That’s not a typo. Windows 96 promised to build on the success of Windows 95, yet it never materialized as originally intended.
I only learned about this a few months ago. To me, this was an incredibly fascinating discovery and wanted to write about & share it.
Back in 1997 I worked overnight at a bank running their backup software. Lots of sitting around being bored. I took it upon myself to change the Windows 95 startup logo to say Windows 96 on a number of computers. Someone out there remembers Windows 96.
So much nostalgia for the Windows 95/98 era.
Playing Descent with musicmatch jukebox running in the background. (Probably a 98 memory).
Bouncing sheep…
I love windows 96
This is a very good article, but this part peeved me on a petty level (as well as explaining why there’s precious little in the way of screenshots):
While I can’t find any uploads that are set to run on their website in a virtual computing session, the files are available to download if you felt like spinning up a piece of computing history.
The opportunity to do a little investigative journalism is right there, and the blog author didn’t take it
Hi, author here 👋. Thanks for the feedback. If the Internet Archive had it on their own VM to run, I would’ve tried playing with it and taken some screenshots. However, I simply did not have the time to get it running locally on my machine, especially because I’m all Mac and Virtual Box doesn’t run on M-series hardware.
I agree it’s a missed opportunity, but I chose to go a little bit of an easier route.
Thanks for reading and enjoying the other 99% of the article. 😉
I was trained on making repairs to Windows 95, there was never a 96. There was a Windows ME which was fucking horrible! My step mom had it on a laptop. Then Windows 2000, which was the best, once you install the other disc that fixed the 250,000 bugs that Windows 2000 came with the original disc. Man those were the days that I could distribute those operating systems on as many computers I wanted with the one disc.
I was actually part of the beta test group for Windows Nashville. It was an improvement over Windows 95, but Windows 98 really brought home a lot of good UI design improvements that began in Windows Nashville. Sadly, it was so buggy that they delayed for several years and, instead, just released Windows 98 when it was finally ready.
Windows Longhorn was a similar failure a few years later
Oh, the name Longhorn unlocked some memories just now…
Windows Vista is Microsoft’s greatest success, because it’s main purpose was to make people forget the promises made for Longhorn.
I do kinda wish we had gotten WinFS. All the “ideas” of it seemed cool, just impossible to implement without breaking every existing application.
FS?
As in “F’ing Shit”?
If I recall, it was a new file system. So instead if folders, every file would just kind of have tags and could be dynamically grouped like that. I could very well be wrong, but I remember being excited for it.
Can we please have a FUSE FS like this?
I was curious, so I found this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3263036/file-system-that-uses-tags-rather-than-folders
One of the projects they mention is tagfs, which sounds like it does what you want: http://github.com/marook/tagfs
Ha, thanks for searching!
