1995: WINDOWS 95 launch - is Microsoft too big? | Newsnight | Retro Tech | BBC Archive 

It's very similar to the style used in the 1995 movie Hackers.

I'M USING A COMPUTER!!!!!! LIKE IN TRON!!!!

Jick Nickelson and Princess Diona*

They need to stop nickel and diming everything!

I 'm old school- I can't use the Internet on my PC unless I'm bathed in magenta light, sitting at my computer on a rotating platform cut into the middle of the floor of an empty room, using a DOS-based Internet browser designed by someone at BBC Newsnight. The experimental-era techno, though? I can take it or leave it.

Ahh the days of only catching a glimpse of your blurry monitor per rotation

Personally, I miss the screeching 14.4k modem being part of the experience.

Lol sounds like you had quiet the experience back in the day

reddit

I'm still not over all the illegal operations I performed back then. Feel so guilty.

@@josehenriq90 lmao kid, they couldn’t even play video frames without dropping them without stealing QuickTime tech from apple. You have no idea

@@jessepatterson8897 but what is The relevance to the content you are responding to?

@@jessepatterson8897 stole? developing =/= stealing if i develop something that someone else did before me does not mean i stole it from him xd also defending Jobs saying that someone stole something from him is a little bit hypocritical considering how much money he basically stole from people with the prices of 'his products'... oh and what about stolen lifes and work camps? You forgot to mention about his cool work facilities where hundreds of thousands of people work 12-18h a day for a dogshit salary where in some of such places they even have to live there which basically makes them become a slaves. What about suicides which practically became part of the facilitie's normal daily rutine and everyone already used to them? Who cares, rotation is so big that there will always be someone to fill the empty 'space'. Jobs was brillian, yes... but he cared more about the money than about lifes of the people he hired and that made him just cruel so saying 'ohohohoh poor Steavie got robbed' sounds just pathetically ridiculous

I wish 2020s Google would do something as epoch defining and brilliant as windows 95. Don't get me wrong, you're right. But windows 95s launch was such a unique moment in computing history

I'd say Google Earth/Maps and Android is their Windows 95. Those two products changed our world more than people realize. Before Google Maps, you would use the yellow pages to find what you wanted and then use Mapquest, or if you went back far enough, pull out a road map of your city.@@medes5597

Apple - hold my ecosystem

​@@maximusg88That company being that overvalued is just stupid.

One of the lines in that song is, "You make a grown man cry."

They were promoting Information Superhighway, an alternative to internet but owned by big corporations. If that had succeeded, there would be no Google Facebook Uber Twitter torrents VPN RU-vid and so on

If information Superhighway had become successful, the progress of everything would have shifted by many decades

this was their second choice, i don't remember the first choice but they refused under any circumstances. They were hated, and should have been. At the time they still had quicktime code in windows.

@@amit4Bihar and yet here at are with most of the internet centralized to a handful of big tech companies. Not distributed as it was originally intended.

Google?

@@lordvader3697 ...was not around in 1995

Yup, exactly. They have market saturation, so they don't need to spend the big bucks marketing it anymore.

These days, most people don't want new Windows features. They just want good enough left alone, something MS has had trouble doing since XP. In the Windows 95 days on the other hand, it really upgraded the capability of your computer compared to Windows 3.1.

There hasnt been a huge jump in quality like since then so why would they bother

Because back then, computers weren't filled with the junk, microtransactions, paid features, and loot boxes that modern computers have today.

Meanwhile, 2000's toolbars and viruses enter the chat... @@OctavioGaitan

🎉😂 We did the same. We got home internet as soon as it became available. No one we knew had it yet and people would come over to marvel over it.

I had the first Apple desktop computer as soon as it became available for market. Huge loud computer the fans were loud but it worked amazing for a first time computer to the masses.

I wonder about that. The mention of the Ferryman as an example of monopolisation and the use of 'demon du jour', plus the way people took time to pause and think about what they were about to say, is all kinds of stunning to me. I don't feel like you get that level of thoughtfulness in today's news segments :\

No grotty tracksuits or kids screaming

XX century

What is the thing it gets us to?

@@daithiocinnsealach1982 I'm pretty sure it's a quote stolen from a TV show called "Halt and Catch Fire", unless the show stole the quote from someone real. It is an extremely underrated drama loosely based on true events from the early computing industry. Edit: The actual quote is "Computers aren’t the thing. They’re the thing that gets us to the thing" and it does seem to originate from HaCF. Seriously go watch it. It's my favourite TV show. Kinda like Madmen but better imo.

We wouldnt be able to handle the truth back then if we could see what has happened to the world because of the internet

​@@TurboMintyFreshcall me stupid but what do you mean?

Sorry, what do you mean?

ah yes. apple bigger, better and hah 'underestimated'... why didn't you mention the prices of their products? maybe because it never makes you better if you charge more, huh? maybe because it makes you just... more expensive

@@godzilla928 I have no idea what your point is. I was talking about market caps and their relative penetration of the IT industry. I do not own any apple products at all. I personally feel they are over priced for what they are, but that has nothing to do with business success. That is largely down to effective marketing. So again, no idea what you're saying at all.

