301: Will Ruined the Internet

Brad, I did it again. Oops, you did it again. Oops, I did it. I made another podcast. You played with someone's heart. I got lost in the game. Yeah, that I did definitely get lost in the game. Baby, baby. No, that's too far.

Okay. I started a new podcast. Really? What? Yeah. Why would you do such a thing? I mean, congratulations. Yeah. Hi. It's aligns with your interests, I think. Oh, over on the full nerd PC world's podcast devoted to PC hardware and hardware enthusiasm. Yes, we have been. At first, joking, but increasingly seriously calling 2025 the year of Linux because of the impending Windows 10 apocalypse that's happening. I think it just is.

I think that ship may have sailed. I think the year of the Linux desktop has arrived. I think we're in it. So we started, we were like, hey, we should do a Linux podcast about... running desktop linux and so he started it started doing it and turns out it's real good it's it's real nice to not have um Your operating system always trying to sell stuff to you. Ads in your face constantly. Yeah. Upsells. I got one the other day. Yeah. Logged in. I got up and turned on my computer. And first thing.

As I often do. Consider using Windows Backup. I frequently am in here before the sun is up with the computer on. Uh-huh. And I've got everything tuned nice and dark for the early hours, you know, dark UI and everything. Mm-hmm. Full screen, giant, bright white splash screen. Hey, Office 365. Hey, OneDrive. Like, dude, I'm not even awake yet. Operating system. Like, get out of my fucking face with these on full screen.

bright white ads you know what the best part about those ads is you get them if you're paying for office 365 i bet you do i bet you do so anyway we started this podcast it's called the dual boot diaries you can find it wherever fine podcasts are found that's a good name And the idea is that we are going to set up dual boots on our work laptops because that's like it's a little bit easier than a than like a gaming desktop or something like that, at least to start.

and run through the experience of learning to use Linux as a desktop OS. I have a little bit more experience just from like running servers and stuff for years. Adam is scared to death of the command line. It's kind of cute. Oh, man. I got to talk to him. Yeah. Yeah. But, uh, he's getting there. He like, he's into it and like, we're.

We're sharing what's working, what's not. We have homework each week that we want the audience to kind of follow along and folks in the full nerd discord are helping out and asking questions and doing it along with us. And it's been a lot of fun so far. And this is the best part. At some point in the future, we're going to either remove Windows or Linux from our computers.

Is that like a big reveal? Is that going to be like you show up and it's like, all right, which one did you ask? That's the end of the show. That's the last episode. We're like, well, I got rid of Linux and now that podcast is over. Okay. I have to know. Yeah. How did you choose your distros, at least your starting distros? So Adam has gone. He called a bunch of hardware vendors and was like, hey, I want to try Linux laptops. And they sent him laptops because, you know.

It's the power of PC world. Yes, of course. I took the laptop I had, which is a lunar lake laptop and was like, what distros are going to support this reasonably well? And then I was like, what if I run cashy?

so i'm running cashy on that okay valid choice yeah it's just because relatively new hardware new you know it seems like a safer bet than like something with a little more conservative uh approach and i'm just i'm just doing like basic katie plasma business nothing complicated um but yeah it's like i the thing i'll say

Now, this is a big, giant asterisk because like you and I have both done a bunch of Linux server stuff at this point. And like, I'm pretty comfortable. I understand the basic metaphor of Linux and how stuff works. I'm bad on details, but I know enough that I can. that i can find my way to an answer usually like i know what to ask to get to the answer that i need uh it's going really well right it's like the early uptake is it's real fast

It boots real good. I'm not seeing like terrible battery life or anything. All of the buttons on the keyboard for the laptop and the trackpad work as I would expect and feel good. And like it's like I'm. kind of blown away with this experience because the last time I really spent time running Linux on the desktop was probably like early 2000s, like 2004, 2005. I understand some things have changed. We've come a long way, come a long way. It's been a long road, but yeah, it's good.

That's exciting. I will have to keep up with that. I had a brief flirtation with desktop Linux earlier this year. I was tinkering with a few distros on this Raptor Lake refresh machine, 14th gen. And yes, like even on a live, even booting off of like a live USB, you forget.

installing into your actual usb i mean your actual ssd it's crazy how fast and streamlined it like when the thing is only running the things it needs to run for you to use it and not a bunch of other services that are doing who knows what

And I'm not even one of these big like Windows deep loaders or whatever. Yeah. But still, the difference in just basic responsiveness and speed of operation when the thing is only doing the things that it needs to do to be an OS and nothing else is like kind of crazy. And then the funny thing that you forget, like in Windows, your UI choices are like, do you want the start menu on the left or in the center these days? That's pretty much it.

Do you want dark mode or light mode? Do you want to have words on your taskbar in addition to pictures?

Those are the choices you can make when you can go between Gnome or KDE Plasma or one of the bazillion other weird desktop managers that exist now. Cinnamon, XFC. Yeah, you can get real wild. Budgie.

Yeah, I'm just running KDE Plasma because I'm picking defaults just for sanity. I think that's sensible. The split I see generally and this aligns with my brief experience is the... plasma is for windows users and gnome is for mac users yeah that's my that's my read as well i think i might end up being a gnome guy it's funny i haven't looked at it yet but i yeah i get the appeal uh the the the big thing for me

Well, there's two things. One, you have infinite choice on everything. Like everything is a choice to there's no safety net. So like. where windows will sync your profile to your one drive account and if you're like your machine implodes your desktop and downloads and documents will all be there you're on your own here you know uh at the same time

There's nobody trying to sell you 50 million services, which is pretty nice. Pros and cons. Yeah. For the pros, I might be pretty pro in my experience. I thought I had an idea of how this was going to work out when we started. and about where we just recorded the third episode today and i don't like i kind of don't know where we're going to go i don't know where it's going to end up at this point and i'm excited to see it's going to be a fun ride

It hasn't started running already. So we we literally as we record this on Friday morning or Friday afternoon, we posted the kind of zero preview episode. Uh, and share that with the audience today. And then we'll start promoting, like we'll put, we'll put episode zero in the full nerd feed. I think next week sometime is the plan. I look forward to checking that out. I will try to keep my mouth shut as much as possible.

But I was going to say, that's the other thing is we want feedback from listeners, both from people who are going along with us that don't know what they're doing and people who do. We're very much pitching this as we're not experts because neither of us are. I'm a dilettante. Adam's a complete noob.

I don't know where I fall these days. Like, definitely on the desktop side, I've got, like, no experience at all. Like, I know my Wayland from my X11 conceptually, but not in practice at all in terms of...

working with those things but i've got like thousands of hours on the server command line at this point so somebody in the full nerd discord said this the other day that they feel like there's everybody has expertise even people who are really deep in linux have expertise in some core chunk and then If you get outside of that area where they have expertise, they're just as much of a noob as anybody else. Totally. 100%. That feels very real to me. Yes. Right now. Very much so.

Like all of all of my experiences is relevant to a headless system that doesn't even have a monitor hooked up to it. Yeah. A desktop system. I'll tell you one thing and we should start this podcast and talk about a different operating system on the subject of not having a safety net.

When I was tinkering with various desktop distros, I had them on a ButterFS partition earlier this year. Yeah. I might recommend giving that a shot once you feel comfortable enough to try to transition because then you can just snapshot everything. I'm running ButterFS. Oh, you are? Yeah. Okay.

Cache defaults to ButterFS. Oh, really? Interesting. OK, well, then just get up to speed on how the snapshots work and then make snapshots before you do anything potentially catastrophic. And then it's quite easy to just roll back. That is a super duper good idea. And I wish I had done that about two weeks ago. So listen to episode one. We get into it anyway. I guess we should probably start the show. Okay.

Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. Brad, the year was 1995. It was. It was a Thursday. It was. People were lined up outside CompUSA. I remember it well, yes. And I was sitting at the front door of my one bedroom apartment in Knoxville, Tennessee, waiting for the UPS guy to show up. Really? Yeah.

Is that how I went down? I think I may have mentioned this on this very podcast before. I distinctly remember coming home from school and running. Is it there? Bob, is it here? I literally ran across the front deck.

to the front door to see if the package was there. And it was. We are alluding to the fact that today, as we post this show, August 24th, 2025. It is the 30th anniversary of the release of Windows 95. Yeah. Still, to my mind, probably the... Biggest, I mean, I don't know, maybe not by raw numbers. I don't know, there might be something bigger, but in my mind, it's still probably the biggest release ever of a computing product. It's definitely not by numbers, but in terms of like, for me...

Windows 95, and we'll talk about this more, but Windows 95 to me feels like the start of modern computers. Like my experience bridged the early days of DOS and like. basically pre-microsoft computing like when you were using commodores and ti's and microsoft was just the people that made basic and maybe a disk operating system for your ibm pc to um

like windows 3.1 and all the kind of different GUI operating systems that were fledgling during that time. And then the modern internet age, like the, for me, windows 95 feels like the beginning of modern computing. Yeah.

