Microsoft went crazy with Windows 95 marketing and release.
They also spent 3m (reported between 8m-15m at the time though -- which was massive for its day) on licensing Stones' Start Me Up.And they actually sent some shitty live version which would have avoided paying their old bassist. Jerks.
The hype was real though. I can still remember installing the floppy version on one of my first PCs. The first start up was like Star Trek level awe. It was so radically different and cool. Imho, Windows 95 is probably one of, if not, the most important software release of all time. Shaped how PC technology was used for the next 4 decades and still going strong.
I miss the 90s where every next iteration or release of hardware/software was generally a huge improvement. Like going from a 120mb hard drive to 1.6gb disk. Or getting your first CD-ROM after only having floppies, or CD-Writer (parents bought a 1x SCSI CDR the first year consumer ones came out -- made lots of coasters). Dial up to cable internet. The feeling of experiencing those new technologies was unmatched. It created such a since of awe, inspiration and wild imagination of possibilities. I don't get that feeling much these days.
> The story took another surprising turn in 1993, when Wyman's 30-year-old son from his first marriage, Stephen, married Smith's mother, Patsy, then aged 46, making Smith her own step-grandfather’s ex-wife.
It was pretty groundbreaking tbh. Many of the UI paradigms are still used today. Windows 95 introduced the start menu and the task bar, windows 3.11 didn't have them in that form. The start menu was just an applications folder (a bit like on Mac) and the task bar was some shortcuts on what was basically the desktop. I don't think windows 3 had a registry either. It really became what we still know as windows today.
Of course the architecture sucked deeply with its dos based heritage but they fixed that soon after when NT 4 came out. And 2000 made that a stable experience.
I remember it was a pretty exciting time. I was studying computer science and we tried early beta builds ("Chicago") that had leaked.
For working with data, I certainly like lists and trees with automated layout and dislike 2d space with human drag-and-drop layouts.
I assume most people are like this, and the start menu was a huge improvement. Most people would have been lost if it was just windows and icons freely floating in a 2d space.
> Windows 95 introduced the start menu and the task bar,
True.
> windows 3.11 didn't have them in that form.
It didn't have them in _any_ form. It had the Program Manager and the File Manager, inherited from OS/2 1.1.
> The start menu was just an applications folder
No, it wasn't.
> (a bit like on Mac)
Again no. Not at all.
The Start menu is a hierarchical browser showing a tree constructed on-the-fly from the storage on disk. That storage is just a folder, yes, but it's a folder containing shortcuts and folders. It does not contain anything else: no binaries, no programs, no config. Just directories full of shortcuts.
(For hardcore Unix folks: "shortcuts" are Windows >= 95's version of symlinks, with more and richer metadata, but they are filer-GUI-level only and are not understood by the shell, because the shell predates them by a decade or more.)
> and the task bar was some shortcuts on what was basically the desktop.
Nope, not at all. It's a rich UI in its own right with half a dozen separate interacting components: in Win95, it contained the start menu, then a window switcher, then a notification area containing sub-controls (as separate applets) and the clock.
It is more complex and sophisticated than the only 2 limited bits of prior art: the icon bar in Acorn's RISC OS, and the Dock in NeXTstep, which was influenced by RISC OS.
> I don't think windows 3 had a registry either.
It did, but all it stored were file associations: the 3 letter extensions on the end of filenames, and what app opened what file extension.
> It really became what we still know as windows today.
This is from and old post on a news group a long time ago and I can't find it anymore, so here's citing from my murky brain:
Q: Did Microsoft really pay Mick Jagger $3M to license "Start Me Up" by the Rolling Stones during the Windows 95 product launch event?
A: No. They paid $3M to license only a part of the song. They omitted the lines "You made a grown man cry" and "You made a dead man cum"
I remember my father had installed Windows 3.10 (not 3.11) on our home pc (I must have been 6-7 at the time). I complained that it was just awkward to use compared to DOS and all games required you to reboot in DOS anyway. I didn't see the point with a graphical OS.
> experiencing those new technologies was unmatched
I think about this a lot and it feels like there's still massive advancements. Obviously AI is up there, but also smartphones, star link, autonomous (presumably) driving, noise canceling headphones, robotics.
I agree the 90s were way more exciting. The tech was moving fast but also the vibe was much more positive and optimistic. Today we might have massive breakthroughs in tech but we constantly feel like society is doomed and said tech might actually just destroy our jobs.
You could be right, I am much older and much more jaded than I was in those bright-eyed years. I could just simply have different perspective now.
Although, you made me think of the last time I felt that feeling was the first iPhone release. Going from our Nokia's with snake to the iPhone was also quite the experience. I remember my uncle getting one very, very early, maybe even pre-release and we went out for a big family dinner and there was like 15 of us just crowded around my uncle watching him use random apps. No one had ever seen anything like that before.
The problem/challenge w/ LLM's is we've been building interactive chat bots since the IRC days, probably earlier so the interface doesn't feel new. And no one really understand what's going on behind the scenes other than "it does stuff" and "sometimes it get's it right and sometimes... not so much". It's a weird technology lol
To me, the current AI boom is more like when McDonald's became available in my neck of the woods after '89. Amazing at first, but then you realize it's mostly sloppy grease that has its uses.
The wild technology race of the 90s, on the other hand, felt like a magical new dimension opening up. Maybe just because it took much longer to get thoroughly turned into a vector for BS.
lol, we also did that. And we a Cyrix chip so our computer was pretty slow (but fast for the time) and you had to shut down absolutely everything, even the screensaver, that damn thing coming on is probably responsible for at least 100 coasters haha. Any sort of PC stutter and you were presented with that damn buffer underrun error message.
I was like 12 or 13 and wanted to install linux, like slackware 2.0 or some shit lol. But I didn't know about iso's, just FTP. So I was trying to download every single file from a unpacked linux distro on a ftp site with a 14.4k modem. Then I'd burn them and try to install. I think it took me nearly 500 cds before I got a working install. The install would get like 60% and die on some corrupt package/file, I'd redownload that file, burn it again, run the install... 61% crash, repeat... I did get that sucker installed though. insanity lmao
I'm so grateful for flat LCD screens. Man, all those CRT boxes. Yikes.
The rest of this video, it doesn't look like the world has changed all that much since 1995. Computing just kind of looks the same. I guess minus the lack of phones in everyone's hands.
Progress is a little slower this days in hardware, but it's there. Last year I finally assembled a new PC after surviving almosta a decade on my old laptop. The hardware spec jump made me remember old days. 8x more memory, 10x faster disk, 4x more cores and each one 2x faster!!! Gpu has as much memory as my previous laptop after upgrading it! Seeing the cpu usage and temps, also seeing how much data now I can download from net (I also got fiber recently and lan in old laptop was not working) was exhilarating. I can now ask my computer a question and it will respond (but slowly, local llm)!
To me the jump from my GF's celeron laptop with 2GB to her current 8GB high end Celeron (i5-i7 speeds, almost) and a Intel UHD was as big as a Pentium III 500 with a TNT2 compared to a Pentium 4 with SSE2 and a Geforce 2ti/3. A big jump in very few years from the PIII, for 12 years the gap of the laptop and the current one it's nothing.
By comparison the El Cheapo laptop she bought should have been able to play RTX bound games, and yet we are stuck there. Remember, 12 years it's 2x the time.
Except for the GL 2.1 ->Vulkan/GL 4.6 jump and videos from 1080p to 4k, the jump isn't that big. I would expect more. For young HNers, if the progress was like the 90s, in 12 you would buy a laptop for $300 and maybe play an RTX raytraced Quake... virtualized.
There were stories floating around at the time of people who were interested in buying it, having no idea what it was, not owning a computer and not realizing you needed one to use it.
I completely agree with you. Our family's first computer ran Windows 3.1. Moving to Windows 95 was a huge revelation about the potential that a computer could unleash.
