I was on the beta team, I'll have to look over what "official" builds were given out during the beta phase. There was also a lengthy release candidate phase that you skipped. My vague recollection is that Microsoft would seed different builds among testers. I don't recall getting a RC3 CD for example. Regarding Web TV For Windows. I owned the lone capture card that was supported during beta, the original ATI All-in-Wonder. It never worked right, and other testers had the same results. MS put a TON of resources behind developing and having it beta tested. It was a bloated buggy mess that Microsoft eventually shelved as it was clearly not going to work. I remember rosy predictions from people backing the likes of WaveTop about a market for selling VBI space for datacasting use. Yeah, that didn't work out.
The single-click mode shown in 5:31 is actually available in Windows 98 and above, but it needs to be enabled from the Explorer settings (in Win98 at least it can be changed from Folder Options > General > Web style, or General > Custom > Settings... > Click items as follows).
@@l3p3 I didn't, I had remembered seeing one teacher's computer looking like that back in the day and they were like "IDK how to turn it off" so I vaguely recalled seeing it, looked down to the comments when I saw it in a beta in this video, and was thankful that she hadn't somehow been using a beta version this whole time.
Something many people don't know is that Windows 98's UI changes were actually developed by the Internet Explorer team as part of IE 4 and then ported over. This was referred to as Shell UI and Active Desktop, and was my first product in the 20 years I spent working at Microsoft. I also got such a kick out of seeing the comma splice I filed a bug on at 12:04 (in the lower left corner). Believe it or not, correcting their grammar ruffled some feathers, but at least they fixed it. If only they had fixed the Earth turning backward in IE 5.0 Setup when I filed that bug, we could have saved some public embarrassment. All they had to do was reverse the order of the frames in the animated GIF, but the PM felt it was too late to take on a potentially "destabilizing" fix, and that no one would notice anyway. smh
Being a kid who went from windows 95 to 98. If only the internet was more open back then I would wish I had known so much behind the scenes. Years later I now know XD Funny how that works.
@@Khyree_Holmes To further complicate things: Later OEM versions of Win95 also acted as prototypes to Win98. Win95C (officially known as Win95 OSR 2.5) which I believe was released in 1997, had a lot more in common with Win98 than the original retail version of Win95.
To think the "Show desktop button" could have been implemented as early as Win 98!!! It would have been SO useful. I use it all the time and it was truly missing back then.
They didn't just make Explorer like Internet Explorer, they embedded Internet Explorer in it. Thats why the Beta build has single click launch: they are links. :)
4:44 Go to View to bring up tool bar and "address bar" and folder options to set all folders to be opened in single windows! Windows 95 have those features and I do not know why they are not enabled by default !
Hey man, been subscribed for a while now, love the coverage of various OS's and software, feels like I'm going back in time lol, keep up the good work dude !
I really love the Second Edition better than the first edition Michael. Keep up the good work. In the next few months, I am going to start a new tech series for Tech Monday.
I regularly watch these on my smart TV, so I can't post comments there. Just let me say, I love this kind of videos, in which you look into the development history of a major Windows release without getting too technical o the issue.
WOW! To think that my hometown was actually used as the code name for one of the most liked operating systems in the mid to last ’90s and I only able two years old when it released too! THAT IS SO DANG AWESOME!😃
Great trip through childhood nostalgia! Another chance to forget common things in 10 that weren't always there, which is entertaining knowledge worth having. Cheers!
Windows 98/SE will ALWAYS be for me the ultimate best operating system to come from Microsoft. I still have an old 98 system and I use 98 in a vm. I still remember all the great unsupported updates, fixes, additions, etc. that came out for it when 98 was going EOL. I will never stop wondering why Windows XP, and now even 7 never seemed to get the same attention when it hit the EOL. Thanks for another great video.