Absolutely for me, too. I mean, that's based on my experience, of course, because like you really get down to it. There's nothing Windows 95 did that some other more advanced operating systems hadn't done before, but you needed like a ten thousand dollar next machine, for example, prior to that. It was like a lot of what we think of as modern computing came to the masses via Windows 95.

And maybe it's not modern computing. Maybe it's mainstream computing, right? Maybe that's the. Yeah, I mean, I think like the like the desktop metaphor is still with us today and probably will be forever. I think I think that I think the idea that you can just plug something into your computer and it will just work kind of.

was birthed in windows 95 it didn't really come to fruition until a lot later yeah like desktop plug and play uh internet networking like i mean this i think i think the timing on that is a bit coincidental but

This was the first Windows that shipped with a TCP IP stack in the box. That's true. And happened to be, in my case, I think you were already in college, so you probably already had some form of actual internet access, right? But I was still on BBSs in 1995 when... when this came out and but it was not that much longer before we got our first home ppp connection yeah so i had uh shell accounts but i was using everything like i was using the internet at the command line

Still, right. I was using links and hitting Usenet groups and reading them the old fashioned way in a text interface. What was what was the not to derail with my headless text based perversions? Do you remember what the newsreader was? what the what the terminal i think you just typed usenet if i recall okay like i it's it's weird because like you learned about how to do that stuff by

um let's see at that point i was on a unix machine because i took cs100 that year specifically so i would get access to the unix machine instead of the vax but but to to use the internet before then and you You could slip or PPP into a real shell connection, like a real computer connection at that time, but they kind of didn't tell you how to do it.

Because everybody was on Windows 3.1 and you had to buy like that stuff didn't ship with Windows. So you had to buy a package, a modem package from somebody that had the dialer. And the terminal program and all that stuff. Wow. Yeah. Like, did Windows 3.1 not have a terminal built in? No, not built in. Interesting. And neither did 3.11. Okay. So, yeah. And those packages were expensive. It was like $100. Yeah.

So, yeah, like the the basic thing that they gave you when you signed up for Internet access to the university when I was a freshman in 93 was a floppy drive with. a dialer a terminal it was all that stuff like the open versions of those that were they just really distributed yeah you said 93 this is september of 93 oh my dude that's that is a full three years before we got our first home internet connection

Yeah. So, but that was the eternal September. That was the eternal. Yeah. Like we ruined, I was the first group of people that ruined the internet. You were in the vanguard of ruining the internet. Yeah. And, and I think I've talked about it before, but there were. Like in my freshman dorm, I went to Vanderbilt for a year before I transferred to UT because Vanderbilt was stupid expensive. And also I got terrible grades because I really, anyway, mistakes were made. Go on.

The Vanderbilt freshman dorm, we had like a lounge at the end that was supposed to be like the common area for the floor, but they overbooked students. So they made these Malaysian exchange students live in the lounge like. Nine people lived in the lounge. It was wild. Like, I can't believe they did a anyway.

I assume it was no longer open as a lounge. No, it was their room at that point. Right. But it was also super weird that they put all these guys that don't speak super good English and they made them live in the common area. But they taught me how to use IRC.

Because they would use IRC, like their family members would go to cafes and they'd hop on IRC and they'd be on IRC at like one o'clock in the morning talking to their mom and their uncles and their aunts. Like IRC was like the proto WhatsApp, right? It was the free means of international communication before while there was nothing else. So I learned about Fnet from those those dudes because like computer nerds, all the same nerds, it turns out. And like it was.

It was like a very gradual learning. Like I learned how to search library collections by using Archie and Gopher and things like that. And you learned about Usenet because you wanted to go hear people bitch about Wil Wheaton or Barney or whatever on the funny. uh, alt dot binaries domains, uh, or news groups. And, um, but other than that, your computer was kind of an Island, right? Your windows 3.1 machine.

was just a thing that like you had a word processor probably and you had maybe a spreadsheet if you if you were a science science student um and you maybe had a couple of games that you'd bought and had discs for that you would put in when you wanted to play

But there wasn't a web browser. There wasn't like it wasn't easy to get information from outside the computer or even get new software on the computer, honestly. Yeah. Yeah. Or, you know, even in my case, once, you know, once we got a modem, we got a 14.4 modem. Yeah. At home. There were like three, I think, BBS is local to me that I didn't have to pay long distance for wild. We didn't have any BBS is it's it is crazy to me. Like, you know, I didn't I lived in a relatively small town.

in the mountains but for whatever reason we had people around it was a big county it was like you know it's a very large rural county that encompassed like multiple townships you know yeah that kind of thing So we just happened to have a few BBSs around. And I don't think I think the biggest one had four lines to put it in perspective, like four or four phone lines. So you generally could get on at some point in the evening. But like, that's how.

That's how I was downloading demos for early PC games before we got internet. Like that's how I downloaded like the Dark Forces, the Star Wars Dark Forces demo from one of those BBSs like the night it came out before I had internet access. But even that was like.

a very limited way of interacting with people. Like I didn't really talk to people on whatever kind of boards they had on, on the PBS. It was mostly for downloading. It was mostly for playing door games and downloading stuff. So it's funny is the, the in Tennessee. The local calling range was really small, typically. It was inside your town and maybe a little bit of the county surrounding. So all of our BBSs were in Blountville and Johnson City where their college kids lived.

And they were all long distance for us. So my friend who lived just a little bit closer to Blountville was able to call into a BBS without getting long distance because he was in a different exchange than us. But it was all based on like the middle, the middle three numbers of your phone number, which ones would be long distance to who.

I would have just been like rolling over there with floppy disks constantly to like download and take stuff home. Well, so he was an enormous nerd and he would come in, come back from high school with a huge stack of three and a half inch disks that people had handed him. Right. To download and like he was he I want to say people in his high school pulled a bunch of people, pulled money together to buy him a second floppy disk. So you just do copy copy.

Oh, that rules. Computers used to be so cool. I'm sorry to be that guy. Yeah, it was wild. I mean, there was kind of like, what's the term sneaker net or whisper net, you know, like what is the term for sort of a human? Is it? Yeah. WhisperNet is a different thing. Oh, OK. I don't know what that is, but like, you know what I mean, though? It's like. You didn't have ubiquitous Internet access or even bulletin board access, so you were just like a network of people trading. Yeah.

software around because you couldn't all download it or whatever. Anyway, I swear we'll talk about Windows 95 eventually. But I mean, it's important context to understand that computers were pretty isolated. Like it was.

It was a much less useful device and it wasn't a portal into the entirety of the world's knowledge. until windows 95 which i think answers the question that i have lower down in here which is why does this feel like the start of modern computers and it's because it was the way you access the internet for a lot of people yeah

That's probably the big one. But again, I think the graphical interface moving to a desktop is a huge part of that. Plug and play was a huge part of that. DirectX, which came a little bit later. Quite a bit later, actually. DirectX was within Windows 95. They released it for Windows 95, but it didn't roll out until like 98 era. Yeah, I think that's right. A later version of Microsoft would not have released DirectX for Windows 95. That's possible.

Anyway, a lot of what is still with us in terms of the basic Windows experience started with 95 or like most of it did. It was also the beginning of... computers getting easier to use so plug and play stuff started with windows 95 and it didn't really reach fruition until usb and um like actual plug and play hardware

came down the line in like 98 99 like windows 98 and and beyond time frame but um but the idea that you like prior to this in order to add say a new component to your computer you'd have to open up some things There'd be a bunch of little dip switches or jumpers you'd have to change. It was really, really complicated and fraught with peril. And not getting it right meant your computer would no longer work and you have to take it to some nerd someplace for them to fix it.

The idea that we're basically using the same... So I set up a Windows 95 VM before we started working on this episode. Yeah.

Um, or, well, so I, I did too. We're both using 86 box, which this might actually just turn into like a stealth 86 box episode because if you, if you used or enjoy old computers, 86 boxes, the best thing ever made. It's pretty good. I do think it's important to distinguish. I don't think, I don't know if it's accurate to call that a VM. I mean, I know for colloquial reasons, it's fine, but 86 box is actually emulating the entire stack from the BIOS on down, like all the hardware in the computer.

even specific computer models like you can there's gateway computer like a gateway pentium 200 in there that's right like yeah It's not using virtualization hardware on your CPU and doing a generalized sandboxed bootable machine. It is literally emulating every piece of the hardware from an era-appropriate computer, so it's a slightly different thing, but it's a more accurate thing for...

for this time. Agreed. Especially because as we'll get into, it gives you the truest, most pure Windows 95 experience, which is hunting down drivers and trying to make them work for your stuff. It's really true. I'm I'm setting up TCP IP on my Windows 95 VM right now. Yeah. So like this episode might be a little scattershot because there's so much to talk about here. But that was one of the things that jumped out at me as I was.

I had a Windows 3.1 86 box machine that was sitting around, so I upgraded that to Windows 95 last night. And one of the things that jumped out at me in the upgrade process is when you go through the networking setup. They do not include TCP IP by default. You have to dig through like two layers of menus to flip that switch on to make it install that because like, I guess at that time there just weren't enough people using the internet.

on a desktop for them to think it was necessary to install it. It was, it was, well, I mean, they didn't ship a browser with windows 95, right? No, you had to buy Microsoft Plus to get Internet Explorer 1.0. Or you bought a package for Windows 3.1 that had a dialer and all this other crap that also included disks for Netscape Navigator. Yeah.

