Windows 95 was developed over several years with a lot of research and user studies. The primary objective of all this work was so that a person without prior exposure to computers could figure out how to use it. The software was designed to help the user accomplish the tasks they have set out to do before sitting down at the computer.
Today, both the audience and the objectives have changed. The overwhelming majority of the audience is now computer-literate and can be counted on to figure out how to use the basic features regardless of how poorly designed or inefficient they may be. And the priorities for many interfaces have changed, with the user's tasks relegated to a side quest.
Another factor is that Windows 95 was developed for "install it and leave it" operation, with the next upgrade coming in a year or two. Giving more attention to detail was unavoidable because you could not patch a bug a week after release. And Microsoft was offering phone support for its products, so every UI flaw would increase support costs.
Also, one of the design requirements was to fully support only-keyboard operation as a first-class access method, and a lot of QA effort went into ensuring this was true. This parallel access method resulted in a UI which was much more thoroughly evaluated for its efficiency.
Finally, I think a higher portion of people in the UI field were there for personal and passion reasons, and would have been embarrassed to have anything to do with the type of blundering buffoon of an interface that is common in today's computing.
> Today, both the audience and the objectives have changed. The overwhelming majority of the audience is now computer-literate and can be counted on to figure out how to use the basic features regardless of how poorly designed or inefficient they may be.
Not sure if I agree, and anyway this doesn't seem to be the assumption of mainstream modern UI design. Rather we have extreme simplification justified by the need not to overwhelm the users and isolate them from (arbitrarily) "less needed" features and technical considerations. I don't know if UI departments base this on research and studies, but anecdotally both for me and non-technical people I know smartphones have become black boxes due to this. We often discover features by accident, not sure how we even triggered them. Many simple tasks have to be googled, because there seems to be little logic in where they're hidden. Maybe very young people are better at this - though on the other hand we hear about them being less PC platform-literate - and this knowledge still feels like a random collection of incantations rather than a system you could master.
Maybe I wouldn't hold up Windows registry, Office 2000 etc. as paragons of mental tractability, but I would posit that 1. the filing cabinet mental model was useful in learning generalizable, organized knowledge of using computers, 2. it has been destroyed by tech corporations for the mass audience. I don't believe that we are fundamentally dumber compared to 1990s, we could figure this out if given a chance.
> The overwhelming majority of the audience is now computer-literate and can be counted on
HIGHLY disagree. From what I have seen in the professional world and in school systems, just being able to type on a regular keyboard and use a mouse seems to be premium features to ask of a human, let alone navigate completely alien user interfaces and concepts they were never taught like files and folders, or what the hell the save icon is even depicting (or what it means).
> Today, both the audience and the objectives have changed. The overwhelming majority of the audience is now computer-literate and can be counted on to figure out how to use the basic features regardless of how poorly designed or inefficient they may be
Except that the majority of the audience has no idea how a computer works, what is a directory/folder and that the USB stick has a filesystem on it.
>Another factor is that Windows 95 was developed for "install it and leave it" operation, with the next upgrade coming in a year or two. Giving more attention to detail was unavoidable because you could not patch a bug a week after release.
This should be qualified. Windows95 was famed for its weird bugs e.g. 49.7 days of uptime leading to a crash. Once these bugs were in the wild they were very hard to fix on the majority of installs.
If the price of being able to fix bugs UX easily with an internet connection is shoddier initial development on the initial release it's a small price to pay.
To be fair to Microsoft, that's still mostly true for the Windows server editions.
The pared down version without the GUI even runs fine on 512MB of memory. Though still a far cry from the 64 MB that XP needed, which included the GUI.
95 needed at least 4MB, ideally 8MB or more of memory. Which means it will fit in the cache of modern CPUs many times over, though I may be ignoring some swap stuff.
512MB isn't a lot today so might as well use it, at least for things that are useful, but it's nevertheless impressive how puny these old operating systems were, despite having user-facing functionality that would still feel familiar and natural to today's users.
> Which means it will fit in the cache of modern CPUs many times over, though I may be ignoring some swap stuff.
has anyone ever done this with an OS? I assume it'd be impossible with hardware that needs DMA, and a bunch of other reasons, but it'd be cool to see a machine keep running after you pull out the RAM.
In 7th grade, my class had Boeing surplus computers at each student's desk. Most were 386SX with 4MB. I remember getting a chance to harvest parts from a broken machine and mine went up to 8MB. That was enough to install and run Windows 95.*
* On paper
It was awful and while that CPU did no favors, it was swapping that made it awful.
Today, both the audience and the objectives have changed. The overwhelming majority of the audience is now computer-literate and can be counted on to figure out how to use the basic features regardless of how poorly designed or inefficient they may be. And the priorities for many interfaces have changed, with the user's tasks relegated to a side quest.
Another factor is that Windows 95 was developed for "install it and leave it" operation, with the next upgrade coming in a year or two. Giving more attention to detail was unavoidable because you could not patch a bug a week after release. And Microsoft was offering phone support for its products, so every UI flaw would increase support costs.
Also, one of the design requirements was to fully support only-keyboard operation as a first-class access method, and a lot of QA effort went into ensuring this was true. This parallel access method resulted in a UI which was much more thoroughly evaluated for its efficiency.
Finally, I think a higher portion of people in the UI field were there for personal and passion reasons, and would have been embarrassed to have anything to do with the type of blundering buffoon of an interface that is common in today's computing.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii...
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/07/31/hard-assed-bug-fix...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932340