Windows 98 too with IE remover where you could decouple it from the shell andd use Win95's shell on top. Yeah, libre software solved it with ease today with Classic Shell and back in the day under any Unix/GNU/BSD with FVWM+RXvt against boated DE's or environments (maybe people won't know, but FVWM despite its features and look it was actually lighter than TWM) did the same surprise to me. Cycles mattered even under an Athlon, and as I loved emulation every non related cycle for MAME, PCSX and some new emulators was a waste on resources.
Ditto for multimedia and games.
Oh, and sometimes MPlayer can still be faster than MPV with legacy machines. And the same happens with some Mplayer ports (or MPCHC which should borrow lots of code) against WMP or VLC itself.
My sister and I were so excited to discover this on the CD as we were clicking through every folder. Awesome song that kicked off a love of the blue album, Pinkerton and the green album. (I had off-campus lunch privileges, so was sent to Borders to pick up copies of the green album on release day.)
We'd heard of Happy Days, but we didn't know if the show was like it was portrayed in the video. We may have thought the band was from Wisconsin. I don't think either of us ever became Happy Days fans.
> My sister and I were so excited to discover this on the CD as we were clicking through every folder.
This was a common experience back then, you got ahold of some new "piece of software" and you started discovering new stuff in it.
My fondest memory ever is one day in February 2001 browsing through the Windows 98 Add/Remove Windows Components dialog and realizing I could install the same Desktop Themes I remembered from like 1996 from my friend who had been lucky enough to have Plus! for Windows 95 (which had, years before, disappeared from his computer in that endless virus/reinstall cycle that characterized those times). Next day I showed the themes to said friend and we were speechless.
It was this promise of endless discovery that made me want to study CS.
I want to give a huge shout out to the UK magazine PC Format for the most absolute banger 90s magazine CD that I ever encountered.
It didn't just have Demos of new games, if you poked around you'd find that it had "this cool program called Scream Tracker 3" and a whole bunch of these ".MOD files" that played music that sounded like a CD![0]
[0] - Well, it was the 90s, and typical bundled multimedia speakers were so bad you couldn't tell the difference...
At their best they had an exceptional amount of demoscene / game development content overall, as well as several full (usually "previous") versions of various creative software like 3D modeling or photo editing apps.
Later on with the Internet biting into the cover disk magazines, they started to steadily fall towards the lowest common denominator and shift to the gamer lad segment. But I wouldn't have had as much fun with computers if it wasn't for a subscription back in the day. Thanks for the reminder.
This is fairly common in warmer climes in the US like California. Rather than have a monolithic high school building with lots of wasted space for hallways they will have a bunch of smaller buildings that students go between outside. They are "campuses" in the same sense that various tech companies call their cluster of buildings a "campus".
I remember watching a TV show set in socal (Beverly Hills 90210 maybe?) in the late 80s I think? And them having high schools and even lockers outdoors just blew my mind.
Decades later Apple put U2 on everyone's iPhone and people got mad... (/s, yeah the album was a gift on people's account, ready to download to the phone but not taking space otherwise, but I would've found it obnoxious too).
This video was also on the CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc .. holy smokes, let's rewind time 30 years, where the presidential sex scandal was singular, consensual, and was actually a scandal!
Sony wasted several gigs of the very small (32g to 120g) and very expensive ssds of the time with 2 copies of a Spider Man 3 movie pre-loaded onto several different laptops. One copy in the normal installed fs, another copy in the recovery partition.
And you couldn't even watch the movie unless you also paid to unlock it.
You could delete the normal copy if you even knew it was there and then also used a disk usage util to FIND the actual file. But you couldn't do anything about the copy in the recovery image except delete the recovery partition and basically wipe & repartition the drive and do your own fresh install.
I've sworn off Sony products - well, as much as one can do so - for the past, what, 20 years? - because of that. It's kind of funny to me because I don't usually have a high opinion of "wallet activism", but one day when I was 20 I found out I had a rootkit installed on my computer by Sony and now they are _dead to me_.
The perception was: my iTunes library is mine, and it's invasive for Apple to put something in there without my permission.
Whereas: the Windows 95 CD is Microsoft's, Microsoft is free to put what they want on there. I bet most people who weren't nerds or curious kids never even found it!
Music videos on the Windows 95 CD didn't occupy space on your hard disk, either. As long as the operating system still fit on the CD-ROM, it didn't matter what other extras were on it.
And at the same time, Apple claimed it was the biggest ever album release by number of downloads, or something like that. They were not only messing with our libraries, they were claiming we wanted it and were in fact U2 fans.
If you had Spotify running and then pressed the quick-play on your phones it would continue where it was, but after a reboot the iPhone would auto-play from Apple Music instead if Spotify hadn't been started.
So tapping play on your headphones would start those damn U2 songs "by accident" because it's the only thing that was on the Apple Music accounts we aren't using.. yeah no thanks.
And Siri still plays it for me when it doesn't understand me because I have nothing else in my music library and it's still not possible to remove it :( :( I hate U2 and I don't have homepods to play music. But deleting it from the library just puts it back
There was something about iTunes at that time where every time I started my car it would connect to my phone and start playing that U2 album regardless of what I had been listening to earlier. It just would not go away.
There's still something about CarPlay that does that kind of thing but not tied to a specific song. I'll be in my car listening to the car's radio, with my phone on its mount but inactive and all is well. The phone connected wirelessly to CarPlay when I started the car, but I'm not using any CarPlay features on this trip.
Then I need to activate the phone (say I'm pulling into the McDonalds parking lot and need to look at the McD app to get my drive thru pickup code for my order), so I tap it and swipe up...and the car switches to playing in whatever app I last used in CarPlay such as Podcasts or Spotify.
If I hit the media button to bring up the car's media selection screen and switch it back to radio that plays for a few seconds and then it switches back to CarPlay.
If on the phone I go to the now playing thingy in control center and hit the gizmo for selecting where to play I can explicitly switch it from CarPlay to iPhone Speaker and then it stops messing with the radio.
Some Googling and some asking LLMs turned up that a lot of people have problems with CarPlay overriding the car's entertainment system and apparently nobody has a fully satisfactory way to deal with it. Some people have addressed it by using Shortcuts automation to pause playback whenever the phone wakes up. They still get interrupted, but at least it doesn't keep interrupting.
I have a 2010 Honda. I found a usb port in the glove box. When I plug in my phone there is a 50% chance it will start playing my iTunes library alphabetically. (I get a Neville Brothers song, which isn’t so bad, I put it in there)
It was much worse than just adding it to your library as a gift. The cover art for the album[1] would appear in seemingly random places on your phone. And there was literally zero way to remove it, until there was such an uproar that Apple had to make a special tool.
Apple spent money on this and they really, really wanted to force feed it to every Apple user (not unlike their F1 movie venture). It was incredibly obnoxious.
1 - And it isn't homophobic to note that the Songs of Innocence cover art looked a bit like you were browsing Grindr or something. People have the right to have the opinion that having that image suddenly being featured on their phone might be misinterpreted by others.
... It's a shirtless man hugging the waist of another shirtless man. The cover art doesn't even have any text on it, but instead is just a picture of a couple of shirtless dudes in an incredibly weird pose. Yeah, I'm sure lots of fathers find themselves in scenes just like this. Totes normal.
"Not every picture of two men is sexual."
Yes, no shit. Of course on HN someone would try this morally righteous horseshit, especially hilarious when it's served with a side of "Duh, of course!"
But you know what the picture represents because you were quite literally told how to interpret it. I don't want some picture I didn't ask for suddenly appearing on my lock screen (because most of us actually had empty libraries, so when this "gift" was added and the device did its fun "autoplay" nonsense, it would suddenly be active media), walking around saying to anyone who might catch site "Oh don't worry, it's an artistic image of a father protecting his son or something"
I wasn't told how to interpret it, I saw an unusual picture and, where you apparently jumped the conclusion that it was two men that were obviously about to have sex and that it would be a scandalous statement on your own sexuality if anyone were to see you with that picture, I chose to look up what the explanation was. I can only imagine how much you must clutch your pearls when naval aviators play volleyball together in the movies.