I was going to say there's other stuff, though, too, like the taskbar and all that being. The UI being essentially the same for the last 30 years is kind of wild when you think about it. It really is. I mean, I'm sitting here looking at my Windows 11 interface and it is conceptually the exact same thing as is sitting in a window, an 86 box window. Like same, it's not called a system tray, but same system tray, same start menu. My icons are centered now.

I'm still, you know, I'm a lefter for life. I'm a lefter lifer. Wow. It's 32-bit. Was another thing that was new here. That was, that was a big change. Or, you know, and, and the supposed stability that came along with that. I mean, in practice, maybe it was not exactly bulletproof, but. I do in my mind, I do remember it being a pretty vast improvement over three one. It was generally better, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. Like I read about I went through the Wikipedia page. There's a ton of info on.

The Windows 95 Wikipedia page about dependence on MS-DOS is the name of the section. And the best I can gather, DOS... I always understood that DOS was still running underneath Windows 95, but I don't think that's quite accurate. It was kind of a cooperative situation. Like the terminology they use is demoted. After boot, MS-DOS is demoted to a compatibility layer for 16-bit drivers is how it puts this. So DOS is still hanging around under the hood of Windows 95, but...

I think any like pure one 32 programs that you're running are basically not touching it at all. That's my understanding. That seems, seems right. Yeah. It's, um, That was the kind of thing that people used to argue about on the internet a lot in the early internet days of Windows 95. Especially because I was reminded going through this Wikipedia page, you could tweak things to boot into MS-DOS 7 on the Windows 95 install.

You could actually have it bypass or not not start the graphical shell and just boot to a DOS 7 prompt, which I think probably led to a lot of people believing that it was still just DOS under the hood. I mean, I. Like one of the things that you used to do, especially if you had a low RAM machine back then, was you would you would install you would build floppy disks that were boot disks with the Windows 7 command. I mean, sorry, the DOS 7 command dot com.

And use those to make a bootable, essentially turn your PC into a console. You just jam the TIE fighter disc in and it would launch TIE fighter right off of the disc. It was, it was, but, but for me. The defining moment was installing this. I got a whole buttload. Even though I had a CD-ROM drive, I got a whole buttload of floppy disks when I ordered it. Really? Yeah. By choice.

I think so, because I want to say I bought a full install rather than an upgrade. Oh, you know, so I was, you know, there's a plethora of information out there about this stuff, but it's all fairly poorly documented. So I was reading a. debate about this very subject the other night and it seems like the common belief is there was no cd-rom full retail release of windows 95 yeah i i don't i believe that to be the case yes

that it was like a full retail, like you don't need to own any other Microsoft product release was only on floppy and the upgrade was only or CD was only upgrade. Basically, like you could only get the quote unquote upgrade version that you needed a.

Windows 3.1 copy to kind of validate. And I think with the upgrade version, it wasn't even that you needed to validate it. You had to start the upgrade process from inside Windows 3.1. So you can do it from the command line, but I just went through this last night. So you can do it from the DOS shell, but it will...

But it tells you when you do that, it says, we're going to check your hard drive for a valid previous Windows. If we can't find one, you're going to be required to put in floppy disk one of Windows 3. Oh, OK. So there's probably ways these days to even defeat that.

I'm sure. Yeah, but they did. They did go out of their way to check for valid windows on the upgrade CD. But it wasn't. I mean, I guess there was a key, but it's not like they checked with the key online or anything like that. They came that came later. yeah um the the thing from okay so they were going through the install process for the first time in 30 years 25 years probably was was wild

How many times total in your life now do you think you've installed Windows 95? Well, I sold a bunch of PCs to people in college, so I did it a lot. Okay, that kind of pollutes the tally a good bit. I couldn't even guess, but it's like... Probably it's double digits, I would have to assume. Like I definitely like hosed installs or thought they started feeling clunky and wiped and reinstalled numerous times back in the day. I'm definitely high, high double digits.

I didn't sell a ton of PCs, but I probably built more than two dozen PCs over four years of college and sold them to people. Yeah, the thing that struck me was the stuff that they were selling on the splash screens during the setup process. Because on Windows 3.1, you install, it's just a command line text mode installer. There's no opportunity to advertise.

This is very clearly the dawn of the M dollar sign Microsoft era. Cause like, Hey man, did you know that we have the Microsoft network? It's an affordable and easy to use online service. It connects you to the world of electronic information. I'm looking at the icon right here on my Windows 95 desktop. Yeah. Did you know that Windows 95 is the easiest Windows yet?

You can click the start button to quickly open programs, find documents and use system tools or use the taskbar to switch between programs as easily as changing channels on your TV. That's right. Look, they wanted a return on that billion dollar marketing campaign. Well, but but like the stuff that they're advertising is really.

Like it's the most basic table stakes for using a computer. Hey, you can switch applications. You can launch programs. You can find your documents. You can use long file names to make your files easier to organize and find. It's really like. It's really wild how rudimentary the whole thing is. Yeah, fair. Although, I mean, the MSN stuff is a pretty big milestone in the embrace, extend, extinguish. Oh, yeah. You know, like that was.

I was like, this was basically the beginning of Microsoft trying to insert themselves into news media and all kinds of stuff. Well, I mean, like MSNBC just stopped being MSNBC the other day, right? It did, although they kept the MS part. Yeah. They dropped the NBC part. They kept the MSN part in this now, I think is what it's called now, but still MSN. But yes, yeah, it was. It's it's weird traveling back in time. OK, so people lined up at.

stores to buy this people were lined up cop usa people were lined up at best buys they had midnight events i think bill gays went to a midnight event didn't he i think there's you can find news footage out there still of him like handing out the first copy or whatever redmond probably probably

It's probably all Microsoft employees knowing what I know now, but yes, they, they, they had an upsell. If you wanted to give Microsoft more money, they'd sell you plus. Yeah, of course. On the moment, on the day there, you get a bad internet explorer.

pre it's not even called internet exports it's called internet the browser yeah it's called the internet um i mean the hype for this thing was like real like say what you want about maybe they seeded some midnight events with employees or whatever like the hype for this thing was unfucking believable Jay Leno bits about it. There's the whole Rolling Stones start me up thing, which at the time I remember in the news being reported as Microsoft buying that song.

Lock, Stock and Barrel? Do you remember that? No, they didn't. They could not possibly have bought the song Lock, Stock and Barrel. I could have sworn I remembered N95, the news reports being that Microsoft had literally bought the rights to that song, but maybe that's not the case. That's wild.

I can't find any evidence of that. So maybe I inflated that a bit in my memory, but like there was the Matthew Perry, Jennifer Aniston, like sitcom advertisement thing. Do you remember that? That was later, wasn't it? No, that was around launch, I believe. Really? Yeah, I'm pretty sure that was pretty close to or at launch. I'm fairly, fairly certain. Yeah. Yes, that was. That was right around launch. Oh, it was. I forgot Friends started before Windows 95.

wow that ran for a long time yeah anyway point point being like the hype was huge and also like i was fucking burning for this thing by the time it came out because i was so tired of windows 3.1 like i wanted the desktop so badly i don't know did you have much like desktop experience had you touched max much or anything else um i yeah because i lived in a dorm so there were four or five kids on the most people had windows pcs with windows 3.1 and on my freshman year and

A handful of people had Macs and the Mac, the ability to dump shit on your desktop. That was it. That was it. Really, really powerful, which is hilarious because I. I've actively stopped doing that as of like 10 years ago. I've still, I've still got icons all over the place. Like that was it. That was the.

The thing I wanted was to be able to just put a file right there on the desktop whenever I felt like it. It seemed it seemed really well. I mean, it's funny because like on Windows three one, that background space was basically useless. It did nothing. I didn't. I never.

I never had program manager anything but maximized in Windows 3.1. Yeah, that seems right. Like, what was the point? I mean, the only thing you ever got out of minimizing program manager was a way to see what else was running, but...

Computers were so weak at that point that your ability to run a bunch of different things at one time was very limited anyway. So like Windows 3.1 was just full screen program manager. It was just a big menu full of icons to launch stuff. And that was kind of it, you know, like. Getting a full desktop felt like just expanding the scope of how you use the computer to me in a way that felt really futuristic. And again, I had very limited experience with Mac and Macintosh.

Certainly had never seen anything more powerful than that. Did you did you touch anything before launch akin to like a demo or sampler thing for Windows 95? No, I didn't see any of that stuff. Because I would swear I bought a magazine at some point a few months before launch that had like. Kind of like an interactive demo of how the desktop was going to work. It wasn't like fully. Obviously, it was not like an OS run. Well, there were.

there were definitely previews in like, I remember picking up a PC mag or a PC world or something that was, Hey, here's, uh, here's. the like screen by screen preview all the stuff that changes in windows 95 like i definitely knew yeah what was coming and was excited about it

Maybe that's all it was in my in my memory. It was like some kind of little sandbox, like artificial environment where you could kind of play around with what the graphical shell was going to be like. I can't remember. Anyway, based on stuff like that and magazines and just.

wanting a better operating system i was like i was like jumping out of my skin trying to get my hands on windows 95 by the time it came out it wouldn't surprise me if they did did something like that like that that absolutely seems like a thing they would have done Okay, so you get it, you install it, you suddenly have access to the internet, kind of. Well, some people do.

