Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-24, 16:55:What's wild to me is how quickly operating systems changed. […]
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gerry wrote on 2023-10-24, 15:43:
Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-20, 23:50:
I've compiled a list of "ultimate" gaming build specs by year from 1994 to 1999. It's based on what should have been available up to December 31 of that particular year. A lot of specs were compiled from old magazines and some educated guesses about when certain hardware was made available.
interesting list and thread 😀
a reminder of jut how much things were moving back then - the gulf between 94 and 99 (and think between 89 and 94 too!)
What's wild to me is how quickly operating systems changed.
From 1994 to 2001 we went from DOS -> Windows 95 -> Windows 98 -> Windows XP. Four operating systems in just seven years.
Meanwhile over the past dozen years I've only used two: Windows 7 and Windows 10.
Well, you're missing NT 3.5, NT 3.51, NT 4, and Windows 2000 as well.
Over the past dozen years, there was also 8 and 8.1, but those were... doomed.
But I think it's important to understand one core thing about the 1980-2000ish period, especially in operating systems. People knew how to design robust operating systems; the original UNIX on PDPs dates back to the early 1970s. But those operating systems needed expensive hardware - memory, MMUs, lots of other things. So PCs (whether DOS, Mac, etc) in the early 1980s launched with, frankly, bad operating systems. But hey, those were the best operating systems that you could run on the hardware in your budget.
What happened in the course of the 1990s, in particular, is that the hardware got dramatically better. More memory, more clock rates, but also built in MMUs, built-in FPUs, etc. And so... the operating system world basically struggled to go from the lousy, unreliable, single-tasking-focused operating systems of the 1980s to much more robust operating systems, while trying not to break software compatibility too much.
In Windows world, you see this with Win9x, which were lousy operating systems but were able to run 32-bit software using the Win32 API on relatively affordable hardware (and also had excellent compatibility with DOS at a time when lots of people still wanted to run WP5.1 for DOS). NT 3.1/3.5/3.51/4 were much better operating systems, but their RAM requirements (16+ megs at a time when that would cost thousands of dollars) alone made them unattainable for most. By 2000, hardware had improved to such a point that you could run an NT-based OS on a lot of things, and by 2003-4, your grandmother could run an NT-based OS on a Dell Dimension 2400 for however little money those cost. And since you were already running 32-bit Win32 software on 95/98... well, certainly most productivity software moved over to NT-based OSes just fine, games less so.
People were very, very eager to embrace new operating systems until, well, Vista, because, for most people, every operating system they had used prior to XP was garbage. (Win2000 fans, obviously, would disagree, but not that many people used 2000). So the bar was really "is Win98 RTM on release day any worse than Win95?" and the answer was usually no.
In Mac world, you see a less orderly transition but a struggle with basically the same issue. The classic Mac OS was designed for a single-tasking system and made a whole number of (dumb) architectural decisions based on that assumption. By 1991, they wanted to have multi-tasking always enabled and the hardware was powerful enough to do it, but MultiFinder was a giant, ugly hack. Apple struggled to develop a more modern operating system (anyone remember Copland and Gershwin?) until eventually, they bought NeXT, developed two compatibility mechanisms for existing software, and moved forward with NeXT's *NIX-based OS. And while Apple has had a lot more OS versions between 10.0 and today's Sonoma, after the first couple of OS X releases, most were relatively minor revisions.
(I should note, I have been unable so far to get a retro 98SE machine working... I do have two vintage Macs that can boot the classic OS, and... while the classic Mac OS is a brilliant quirky piece of engineering, it's also amazing how bad a lot of things, particularly dealing with multitasking, are when you've been used to Win95/98, NT, and OS X for 25 years. These were not robust operating systems...)