Then you detail how you had to look up how to interpret this. Amazing stuff. Like, do you realize you just destroyed your own nonsense? Doing the "Duh, obviously" bit and then saying "this picture was so weird I had to be told what it meant" is quite the self-own.
"where you apparently jumped the conclusion that it was two men that were obviously about to have sex "
Save this boorish troll Reddit righteous-brigading garbage from HN. How isn't your garbage post far in the negatives?
Yes, you're so enlightened and better than thou. Howler.
It's an extremely odd picture to be on one's homescreen. Some people have their dog, some their wife, and then Bob here, he has two strange shirtless men in an extremely odd pose. Not even any normal album cover text to make it clear it's an album cover. Just a picture of two shirtless men.
No, I'm not saying "it's obviously a father and a son", I'm saying "it's not obviously sexual or gay and it's weird that you were so concerned about that interpretation that you were embarrassed about it". I didn't immediately know it was his son and represented innocence. I did immediately know that it was probably not something sexual, and I went looking for an answer instead of panicking about anyone seeing me looking at it.
For a guy who complains about reddit so much, you sure seem intent on having a deliberately obtuse reddit-style "gotcha" argument. I'm not really here for that. I hope you remain safe from phone images that scandalize you and those around you.
In this vastly unlikely passive aggressive hypothetical scenario, you're imagining that a random person who might see your screen would be as triggered by the image as you were. Most people had figured out by then that two men together are no more offensive or evil than a man and a woman.
> holy smokes, let's rewind time 30 years, where the presidential sex scandal was singular, consensual, and was actually a scandal!
Or 11 years, when the scandal was that the president wore a tan suit [1]:
> U.S. representative Peter King, a member of the Republican Party, deemed the suit's color combined with the subject matter of terrorism to be "unpresidential". He went on: "There's no way, I don't think, any of us can excuse what the president did yesterday. I mean, you have the world watching"
The lesson of tan suit learned by modern politicians: if you don't feed the media plenty of juicy things to be made into outrage pornography they will invent some. Much better to do the inventing yourself and keep people afraid and angry in the direction of the other guy.
Nobody cared because nobody knew what an mp3 was in 1995. Most people - everyone but a minority of tech-minded audio producers - considered digital audio on a computer just a novelty. It took another four years until the public started to associate a music collection with the computer (ie: 1999, when Napster came out).
everyone [...] considered digital audio on a computer just a novelty
Personal computers, in 1995, did not have the juice to play high quality audio and video. Media formats used less efficient compression and harddisks were smaller (most couldn't fit a whole CD of PCM audio).
And, in 1995, there were no portable device options - as far as I know - to play audio files, on-the-go. For high-quality digital audio, it was pretty much either DAT cassettes, or CDs (recordable CDs were too new for normal people to own).
On the internet, a few sites, such as radio stations, streamed audio using 'realaudio'. The sound quality was abysmal.
At the same time, the tech industry was in the midst of a 'multimedia' bubble. 'Multimedia' essentially referred to programs on CD-ROMs that could play postage-stamp sized videos and short snippets, or low-quality snippets, of audio.
The music environment became closer to today's in 1999 - with Napster - when the public discovered mp3s, and closer still in 2001 - with Apple's introduction of the iPod - when the public discovered portable music players.
I don’t remember U2 being a gift being ready to download. It was automatically put on all my devices in iTunes. I think it’s still there but I use Spotify instead of iPods and iTunes.
I think there were two problems with the U2 thing...
First, U2's general public perception as far as grandstanding[0]...
I think the bigger subconscious part was, at the time, Apple stuff was still premium price compared to most other brands, and the consumer perceived price of a U2 album, i.e. "It would cost me 10-15$ to buy this at Media Play^W^W FYE^W Best buy or wherever, couldn't they have made the contract price 10-15$ (which back then may have been as much as 5-10% of cost) cheaper"?
Cause I know an ex-partner bitched about that.
And, to other's comments, they bitched about the bono stuff popping up randomly playing music...[1]
[0] - I mean there was a whole south park episode about Bono's grandstanding...
[1] - Interestingly, the South Park episode was good therapy for her.
That’s a very confident recount given that it’s completely false. Good for you that you’ve memory-holed it. But don’t turn around and act like everyone else was insane.
Maybe you don’t remember iTunes mechanics at the time, but this “gift” as you call it would get in the way all the time. I’d always end up accidentally playing it. It’d always be present in library views when I did not care for it. It couldn’t be truly removed until Apple built a custom web page where you could request it to be removed from your account.
Honestly it was the cover art and title, not the album itself. Without context, it’s easy for all of our internet-jaded minds to get a very wrong idea about what the album relates to.
And your music library is a very personal thing. For some people, it represents part of their identity. It can feel wrong to have something you may not like or agree with stuck in there.
'Consensual' sex between a 50 year old President - the most powerful man in the world - and a 21 year old intern. Yeah right.
Clinton had a decades-long history of being a sexual predator. He was repeatedly accused of rape. He was also active with his friendship with Epstein during those years, which I think everybody understands what that means at this point.
> let's rewind time 30 years, where the presidential sex scandal was singular, consensual, and was actually a scandal
You're right: now we learned that same ex-president was frequenting Epstein's island. Did that ex- president have sex with trafficked women (Ghislaine Maxwell is in jail for sex-trafficking and she was a known friend of the Clintons btw) on Epstein's island? Was it consensual?
As a teenager I found this video on the Windows 95 CD without context and for some time after I thought that Weezer was a 60's band that just had a style way ahead of their time.
Crowding around our first ever computer, a 120mhz pentium with 16mb of RAM and a 1.6gb hard disk, watching that Weezer video on the CRT monitor with my whole family is a cherished memory.
I kept scrolling because the line in the article “It’s like, there’s one video on YouTube, and it’s your video” rung hollow considering the CD had two music videos on it and I played them over and over.
Yeah, it's a shame. I usually enjoy Raymond Chen's posts, but this doesn't tell me anything particularly interesting other than that the band didn't know. The main question I have is: why this video? What's the story behind the choice?
Our family's Packard Bell in 1996 came with a full-motion video game called Silent Steel. Coming from a 486, FMV video games sure felt like the future.
It was pretty much Choose Your Own Adventure, but with video. You had to know the exact sequence of actions to get to a "good" ending, and apparently there were several endings. For the mid 90's, the script, acting, and sets (and CGI) were actually not half-bad. But mapping out all the choices that didn't kill you while watching the same set of clips over and over was not as much fun as it sounds.
That sounds really familiar—I think that must have been on my Packard Bell from that era too.
Mine also came with a CD-ROM game called The Journeyman Project. I think there was also a "Family Cooking" CD with recipes and maybe demo videos as well, and also a home repair CD (presumably intended as the equivalent of home ec and shop, for female and male users, now that I think about it), along with Microsoft Encarta and some sort of health guide on CD-ROM, maybe from the Mayo Clinic.
I also remember this recording (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/d3HThl75oug?app=desktop) of a man with a thick accent saying "computers today need more power: the power of sound," which I guess was a sound card demo, though I can't remember where it was on the computer.
Also there was packard bell navigator. I still have all the shovelware cds from that machine. Other stuff was Tuneland, which was narrated by howie mandel and my little brother loved, Sports Illustrated clips, and some weird not very good reference books. Maybe there were some creation tool demos, I vaguely remember corel draw and some 3d took.
It was never clear to me if the journeyman project was a demo or a full game- I remember getting stuck pretty quickly.
> Some time ago, I noted that the Windows 95 CD contained a variety of multimedia extras
That "some time ago" is 20 years ago. It is crazy that Raymond has been able to consistently write historical yet fun blog posts for decades. What a dedication.
Even longer, 1995 is over 30 years ago now. I remember playing this clip over and over at the time (there wasn't a heck of a lot of digital video clips to play in 95!).