Like you did, right? I mean, is that what happened in the dorm? Did you immediately get online with its built-in TCP IP and everything? I was not in the dorm by the time Windows 95 came out. I had moved off campus by then. Yeah. But also our dorm didn't have TCPIP because I went to Tennessee. Okay. So nobody had bothered. The thing is, prior to having internet, like real internet, there wasn't a push from students.

to get internet until all of a sudden we're all dialing into the 12 modems or something the university had and everybody's like hey man i can't dial like let me put it this way my first two It wasn't until probably the September of 96 that we could register for classes online. Like we still went to the gymnasium.

and put out, put the classes we want on a bunch of three by five cards and then put them in the right folders. Okay. Yeah. So you're, you're four years ahead of me. So I think, yes, by the time I got to college, it was all online registration all the time. The first year they did online registration, it was super easy because nobody knew about it. And the next time they did online registration, everybody knew about it and they didn't want to have to go to the thing.

And getting jacked up internet, dial up internet on the campus for a week as a result of everybody trying to log in and select their classes on the VAX. Right. So does your dorm have a residential network of any type? No, not when I lived on campus. Okay. Interesting. Oh, that's not true. When I was a freshman at Vanderbilt, the computer lab in the basement had a LAN, was like plugged into the school LAN because we went down there to play Doom.

the night the doom shareware dropped right was that an ipx it was ipx yeah ipx network okay uh and i mean it had they had tcp on them too because you could you could open up uh the terminal like the terminal and connect to to

uh the unix machine across campus or alternately use net and irc and stuff like that got it and then the school at ut the the school uh computer labs were all wired up as well but but there was no like they didn't the the network for the school was mostly confined to like offices and labs

classrooms i don't even think had network until much later than that so do you remember we're just so you were on dial-up i guess when windows 95 came out yeah did you did you just immediately immediately set up a dial-up internet connection as soon as you got it

So I had dial up before because I could dial into the shell. I would dial into the shell. Okay. But I didn't know how to do slip or PVP. That's what I mean. That's what I mean is a... I struggle with the terminology here, but like a generalized PPP connection where your whole OS has a TCP IP stack running and can run any application over the network and not just like a serial terminal overrun.

Like a shell. So for folks who don't know, before you had before your computer could get on the Internet. you could dial in and have like a text mode interface for the internet, which is what we talked about earlier. The distinction there is that whatever the computer you're dialing into is the one that's technically on the internet. You're just dialing into a serial or whatever type of terminal to access what it is doing on the internet.

versus what we're talking about here is putting your actual Windows 95 machine on the Internet itself. Yeah. And prior to Windows 95, you could do a thing where you type the right command in that terminal and it would negotiate the direct PPP or slip connection.

which would put your computer online, which would basically pipe all the data that your computer was asking for over TCPIP across that serial connection, which is what the modem was. Post Windows 95, the school sent a note to everybody that was like, hey, if you want to do this, you can by doing this. And then that was all over at that point.

That was the beginning of modern computing. Yeah, that was that was the moment. As soon as I like fired up now, because I had paid for a package when I bought Windows 95. I bought Windows 95 from I can't remember one of those. One of the early retailers is pre Amazon.

And pre-New Egg. So it was who knows. And I got with it. It was like, hey, do you want to get this other stuff? Because they were like feeding frenzy. And I bought a copy of Plus, which we'll talk about in a little bit. And I bought a modem. package that included netscape navigator because i was like hell yeah i have internet access i would love to have a web browser like in the computer lab that's dope man you paid for netscape look i don't want to talk about it i didn't know so

Just to be clear for people who were not alive then or don't remember, they gave away Netscape Navigator. I'm not talking about pirating it. I mean, they gave it away free kind of forever. Well, it was also like... six discs or six floppy discs. It was big. So it would have taken a fair amount of doubt. Anyway, the point is you did the, you did the, I, so I did this, I installed all that stuff.

And it tried to install a bunch of Windsock crap that jacked up the Windows Windsock implementation in Windows 95. And I had to reinstall Windows as a result of that almost immediately, which is a really grim foreshadowing of the rest of my Windows experience. Yep.

And then I fired up Netscape and it was like, well, you don't have an internet connection, dog. I was like, what the hell do you mean? I'm connected. I'm looking, I see it's right here. It's in this text window is the internet connection. What do I do?

And then you called the help desk and they were like, oh, you got to type slip and then type your password and your username and it'll just work. I was like, oh, interesting. Yeah. OK. So for a long time, it was manual, like until the PPP stuff hit. Because there were, as I recall, there were like, basically, if you had a slip connection, your ISP would hand you a script that would do the login for you. And those were probably ISP specific.

Interesting. PPP had the authentication protocols built in, which was the advantage of PPP. That's exactly what I'm all excited to talk about here. So we got our first connection in 96, and it was a commercial local internet provider.

And yes, that was a PPP connection and that was all built into Windows 95. Like you set the connection up in kind of what everybody knows of as the network dialogue. And then every time you would connect, you put in your name and password in a little Windows provided pop up. Yep.

Or you can save it if you wanted. Oh, yeah. I mean, eventually. Yeah, probably did that eventually. But you were dialing through the operating system and it was all built in. There was no there was no you never had to look at that terminal window again. Yes. The terminal window was fun.

Yes, I mean, at this point, I wish I had done more terminal back then. Although, I know this podcast is kind of careening left and right all over the place. I was reminded installing Windows 95 last night that Hyper Terminal, I think, is the terminal I use to access BBSs. Is Hyperterminal built into Windows 95? It's right here. It had to have been, I assume. It's right here in my fresh Windows 95 upgrade. Oh, sure enough. Accessories. Unless it carried Hyperterminal over from 3.1.

Hyperterm, TRM? I don't think there was a terminal built into 3.1. I think you had to get a terminal from your ISP. I don't think so. I can't run Hyperterminal. It's by Hillgrave from Monroe, Michigan. Oh, wow. I guess Microsoft must have licensed it for Windows 95, I guess.

that makes sense you have to install a modem before you can make a connection sadly i do not have a fake virtual modem set up in 86 box so i can't actually do anything with hyper terminal right now I also love that they shipped a CompuServe MCI mail and AT&T mail clients out of the box for this. That's wild. I sure did. It was a real moment when you first connected to the real internet and it's like.

The closest thing I can think about it in pop culture is when like Neo takes the red pill in the matrix and wakes up in the real world was the, like the closest analog I recall from mass media. And I apologize for that reference because I know it has a ton of terrible fucking baggage now. Yeah. Well, but like, but like it, it was, it was wild sitting in front of a computer in my apartment.

looking at a web browser that was graphical totally like i was like oh right i understand why people like the web now You had and you had way more context for that than I did because, well, I had BBS. You know, I did have some text mode, some antsy graphics experience under my belt to contrast with what the modern web was becoming. But I mean, it was also this is becoming as much like.

early internet episode as it is a Windows 95 one, but they're kind of intertwined, right? Yeah, right. But it was, it was also mind blowing from the perspective of just being able to like connect with like-minded people out there, especially being in a small town where there were not that many of those around, you know? Like that was right around the time that I was extremely, extremely into like Squaresoft 16-bit RPGs, JRPGs and stuff. You're talking about Aerith again? No, no.

Look, we've read enough of my old Usenet posts, but like, you know, being able to like go out and find information about imports and stuff. Like I knew nobody that was importing games from Japan at that point. Yeah. So being able to like go out and find information. But I otherwise would have had zero access to was so invaluable. I mean, like. Might sound a little grandiose, but I like I I basically owe everything I am and everything that I have to get on the Internet when I did.

In terms of the skills that I built up, the connections that I made, like the, you know, where it has led me in my work life and everything. And like Windows 95 was kind of like the gateway to all of that. Well, it was a super. it was a super powerful skill that not a lot of people had at that time like i i paid for college by running networks for small businesses right like i literally would leave school at the end of the day and then i would run

10 base to cable around people, people. Look, there was another thing that happened as a result of Windows 95, which was the Internet. A became a thing that every business felt like they had to have, even if they had no idea why they needed the Internet. They were like.

Oh, I'm a plumber. I got to get on the internet. In 2025, 100% true. In 1995, absolutely unnecessary. Probably unnecessary. I mean, as a goofy aside, or maybe it's not so goofy. It's kind of dire. You can see the same patterns playing out today, you know.

Yeah. With the artificial intelligence. Like everybody needs AI. We don't know what AI does exactly, but we know we need to have it because everybody else has it. Right. Exactly. Except, except the internet actually was extremely useful. Yeah. And.

