My sister and I were so excited to discover this on the CD as we were clicking through every folder. Awesome song that kicked off a love of the blue album, Pinkerton and the green album. (I had off-campus lunch privileges, so was sent to Borders to pick up copies of the green album on release day.)
We'd heard of Happy Days, but we didn't know if the show was like it was portrayed in the video. We may have thought the band was from Wisconsin. I don't think either of us ever became Happy Days fans.
This was a common experience back then, you got ahold of some new "piece of software" and you started discovering new stuff in it.
My fondest memory ever is one day in February 2001 browsing through the Windows 98 Add/Remove Windows Components dialog and realizing I could install the same Desktop Themes I remembered from like 1996 from my friend who had been lucky enough to have Plus! for Windows 95 (which had, years before, disappeared from his computer in that endless virus/reinstall cycle that characterized those times). Next day I showed the themes to said friend and we were speechless.
It was this promise of endless discovery that made me want to study CS.
It didn't just have Demos of new games, if you poked around you'd find that it had "this cool program called Scream Tracker 3" and a whole bunch of these ".MOD files" that played music that sounded like a CD![0]
[0] - Well, it was the 90s, and typical bundled multimedia speakers were so bad you couldn't tell the difference...
Later on with the Internet biting into the cover disk magazines, they started to steadily fall towards the lowest common denominator and shift to the gamer lad segment. But I wouldn't have had as much fun with computers if it wasn't for a subscription back in the day. Thanks for the reminder.
You only need to encode the notes you play on the instruments you use.
What kind of college doesn't allow students to leave for lunch? Lord.
School grounds are also commonly called campuses in the US, not just colleges. Our high school called it “off-campus lunch”.
This video was also on the CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc .. holy smokes, let's rewind time 30 years, where the presidential sex scandal was singular, consensual, and was actually a scandal!
And you couldn't even watch the movie unless you also paid to unlock it.
You could delete the normal copy if you even knew it was there and then also used a disk usage util to FIND the actual file. But you couldn't do anything about the copy in the recovery image except delete the recovery partition and basically wipe & repartition the drive and do your own fresh install.
I don't know how Sony could top this, except possibly by also suing everyone.
Whereas: the Windows 95 CD is Microsoft's, Microsoft is free to put what they want on there. I bet most people who weren't nerds or curious kids never even found it!
If you had Spotify running and then pressed the quick-play on your phones it would continue where it was, but after a reboot the iPhone would auto-play from Apple Music instead if Spotify hadn't been started.
So tapping play on your headphones would start those damn U2 songs "by accident" because it's the only thing that was on the Apple Music accounts we aren't using.. yeah no thanks.
Then I need to activate the phone (say I'm pulling into the McDonalds parking lot and need to look at the McD app to get my drive thru pickup code for my order), so I tap it and swipe up...and the car switches to playing in whatever app I last used in CarPlay such as Podcasts or Spotify.
If I hit the media button to bring up the car's media selection screen and switch it back to radio that plays for a few seconds and then it switches back to CarPlay.
If on the phone I go to the now playing thingy in control center and hit the gizmo for selecting where to play I can explicitly switch it from CarPlay to iPhone Speaker and then it stops messing with the radio.
Some Googling and some asking LLMs turned up that a lot of people have problems with CarPlay overriding the car's entertainment system and apparently nobody has a fully satisfactory way to deal with it. Some people have addressed it by using Shortcuts automation to pause playback whenever the phone wakes up. They still get interrupted, but at least it doesn't keep interrupting.
Or 11 years, when the scandal was that the president wore a tan suit [1]:
> U.S. representative Peter King, a member of the Republican Party, deemed the suit's color combined with the subject matter of terrorism to be "unpresidential". He went on: "There's no way, I don't think, any of us can excuse what the president did yesterday. I mean, you have the world watching"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_tan_suit_controve...
everyone [...] considered digital audio on a computer just a novelty
And, in 1995, there were no portable device options - as far as I know - to play audio files, on-the-go. For high-quality digital audio, it was pretty much either DAT cassettes, or CDs (recordable CDs were too new for normal people to own).
On the internet, a few sites, such as radio stations, streamed audio using 'realaudio'. The sound quality was abysmal.
At the same time, the tech industry was in the midst of a 'multimedia' bubble. 'Multimedia' essentially referred to programs on CD-ROMs that could play postage-stamp sized videos and short snippets, or low-quality snippets, of audio.
The music environment became closer to today's in 1999 - with Napster - when the public discovered mp3s, and closer still in 2001 - with Apple's introduction of the iPod - when the public discovered portable music players.