This music video was the reason we decided to upgrade the CD-ROM drive on our family computer, since it could not play without stuttering on our existing one.
I think folks forget this was part of it. PC's were being sold as supporting "multimedia" and Intel was selling chips with "Multimedia extensions". Just playing a video at all was a big deal.
Video was rare. You weren't downloading videos over 56k dialup (I remember leaving the modem running all night to download movie trailers from Apples Trailers website (only available in Quicktime format of course)
Not so much in the 90s; But during 2003/2004, with a 56k modem, an unlimited dialup plan, a second phone line, software to redial when the internet dropped, and bittorrent: I was managing to download roughly 150-200MB of data per day (sometimes more)
I could download one of those 350 DivX/Xvid rips every second day. At one point, someone was posting 60MB .rmvb encodes of Stargate SG1. From memory, the quality wasn't great, but I could download 2-3 per day.
I wish I still had some of those 60MB .rmvb encodes, just so I could see exactly how bad the quality was. But I deleted them all, and they seem to have disappeared from the internet.
The "RealMedia Variable Bitrate" codec was essentially a prototype of H.264 (which is still widely used today) but predating it by a year or two.
I remember getting my hands on a rip of Titanic, burned onto 3 CD-ROMs in 1997/1998 before it was released to video. I used the CD burner at school to sell copies to other students, and got in trouble for it lol. Just having a copy of the movie before it was released was really something.
I just went through a bunch of old CDs that had DivX rips on them a couple of years ago. Binders with hundreds of CDs. I thought that they would still look decent and I was going to back them up... back to my hard drive. But no they were really terrible. I donated the binder to Goodwill, hoping that someone might find the surprise...
They were fine when you had a CRT TV to play them on, we even had a DVD player from LiteOn that would play DivX videos back then.
I downloaded a shit-ton of anime over 56k via CuteMX in 2000. I used to start the download before bed and then watch the episode the next day after school.
Little 12fps postage-stamp-sized RealPlayer/RealMedia video files. I still have them if you want to check them out.
Any time you get mad about a streaming service who seems to have changed music or a credits clip for a TV show or movie, this is basically why.
To get the rights to use things in technologies that didn't exist when the media was created, you often have to go back to everyone involved and get their permission. Sometimes they don't say yes, or they aren't findable, or just aren't alive, and it's not clear who owns the rights anymore.
This isn't as much of a problem with newer media, because contracts now specify what happens with new technologies, but old contracts were often limited to specific technologies.
IIRC, I was able to watch the videos on my 486. It was quite something being able to do that l, while in Windows 95 and switching between apps. Prior to that, I’d only seen FMV in a few video games.
Back in 1997 or so I bought an ATI video card that also had a Weezer video on the CD. I remember being amazed that it could play the video at 1024x768 with just a little bit of tearing.
Henry Winkler (the Fonz) went on to become a big-name Hollywood producer—he executive produced the original MacGyver—so he was probably one of the easiest to contact.
I found it somewhat interesting that they had to track down all the actors from Happy Days. You would think that there would be one single point of contact with whomever made the video, cause it's not like they were using the footage of the actors in a new way.
But honestly, I'm ok with it being only somewhat interesting. When you write as many posts as Mr. Chen does, they aren't all going to be bangers.
> You would think that there would be one single point of contact with whomever made the video, cause it's not like they were using the footage of the actors in a new way.
That depends. Licensing is a weird nuanced beast. The original video could have received a license to broadcast on something like MTV. MS didn't want to broadcast it, but distribute it. That's an entirely different thing in the licensing world. The fees also change depending on broadcast/distribute. The number of units would be considered and fees based accordingly.
I liked this one because that video on that CD was a big part of my childhood.
But yeah, same here. The worse ones are the ones from Apple / Steve Jobs that are meant to be cute and quirky but are actually just examples of sociopathy.
Microsoft went crazy with Windows 95 marketing and release.
They also spent 3m (reported between 8m-15m at the time though -- which was massive for its day) on licensing Stones' Start Me Up.And they actually sent some shitty live version which would have avoided paying their old bassist. Jerks.
The hype was real though. I can still remember installing the floppy version on one of my first PCs. The first start up was like Star Trek level awe. It was so radically different and cool. Imho, Windows 95 is probably one of, if not, the most important software release of all time. Shaped how PC technology was used for the next 4 decades and still going strong.
I miss the 90s where every next iteration or release of hardware/software was generally a huge improvement. Like going from a 120mb hard drive to 1.6gb disk. Or getting your first CD-ROM after only having floppies, or CD-Writer (parents bought a 1x SCSI CDR the first year consumer ones came out -- made lots of coasters). Dial up to cable internet. The feeling of experiencing those new technologies was unmatched. It created such a since of awe, inspiration and wild imagination of possibilities. I don't get that feeling much these days.
> they actually sent some shitty live version which would have avoided paying their old bassist.
Their old bassist did not make for good PR... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandy_Smith
> The story took another surprising turn in 1993, when Wyman's 30-year-old son from his first marriage, Stephen, married Smith's mother, Patsy, then aged 46, making Smith her own step-grandfather’s ex-wife.
that's a stroke inducing sentence right there
Yeehaw
yikes. didn't know about any of that.
It was pretty groundbreaking tbh. Many of the UI paradigms are still used today. Windows 95 introduced the start menu and the task bar, windows 3.11 didn't have them in that form. The start menu was just an applications folder (a bit like on Mac) and the task bar was some shortcuts on what was basically the desktop. I don't think windows 3 had a registry either. It really became what we still know as windows today.
Of course the architecture sucked deeply with its dos based heritage but they fixed that soon after when NT 4 came out. And 2000 made that a stable experience.
I remember it was a pretty exciting time. I was studying computer science and we tried early beta builds ("Chicago") that had leaked.
For working with data, I certainly like lists and trees with automated layout and dislike 2d space with human drag-and-drop layouts.
I assume most people are like this, and the start menu was a huge improvement. Most people would have been lost if it was just windows and icons freely floating in a 2d space.
> Many of the UI paradigms are still used today.
True.
> Windows 95 introduced the start menu and the task bar,
True.
> windows 3.11 didn't have them in that form.
It didn't have them in _any_ form. It had the Program Manager and the File Manager, inherited from OS/2 1.1.
> The start menu was just an applications folder
No, it wasn't.
> (a bit like on Mac)
Again no. Not at all.
The Start menu is a hierarchical browser showing a tree constructed on-the-fly from the storage on disk. That storage is just a folder, yes, but it's a folder containing shortcuts and folders. It does not contain anything else: no binaries, no programs, no config. Just directories full of shortcuts.
(For hardcore Unix folks: "shortcuts" are Windows >= 95's version of symlinks, with more and richer metadata, but they are filer-GUI-level only and are not understood by the shell, because the shell predates them by a decade or more.)
> and the task bar was some shortcuts on what was basically the desktop.
Nope, not at all. It's a rich UI in its own right with half a dozen separate interacting components: in Win95, it contained the start menu, then a window switcher, then a notification area containing sub-controls (as separate applets) and the clock.
It is more complex and sophisticated than the only 2 limited bits of prior art: the icon bar in Acorn's RISC OS, and the Dock in NeXTstep, which was influenced by RISC OS.
> I don't think windows 3 had a registry either.
It did, but all it stored were file associations: the 3 letter extensions on the end of filenames, and what app opened what file extension.
> It really became what we still know as windows today.
True.
This is from and old post on a news group a long time ago and I can't find it anymore, so here's citing from my murky brain:
Good heavens. That I didn't notice.
I remember my father had installed Windows 3.10 (not 3.11) on our home pc (I must have been 6-7 at the time). I complained that it was just awkward to use compared to DOS and all games required you to reboot in DOS anyway. I didn't see the point with a graphical OS.
Then came Windows 95 and my mind was blown.
I miss that kind of iteration. New OS releases actually meant new technology, better tools, a more refined UX.