And so I would run cable and put install network cards in people's computers and I charged them like 40 bucks an hour, which was a fortune back then. Wow. Yeah. That is a fucking lot. I did a little bit of, I did a little in high school. I did a little bit of like tech support, kind of helping some elderly folks understand.

word processors and mail. Why wouldn't I charge elderly folks 40 bucks an hour? I charge businesses 40 bucks an hour. I charge either five or 10 an hour. I can't remember which. That was not enough, Brett. I think it might've been 10 an hour. Okay. 10, 10 seems right. It was never more than an hour or two, you know, so it was just kind of pocket change, spending money, or, you know, you'd save up for a couple months to get a new game.

Well, I would running in the networks was a, was a, I show up at six o'clock when the doors close and then they open the door at three o'clock and then like, I leave at three o'clock in the morning when it's done. And Yikes. Well, also you're working for a business, you know, they've got money, they've got money to spend. Yeah. I mean, it's like.

yeah it made sense and along the way i would do like windows 95 upgrades for folks and and i helped build a bunch of file servers and stuff like that and like it was um it was good honest work honestly like like i've helped a lot of people like they were really grateful to get their businesses online and um we helped them figure out stuff like isdn connections and all that so they can have real internet at their at their offices slow though it might be

All right. Yeah. Windows 95. Yeah. I have to say when I got it installed last night, I think I mentioned this earlier. So I had an existing three, one, a computer in here. Yeah. That I cloned. I did not. And, and did the upgrade on. A couple things. First, just a point of order. I'll tell you what's in it. It was a Pentium 75. So for folks who don't know, x86 box, you're basically emulating a specific computer. Yeah, dude. Yeah.

If you grew up with computers in the 80s and 90s and you have not touched this thing, fucking turn off this podcast and go download 86box because it is the most kid in a candy store experience you can possibly have if you're a nerd of a certain age. Uh-huh. Because you're literally sitting here with drop-down menus picking from... There must be 150 different graphics cards to pick from here. It's too much choice in a lot of ways. Like 50 different sound cards, network cards.

You know, hard drives. I mean, I think they will actually emulate specific types of hard drives. If I'm not mistaken, you can pick like what types of CD-ROMs and floppy drives and zip drives and all kinds of stuff to attach to it. You're like, you're picking specific motherboards. I am using... I am using an Asus TX97, which is a Socket 7 board from 1996, for my motherboard. You get the appropriate BIOS and everything. I mean, it is exactly as you remember it.

I had an S3, oh gosh. S3 Verge? No, it was not a Verge. It was before. I had, it was a 2D card because remember this was a Windows 3.1 machine. So there was no point in having a 3D card. It was an S3 Trio of some kind. I forget which. Anyway, Windows 95 did not seem to love the S3 Trio very much. That makes sense. From a driver standpoint. So after I did the upgrade, I...

You basically shut down your fake computer, go to the dropdown and pick a different graphics card. So I put a matrix millennium in post windows 95 install. Okay. And got to have the fun of booting back into windows 95. having traded from one card to the next and having it think there were still two, like they basically thought there were two graphics cards present still, which is how I was reminded that device manager was a thing as of Windows 95. Oh, was it?

Yes, it's in control panel. Oh, I thought that came later. No, go to start, settings, control panel, and it's in the system applet. Oh. They don't even... They don't even call it device manager at the icon level. You open system properties and device manager is just one of several tabs. So I had to go into device manager where it thought I had both the S3 card and the Matrox card.

Man, I got a lot of exclamation points in here. I bet you do. So I had to like manually remove the S3 card before it would switch over to the Matrix card, even though it had drivers for the Matrix card. Really funny. Like that's just there's there's your fresh 1990 August 1995 plug and play experience. Real quick. Do you know where I got those Matrix drivers? Nowhere. Matrix. What?

Matrox still has drivers for all of their cards going back to Windows 3.1. What? Up on their website. That is wild. Shout outs to Matrox, man. Shout out to seriously. I was like, I bowed down to Matrox. That is freaking unbelievable. It really is amazing. Like it's like a time capsule. So you put that in there. I saw that in the notes and I thought you were talking about like.

You went to the Matrox website on archive.org or something. Not that you went to Matrox's website in 2025. That's rad. Their live functional 2025 website still hosts all these drivers for download. So I was going to say for folks who don't know the way I'm getting software into this VM, the easiest is by mounting it as a CD-ROM drive. Yeah, you can mount. You can mount a folder basically or a file. Yeah, you can mount virtual CDs and floppies and all that kind of fun stuff.

Wow. It was fun to be reminded the device manager was in there that early because I guess like you, in my mind, device manager came along later. Yeah, I assume so. But here it is. And like, you know, slightly different UI, but like kind of conceptually unchanged from what it is today. It's it's it's fuckers. The other thing that that like. So I installed a, so, okay. So you have the matrix card. Yep.

What else? What else did you put in there? I've got a regular Sound Blaster 16, not the plug and play version. I don't really know what the I never knew what the difference was. One had dip switches and one just had the plug and play hardware. So it's so like the BIOS could talk to it and pick our reuse and stuff.

We had, if I recall, we had the pre-plug and play version, the just standard ISA. Yeah, I had a Soundplaster 16 CD technically, which had a plug for a special CD on the back of it. Ours, we also had that. It's kind of a weird, this is getting off topic again, it's kind of weird to me that sound cards came to ship with CD-ROM controllers so regularly. I don't know why, I guess that was an easy upgrade.

And it was so they could sell multimedia bundles with a CD-ROM. Yeah. So you could make your PC MPC 1.0 compatible. It's just like, here's your bundle with the sound card and a CD-ROM and they work together. And now you're multimedia. Exactly. What else you got? Oh, let's see. You know, I mean, actually, OK, so the main thing I was going to say once I got past fiddling with graphics card drivers and stuff is.

just how kind of like small in scope and maybe a little barren this whole thing feels, which kind of like aligns with what you were talking about, that when this thing is not connected to the internet, there's like almost nothing to it. You know, like you've got your graphical shell.

You've got Windows Explorer, which is basically your file manager, but there's not a lot in here. You know, there's notepad and wordpad and hyperterminal and a calculator. And that's about it. That's pretty much the whole thing. A couple of, you know, free cell hearts, minesweeper and solitaire.

And some fax software and then all the system utilities. Like there's really not a lot to Windows 95, like original 1995 edition fresh out of the box. It's wild how little stuff there is to do. Actually, I would say. Yeah. Like. It's why I think the plus pack was so important, honestly. So you could install those themes. So you can install themes. You can install a game, that pinball game. Oh, actually, sorry. I should say Hover comes with base Windows 95. I did play some Hover.

Only if you have the CD version. If you have the floppy disk version, you get fucked. Yeah. In fact, you can't even install it. You have to run it off of the CD. You have to put the CD in and open a menu and run it from there. Yep. I'm, I'm, you know what? I'm an executive decision. I'm going to auto run this plus CD that I have mounted and install it while you talk. Oh, I did that. Um, oh boy. So, okay. So I have, uh,

I did a Matrix Millennium 2 as my graphics card. 2 as well? Not a Roman numeral 2? Roman numeral 2 is what I chose. There is a Millennium 2. The Millennium 2 was the banger. 2D graphics card at the time I was building PCs at the beginning. Like no, no lie. The millennium was known as far as I knew, it was known as like the cleanest, best looking, highest performance graphics card out there. Yeah. I mean, but, but also.

If you compared it side by side with the Verge on the kind of monitors that we would have had, you would have not been able to tell the difference. Probably. I did a Socket 7 board. I picked an i430FX Intel chipset, which was a... The one I picked was the Asus P55 TP4XE. Yeah. They didn't have any A-bit boards, or I would have done an A-bit board. For later chipsets, they will. Oh, okay. I'm pretty sure the BH6 is in there.

Okay, I did a Pentium 200. Really? Yeah. I was afraid to go that high. Well, so I did a Pentium 75 because that's what we had. I started with the Pentium 60 and the board that I chose was complicated. So I switched to the Pentium 200 and the FX board. I was a little afraid to go to something like a Pentium 200 with a later chipset because I was worried when it's 95 would flip out. I wanted it to be fast, man.

I get it. I get it. So I did upgrade this to Opinion 120 after the install was done. Okay. Well, that was much easier upgrading these days than it was back then. It turns out. Just to drop in. Just to drop in upgrade. I did a Logitech Microsoft bus mouse, which was like the. PS2 mouse, I assume. The SoundBlazer 16 PNP. I tried the AWE32, but the drivers were a pain in the butt, so I switched to the 16 because it's built into Windows 95. I wonder if it is that bus mouse a serial mouse?

Oh, no, bus mouse is PS2, I believe. Is it? It could be a card that's... Oh, no, standard PS2 mouse would be PS2 mouse. Yeah, I think that is a serial mouse that you're talking about. Weird. Or I wonder if it's a separate thing that has a card or something goofy. I am using a PS2 mouse in here, and I can tell you it doesn't feel any smoother, so you're not missing much. There you go. I tried to install the classic PS2 rate utility.

