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    Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems?

    (devblogs.microsoft.com)
    304 points mooreds | 29 comments | 17 Nov 24 19:54 UTC | HN request time: 1.734s | source | bottom
    1. dusted ◴[18 Nov 24 06:48 UTC] No.42170325[source]▶
    Raymond Chens blog and book (The Old New Thing) is an absolute delight! I always had a big respect for how intuitive the Windows 95 GUI is, and reading his description of the thoughts and methods behind its inception, it's no surprise that it became so good. It seems like Microsoft was extremely pragmatic and reasonable in many of their endeavors back then. It's a wonder how it degenerated into the absolute unit of sh*t that is modern Windows (even if the filesystem and kernel is arguably a lot better, everything on top seems to be developed by an army of interns)
    replies(5): >>42171191 #>>42171616 #>>42171979 #>>42172243 #>>42174602 #
    2. rqtwteye ◴[18 Nov 24 10:19 UTC] No.42171191[source]▶
    Army of interns should about right. I always suspect that Teams is developed by some beginners who are learning Scrum.

    But yes, Windows 95 to Windows 2000 were a huge jump in usability. From Windows 8 on and the “Metro” interface they threw it all away.

    replies(2): >>42171598 #>>42172301 #
    3. Cumpiler69 ◴[18 Nov 24 11:46 UTC] No.42171598[source]▶
    >I always suspect that Teams is developed by some beginners who are learning Scrum

    I get the same feeling from Google's android and Pixels. Lots of neat features keep getting added, but the SW and HW issues that end up in the final product make it seem like an incredibly amateurish effort for such a wealthy company hiring top talent.

    replies(2): >>42171702 #>>42174224 #
    4. andai ◴[18 Nov 24 11:50 UTC] No.42171616[source]▶
    >filesystem is a lot better

    In my tests it was 6-7x slower than on Linux (in VirtualBox on Windows). I assume by better you mean more features?

    On a related note I used one of those system event monitor programs (I forget the name) and ran a 1 line Hello World C program, the result was windows doing hundreds of registry reads and writes before and after running my one line of code.

    Granted it doesn't take much time but there's this recurring thing of "my computer being forced to do things I do not want it to do."

    I also — and this is my favorite, or perhaps least favorite one — ran Windows XP inside VirtualBox (on Windows 10). When you press Win+E in XP, an Explorer window is shown to you. It is shown instantly, fully rendered, in the next video frame. There is no delay. Meanwhile on the host OS (10), there is about half a second of delay, at which point a window is drawn, but then you can enjoy a little old school powerpoint animation as you watch each UI control being painted one by one.

    (Don't get me started on the start menu!)

    Twenty years of progress!

    replies(4): >>42171686 #>>42171830 #>>42172406 #>>42172567 #
    5. hulitu ◴[18 Nov 24 12:06 UTC] No.42171686[source]▶
    > Twenty years of progress!

    Well, it does have more ports normally open and starts connecting to MS as soon as possible, so yes, it is a progress. /s

    6. hulitu ◴[18 Nov 24 12:09 UTC] No.42171702{3}[source]▶
    I think they rotate the interns every year. That will explain the GUI^WUX advances. /s
    replies(1): >>42171934 #
    7. jraph ◴[18 Nov 24 12:36 UTC] No.42171830[source]▶
    > I assume by better you mean more features?

    I would guess better on current Windows than on Windows 95. I don't know about faster, but NTFS is most probably more reliable than FAT32. And also more features of course, and fewer limitations. At least the file size limit (4 Gb) and ownership / rights metadata (ACL).

    replies(2): >>42171926 #>>42177699 #
    8. PaulHoule ◴[18 Nov 24 12:56 UTC] No.42171926{3}[source]▶
    Depends how you use it.

    If you are handling a stupendous number of small files (say doing an npm build) then metadata operations are terribly expensive on Windows because it is expensive to look up security credentials.

