Windows 95, what's not to love?

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Legacy systems, I swear this place should just acquire a company who does nothing but wrench on old crap. Oh wait, that’s me. We have a couple older, “legacy”, DOS applications that are, as I’m told, “absolutely crucial to the business” and “must get creative about making them work”. Yea, got it, your ‘37 Ford needs help because you’re too cheap to buy a new Camry.

We managed to recover some Dell Dimension Dxxx machines from the ashes of the past, grabbed a D233 as it says “made for Windows 95” on it. Why 95 when we’re about to leap into a new century? Simple, that’s as late of an OS as the vendor supports, and I’m tired of installing DOS 6.22, despite it being the last decent OS out of Redmond. But I digress, as usual, so anyways I grabbed a Windows 95 OSR 2.5 CD and went to install it. Having not done that in a few years, here is what I have decided are my favorite things about it.

  1. You can’t install it off the installer CD, you need a boot floppy.
  2. You have to partition the disk using fdisk first, in DOS, or use something else.
  3. The included fdisk is trash, it doesn’t display the sizes correctly. Use the 98 disk, but even it has, erm, issues.
  4. There’s no format command on the boot floppy, it’s actually on the CD, which you can’t boot to.
  5. The OG one is FAT, 2GB anyone?
  6. FAT16 is there, mostly, wow a whole 32GB disk, I’m blessed.
  7. You can make the disk larger than 32, up to 128GB, and it’ll run but you can’t run things like ScanDisk, 2^16 is all it speaks. Oh, and fdisk tells you it’s 64GB when it’s really 128GB so, yea, there’s that.
  8. USB didn’t hit until OSR2.5, OG and 2.0 had no USB. You can install it on 2.0 using an update, but it wants to run ScanDisk first. You did make it only 32GB, yes?
  9. It takes 37 restarts to get everything installed. On a good day.
  10. Undetected devices will forever go undetected unless you undetect the undetectedness before installing the correct drivers.

I am sure I’ll remember more but that’s good for now. Gonna go see that Matrix movie this week, hear it’s good.

Laterz

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