, you had to separately install it yourself. The default protocol was originally NetBEUI:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBIOS#NetBEUI

Yeah, those features started showing up first in the regular builds of Windows Nashville. I was downloading them almost daily to see the (at the time) amazing new UI concepts that were being tested:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_96

Yes, unfortunately most of them didn't make it.

There was also talk of replacing most of the file system with a database, something which they played with for years and then discarded.

Does anyone know why? This still seems to have quite a bit of potential to me.

Besides that: Is my intuition correct that they barely innovated in user-facing features after the early 2000s? Yeah, they broke everyone's workflows once or twice, but nothing about the way things work seems to really have changed, especially not in ways seen before elsewhere.

A file system as a database is one of those things that makes a good pitch but falls down pretty hard once you try implementing it. It falls apart faster if you've got to touch the Internet.

The first and biggest problem is that different types of files have metadata they consider to be important. Author and editor information useful for collaborative editing in a Word document is immaterial to a static raster image saved with a lossy codec. So your database ends up with dozens to hundreds of schemas to store metadata. You still need to serialized and deserialize metadata on files going out or coming in. If some unrelated application (not the authoring application) went and edited the database, which metadata for that file is canonical? The world may never know.

If you're building some metadata management database that's also storing binary blobs on addressed blocks on a disk, you might as well use a traditional file system and have a read-only database on top.

That way the file system stores bytes. An application unrelated to authoring can safely shuffle those bytes over the Internet. It's up to an authoring/editing application to store appropriate metadata.

The files themselves always have the canonical metadata and the read-only database for finding/organizing the files can just update when it's notified of a change in the file.

The database can focus on database things and the file system can make sure bytes go where they need to be. This also gives the flexibility to swap out either the file system or database at any time. This is the way Windows and macOS went and how many Linux DEs work.

They were innovating behind-the-scenes, but the stuff just never made it out. I was doing some forward-looking stuff on contract for them. I thought Windows Phone was innovative, myself, and really easy to develop for, but for whatever reason it never gained the traction of its competitors.

As far as I can tell, the advanced features of Longhorn like WinFS just kept on running over schedule and eventually they had to cut down the scope and release Vista.

That was WinFS in Longhorn, that became Vista. The filesystem as database thing wasn't in the 9x days AFAIK.

Still think it would have been a great idea. Of course it was being planned for Linux too as ReiserFS but then he went off killing his wife and that was the end of that.

Not sure why MS ever dropped the idea of WinFS. It has merit IMO.

Apple tried it as well with the iOS apps being able to dump their files in a flat structure only and organize and find them using labels and search.

It doesn’t work if you have more than a few documents and it isn’t what users want. Users want to be able to organise their documents in folders.

That was a bit different though. It didn't really have labels in a consistent way.

I agree folders are still great to have but I don't think the idea of a database-driven filesystem precludes that. It will just add more organisation options, not take any away.

If you don’t take away folders then the ‘database filesystem’ is not the main way of accessing files. And then it is nothing more than an index like those used by Spotlight or Cortana.

If you’re going to make a drastic move like switching the filesystem paradigm you need some really convincing arguments to sell it. More than ‘some organisation options’.

That was much later. OP is referring to the Cairo project and its Object File System, which was canceled.

Oh ok I didn't realize there was another cancelled project there.

Thanks I'll read up on it.

Did the original Windows 95 even have a TCP/IP stack? I think the first copy came with MSN, but it wasn't until the Plus pack that it came with a browser. IE4 was the active desktop and wasn't out until September 1997.

Windows 95 had a native TCP/IP stack. Lan Manager had it from 1990 (a bunch of that expertise came from hires from Finland). And Windows NT had it in 1994. In '95 everyone was using TCP/IP and pretty much was standard at M$. I was there. It's true the browser didn't kick into high gear until '97 after Microsoft decide set-top boxes might not be information access solution of the near future. Microsoft was a little slow to admit that the Internet might win but eventually they came 'round and put some effort into it. Interestingly, both Gopher and Mosaic came out of Midwest universities in early '90s - great stuff, fun times.

You are right, I might be attributing things to Windows 95 that really only happened in updates or in Windows 98.

I thought that was the USB stack that didn't come until the plus pack.

Windows 95 OSR2 IIRC. If you bought Plus! I believe that upgraded you to OSR2 but there was an independent update and OEM build. I got a PC in 1997 with two USB ports but the documentation said they wouldn't work until a later Windows 95 release.

By some means I got OSR2 and the USB ports showed up in the Device Manager but it I had to wait a few years before I even owned a USB device to use with them.

It had a TCP/IP stack but you had to install it manually.

I think it was present, you just had to enable it.

Active desktop appeared in windows 98. I would not say that windows was ahead of its times. It was an OS which was agresively pushed to people.

Windows definitely shipped a universal WebView long before anyone else would. For a long time software like Steam would still shove an embedded IE component into dialog boxes and windows to show formatted and/or dynamic content. Being able to rely on having access to a consistent HTML renderer with scripting was huge for frontend software dev.

These days people just ship 50+mb worth of chromium goo with every application instead, but Windows definitely lead the way there and did so very early.