It's not an operating environment as it can boot without any other OS to be booted by the user first. (It boots DOS in the background and then becomes independent once it starts)
@@notthatntg While yes the user does not need to start DOS 7 themselves, the Windows 98 environment cannot operate without DOS 7. If you remove the Windows directory entirely, the machine would still function under DOS 7 (hence Restart in MS-DOS Mode in the Shutdown Menu). But if you removed DOS 7 the machine won't boot. The Primary Partition is DOS with Windows 98 laying on top of it. That is different to the NT side, because NT is the actual Windows Operating System not DOS.
Even the earliest Windows 95 releases had address bars (View->Toolbar/Adressbar) and weren't very different to the one in Windows98. Also open in a single window was an option in 95 (that could be set in the view menu). I believe (but I haven't checked yet) one click opening was also an optional thing from the very first 95 commercial releases.
"My" first PC ran Windows 98. My older brother got it as a present from our grandparents, it was the family's first computer. I was 5 years old at the time and it probably sparked the fascination for tech in me. Today I work in software development. My grandparents are long dead by now. They never used computers in their lives. But they apparently understood it enough to realize that this was a tool that would matter in the future. My brother hadn't asked for a computer. I never thought about how much this investment into a computer has probably affected my life. Who would have thought back in 1999 in the store?
I find it interesting that these older versions of Windows are still floating around out there in the ether. When I was in my early teens, when internet access was at a major premium, and people were still charged by the hour, it was common for us to utilize local BBS' in order to more openly communicate with one another, share files, games, etc. One of the local BBS' had a, for the time, major repository of software. It was common practice that if you wanted to download content, that you should rip your own games, and upload them back to the BBS to share with others. This particular BBS was simply known as 'KABOOM', and they had a copy of Windows that was referred to at the time as 'Windows 96 Memphis". Looking back now it was definitely an early alpha or beta of Windows 98. I downloaded it at one point and made the necessary efforts to make it installable, but it was very unstable on my system and would crash during setup. I can't recall what the issues were - as this was ages ago, but it I do remember spending a very, very long time licking my PC's wounds reformatting and re-installing Windows95, plus all the gobbledygook that went with it (PCs used to include a ridiculous number of software packages back then). We didn't know much about it though, what the story was, what the differences were (This was before 98, so it'd be a couple more years before we found out), we all just thought Microsoft had some kind of super secret "Windows96" that wasn't available to the pubic.
Ah, windows 98. I was on the beta for this from beta 2 (I think). It was always fun to get a package from overseas with another disk. I ended up with enough CDs to make up the complete Windows logo on my wall (each CD had part of the logo)
Thanks for the great video! Microsoft went all-in on the Web design with the blue hyperlink for icons and the single click in the second build. Never knew that because it was reverted. Also, foreshadow to the Show Desktop and the Settings + Control Panel we have since Windows 8. Michael, could you check if the third build is a reset build like what happened with Longhorn? Or was it a continuation of the second build with the features removed? Also, is it possible that those features are just locked in the 3rd build and require something like Redlock?
Would've been great to have the "Welcome to Windows 98" music play as your outro to this video as that was thumping. Shame it only lasted around 10 seconds though I do understand it's shortness, Windows only allowed short audio files to play for Windows events. But then again I wonder if it would've incurred the wrath of the RU-vid algorithm and gotten this video a copyright strike.
Yikes! I thought I had gotten references to ME out of my head. By the time ME came out, I had about 7 or 8 computers running on my home network. The next machine I bought (a high end Dell notebook) had ME on it. When I plugged it in and connected it to my network, it was basically running as hard as it could but it was extremely slow. I'd press a key and it would take 3 to 4 seconds to register. It took me a couple of days to figure out, ME was trying to index everything on my network, and with that many computers the indexing was eating up all the resources the machine had. Apparently, indexing was set with a very high priority. When I finally realized what was going on, I temporally disconnected it from the network so I had some control of the machine, turned off indexing, reconnected to the network, then the machine ran pretty good. But I refused to buy another machine with ME on it.