    Maven is not too different from npm in how it works except instead of installing 70,000 small files it installs 70 moderate sized JAR files that are really ZIP files that encase the little files. It works better in Windows than npm. Npm got popular and they had to face down the problem that people would try building the Linux kernel under WSL and get awful times.

    Microsoft knows it has to win the hearts and minds of developers and they believe in JS, TS and Visual Studio code so they’ve tried all sorts of half-baked things to speed up file I/O for developers.

    replies(1): >>42172197 #
    9. Cumpiler69 ◴[18 Nov 24 12:57 UTC] No.42171934{4}[source]▶
    UI/UX keep getting shittier over time is an industry wide phenomenon not a Google exclusive one. To me everything kinda peaked in late 2000's and has been on a downwards slope ever since the mobile became the dominant platform so everything from desktop PCs to cars had to look and function like a phone.
    replies(1): >>42173809 #
    10. cpursley ◴[18 Nov 24 13:05 UTC] No.42171979[source]▶
    Interesting take, I feel like the current iteration of the Windows UI is actually really good. Microsoft seems to be continually tweaking and improving it.
    replies(2): >>42172340 #>>42189311 #
    11. akx ◴[18 Nov 24 13:41 UTC] No.42172197{4}[source]▶
    No filesystem is great in the lots-of-small-files case, partly simply due to syscall overhead.

    There's a reason https://www.sqlite.org/fasterthanfs.html , SquashFS, etc. are a thing, or why even Europe's fastestest supercomputer's admins admonish against lots of small files. https://docs.lumi-supercomputer.eu/storage/#about-the-number...

    replies(4): >>42172253 #>>42173942 #>>42176439 #>>42181557 #
    12. red_admiral ◴[18 Nov 24 13:46 UTC] No.42172243[source]▶
    I've heard tales of when working at MS was the job everyone in "dev" aspired to, like for Google and the like in their heyday.
    13. red_admiral ◴[18 Nov 24 13:48 UTC] No.42172253{5}[source]▶
    I guess that's where the "sqlite competes with fopen" part might help.
    14. ◴[18 Nov 24 13:56 UTC] No.42172301[source]▶
    15. heraldgeezer ◴[18 Nov 24 14:03 UTC] No.42172340[source]▶
    With heavy tweaking, 11 is okay... but the standard right click menu is a disaster for power users. And many other settings like the start menu they destroyed.
    replies(1): >>42173175 #
    16. heraldgeezer ◴[18 Nov 24 14:11 UTC] No.42172406[source]▶
    >On a related note I used one of those system event monitor programs (I forget the name) and ran a 1 line Hello World C program, the result was windows doing hundreds of registry reads and writes before and after running my one line of code.

    You were probably using Sysinternals process monitor. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/pro...

    Windows does a tonne of things in the background, yes. If I run that and let it monitor everything, things will happen even if I do nothing. It is an OS and complex.

    >It is shown instantly, fully rendered, in the next video frame. There is no delay

    THIS is true and also crazy to me. I forgot how fast XP was. Especially on modern hardware. I TeamViewer into a laptop with an i5 CPU and Windows XP (medical clients...) and it felt faster than my more powerful local machine!!

    I have set my sysdm.cpl performance settings to this, and it does help a bit to get rid of the animations and crap.

    https://imgur.com/a/jlre36e

    Yea... I like the 10 start menu but they destroyed it in 11...