How did we end up in a world with Windows 11 and Liquid Glass? So sad.
> How did we end up in a world with Windows 11 and Liquid Glass? So sad.
Nostalgic memories of daily BSODs ensue
> experiencing those new technologies was unmatched
I think about this a lot and it feels like there's still massive advancements. Obviously AI is up there, but also smartphones, star link, autonomous (presumably) driving, noise canceling headphones, robotics.
I agree the 90s were way more exciting. The tech was moving fast but also the vibe was much more positive and optimistic. Today we might have massive breakthroughs in tech but we constantly feel like society is doomed and said tech might actually just destroy our jobs.
You could be right, I am much older and much more jaded than I was in those bright-eyed years. I could just simply have different perspective now.
Although, you made me think of the last time I felt that feeling was the first iPhone release. Going from our Nokia's with snake to the iPhone was also quite the experience. I remember my uncle getting one very, very early, maybe even pre-release and we went out for a big family dinner and there was like 15 of us just crowded around my uncle watching him use random apps. No one had ever seen anything like that before.
The problem/challenge w/ LLM's is we've been building interactive chat bots since the IRC days, probably earlier so the interface doesn't feel new. And no one really understand what's going on behind the scenes other than "it does stuff" and "sometimes it get's it right and sometimes... not so much". It's a weird technology lol
The last 3 years of LLM progress, to me, feel like 1994-1998.
I don't know. The novelty of LLMs faded very quickly for me.
I think they're scaling down in novelty quicker than they're scaling up in capability.
Still easy to be surprised if you stop paying attention for a while though.
Agree! I've been computering for 50 years and for me the significant milestones have been:
- rdbms
- PC
- Internet and email
- SaaS
- Mobile
- social media
- LLMs
I doubt that LLMs will be anything like as significant to our futures as social media though. And not in an entirely good way.
Except this time there isn’t a strong hacker counter culture.
Where are the greybeards in their flip flops? Where are the teen prodigies?
Everyone is sucking corporate dick, myself included
To me, the current AI boom is more like when McDonald's became available in my neck of the woods after '89. Amazing at first, but then you realize it's mostly sloppy grease that has its uses.
The wild technology race of the 90s, on the other hand, felt like a magical new dimension opening up. Maybe just because it took much longer to get thoroughly turned into a vector for BS.
> made lots of coasters
Haha we would leave the room and avoid walking near the computer when the burner was running. Thanks for bringing back a memory :)
lol, we also did that. And we a Cyrix chip so our computer was pretty slow (but fast for the time) and you had to shut down absolutely everything, even the screensaver, that damn thing coming on is probably responsible for at least 100 coasters haha. Any sort of PC stutter and you were presented with that damn buffer underrun error message.
I was like 12 or 13 and wanted to install linux, like slackware 2.0 or some shit lol. But I didn't know about iso's, just FTP. So I was trying to download every single file from a unpacked linux distro on a ftp site with a 14.4k modem. Then I'd burn them and try to install. I think it took me nearly 500 cds before I got a working install. The install would get like 60% and die on some corrupt package/file, I'd redownload that file, burn it again, run the install... 61% crash, repeat... I did get that sucker installed though. insanity lmao
The ad, for the curious:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P0AJM6HMYjM
I'm so grateful for flat LCD screens. Man, all those CRT boxes. Yikes.
The rest of this video, it doesn't look like the world has changed all that much since 1995. Computing just kind of looks the same. I guess minus the lack of phones in everyone's hands.
And the fact that the UIs are less responsive and have worse UX now.
My UI is pretty responsive. Of course, I also don't run MacOS or Windows, so...
I guess you also don't run any Electron apps?
Didn't they also pay Brian Emo to make the little startup jingle?
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/how-brian-eno-created-the-micro...
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/technology/brian-eno-donates...
Is “Start Me Up” the song that goes, “you make a grown man cry”?
Our group replaced the “dead man” at the end with Bill Gates.
Amongst other bodily excretions
Progress is a little slower this days in hardware, but it's there. Last year I finally assembled a new PC after surviving almosta a decade on my old laptop. The hardware spec jump made me remember old days. 8x more memory, 10x faster disk, 4x more cores and each one 2x faster!!! Gpu has as much memory as my previous laptop after upgrading it! Seeing the cpu usage and temps, also seeing how much data now I can download from net (I also got fiber recently and lan in old laptop was not working) was exhilarating. I can now ask my computer a question and it will respond (but slowly, local llm)!
To me the jump from my GF's celeron laptop with 2GB to her current 8GB high end Celeron (i5-i7 speeds, almost) and a Intel UHD was as big as a Pentium III 500 with a TNT2 compared to a Pentium 4 with SSE2 and a Geforce 2ti/3. A big jump in very few years from the PIII, for 12 years the gap of the laptop and the current one it's nothing.
By comparison the El Cheapo laptop she bought should have been able to play RTX bound games, and yet we are stuck there. Remember, 12 years it's 2x the time. Except for the GL 2.1 ->Vulkan/GL 4.6 jump and videos from 1080p to 4k, the jump isn't that big. I would expect more. For young HNers, if the progress was like the 90s, in 12 you would buy a laptop for $300 and maybe play an RTX raytraced Quake... virtualized.
There were stories floating around at the time of people who were interested in buying it, having no idea what it was, not owning a computer and not realizing you needed one to use it.
I completely agree with you. Our family's first computer ran Windows 3.1. Moving to Windows 95 was a huge revelation about the potential that a computer could unleash.
and tweaking 95 with nlite so it was blazing fast after stripping all useless stuff, great era
Windows 98 too with IE remover where you could decouple it from the shell andd use Win95's shell on top. Yeah, libre software solved it with ease today with Classic Shell and back in the day under any Unix/GNU/BSD with FVWM+RXvt against boated DE's or environments (maybe people won't know, but FVWM despite its features and look it was actually lighter than TWM) did the same surprise to me. Cycles mattered even under an Athlon, and as I loved emulation every non related cycle for MAME, PCSX and some new emulators was a waste on resources. Ditto for multimedia and games.
Oh, and sometimes MPlayer can still be faster than MPV with legacy machines. And the same happens with some Mplayer ports (or MPCHC which should borrow lots of code) against WMP or VLC itself.
I mean, yes, true, but there wasn't much to strip out of Win95!
I know. I did it. PC Pro magazine paid me to fit it into a very early SSD, which only held 16MB.
There was only 24MB of installation files!
https://winworldpc.com/product/windows-95/rtm
It took more installed, obviously. 16MB was hard but I did it. No help, no fonts, not even Notepad, but it ran.
Nlite came into its own with Win98 and especially Win98SE. You could cut that down by half easily. No IE, for instance. I used Opera.
It is still around!
https://www.nliteos.com/
Always enjoy Raymond Chen's musings.
My sister and I were so excited to discover this on the CD as we were clicking through every folder. Awesome song that kicked off a love of the blue album, Pinkerton and the green album. (I had off-campus lunch privileges, so was sent to Borders to pick up copies of the green album on release day.)
We'd heard of Happy Days, but we didn't know if the show was like it was portrayed in the video. We may have thought the band was from Wisconsin. I don't think either of us ever became Happy Days fans.
> My sister and I were so excited to discover this on the CD as we were clicking through every folder.
This was a common experience back then, you got ahold of some new "piece of software" and you started discovering new stuff in it.
My fondest memory ever is one day in February 2001 browsing through the Windows 98 Add/Remove Windows Components dialog and realizing I could install the same Desktop Themes I remembered from like 1996 from my friend who had been lucky enough to have Plus! for Windows 95 (which had, years before, disappeared from his computer in that endless virus/reinstall cycle that characterized those times). Next day I showed the themes to said friend and we were speechless.
It was this promise of endless discovery that made me want to study CS.
I want to give a huge shout out to the UK magazine PC Format for the most absolute banger 90s magazine CD that I ever encountered.