Yeah, that doesn't work. No, it's not going to work. Probably the thing that increased the polling rate of your PS2 mouse and windows to make your mouse smoother. But it did not work in here for some reason. I did a Novell NE2000 network card, which is just a bog standard. I was looking for the 3Com Etherlink 3, but they don't emulate that, unfortunately. Seems like PCI stuff is a little thinner.

And then I did a 420 gig hard drive because I was I couldn't remember what the weird limits were. I knew that there were some jumping points where you had file system problems or. uh a different different file size different drive size limits rather yeah i looked some of that stuff up according to wikipedia windows 95 will fail to boot on a 2.1 gigahertz processor or with more than 480 megabytes of ram

Oh, but I couldn't, but I couldn't find, I couldn't find any info about a hard drive being too big. I only did, I think I did eight megabytes of RAM and I felt like that was really gratuitous for Windows 95. I've got, I've got two hard drives in this machine, both 512 megabytes. Wild. Just really, really splurge in there, Brad. That's the magic of this thing. I remember the computer that had Windows 95 on it, my Pentium 60.

I remember getting a one gigabyte hard drive for and feeling like the most luxurious motherfucker on earth. Oh yeah. It's like, this is really, really changing things here. And okay. So to answer your question, can you drag windows and still see what's in them?

In Windows 95? Yes, we talked about that before we started recording. Oh, I can remember. So I got my, I got my Matrox Millennium 2 drivers installed. I can see the contents of the window and I drag now. So Windows 95 has show contents while dragging? Uh-huh.

yeah really yeah i was thinking that might not have happened until windows 98. nope windows 95 works man okay i might have to put a millennium 2 in this machine god this matrix display properties app that they install with the driver it has the normal gray but then it also has just a close up macro shot of a, of a matrix video card on the gray. It's a nightmare. It's almost completely illegible. Yep. Yeah.

I mean, I'm sure this varies by card and drivers, but mine booted up to 16 color mode. Yep. After install. It worked. I'm 16 bit now, baby. Yeah. And so this was also a reminder that Windows 95 made you reboot for absolutely everything. I was going to say, wow, they really did make you reboot for everything. It's like.

Change your color depth, change your desktop resolution, like literally any setting that involves a hardware mode and you are going to reboot the machine. I think you could eject a CD probably. Yeah, yes, definitely. And a floppy disk you could eject. That's pretty much it. Yeah. And also, if you had a floppy disk in that wasn't bootable, it would complain every single time you reboot. Yeah. So I have the Internet working. I got my Novell driver working.

Yeah, so that was one thing that I didn't realize until you told me this when we were starting this up, that 86Box will connect your real current host computer networking to the virtual networking adapter in this thing. Yep. So you can straight up take that Windows 95 machine online if you want.

I got bad news about how useful that is. Yeah. So in the course of this, do you remember this probably made headlines three or four years ago when this happened? Somebody put out Windows 95 in JavaScript. Oh, yeah, yeah. Or actually, sorry, Electron. Electron, I should say. Somebody put out an Electron app that is the entirety of Windows 95. It's like an emulator for Windows 95, right?

So I was tinkering with that this morning too, and that does have networking enabled by default. And in fact, it has Internet Explorer 5.5 in it, which was the final IE release for Windows 95. Nothing loads in Internet Explorer 5.5 anymore. I mean, nothing. Yeah, I was going to say, I don't know anything. This is Internet Explorer 4 on this one that I have now. It seems like nothing's also installing with that. So, yeah.

I don't know what you do to get new browsers on here, I guess. Honestly, I don't know what you could do on the internet with this thing besides the terminal program at this point. certainly shell into some stuff from there but beyond that like now you could get like a newsreader you could go get forte free agent which was my newsnet newsreader of choice wow in the windows 95 era

That would probably still work, because I assume that would still connect to Usenet servers just fine. But as far as the web goes, I don't think an internet-enabled Windows 95 install is going to do much for you at this point. When I go to so I tried Microsoft dot com, which just throws an error. Google throws a bunch of script garbage where the scripts don't show. But if you scroll down.

You do get to a Google search and the old school buttons that say I'm feeling lost. Really lucky. OK, but it's all black other than that. So Windows 90. Let's see if it works. Web browser. Okay, I got a bunch of script garbage again. The little clouds moving in the background. I really never used Internet Explorer at all, I'm realizing. Really? Hardly ever. No kidding. After Netscape started to fall off, it was my browser of choice for a very long time.

These results are completely useless. Um, yeah. So anyway, it's, it's. Look, you can't go home again. You know, that's the kind of can't. That's the lesson here, I guess. My plus install just finished and it wants to restart Windows. Yeah, you had to. Well, it installed Windows components. You got your drive smart. You got your drive compression in there, you know? Yep.

It also installed some TCP IP stack. So I had to get, let me tell you, installing Windows 95 in 2025 off of a bunch of virtual floppy disks, maybe the most annoying thing I've done in a decade with a computer.

Why would you do that to yourself? I mean, I know why, because the alternative was you would need to go put together a boot disk that had CD-ROM drivers for DOS in it so you could boot with the CD version. Yeah, which I don't, I knew how to do that at one point or another, but I don't have that knowledge anymore. Yeah. It took forever and it keeps changing back and forth too. I'm trying to pull from the memory banks here. You have to set MSCDEX to something.

Yeah, but you also have to install the driver for your controller and all that stuff first. It's a pain. Yes, it's a lot. Anyway, it seems to be working pretty well, though. Well, the version of Samba that... Windows 95 uses no longer supported by anything in my network, so I can't browse the network, sadly. Yeah, I need to look up. How old is the SMB protocol? Well, it launched with 3.11. 83.

Oh, wow, it's that old? In 83 at IBM. Wild. So in 1987, Microsoft and 3Com implemented SMB for OS2, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, yes, SMB had been around for a while by the time. Oh. Okay. I think what we know of as current modern day SMB 1.0 was published in 1996 by Microsoft. Yeah. It was. Yeah. So predates post dates this even. Yes. Weird. Yep. Yeah, it's it's this has been a fascinating walk down memory lane for me. I don't like. It's funny looking at it now.

Well, I mean, okay, I guess I can watch the videos now, which I couldn't do before. The videos that are on the install CD, the Weezer. You want to talk about this thing feeling futuristic. Nothing compares to opening up that CD. And watching that Edie Brickell video or the Weezer Buddy Holly video or that Rob Roy trailer. The autoplay when you put the Windows 95 upgrade CD in your computer is, hey, we have a Windows 95 tour.

We have Microsoft Exposition, which I think was what became Encarta, right? That sounds right. It's the encyclopedia. There's Hover, which is a game, a fast-paced game of bumper cars in a huge 3D maze. And cool video clips. Cool video clips. I'm clicking on cool video clips. So now I have a high perf, which is a folder. Oh, those are the good versions. Yeah. So the high perf is where the better versions of the same videos are. And it's slightly better codecs. And these were like.

I don't even know. These are all like CPU software only codecs. Like I think it might be like Intel Cinepac or something like that. Like some very, very early video compression and uncompressed audio, if I recall, because I have tinkered with these video files before, because of course I have. And if I'm not mistaken.

The audio in these predates audio compression. It's just uncompressed like wave, you know, PCM audio, but they're all like 11 kilohertz because they have to be fit to play on the CPUs at the time. Yeah. Is the good time is the E.D. Brickell video, right? Yep. Wild. Like listening to that song still feels like the future of computing to me. Yeah, it's PCM 22 hertz, 22,000 hertz, 16 bit stereo. Yep.

And it's 320 by 240, 24-bit color. It tells you how many frames it is. 2,912 frames and 15 frames a second. Cinepac. I don't even know what the name of this video player is. I think it's just video. Like it doesn't have a name. Like the title bar is just the name of the file. It's wow. You're not wrong. And the controls are play and stop. And that's it. You can you can drag the bar and scrub.

Yeah. I don't think I realized this was Edie Bukel at the time for what it's worth. Extremely, extremely nascent digital video playback on a computer. I mean, this is like the year after the Sega CD came out, you know, this is like. Not long after the first time I ever saw full motion video on anything. Well, I was going to say, like, if you wanted to do video on a computer prior to this, you kind of had to have like dedicated hardware to handle the video rendering. Right. Right.

Um, there's a Rob Roy movie trailer. Yep. I guess. Is that a young, is that a young Liam Neeson? Oh yeah. Oh, absolutely. I think this movie was like quite well respected. Yeah. It won an Oscar was nominated at least. Yeah. You have the Weezer is just the name of the next file, which is the Buddy Holly music video directed by young Spike Jones featuring young Weezer.

Yeah, it's the entirety of the Buddy Holly video, which was like pretty contemporary at this point. I think the blue album had just come out like the year before. And they like this is the one that they superimpose themselves in like old High Happy Days clips. This was like this video was huge on MTV at the time.

Yeah, it was a tour de force for 1995. Fun stuff. And then there's Welcome 1, 2, and 3. That is fun stuff. Those are dumb. I can tell you from experience. Oh, no, actually, I'm sorry. Those are Bill Plimpton animated cartoons. Yeah, these are dope at all. I was thinking this was just some stupid Microsoft motion graphics stuff, but no, these welcome videos are actually like, there's actually like something to these. Oh, these are fabulous. Yeah. Although they may not all be Bill Plumpton.