First, U2's general public perception as far as grandstanding[0]...
I think the bigger subconscious part was, at the time, Apple stuff was still premium price compared to most other brands, and the consumer perceived price of a U2 album, i.e. "It would cost me 10-15$ to buy this at Media Play^W^W FYE^W Best buy or wherever, couldn't they have made the contract price 10-15$ (which back then may have been as much as 5-10% of cost) cheaper"?
Cause I know an ex-partner bitched about that.
And, to other's comments, they bitched about the bono stuff popping up randomly playing music...[1]
[0] - I mean there was a whole south park episode about Bono's grandstanding...
[1] - Interestingly, the South Park episode was good therapy for her.
Maybe you don’t remember iTunes mechanics at the time, but this “gift” as you call it would get in the way all the time. I’d always end up accidentally playing it. It’d always be present in library views when I did not care for it. It couldn’t be truly removed until Apple built a custom web page where you could request it to be removed from your account.
Apple spent money on this and they really, really wanted to force feed it to every Apple user (not unlike their F1 movie venture). It was incredibly obnoxious.
1 - And it isn't homophobic to note that the Songs of Innocence cover art looked a bit like you were browsing Grindr or something. People have the right to have the opinion that having that image suddenly being featured on their phone might be misinterpreted by others.
"Not every picture of two men is sexual."
Yes, no shit. Of course on HN someone would try this morally righteous horseshit, especially hilarious when it's served with a side of "Duh, of course!"
But you know what the picture represents because you were quite literally told how to interpret it. I don't want some picture I didn't ask for suddenly appearing on my lock screen (because most of us actually had empty libraries, so when this "gift" was added and the device did its fun "autoplay" nonsense, it would suddenly be active media), walking around saying to anyone who might catch site "Oh don't worry, it's an artistic image of a father protecting his son or something"
Then you detail how you had to look up how to interpret this. Amazing stuff. Like, do you realize you just destroyed your own nonsense? Doing the "Duh, obviously" bit and then saying "this picture was so weird I had to be told what it meant" is quite the self-own.
"where you apparently jumped the conclusion that it was two men that were obviously about to have sex "
Save this boorish troll Reddit righteous-brigading garbage from HN. How isn't your garbage post far in the negatives?
Yes, you're so enlightened and better than thou. Howler.
It's an extremely odd picture to be on one's homescreen. Some people have their dog, some their wife, and then Bob here, he has two strange shirtless men in an extremely odd pose. Not even any normal album cover text to make it clear it's an album cover. Just a picture of two shirtless men.
"naval aviators"
Again, Reddit look-at-the-crowd bullshit.
For a guy who complains about reddit so much, you sure seem intent on having a deliberately obtuse reddit-style "gotcha" argument. I'm not really here for that. I hope you remain safe from phone images that scandalize you and those around you.
https://www.howtogeek.com/playstation-is-deleting-tv-shows-f...
https://www.npr.org/2009/07/24/106989048/amazons-1984-deleti...
That, of course, being the other track on some editions of Win95's CD.
Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians, "Good Times".
And your music library is a very personal thing. For some people, it represents part of their identity. It can feel wrong to have something you may not like or agree with stuck in there.
Clinton had a decades-long history of being a sexual predator. He was repeatedly accused of rape. He was also active with his friendship with Epstein during those years, which I think everybody understands what that means at this point.
You're right: now we learned that same ex-president was frequenting Epstein's island. Did that ex- president have sex with trafficked women (Ghislaine Maxwell is in jail for sex-trafficking and she was a known friend of the Clintons btw) on Epstein's island? Was it consensual?
BE THAT AS IT MAY, that’s not what we are talking about. This isn’t a Facebook comments section.
Thankfully nothing will be done, of course. Rome truly is in decline
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okt9GcWiWmE
There's also Weezer? Whoa. Of course I did experience Win 95. My 1st PC (96/97 ??) came with it. Never bother to mess with the instalation CD, though.
It was pretty much Choose Your Own Adventure, but with video. You had to know the exact sequence of actions to get to a "good" ending, and apparently there were several endings. For the mid 90's, the script, acting, and sets (and CGI) were actually not half-bad. But mapping out all the choices that didn't kill you while watching the same set of clips over and over was not as much fun as it sounds.
Mine also came with a CD-ROM game called The Journeyman Project. I think there was also a "Family Cooking" CD with recipes and maybe demo videos as well, and also a home repair CD (presumably intended as the equivalent of home ec and shop, for female and male users, now that I think about it), along with Microsoft Encarta and some sort of health guide on CD-ROM, maybe from the Mayo Clinic.