It didn't just have Demos of new games, if you poked around you'd find that it had "this cool program called Scream Tracker 3" and a whole bunch of these ".MOD files" that played music that sounded like a CD![0]
[0] - Well, it was the 90s, and typical bundled multimedia speakers were so bad you couldn't tell the difference...
At their best they had an exceptional amount of demoscene / game development content overall, as well as several full (usually "previous") versions of various creative software like 3D modeling or photo editing apps.
Later on with the Internet biting into the cover disk magazines, they started to steadily fall towards the lowest common denominator and shift to the gamer lad segment. But I wouldn't have had as much fun with computers if it wasn't for a subscription back in the day. Thanks for the reminder.
mod files include their own samples, so they could have very easily been (close to) CD quality while still being quite small.
You only need to encode the notes you play on the instruments you use.
> I had off-campus lunch privileges, so was sent to Borders to pick up copies of the green album on release day.
What kind of college doesn't allow students to leave for lunch? Lord.
Probably a US high school, where off-campus lunch is usually reserved for older students.
That's fine...never heard high school grounds referred to as a campus before so assumed college.
This is fairly common in warmer climes in the US like California. Rather than have a monolithic high school building with lots of wasted space for hallways they will have a bunch of smaller buildings that students go between outside. They are "campuses" in the same sense that various tech companies call their cluster of buildings a "campus".
I remember watching a TV show set in socal (Beverly Hills 90210 maybe?) in the late 80s I think? And them having high schools and even lockers outdoors just blew my mind.
The climate makes it work. I wish it was like that for my high school, but alas we just had the stifling building.
High school ... 20+ years ago probably
That's fine...never heard high school grounds referred to as a campus before so assumed college.
Others covered it. This was high school, not college. :) it was upperclassmen only and your parents or bad grades could get the privilege revoked.
School grounds are also commonly called campuses in the US, not just colleges. Our high school called it “off-campus lunch”.
Loosely related - Weezer’s lead singer writes code regularly https://github.com/riverscuomo
He curates his own tags. I knew it. https://github.com/riverscuomo/mp3tagger
Rivers is a legend, for many reasons!
Decades later Apple put U2 on everyone's iPhone and people got mad... (/s, yeah the album was a gift on people's account, ready to download to the phone but not taking space otherwise, but I would've found it obnoxious too).
This video was also on the CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc .. holy smokes, let's rewind time 30 years, where the presidential sex scandal was singular, consensual, and was actually a scandal!
Sony wasted several gigs of the very small (32g to 120g) and very expensive ssds of the time with 2 copies of a Spider Man 3 movie pre-loaded onto several different laptops. One copy in the normal installed fs, another copy in the recovery partition.
And you couldn't even watch the movie unless you also paid to unlock it.
You could delete the normal copy if you even knew it was there and then also used a disk usage util to FIND the actual file. But you couldn't do anything about the copy in the recovery image except delete the recovery partition and basically wipe & repartition the drive and do your own fresh install.
... That is the most Sony thing ever lol
Indeed.
I don't know how Sony could top this, except possibly by also suing everyone.
Shipping rootkits on their music CDs?
Funny how people seem to have forgotten that.
I've sworn off Sony products - well, as much as one can do so - for the past, what, 20 years? - because of that. It's kind of funny to me because I don't usually have a high opinion of "wallet activism", but one day when I was 20 I found out I had a rootkit installed on my computer by Sony and now they are _dead to me_.
And somebody probably got a fat bonus for that shovelware.
The perception was: my iTunes library is mine, and it's invasive for Apple to put something in there without my permission.
Whereas: the Windows 95 CD is Microsoft's, Microsoft is free to put what they want on there. I bet most people who weren't nerds or curious kids never even found it!
Music videos on the Windows 95 CD didn't occupy space on your hard disk, either. As long as the operating system still fit on the CD-ROM, it didn't matter what other extras were on it.
And at the same time, Apple claimed it was the biggest ever album release by number of downloads, or something like that. They were not only messing with our libraries, they were claiming we wanted it and were in fact U2 fans.
Totally. Windows CD was a gift box to explore, nothing in it was intrusive.
Because it auto-played when you didn't want to.
If you had Spotify running and then pressed the quick-play on your phones it would continue where it was, but after a reboot the iPhone would auto-play from Apple Music instead if Spotify hadn't been started.
So tapping play on your headphones would start those damn U2 songs "by accident" because it's the only thing that was on the Apple Music accounts we aren't using.. yeah no thanks.
THIS WAS THE ISSUE 100% - every single time I rode in a car with an iPhone connected to the ICE, that damn U2 album would autoplay.
And Siri still plays it for me when it doesn't understand me because I have nothing else in my music library and it's still not possible to remove it :( :( I hate U2 and I don't have homepods to play music. But deleting it from the library just puts it back
UX at its finest.
But not U2 at their finest, though
There was something about iTunes at that time where every time I started my car it would connect to my phone and start playing that U2 album regardless of what I had been listening to earlier. It just would not go away.
There's still something about CarPlay that does that kind of thing but not tied to a specific song. I'll be in my car listening to the car's radio, with my phone on its mount but inactive and all is well. The phone connected wirelessly to CarPlay when I started the car, but I'm not using any CarPlay features on this trip.
Then I need to activate the phone (say I'm pulling into the McDonalds parking lot and need to look at the McD app to get my drive thru pickup code for my order), so I tap it and swipe up...and the car switches to playing in whatever app I last used in CarPlay such as Podcasts or Spotify.
If I hit the media button to bring up the car's media selection screen and switch it back to radio that plays for a few seconds and then it switches back to CarPlay.
If on the phone I go to the now playing thingy in control center and hit the gizmo for selecting where to play I can explicitly switch it from CarPlay to iPhone Speaker and then it stops messing with the radio.
Some Googling and some asking LLMs turned up that a lot of people have problems with CarPlay overriding the car's entertainment system and apparently nobody has a fully satisfactory way to deal with it. Some people have addressed it by using Shortcuts automation to pause playback whenever the phone wakes up. They still get interrupted, but at least it doesn't keep interrupting.
I have a 2010 Honda. I found a usb port in the glove box. When I plug in my phone there is a 50% chance it will start playing my iTunes library alphabetically. (I get a Neville Brothers song, which isn’t so bad, I put it in there)
It was much worse than just adding it to your library as a gift. The cover art for the album[1] would appear in seemingly random places on your phone. And there was literally zero way to remove it, until there was such an uproar that Apple had to make a special tool.
Apple spent money on this and they really, really wanted to force feed it to every Apple user (not unlike their F1 movie venture). It was incredibly obnoxious.
1 - And it isn't homophobic to note that the Songs of Innocence cover art looked a bit like you were browsing Grindr or something. People have the right to have the opinion that having that image suddenly being featured on their phone might be misinterpreted by others.
[flagged]
... It's a father trying to protect his son from the world's dangers. Not every picture of two men is sexual.
... It's a shirtless man hugging the waist of another shirtless man. The cover art doesn't even have any text on it, but instead is just a picture of a couple of shirtless dudes in an incredibly weird pose. Yeah, I'm sure lots of fathers find themselves in scenes just like this. Totes normal.
"Not every picture of two men is sexual."
Yes, no shit. Of course on HN someone would try this morally righteous horseshit, especially hilarious when it's served with a side of "Duh, of course!"
But you know what the picture represents because you were quite literally told how to interpret it. I don't want some picture I didn't ask for suddenly appearing on my lock screen (because most of us actually had empty libraries, so when this "gift" was added and the device did its fun "autoplay" nonsense, it would suddenly be active media), walking around saying to anyone who might catch site "Oh don't worry, it's an artistic image of a father protecting his son or something"
I wasn't told how to interpret it, I saw an unusual picture and, where you apparently jumped the conclusion that it was two men that were obviously about to have sex and that it would be a scandalous statement on your own sexuality if anyone were to see you with that picture, I chose to look up what the explanation was. I can only imagine how much you must clutch your pearls when naval aviators play volleyball together in the movies.