The first one is... No, these are all different animators, actually. Each one of these is entitled Windows, but by a different animator. They spent kind of a lot of money on art. It turns out I wonder if these were originally going to be like a thing that played when Windows starts and they decided it was annoying. So they just chucked it in fun stuff. Yeah, because welcome three is the one I was thinking of. That's just like a stupid Windows three one desktop like.

with a little video morph into clouds from one is 95. That's pretty good. Speaking of spending money on stuff, Brian Eno sound. Yeah, most expensive single piece of sound ever made is my understanding. Yeah. Have you ever read about his composition process for that? No, I assume they wrote a really big check and then cashed it. But he's talked about composing that thing before. He did something like 80, over 80 different separate pieces of music. Wow.

before they finally picked one do you think bill gates was standing over his shoulder the whole time being like no not that one i don't think so no not that one no he actually has talked really positively about the experience he talked about how kind of creatively invigorating it was to have

such an incredible constraint as having to compose a piece of music in three seconds so i think he made it sound like he actually like loved doing it and that's why he did so many different pieces because it was just like really fun which i could kind of see I mean, they just call it the Microsoft sound. Yes, they literally called it the Microsoft sound. It really is. This was really the moment that Microsoft became the bad guy, right?

Well, it's getting there for sure. Not quite. We're not quite in antitrust land yet, but we're getting close to it. I mean, MSN was antitrust land, Brad. Well, I mean, in terms of the government actually taking action, we're a few years out from that still.

I have always been bummed that Microsoft has never released a higher quality version of the Microsoft sound. Because it's only 16 bit. It's like it's it is also maybe 11 kilohertz or maybe 22. But, you know, it sounds like shit. It's very scratchy. It sounds like very old, low sample rate audio. Yeah, it definitely does sound kind of gnarly. What the hell is hover? I don't think I ever played this. It's the little first person like hover tank game. Oh, I have to use the arrow keys.

Anyway, if anybody from Microsoft or formerly of Microsoft who's listening and has the power to do so, please find a way to put out the Microsoft sound in higher quality. That would be dope. Like you can find like SoundClouds out there of people who have tried to use, I don't know, Pro Tools or Fruity Loops or whatever the hell to like recreate it. Some people have gotten very close to recreating the real thing in higher quality, but nobody's ever quite nailed it.

Yeah, it's it's not it never sounds quite right. I've definitely listened to those before and been kind of bummed. I don't know that there's a way to wrap up and sum up this in a in a like tidy bow other than to say. We wouldn't be where we are now if it weren't for Windows 95 in both good and bad ways. Yep, absolutely. It made computing a thing that everybody could do. And they spent a bunch of money to tell everybody that they could do computing.

It's funny. There's a thing going around Blue Sky right now about AI that people, somebody explicitly said, I wish I remember who it was, but somebody said, look, remember this next time that some company is trying to push something on you so mercilessly. that you don't really have to advert. Like if something's really good, you don't have to advertise it. And that was true for phones. I feel like phones went from something that was like a weird niche.

enthusiast thing to something that everybody had in like a five to six year time time period now from the dawn of the iphone until like the iphone 4 4s when everybody had them all of a sudden at least in the bay area but Like Microsoft spent an insane amount of money pushing Windows 95. They did. And pushing this as here's how computers work.

for lack of a better word here's how they're going to work yeah like this was bill bill gates wrote a book not long after this called the road ahead i've i read that book Me too. When it came out. Yeah, it was wasted time. It wasn't super. It wasn't as what I was expecting. But but it was like they definitely pushed my windows.

Like they were definitely selling, hey, you're going to Windows is your way to the Internet, which which was like they sure did. They spent a bazillion dollars advertising Windows is your way to the Internet. Matthew Perry and Jennifer Anson did not come cheap.

The Weezer video did not come cheap. Edie Brickell maybe came cheap, but I don't think so. I think she was at the start of her career. That Rolling Stones song didn't absolutely. I looked accounts differ, but it looks like they spent somewhere between like three and $11 million on that song.

Yeah, that seems right. Brian Eno didn't come cheap. No. Yeah, no. They wanted this thing to be a thing. I've talked about this before, and we should dig into this more in the future. If you go back and read, there's a lot of evidence that almost it didn't turn out this way. How so? Because Windows was floundering right up until Windows 3.1. Oh, yeah. In fact, Microsoft was selling a Unix throughout the 80s. parallel to their sale of DOS to PC OEMs. Oh, yeah. It was called Zenix, Z-E-N-I-X.

And POSIX compliant. It was, it was a full on, it was licensed from AT&T. It was a proper Unix. Like Microsoft was selling a proper ass Unix with all of the built in advantages compared to DOS that Unix had in that time, which was like, you know, preemptive multitasking. It was a more proper, multi-user, multitasking operating system like we are used to today. The thing that forms the basis of like every modern operating system.

And then Windows basically, I felt like kind of at the last minute, like Windows 3.1 sold well enough that they decided to put all of their eggs in the Windows basket. Well, and that's what led to the creation of Windows 95 and the 98 and on and on. But I don't think it was ever, like, guaranteed that DOS and Windows were going to be the future of Microsoft until things turned out the way they did.

This was kind of the kickoff for the success of closed software, honestly. Right. Yes. Because up until this point, stuff was by default open and it was unusual if it was closed, like with the Mac. I mean, you know, like in the case of Unix, you did have to license the code from AT&T, but there were lots of companies doing that and there was like, you know, BSD existed and there were like, yeah, nascent, nascent open software efforts happening at that time. Well, they weren't, they weren't.

programatized in the same way that they are now. Just to be clear, Linux was kind of starting to bop around at this point, but it wasn't something that people knew about, right? Well, 91. Yeah, you're right. So yes, Linux had been out for some time by the time 95. came out but but like there weren't there weren't multiple distros and like there were a handful it was small yeah um so yeah it uh like i would encourage anybody who wants to spend so it's like it is it was

It's very instructive for me to spend some time with x86 box and set this up. It was kind of a pain in the butt. There's a couple of really good guides on how to do it on Vogons. Yes, Vogons, if you get into deep into the stuff, is a site you will end up on regularly looking for drivers or just like tweaks and like how to's on various old things. Yeah, but I don't actually remember the URL off the top of my head. Is it just Vogons.net? It's fogons.org. I knew it was. I knew it was not.

But yeah, they have a thing. If you search for it, it's Windows 95 setup guide for the 2020s, which ironically has a post date of 2013. But it's basically they're running updated guide for how to set up.

windows 95 on old hardware they also have a similar guide for x86 box which is what i would recommend or 86 box just just 86 box yeah which i which is what i would recommend And 86 box, just for folks wondering how much modern computer horsepower it takes to run an 86 box instance for Windows 95 on my machine, it looks like it's running. like, uh, three tenths of a percent at idle. Yeah. This, and it's basically single threaded too. It's like on one core basically, but I'm like,

Mine is sitting at basically 0% CPU right now to run a Pentium 120 at full speed. Yeah, we have the horsepower. Yeah, for sure. This thing will go up to Pentium Pro, Pentium 2, basically. I don't think it'll do a Pentium 3, but it might. Does it slow down the machine if it gets overloaded? Is that what happens? Yeah, yes. So if you look in the top right, you'll see the speed rating or the speed percentage. Where it says 100%? Yes.

So I've put basically the fastest CPU and like you can put 3D effects cards and stuff. You can get early 3D graphics in here as well. I basically built like the fastest machine I could with the available configuration. Okay. And was no longer hitting 100% speed. That makes sense. It's a pain in the butt to install it with a traditional VM. Like I tried with VirtualBox in the past and it's a hassle. It's not worth for old, old, like especially old, like pre.

pre-UVFI, pre-GPT operating systems, I think, especially of this era, I think you're better off with 86Box or PCEM or one of those. But Vogons also hosts on VogonsWiki.com and VogonsDrivers.com. Yeah, VogonsDrivers.com. old drivers and old builds of what like a like abandoned where builds of 95 and um yes 98 all that stuff so winworld.com is another good resource for stuff like this yeah they've got although

You'll see in the comments on some of their archive, like some people questioning the provenance of some of the disk images they have. Some of them might be cobbled together from different things and not like direct images of retail releases. But archive.org, of course, has a lot of disk images and stuff as well. Yeah. And, and like, um, it's kind of useless. Like there's not a whole lot you can do with it. Yeah. It's fun to go back and remember. Yeah. That's pretty much it.

I don't think you're not going to like do your daily work stuff in a Windows 95 box at this point. Probably. I hope not. You could do some basic word processing and email, I guess. That's true. I think maybe run WordStar. If you want to run WordStar, there you go. Maybe do. I guess that'll do it for us this week, Brad, unless you have anything else. Windows 95, a landmark product.