    replies(1): >>42173846 #
    17. dusted ◴[18 Nov 24 14:31 UTC] No.42172567[source]▶
    Oh, i meant that ntfs is a lot better than fat16/32. I mainly use linux, and I like ext4 and love zfs, but ntfs is also reasonably stable.
    18. EricE ◴[18 Nov 24 15:23 UTC] No.42173175{3}[source]▶
    Open Shell has been a first install for me since Windows 7.
    19. treve ◴[18 Nov 24 16:15 UTC] No.42173809{5}[source]▶
    Perhaps controversial but I think the ability to ship continuously is also a factor. You just have to pass and fix the things with the most complaints after. A holistic view on the general user experience will never make it to the top of a pile now.
    replies(1): >>42181395 #
    20. andai ◴[18 Nov 24 16:17 UTC] No.42173846{3}[source]▶
    And it was considered bloated at the time!
    21. whoknw ◴[18 Nov 24 16:25 UTC] No.42173942{5}[source]▶
    The reason LUMI is advising against many files is that it uses the Lustre parallel filesystem, which is notoriously bad with small files. See here: https://www.lanl.gov/projects/national-security-education-ce... .
    22. Sylamore ◴[18 Nov 24 17:23 UTC] No.42174602[source]▶
    I know at one point Microsoft and IBM both invested significantly in studying UX research. It doesn't feel like that's happening or if it is, I guess I must be drifting out of touch with what's considered intuitive in user interfaces. It's not just MS either, I feel like the ability to discover what you can do in an app/site any more is hidden by aesthetic choices over functional ones.

    I remember being pulled into user surveys and usability studies while wandering the mall back in the day and being given series of tasks to accomplish on various iterations of a windows GUI (in the Windows 9x era) while they observed, and then paid $100 for my time for each one I participated in.

    replies(1): >>42189294 #
    23. mech422 ◴[18 Nov 24 20:16 UTC] No.42176439{5}[source]▶
    That used to be ReiserFS's claim to fame - tail packing small files. Doesn't seem like any FS has really optimized small file handling since then.
    replies(1): >>42177502 #
    24. PaulHoule ◴[18 Nov 24 21:52 UTC] No.42177502{6}[source]▶
    It is not so much the wasted space that bugs me as all the metadata and processing of that metadata.

    For instance, the 70,000 files in your node_modules do not need separate owner and group fields (they all belong to the same user under normal conditions) and are all +rw for the files and +rwx for the directories. If you have access to one you have access to all and if your OS is access checking each file you are paying in terms of battery life, time, etc.

    On Windows it is the same story except the access control system is much more complex and is slower. (I hope that Linux is not wasting a lot of time processing the POSIX ACLs you aren’t using!)

    25. EasyMark ◴[18 Nov 24 22:14 UTC] No.42177699{3}[source]▶
    As someone who has done some fairly extensive reboot testing of “power failures” for fat32 and ntfs I can guarantee you that NTFS is far more robust but it’s not bullet proof
    26. rqtwteye ◴[19 Nov 24 09:12 UTC] No.42181395{6}[source]▶
    I think yearly releases were much better. I feel a lot of sites and software now have constant change you can’t keep up with and often the change doesn’t really improve anything. Reddit would be a good example. I constantly have buttons disappear and rep appear or move around. Same in YouTube. Much friction for no benefit.
    27. account42 ◴[19 Nov 24 09:35 UTC] No.42181557{5}[source]▶
    SquashFS is a (read only) filesystem designed for small files.

    Which shows that even if you don't want to call any filesystem great here, they differ vastly in just how bad they handle small files. Windows' filesystems (and more importantly it's virtual filesystem layer including filters) are on the extremely slow end of this spectrum.

    28. int_19h ◴[19 Nov 24 23:44 UTC] No.42189294[source]▶
    These kinds of studies are still very much there at MS, and not just for Windows.

    The problem, in my experience, is that when some manager really wants to do something, they'll find a way to justify that with a study. Pretty much every UX decision that ended up being universally panned later had some study or another backing it as the best thing since sliced bread.

    29. int_19h ◴[19 Nov 24 23:46 UTC] No.42189311[source]▶
    Tweaking, yes. Improving, not so much. If anything, things have been regressing lately - for example, we were able to make taskbar vertical ever since it became a thing in Win7, and it makes perfect sense to do so on any landscape-oriented display for most efficient use of display space. The new redesigned taskbar in Win11 killed that option outright.