"I wasn't told how to interpret it"
Then you detail how you had to look up how to interpret this. Amazing stuff. Like, do you realize you just destroyed your own nonsense? Doing the "Duh, obviously" bit and then saying "this picture was so weird I had to be told what it meant" is quite the self-own.
"where you apparently jumped the conclusion that it was two men that were obviously about to have sex "
Save this boorish troll Reddit righteous-brigading garbage from HN. How isn't your garbage post far in the negatives?
Yes, you're so enlightened and better than thou. Howler.
It's an extremely odd picture to be on one's homescreen. Some people have their dog, some their wife, and then Bob here, he has two strange shirtless men in an extremely odd pose. Not even any normal album cover text to make it clear it's an album cover. Just a picture of two shirtless men.
"naval aviators"
Again, Reddit look-at-the-crowd bullshit.
No, I'm not saying "it's obviously a father and a son", I'm saying "it's not obviously sexual or gay and it's weird that you were so concerned about that interpretation that you were embarrassed about it". I didn't immediately know it was his son and represented innocence. I did immediately know that it was probably not something sexual, and I went looking for an answer instead of panicking about anyone seeing me looking at it.
For a guy who complains about reddit so much, you sure seem intent on having a deliberately obtuse reddit-style "gotcha" argument. I'm not really here for that. I hope you remain safe from phone images that scandalize you and those around you.
In this vastly unlikely passive aggressive hypothetical scenario, you're imagining that a random person who might see your screen would be as triggered by the image as you were. Most people had figured out by then that two men together are no more offensive or evil than a man and a woman.
> holy smokes, let's rewind time 30 years, where the presidential sex scandal was singular, consensual, and was actually a scandal!
Or 11 years, when the scandal was that the president wore a tan suit [1]:
> U.S. representative Peter King, a member of the Republican Party, deemed the suit's color combined with the subject matter of terrorism to be "unpresidential". He went on: "There's no way, I don't think, any of us can excuse what the president did yesterday. I mean, you have the world watching"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_tan_suit_controve...
The lesson of tan suit learned by modern politicians: if you don't feed the media plenty of juicy things to be made into outrage pornography they will invent some. Much better to do the inventing yourself and keep people afraid and angry in the direction of the other guy.
Nobody cared because nobody knew what an mp3 was in 1995. Most people - everyone but a minority of tech-minded audio producers - considered digital audio on a computer just a novelty. It took another four years until the public started to associate a music collection with the computer (ie: 1999, when Napster came out).
To flesh out my comment with more context...
Personal computers, in 1995, did not have the juice to play high quality audio and video. Media formats used less efficient compression and harddisks were smaller (most couldn't fit a whole CD of PCM audio).And, in 1995, there were no portable device options - as far as I know - to play audio files, on-the-go. For high-quality digital audio, it was pretty much either DAT cassettes, or CDs (recordable CDs were too new for normal people to own).
On the internet, a few sites, such as radio stations, streamed audio using 'realaudio'. The sound quality was abysmal.
At the same time, the tech industry was in the midst of a 'multimedia' bubble. 'Multimedia' essentially referred to programs on CD-ROMs that could play postage-stamp sized videos and short snippets, or low-quality snippets, of audio.
The music environment became closer to today's in 1999 - with Napster - when the public discovered mp3s, and closer still in 2001 - with Apple's introduction of the iPod - when the public discovered portable music players.
I don’t remember U2 being a gift being ready to download. It was automatically put on all my devices in iTunes. I think it’s still there but I use Spotify instead of iPods and iTunes.
I think there were two problems with the U2 thing...
First, U2's general public perception as far as grandstanding[0]...
I think the bigger subconscious part was, at the time, Apple stuff was still premium price compared to most other brands, and the consumer perceived price of a U2 album, i.e. "It would cost me 10-15$ to buy this at Media Play^W^W FYE^W Best buy or wherever, couldn't they have made the contract price 10-15$ (which back then may have been as much as 5-10% of cost) cheaper"?
Cause I know an ex-partner bitched about that.
And, to other's comments, they bitched about the bono stuff popping up randomly playing music...[1]
[0] - I mean there was a whole south park episode about Bono's grandstanding...
[1] - Interestingly, the South Park episode was good therapy for her.
That’s a very confident recount given that it’s completely false. Good for you that you’ve memory-holed it. But don’t turn around and act like everyone else was insane.
Maybe you don’t remember iTunes mechanics at the time, but this “gift” as you call it would get in the way all the time. I’d always end up accidentally playing it. It’d always be present in library views when I did not care for it. It couldn’t be truly removed until Apple built a custom web page where you could request it to be removed from your account.
Apple also put the music video for The Old Apartment by Barenaked Ladies on the Mac OS 8 CD.
Edie is also married to Paul Simon of all people. The story of how they got together is very sweet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRBcsiUnk44
Imagine that's the worst that happens to "your" library. Good times. We really need to bring the idea of ownership back.
https://www.howtogeek.com/playstation-is-deleting-tv-shows-f...
https://www.npr.org/2009/07/24/106989048/amazons-1984-deleti...
> Good times.
That, of course, being the other track on some editions of Win95's CD.
Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians, "Good Times".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc
Yes, yes. Everything comes back to personal property and freedoms. Whatever. Americans are so tiring.
Honestly it was the cover art and title, not the album itself. Without context, it’s easy for all of our internet-jaded minds to get a very wrong idea about what the album relates to.
And your music library is a very personal thing. For some people, it represents part of their identity. It can feel wrong to have something you may not like or agree with stuck in there.
'Consensual' sex between a 50 year old President - the most powerful man in the world - and a 21 year old intern. Yeah right.
Clinton had a decades-long history of being a sexual predator. He was repeatedly accused of rape. He was also active with his friendship with Epstein during those years, which I think everybody understands what that means at this point.
[flagged]
That one woman’s name? Juanita Broaddrick.
> let's rewind time 30 years, where the presidential sex scandal was singular, consensual, and was actually a scandal
You're right: now we learned that same ex-president was frequenting Epstein's island. Did that ex- president have sex with trafficked women (Ghislaine Maxwell is in jail for sex-trafficking and she was a known friend of the Clintons btw) on Epstein's island? Was it consensual?
I’m a huge fan of “be that as it may” to stop arguments that are essentially “yeah, but…!” This is a prime example.
BE THAT AS IT MAY, that’s not what we are talking about. This isn’t a Facebook comments section.
Don't worry. The current president is mentioned in those files "over a million times" according to a congressperson.
Thankfully nothing will be done, of course. Rome truly is in decline
[flagged]
As a teenager I found this video on the Windows 95 CD without context and for some time after I thought that Weezer was a 60's band that just had a style way ahead of their time.
Me too
Crowding around our first ever computer, a 120mhz pentium with 16mb of RAM and a 1.6gb hard disk, watching that Weezer video on the CRT monitor with my whole family is a cherished memory.
Few months ago I learnt there's Edie Brickell's Good Times video on Win 95 CD:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okt9GcWiWmE
There's also Weezer? Whoa. Of course I did experience Win 95. My 1st PC (96/97 ??) came with it. Never bother to mess with the instalation CD, though.
I kept scrolling because the line in the article “It’s like, there’s one video on YouTube, and it’s your video” rung hollow considering the CD had two music videos on it and I played them over and over.
This is quite short and doesn't really contain any insights or details that aren't simply obvious or easily assumed.
Yeah, it's a shame. I usually enjoy Raymond Chen's posts, but this doesn't tell me anything particularly interesting other than that the band didn't know. The main question I have is: why this video? What's the story behind the choice?
Our family's Packard Bell in 1996 came with a full-motion video game called Silent Steel. Coming from a 486, FMV video games sure felt like the future.
It was pretty much Choose Your Own Adventure, but with video. You had to know the exact sequence of actions to get to a "good" ending, and apparently there were several endings. For the mid 90's, the script, acting, and sets (and CGI) were actually not half-bad. But mapping out all the choices that didn't kill you while watching the same set of clips over and over was not as much fun as it sounds.
