Why Windows 95 Crashed So Often

windows 95 was a big deal it gave us the start button featured usb support and made people who weren't alive in the 1960s aware of who the rolling stones are but despite all that let's be real windows 95 and its successors windows 98 and especially me collectively referred to as windows 9x were buggier than a roach motel it might be tempting to lay the blame on the less powerful hardware of the time especially considering that many of windows vista's problems were a result of pc makers installing it on below spec computers but it turns out the main reason windows 9x was so maddening was that the operating system was built like a house of cards you see all three of these os's were based on ms-dos which was released all the way back in 1981 and even though windows looked very different it shared lots of the code with dos under the hood and as a metaphor well putting an infotainment system and some heated seats in an 81 bonneville isn't exactly going to make it run the same as a modern car the reason that microsoft built windows 95 this way was because they wanted users to be able to run familiar dos programs and wanted the os to run well on older hardware and to be fair to microsoft windows 95 largely achieved these goals but doing so came at an unavoidable cost we'll tell you exactly what they gave up right after we thank grammarly for sponsoring this video grammarly is here to help you answer your emails draft proposals and save time grammarly provides comprehensive spelling and grammar suggestions to ensure your writing is mistake free and polished simply download the free desktop app log in and start typing there's also grammarly premium which provides more in-depth feedback on your writing such as tone adjustments to well adjust your tone and sound more confident there's even full sentence rewrite feature that helps you rephrase hard to read sentences so go to grammarly.com techwiki to sign up for a free account and get 20 off grammarly premium today the stability problems ultimately boiled down to the fact that dos was not meant to be a true multitasking operating system although a big part of microsoft's marketing was how well the new windows taskbar would make it super easy to switch between programs that underlying dos code was built more for something called cooperative multitasking what this meant was that dos relied on programs voluntarily relinquishing cpu time if the user wanted to switch to a different program this wasn't a big problem in dos because users were nearly always just trying to use one program at a time not only were there hardware and software limitations that kneecapped how many programs you could conceivably run and an interface that steered you toward exiting a program rather than minimizing it but early users largely thought in a single task paradigm windows 9x though was supposed to allow you to have lots of things open simultaneously to enable this windows 95 introduced preemptive multitasking which is the same scheme we use today in preemptive multitasking the os has much more control over programs because it steps in and divvies up cpu time on its own rather than waiting for the programs to do it but the problem back in the windows 9x days was that this was really only implemented for newer 32-bit programs and there were plenty of old 16-bit software people were still using that didn't exactly play by the rules a huge problem that you would run into was that older code would often access another program's memory space or even the memory space of windows itself 16-bit programs and especially dos mode device drivers were especially notorious for doing this as during the dos days programs and drivers were allowed to access far more of the system's hardware directly than they are today so when you try to get those pieces of software to work in an environment where there are lots of other programs running at the same time it often wasn't a pretty picture there were other problems as well even newer 32-bit device drivers actually shared memory space with the windows kernel itself meaning that the entire operating system was vulnerable to poorly written software in more ways than one windows 9x also did itself no favors by doing a poor job of freeing up memory that was no longer being used by a program a problem called a memory leak which reduced the amount of memory available to other programs resulting in slowdowns and eventually a crash of course the windows versions of today aren't perfect but they're a heck of a lot more stable than the battle days we've been talking about in this episode so what changed well even before windows 95 came out microsoft already had an alternate version of windows called windows nt this version didn't have the old dos code that made 9x so buggy was built from the ground up for seamless multitasking support and crucially had the ability to isolate each program's memory space much more effectively but as an operating system intended for more professional and workstation use nt had higher system requirements and wouldn't support a lot of the older programs and hardware most users still needed however in 2001 microsoft released windows xp the first version of windows based on the nt kernel that was aimed at home users they were able to do this because the windows 9x family flawed as it may have been steered developers toward coding for 32-bit operating systems compatible with newer hardware after a few years of this microsoft finally felt confident enough to ditch those weird dos windows hybrids and the antique kernel continues to power windows to this day but if you really miss windows 95 there's nothing stopping you from changing your desktop background to cyan hooking up a cd-rom drive and playing some space cadet pinball in your browser you can even kick your tower once in a while if you missed the instability yup gotta love that sometimes i kicked mine to get it to start working again uh usually i just had to unplug it though so thanks for watching like the video if you liked it dislike it if you didn't check out our other videos like um the one i did on redbox that was fun and comment with video suggestions down below and don't forget to subscribe and follow follow like ring the bell you mean yeah ring the bell click the little bell yes thank you bye

Channel: Techquickie

Views: 513,096

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Id: _FlgCM5H85I

Length: 5min 21sec (321 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 19 2022