Indeed. Even Win95 would seem like a recent operating system to me if I weren't constantly reminded by the web (and other media) how ancient it is - if its existence is even acknowledged, that is - many sources seem unaware of anything older than XP. Only 5? The newer one of my two workstations is from 2000 or -01. The older one is from 1995 or -96, and was originally a 133 MHz Pentium (classic, not MMX), with a 1.2 GB IDE drive, 4x CD-ROM, Opti924 sound and S3 Trio64 video. I think the AT case (minitower) and power supply are the only parts that haven't been upgraded: the current specs include AMD K6-III CPU, 73 GB 10k RPM SCSI disk, SCSI CD-RW, AWE32 sound and Matrox Millennium II graphics, but I still count on further upgrades. Also a very significant upgrade was the replacement of the original Win95 keyboard with a proper one with full-size space bar, Ctrl and Alt keys in place of the irritational typo-introducing windoze keys. It came with Win95, but I went back to DOS 6+Win3.x for a while until I learnt about BootGUI=0. Win95 was then used until long after Win98 was released - until around the time that I found out about 98lite. By the time that I got the newer workstation (this one that I'm using now), I had learnt some lessons and only minor upgrades have been necessary or even interesting (e.g. from 9GB to 73GB disk, 128 to 512 MB RAM, 400 MHz Celeron to 500 MHz P3). The stupid Nvidia graphics driver (Riva TNT) also forced me to switch to Matrox graphics (G400). Due to the existence of so much poorly written software that runs slowly even on a 500 MHz Pentium3, I may upgrade to a 1.x GHz CPU (in fact, I already have several, but I need a Socket3xx->Slot1 adapter). Of course, this machine also runs Win98 (SE with many fixes and modifications). The servers run Unix/Linux systems, and are easily accessed over the network from the Win98 machines, which greatly reduces the need to switch the workstations to Unix. I've had more security incidents (including break-ins resulting in full root compromise) with Linux servers than with Win98 machines. All of the machines included in the comparison have (or had) been permanently on-line for years with no firewalls and with public IP-addresses. Try that with an XP box! I upgraded because I found that Win9x with BootGUI=0 actually is more DOS-compatible than Win3.x, not to mention more stable and otherwise more capable in many ways. The DOS-compatibility is the main reason why I haven't traded Win9x for Unix/Linux. It's not necessarily better than Winamp, but I play mp3s on a nearby Linux server and connect its line-out port to the line-in port of the SB-AWE64 card of my Win98 box. This allows me to hear the music as soon as autoexec.bat initialises the sound card, and before booting the GUI. Yes, it would be great to scrap the old 16-bit GUI (Win16 - that is GDI.EXE, KRNL386.EXE, etc.) in favour of a new one based on the X Window System (as used on Unix/Linux). The VMM/VxD layer (mainly VMM32.VXD which contains most core VxDs) really only needs modest upgrades, but due to the lack of source code and documentation that's a more demanding task than it might seem at first. There are better alternatives than NTFS - eg. the XFS or ReiserFS of Linux. Most operating systems used 32-bit file offsets until fairly recently (I think the switch from 16 to 32-bit occurred in the 16-bit Bell Labs Research Unix V.7 in approximately 1979), and large file support took time. The kernel and device drivers were the quick part, while it was a long time until applications were upgraded to support the new (usually 64-bit) APIs. I don't. I don't own a single DVD, and only received a DVD-player yesterday... Yes, indeed. I thought they had gone as far as they could possibly dare to with XP, but Vista proves that they believe users (and hardware manufacturers) will tolerate anything, which seems an accurate assumption so far, but I think Windows will start to decline in terms of market share, especially considering that competition is increasing.