As Bill Gates said - Steve spent twenty years telling Gates and anyone who listened that Apple was going to be the first computer company that was also an aspirational lifestyle brand. They were going to sell millions of computers at prices that no one would expect because they were selling a lifestyle. Gates thought that'd never happen. And it happened pretty much exactly as Steve told them it would and made them the premium brand of the computing world.

@@elastronaute1198 I wouldn't call it "penetration of the IT industry", unless you consider phones, tablets and their overcharging their services. Remove the phones and tablets and Apple is an IT dwarf company, compared to M$. The iPhone fanboys are literally the backbone of Apple.

I had windows 95 on mine form 97 when i got a pc to 2006 when I literally couldn't use it any more.

Now there's a man who's keeping up with the Commmodore!

At least the bit starting ca. 3:57 is "It's More Fun to Compute" by Kraftwerk, or a cover of it at least.

Windows 98/SE was the best of the Windows 9x era, it was relatively stable and was the first version to be properly internet and USB ready. I used it until 2003 when my dad finally upgraded us to XP.

MS were a predatory company from the very beginning. They screwed over Digital Research and CP/M when making the MS-DOS deal with IBM, amongst many other things.

Windows 10 is quite good. 11 needs work yet.

@@jondonnelly4831 I've been using 11 for a while now, I find nothing wrong with it. Also a couple of large updates in recent months have definitely improved it in many ways.

Get Linux

Nah they were doing some nasty stuff even during windows 3

OS/2 users: "There are dozens of us! DOZENS!!!"

Most PS/2s ended up running DOS and Windows because IBM made the completely nonsensical decision to not bundle their OS with the PS/2 line.

Lveel palinyg fleid

No, but he does sound a lot like him

🤣

what!?!?!?!??

But you know that you just named two the most unreliable versions of Windows, right? ME was a total disaster and Vista was dquick cash grab just moments before the full Windows 7 was released :S

@@godzilla928 I'm pretty sure Pye was joking.

but you have camera zoomed in at his very fingers which were doing this very chords?

​@@godzilla928 I want to know the song he's playing, that's all.

Microsoft is up there with them and is bigger than all but Apple.

Home Computer by Kraftwerk

@@lipanook Cheers David 👍 Great Tune.

@@leegoulding857 Try the original German version of the band 's music, they sound so much better imo and I don't even speak German

Where

@@lordvader3697 9:34 (he looks like that character from Big Short)

who asked

My brother still has an Aol email account! He complains he regularly gets hacked.....are the two connected?

In 1995 the Internet was still very young (Netscape only coming out at the end of 1994) and the services like Prodigy and Compuserve still were larger. They were offering Internet services as they saw the rapid rise of the Internet and their plan at the time was you'd get on the Internet through them as they would also be an ISP. AOL was the only one that managed this transition.

They have now

examples?

@@godzilla928 counter wrapping bug

Me too,

This looks like a Newsnight report. Often name supers were put on live via the studio as the taped report was played out. Caption generators (Aston) were very expensive and required a specialist operator. Also there probably was not time to add these prior to tx.

Macos still lacks features in its gui that Microsoft and Linux have had since windows 7. Things like window snapping.

​@@wistals3deniks What are we on 32 bit pc's still, The real question is who really needs any of those windows snapping gimmicks in this day and age? Its full-screen baby or nothing for me! 🍷

Macs are overpriced and only appeal to a niche market (they hover around 10-15% of all computer users). Windows overtook Macs decades ago.

Who’s going to change the language? It was made by the bbc in the 90s, you want someone to dub this whole thing?? 😂😂 Edit : why don’t you do it yourself?

Yeah I'm giving serious thought to this. Still using 7 for now

@@Animal_lives_matter try a lts linux mint, the learning curve is not as steep, most of the things work out of the box, and it will help you ease into linux.

@Geo’s radio & musical stuff But apple tho

@Geo’s radio & musical stuff I usually never ask and just look it up in search. There was a recent video by someone who tried to get DaVinci resolve working and failed and he received the same treatment from some bad apples in the linux community. So I can understand the frustration.

@@gesugao I switched from windows to ubuntu lts. It wasn't too different and felt like using an android tablet emulator

?

You always had to buy MS Word and other office software.

These days, all Windows computers come with the OS for free and they're letting you upgrade for free (I upgraded from 8.1 to 10 and then 10 to 11 for free). They make their money elsewhere (licensing OEM Windows to PC manufacturers, and of course subscriptions to Office 365, not to mention all the corporate level tools they create, like Microsoft Azure.

Windows and Office were always separate products.

who asked

Whoever shall mention windows must know they will hear the echo of Linux

I would need to reinstall Windows 95 and 98 every 4-6 months, it would start doing stupid action then get a digital paralysis. Window XP was much better, windows 11 seems solid once they work out what is hogging all the PCs resources.

ok

@@NateMusic-kg5ob Who permitted you to reply