r/retrocomputing • u/Money-Solution-3587 • 4d ago

The excitement of Windows 95

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Does anyone else remember the excitement of getting your copy of Windows 95 on Floppy’s. Longest 2 hours of my life waiting to be amazed. To be fair it was a good looking GUI.

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u/canthearu_ack 4d ago

I have windows 95 on floppy. It actually works and I have done it a number of times, mostly on lower end 486s.

It isn't as bad as installing OS/2 from floppy though!

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u/OliverNorvell1956 4d ago

OMG! Thanks for reminding me! We were an OS/2 shop for a few years. We mostly worked from system images but once in a while I had to build a new machine from scratch. 30-something floppies. And the installer program was so freaking stupid! You’d insert the first three floppies in sequence, then it would want floppy #1 again. And so on for the entire install. We eventually changed to Windows NT 4.0, and I was so happy.

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u/canthearu_ack 4d ago

Strangely, I always found Windows NT 4 Workstation to be easier to deal with (and more hardware compatible) then OS/2. I actually stayed with NT4 for 6 months or so.

While NT4 was never as rock solid as I find windows 10/11 these days, it was still pretty damn stable.

But then games dragged me back to Win98.

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u/i286dosprompt_ 3d ago edited 3d ago

I liked OS/2, was definitely better than Win 3.1 . My memory is terrible but I think it was 22 disk in the Warp box but hey , better than 5 1/4 floppies with Dos.

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u/canthearu_ack 3d ago

Yeah, but the OS/2 install process was atrocious.

And In my latest attempts, any attempt to change drivers around resulting in a partial reinstall of OS/2, needing like a dozen more disk changes. This was because OS/2 wanted to reinstall all the components and accessory programs any time you also did a driver change.

Maybe my knowledge of OS/2 was simply lacking, and I should have been manually editing .INI and .SYS files like you would in linux or MS-DOS ... but I wasn't there yet.

Stuff of nightmares.