For good and ill, I think probably mostly good. Should we have made this an important product through history? Probably not. This is just an anniversary, right? Yeah, this is an anniversary. um i don't know i uh i remember like i remember spending a lot of time learning how windows 95 worked and and But when I actually get into Windows 95, the things that I remember most, I think, are probably Windows 98 or Windows 2000 would be my guess. We barely even got into the OSR.

releases and the features they added to windows 95 over time yeah actually we should hit that we should hit that real quick because like they did they did two big major releases to windows 95 yeah so oem service release one and two Yeah, service release, the one was available to everybody. You could just download it and then install it on top of Windows if you had a Windows license. Yeah. It didn't add a ton.

OSR2 added stuff like USB support. So I've got the list actually between the two OSRs. Yeah. The list here that was added to Windows 95. Internet Explorer, DriveSpace Compression, OpenGL, DirectX. FAT32 file system support, USB support, IEEE 1394 or Firewire support. Wow. AGP support or, you know, accelerated graphics support. Yeah. Which was the PCI Express of the day.

Some other stuff, alternate DMA mode for hard drive for disk drives. I mean, like it was a lot of foundational stuff that was being added to Windows 95 as in its lifespan. Well, so in the builder community, the fact that you couldn't. Unless you were an OEM, buy an OSR2 disk to install Windows to support that newer hardware was a real problem at the time. So do you remember the term slip streaming?

Yeah, that's when you, the people still, IT folks still do that. It's when you bundle your patches into your installed disk. You could bundle, oh, Windows 95A. I don't remember how that got out there, but I'm looking at a list now. Windows 95A was Windows 95 with OSR1 slipstreamed into it. Yeah, but the OSR2 was the beginning of them selling OEM copies on the gray market, basically.

You couldn't buy a retail copy of Windows 95 that would support USB and Firewire and AGP and all that stuff. But you could go to your gray market screwdriver shop and buy a copy of Windows 95 OSR 2. Windows 95 OSR 2 also noteworthy because it was the first one that did an online check for the key. Interesting. When you typed in your key, it would authorize it and you had to call a phone number.

So you would call an 800 number for Microsoft. You type in. Let's see. How did it work? You put your code into Windows. It would pop up a screen that said call this 800 number. You'd call the 800 number. It would give you a challenge code that wasn't the key. It was just something that was generated based on a hash from the key. And then it would give you an unlock code after that. And you couldn't install Windows if you didn't do that. It was a pain in the butt.

And people were really pissed off about it. It turns out, in retrospect, probably a bad idea. Yeah. Probably. It was very easy to pirate at that point still because you just saved the hashes and... Like, yeah, anyway, mistakes were made. Now, actually, that was one thing I meant to, sorry, this episode's just going to go on forever. There's one thing I meant to touch on when I finished my upgrade last night and just kind of booted into the desktop and sat there looking at it.

The idea of this operating system that's kind of like set in stone and can't just go online and check for updates for itself really made me feel like weirdly vulnerable. Windows 98. added the ability to do Windows Update, if I recall. So did they add? So I got on the Windows Update Wikipedia page last night and was reminded that if I'm not mistaken, Windows Update started as a website. Yeah, you went to a website. Right. So.

They just put the OSRs out for download if you already had Windows 25, right? I don't think so. They're not? Well, so on Windows 98, you'd go to the Windows Update website in a browser, and it would use an ActiveX thing to just update your stuff. I distinctly remember going to the website, yes, like you just described, and having the site directly funnel the Windows 98 updates from the website into the operating system. Some of the Windows 95 stuff got dumped as patches, like the OSR 1 update.

Yeah, I swear I remember downloading OSR stuff on Windows 95 and installing it, but maybe not all of it. But quite specifically, they did not make an OSR 1 to OSR 2 patch path. You had to do a clean install with a special disk that you had to buy from them, and you couldn't just download those updates if you had a pre-OS R2 version of Windows 95.

I wonder if OSR 2.5 was so close to Windows 98 that I just didn't care and just went to Windows 98 instead. Their solution to this problem was just buy Windows 98. Right. And in fact, now that you mentioned it, I guess a lot of the... A lot of the final editions of 2.5 were kind of backports from Windows 98 in the first place, probably. Yeah, OSR2 rolled out, I think, in 97. Okay, yeah, I don't have dates in front of me for these, unfortunately.

Maybe it was late 96, but yeah, people, people were profoundly upset about it. It was, that was, that was maybe the first wave of the M dollar sign. Okay. That makes sense. I mean, especially if they were basically like charging money for USB support and stuff like that. Oh, OSR2 came out basically a year later. It was August of 96. Oh, interesting. And Windows 98 came out in October of 98, if I recall.

so it was a while i have no idea how i was getting my hands on maybe i just never did install those osrs and just waited until 98 or were you building pcs or were you using a

No, I was building. Well, no, no, we had a, we had a prebuilt machine. So you probably, it didn't like, if you didn't have new hardware, it didn't matter. It was like, yeah, we did like, we sure as hell didn't have USB at that time. So we, I guess we didn't really need USB support. Yeah. It was, if you had like a, what, like.

at that point the boards that like it was socket seven stuff had agp slots at that point i think if i remember right so like and maybe not even until later agp i feel like there was a boot magazine that had an agp slot on the cover in like 97. So I did build a Pentium 297. That would have had AGP probably. Is it a Pentium 200 or a Pentium 2? No, it was a Pentium 1 200. That depends on the chipset you had. This is why I will never for the rest of my life forgive myself for...

junking those old computers so i can't just go back and refer to them i do wish i still had my wang yes and tell you exactly what i had but what did i install on that pentium 200 then because that was before you had to do osr2 you probably bought a copy of osr2 with the hardware

i guess so because because that was the thing in order to get the in order to be able to buy the osr2 oem edition you had to buy either a motherboard a hard drive or maybe a cpu i can't remember microsoft had specific requirements Opinium 200 was the first machine I built from parts myself. That was the era I did. I built a K62200 at the same time. Nice. Weak floating point performance, but very fast otherwise.

You were like one upgrade ahead of me on the switched AMD at the time. Not great for Doom, it turns out. I ended up ditching it pretty shortly. For Quake. Yeah, for Quake. Yeah, and building a Pentium 200. A Pentium 2. 266, rather. But those were the days. Yeah, those were the days. I think that's as good a place as any to wrap it up. Yeah. As always, Brad and Will made a tech pod is listener supported. We would not be here without you, the listeners.

And we appreciate each and every one of you, but we, uh, if you want to find out how to support the show, you can go to patrion.com slash tech bod. Again, it's patrion.com slash tech bod. I apologize. I am. My room is carbon dioxide as fuck right now. it's like i'm sitting here i'm like man i could totally go for a nap it's like three o'clock in the afternoon open that window yeah i'm gonna turn the fan on as soon as we finish recording the episode but um

Thanks to everybody who supports the show. And an extra special thank you to our executive producer tier patrons, including Jason Lee, Andrew Slosky, Jordan Lippet, Bunny Fiend, Twinkle Twinkie, David Allen, James Kammack, and... Pantheon, makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer. Thank you all so much. Thank you. And again, if you want to learn how to support the show, you can go to patreon.com slash techpod. And I guess that'll do it for us this week.

Next week, it's the 30th anniversary, 27th anniversary of Windows 98. Wait, is it actually? No, I think it's probably around this time, actually. If you told me the Windows was August month. It was for a long, long time. Did I just say Windows is August month? We were recording this at the end of Friday. August is Windows month is what I meant to say.

General availability, June 25th, 1998. That's right. I remember that because I remember coming out during summer vacation when I was on break from college. It's interesting. October was Windows released for a long time because like Windows XP, Vista. And Windows 7, I think, all came out in October. But anyway, that'll do it for us this week. I guess the next big Microsoft milestone is probably Memphis. Remember Memphis? Memphis? That was the codename.

Walking into Memphis was a 98. That was 98. Yeah. And I'll say, I mean, we probably covered some of this in the ranking of windows years ago. Windows 95 was Chicago, by the way. Chicago, yes, was the code name for that. But I found in doing this Windows 95 upgrade and thinking about old Windows, the one that I keep coming back to and feeling nostalgic for is 2000. I can see that.

That might be my actual favorite windows, irrespective of whatever ranking we came up with. Wow. I can't believe you're throwing our extremely scientific ranking system under the bus, man. That's an objective ranking. This is my subjective preference. Wow. What I was the most excited for at the time, but getting on a proper Windows NT that could run games was.

the best of all possible worlds but anyway i was running a bp6 with two processors on windows 2000 and it was some hot biz needed windows 2000 then it was great right up until the moment i needed to fire up that sound blaster and then everything crashed because their drivers with multi-threading were bad If you want to hear more of this, please subscribe to the show. If you can't, leave a review because we appreciate all of those as well. We do. I'm going to go tell you.

Friend of the show and Toolboot Diaries co-host Adam Patrick Murray told me then. People can leave comments on podcasts on Spotify the other day. Oh. And I was like, oh God, we have comments on podcasts on Spotify. That's terrifying. And I went over there and everybody was really nice. It was very sweet. Thank you. Thanks for the comments, everybody.

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