That sounds really familiar—I think that must have been on my Packard Bell from that era too.
Mine also came with a CD-ROM game called The Journeyman Project. I think there was also a "Family Cooking" CD with recipes and maybe demo videos as well, and also a home repair CD (presumably intended as the equivalent of home ec and shop, for female and male users, now that I think about it), along with Microsoft Encarta and some sort of health guide on CD-ROM, maybe from the Mayo Clinic.
I also remember this recording (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/d3HThl75oug?app=desktop) of a man with a thick accent saying "computers today need more power: the power of sound," which I guess was a sound card demo, though I can't remember where it was on the computer.
Yeah it was mayo clinic.
Also there was packard bell navigator. I still have all the shovelware cds from that machine. Other stuff was Tuneland, which was narrated by howie mandel and my little brother loved, Sports Illustrated clips, and some weird not very good reference books. Maybe there were some creation tool demos, I vaguely remember corel draw and some 3d took.
It was never clear to me if the journeyman project was a demo or a full game- I remember getting stuck pretty quickly.
Sega CD had several games like that too. "Night Trap" was the most well known, and gained some notoriety for a bit of laughably tame footage.
What about Sewer Shark?
Absolutely!
Packard Bells shipped with MegaRace which blended studio video, with main character Lance Boyle, with the game engine for a seamless experience.
that style of game came and went fairly quickly, for good reasons.
> Some time ago, I noted that the Windows 95 CD contained a variety of multimedia extras
That "some time ago" is 20 years ago. It is crazy that Raymond has been able to consistently write historical yet fun blog posts for decades. What a dedication.
Even longer, 1995 is over 30 years ago now. I remember playing this clip over and over at the time (there wasn't a heck of a lot of digital video clips to play in 95!).
The OP is referring to the original article [1] that Raymond Chen published on his blog, which was posted on January 3rd, 2006 (20 years ago).
[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060103-52/?p=32...
I personally prefer Windows XP including David Byrne's "Like Humans Do" as the demo track for Windows Media Player
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMeivIkwf_I
Apple put Barenaked Ladies’ The Old Apartment video on the Mac OS 8 CD as a QuickTime demo
I thought it was the song “one week.” But a quick search shows that song was on the MacOS 8.5 disk.
There were always little interesting stuff on those discs. Some music cds at the time came with “macromedia” stuff. Wonder if that still works..
This music video was the reason we decided to upgrade the CD-ROM drive on our family computer, since it could not play without stuttering on our existing one.
I think folks forget this was part of it. PC's were being sold as supporting "multimedia" and Intel was selling chips with "Multimedia extensions". Just playing a video at all was a big deal.
Video was rare. You weren't downloading videos over 56k dialup (I remember leaving the modem running all night to download movie trailers from Apples Trailers website (only available in Quicktime format of course)
> You weren't downloading videos over 56k dialup
Sure you could.
Not so much in the 90s; But during 2003/2004, with a 56k modem, an unlimited dialup plan, a second phone line, software to redial when the internet dropped, and bittorrent: I was managing to download roughly 150-200MB of data per day (sometimes more)
I could download one of those 350 DivX/Xvid rips every second day. At one point, someone was posting 60MB .rmvb encodes of Stargate SG1. From memory, the quality wasn't great, but I could download 2-3 per day.
I wish I still had some of those 60MB .rmvb encodes, just so I could see exactly how bad the quality was. But I deleted them all, and they seem to have disappeared from the internet.
The "RealMedia Variable Bitrate" codec was essentially a prototype of H.264 (which is still widely used today) but predating it by a year or two.
I remember getting my hands on a rip of Titanic, burned onto 3 CD-ROMs in 1997/1998 before it was released to video. I used the CD burner at school to sell copies to other students, and got in trouble for it lol. Just having a copy of the movie before it was released was really something.
I just went through a bunch of old CDs that had DivX rips on them a couple of years ago. Binders with hundreds of CDs. I thought that they would still look decent and I was going to back them up... back to my hard drive. But no they were really terrible. I donated the binder to Goodwill, hoping that someone might find the surprise...
They were fine when you had a CRT TV to play them on, we even had a DVD player from LiteOn that would play DivX videos back then.
Yeah... Farscape took quite a long time to download on 56K.
> You weren't downloading videos over 56k dialup
I downloaded a shit-ton of anime over 56k via CuteMX in 2000. I used to start the download before bed and then watch the episode the next day after school.
Little 12fps postage-stamp-sized RealPlayer/RealMedia video files. I still have them if you want to check them out.
Any time you get mad about a streaming service who seems to have changed music or a credits clip for a TV show or movie, this is basically why.
To get the rights to use things in technologies that didn't exist when the media was created, you often have to go back to everyone involved and get their permission. Sometimes they don't say yes, or they aren't findable, or just aren't alive, and it's not clear who owns the rights anymore.
This isn't as much of a problem with newer media, because contracts now specify what happens with new technologies, but old contracts were often limited to specific technologies.
IIRC there was also an Edie Brickell video.
Loved that song. Just listened to it again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc
You don't even have to try-y
"Hey, did anyone try the fish tonight?"
"It's not so good, Al"
The Weezer video was quirky, funny, creative, catchy and appealing to multiple generations. A stroke of genius by Microsoft.
IIRC, I was able to watch the videos on my 486. It was quite something being able to do that l, while in Windows 95 and switching between apps. Prior to that, I’d only seen FMV in a few video games.
We used to see who had the most powerful PC by seeing how many videos we could play at once. Long with Robroy and whatever other video was on there.
Back in 1997 or so I bought an ATI video card that also had a Weezer video on the CD. I remember being amazed that it could play the video at 1024x768 with just a little bit of tearing.
Henry Winkler (the Fonz) went on to become a big-name Hollywood producer—he executive produced the original MacGyver—so he was probably one of the easiest to contact.
He’s one hell of an attorney too.
Licensing?
I read the whole thing (all several paragraphs of it) and the answer is, indeed: Licensing.
It's approximately the least-interesting article I've read this year.
I found it somewhat interesting that they had to track down all the actors from Happy Days. You would think that there would be one single point of contact with whomever made the video, cause it's not like they were using the footage of the actors in a new way.
But honestly, I'm ok with it being only somewhat interesting. When you write as many posts as Mr. Chen does, they aren't all going to be bangers.
> You would think that there would be one single point of contact with whomever made the video, cause it's not like they were using the footage of the actors in a new way.
That depends. Licensing is a weird nuanced beast. The original video could have received a license to broadcast on something like MTV. MS didn't want to broadcast it, but distribute it. That's an entirely different thing in the licensing world. The fees also change depending on broadcast/distribute. The number of units would be considered and fees based accordingly.
There's a "footnote video" with slightly more details:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CowQzSVKr8c
People like different things, most of the things on the internet are mildly interesting at best, I found it more interesting than a lot things I read.
Is there any way to make this submission even less interesting? Perhaps we can speculate about parts being written by AI. Did you see any em dashes?
It's just a journal style entry, its not bad that its boring, but its so bland. It will become LLM fodder I'm sure.
We all will. Ashes to ashes.
It was so random finding that on the CD, I remember having no idea why it was there.
It's well known that Bill Gates's favorite band is Weezer, so this feels unsurprising.
He’s ride or die
This is Edie Brickell erasure!
I got weezered by Raymond. what is going on?
The art of storytell—
[dead]
I must confess that these kind of corporate storie make me throw up in my mouth. (Yes, I have karma to burn, hit me)
Pah, I gave you an upvote just to spite you. ;p
I liked this one because that video on that CD was a big part of my childhood.
But yeah, same here. The worse ones are the ones from Apple / Steve Jobs that are meant to be cute and quirky but are actually just examples of sociopathy.
I like the band too and remember the video, but this "article" is just corporate BS.