I also remember this recording (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/d3HThl75oug?app=desktop) of a man with a thick accent saying "computers today need more power: the power of sound," which I guess was a sound card demo, though I can't remember where it was on the computer.
Also there was packard bell navigator. I still have all the shovelware cds from that machine. Other stuff was Tuneland, which was narrated by howie mandel and my little brother loved, Sports Illustrated clips, and some weird not very good reference books. Maybe there were some creation tool demos, I vaguely remember corel draw and some 3d took.
It was never clear to me if the journeyman project was a demo or a full game- I remember getting stuck pretty quickly.
That "some time ago" is 20 years ago. It is crazy that Raymond has been able to consistently write historical yet fun blog posts for decades. What a dedication.
[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060103-52/?p=32...
Video was rare. You weren't downloading videos over 56k dialup (I remember leaving the modem running all night to download movie trailers from Apples Trailers website (only available in Quicktime format of course)
Sure you could.
Not so much in the 90s; But during 2003/2004, with a 56k modem, an unlimited dialup plan, a second phone line, software to redial when the internet dropped, and bittorrent: I was managing to download roughly 150-200MB of data per day (sometimes more)
I could download one of those 350 DivX/Xvid rips every second day. At one point, someone was posting 60MB .rmvb encodes of Stargate SG1. From memory, the quality wasn't great, but I could download 2-3 per day.
I wish I still had some of those 60MB .rmvb encodes, just so I could see exactly how bad the quality was. But I deleted them all, and they seem to have disappeared from the internet.
The "RealMedia Variable Bitrate" codec was essentially a prototype of H.264 (which is still widely used today) but predating it by a year or two.
I just went through a bunch of old CDs that had DivX rips on them a couple of years ago. Binders with hundreds of CDs. I thought that they would still look decent and I was going to back them up... back to my hard drive. But no they were really terrible. I donated the binder to Goodwill, hoping that someone might find the surprise...
They were fine when you had a CRT TV to play them on, we even had a DVD player from LiteOn that would play DivX videos back then.
To get the rights to use things in technologies that didn't exist when the media was created, you often have to go back to everyone involved and get their permission. Sometimes they don't say yes, or they aren't findable, or just aren't alive, and it's not clear who owns the rights anymore.
This isn't as much of a problem with newer media, because contracts now specify what happens with new technologies, but old contracts were often limited to specific technologies.
It's approximately the least-interesting article I've read this year.
But honestly, I'm ok with it being only somewhat interesting. When you write as many posts as Mr. Chen does, they aren't all going to be bangers.
That depends. Licensing is a weird nuanced beast. The original video could have received a license to broadcast on something like MTV. MS didn't want to broadcast it, but distribute it. That's an entirely different thing in the licensing world. The fees also change depending on broadcast/distribute. The number of units would be considered and fees based accordingly.
But yeah, same here. The worse ones are the ones from Apple / Steve Jobs that are meant to be cute and quirky but are actually just examples of sociopathy.
They also spent 3m (reported between 8m-15m at the time though -- which was massive for its day) on licensing Stones' Start Me Up.And they actually sent some shitty live version which would have avoided paying their old bassist. Jerks.
The hype was real though. I can still remember installing the floppy version on one of my first PCs. The first start up was like Star Trek level awe. It was so radically different and cool. Imho, Windows 95 is probably one of, if not, the most important software release of all time. Shaped how PC technology was used for the next 4 decades and still going strong.
I miss the 90s where every next iteration or release of hardware/software was generally a huge improvement. Like going from a 120mb hard drive to 1.6gb disk. Or getting your first CD-ROM after only having floppies, or CD-Writer (parents bought a 1x SCSI CDR the first year consumer ones came out -- made lots of coasters). Dial up to cable internet. The feeling of experiencing those new technologies was unmatched. It created such a since of awe, inspiration and wild imagination of possibilities. I don't get that feeling much these days.
Their old bassist did not make for good PR... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandy_Smith
Of course the architecture sucked deeply with its dos based heritage but they fixed that soon after when NT 4 came out. And 2000 made that a stable experience.
I remember it was a pretty exciting time. I was studying computer science and we tried early beta builds ("Chicago") that had leaked.
I assume most people are like this, and the start menu was a huge improvement. Most people would have been lost if it was just windows and icons freely floating in a 2d space.
True.
> Windows 95 introduced the start menu and the task bar,
True.
> windows 3.11 didn't have them in that form.
It didn't have them in _any_ form. It had the Program Manager and the File Manager, inherited from OS/2 1.1.
> The start menu was just an applications folder
No, it wasn't.
> (a bit like on Mac)
Again no. Not at all.
The Start menu is a hierarchical browser showing a tree constructed on-the-fly from the storage on disk. That storage is just a folder, yes, but it's a folder containing shortcuts and folders. It does not contain anything else: no binaries, no programs, no config. Just directories full of shortcuts.
(For hardcore Unix folks: "shortcuts" are Windows >= 95's version of symlinks, with more and richer metadata, but they are filer-GUI-level only and are not understood by the shell, because the shell predates them by a decade or more.)
> and the task bar was some shortcuts on what was basically the desktop.
Nope, not at all. It's a rich UI in its own right with half a dozen separate interacting components: in Win95, it contained the start menu, then a window switcher, then a notification area containing sub-controls (as separate applets) and the clock.
It is more complex and sophisticated than the only 2 limited bits of prior art: the icon bar in Acorn's RISC OS, and the Dock in NeXTstep, which was influenced by RISC OS.
> I don't think windows 3 had a registry either.
It did, but all it stored were file associations: the 3 letter extensions on the end of filenames, and what app opened what file extension.
> It really became what we still know as windows today.
True.
How did we end up in a world with Windows 11 and Liquid Glass? So sad.
Nostalgic memories of daily BSODs ensue
Then came Windows 95 and my mind was blown.
I think about this a lot and it feels like there's still massive advancements. Obviously AI is up there, but also smartphones, star link, autonomous (presumably) driving, noise canceling headphones, robotics.
I agree the 90s were way more exciting. The tech was moving fast but also the vibe was much more positive and optimistic. Today we might have massive breakthroughs in tech but we constantly feel like society is doomed and said tech might actually just destroy our jobs.
Although, you made me think of the last time I felt that feeling was the first iPhone release. Going from our Nokia's with snake to the iPhone was also quite the experience. I remember my uncle getting one very, very early, maybe even pre-release and we went out for a big family dinner and there was like 15 of us just crowded around my uncle watching him use random apps. No one had ever seen anything like that before.
The problem/challenge w/ LLM's is we've been building interactive chat bots since the IRC days, probably earlier so the interface doesn't feel new. And no one really understand what's going on behind the scenes other than "it does stuff" and "sometimes it get's it right and sometimes... not so much". It's a weird technology lol
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/how-brian-eno-created-the-micro...
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/technology/brian-eno-donates...
Still easy to be surprised if you stop paying attention for a while though.
- rdbms
- PC
- Internet and email
- SaaS
- Mobile
- social media
- LLMs
I doubt that LLMs will be anything like as significant to our futures as social media though. And not in an entirely good way.
Where are the greybeards in their flip flops? Where are the teen prodigies?
Everyone is sucking corporate dick, myself included
The wild technology race of the 90s, on the other hand, felt like a magical new dimension opening up. Maybe just because it took much longer to get thoroughly turned into a vector for BS.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P0AJM6HMYjM
The rest of this video, it doesn't look like the world has changed all that much since 1995. Computing just kind of looks the same. I guess minus the lack of phones in everyone's hands.
Haha we would leave the room and avoid walking near the computer when the burner was running. Thanks for bringing back a memory :)
I was like 12 or 13 and wanted to install linux, like slackware 2.0 or some shit lol. But I didn't know about iso's, just FTP. So I was trying to download every single file from a unpacked linux distro on a ftp site with a 14.4k modem. Then I'd burn them and try to install. I think it took me nearly 500 cds before I got a working install. The install would get like 60% and die on some corrupt package/file, I'd redownload that file, burn it again, run the install... 61% crash, repeat... I did get that sucker installed though. insanity lmao
By comparison the El Cheapo laptop she bought should have been able to play RTX bound games, and yet we are stuck there. Remember, 12 years it's 2x the time. Except for the GL 2.1 ->Vulkan/GL 4.6 jump and videos from 1080p to 4k, the jump isn't that big. I would expect more. For young HNers, if the progress was like the 90s, in 12 you would buy a laptop for $300 and maybe play an RTX raytraced Quake... virtualized.
I know. I did it. PC Pro magazine paid me to fit it into a very early SSD, which only held 16MB.
There was only 24MB of installation files!
https://winworldpc.com/product/windows-95/rtm
It took more installed, obviously. 16MB was hard but I did it. No help, no fonts, not even Notepad, but it ran.
Nlite came into its own with Win98 and especially Win98SE. You could cut that down by half easily. No IE, for instance. I used Opera.
It is still around!
https://www.nliteos.com/
Oh, and sometimes MPlayer can still be faster than MPV with legacy machines. And the same happens with some Mplayer ports (or MPCHC which should borrow lots of code) against WMP or VLC itself.