Ahh the golden age for me. I had so much fun with this version. I’ve been an IT Professional for the past 20 years, likely because I got the bug when I ‘hacked’ my way around the parental controls for ‘Compuserve’. The feeling of power I got from bypassing my Dads feeble attempts at limiting our access to the dreadful 56k, which mostly connected at 28k at the time. I spent so much time in encyclopedia Britannica, Roger Wilco and Delta Force 1. Ahhhh the nostalgia!
The last “best” Windows ever made was XP. After that it was annoyance after annoyance taking away things I used a lot, constant error messages and harder to use ms-dos on the fly.
15:46 Ah - that's the look of Windows Explorer if you have a clean 95A installation and install the full Internet Explorer 4.0 suite, I think they had it listed as "Desktop Enhancements" or "Desktop Upgrade" as a component. I think Windows 95C has that look by default as well.
Awesome video! Now I'd like you to focus on Windows Me, if you could. It actually has a nice development history of its own... You may have touched on some of it in other videos you did.
I have video idea if you want to hear it. Ten changes in each window relese. Show the ten most important new things in win 1 - then ten most important new things in win 2 - ten most important new things in win 3 .... you get the idea just show the full history of changes in windows, maybe start with DOS.
YES! history videos are my favourite (just about) My favourite is the windows 98 PC when you install OSes in it I have a suggestion can you install a very slimmed down version of Windows 10 or 8?
i used windows 98 up untill it was retired in 2007 and i loved how simple and hackable it was, i used blue circle side bars frim internet explorer 4.0 installed over windows 95, basically riping the web folder and replacing it in windows 98 , i had patched start bar program to support 256 colors tray icons and my own side image in menu start i also loved 2 color window bars, that should be back in 10 someday i miss old grey windows gui
I still don't get why there's so much hate for Windows 10 (aside from Windows Update which I totally understand but that's just a piece of the pie). I mean, it works well for me. Update is just the shitty thing but other than that it's a good one. Unless I'm missing something.
Okay I’m sorry to burst your bubble man but that’s biased as fuck lol. I’ve used Windows 98 am absolute fuck ton and there’s definitely a reason why I use Windows 10 for daily use. 98s UI consists of a literal rubbish bin compared to modern Windows.
MichaelMJD: our legend, Enderman: our brother, Siam Alam: our computer malware professor, Come on Windows: our friend, me and the millions of people: followers. Yall need respect
Tug And Thug Computing it was present in every release yes, but what Michael is saying is that only recently, with the release of Windows 7 it moved from the Quick Launch menu over to the right hand side of the taskbar.
I feel like it's worth mentioning that a lot of these features, like the IE-based Windows Explorer and Active Desktop, were included in Windows 95 OSR 2.5, which _was_ released to the public. The Explorer in 1593 uses an identical design to the Explorer in OSR 2.5, including the IE logo in the corner.
So both the show desktop button and the streamlined control settings from Windows 10, were already a thing in 1996 ? So it's not only Nintendo the one that never throws anything away and reuses old ideas decades later...
Way back when I got my hands on build 1351 shortly after it was released and tried it out. It did not go well! The PC I was using had an AMD 5x86 (which was just a high clocked 486 chip) 133 mhz CPU running at 120 mhz (due to my PC's MB being from early 1992!) and only 12 MB of RAM. That Memphis beta would boot but was unbelievably slow, even compared to plain old Windows 95! Speaking of Win95. I got my hands on build 357 of Win 95 in March or April of 1995 and used it as my main OS for almost a year before "upgrading" to the retail version of Win 95. Even compared to the retail build of Win 95, that earlier beta build was quite good and ran fast since it didn't have some of the stuff later added to the "official" release of the OS.
i installed RetroBar on my windows 7 laptop last week and thought the devs had created a show desktop button that looked incredibly authentic to how it would have actually looked in 98... now I know why!!
I definitely saw animated text in the final version of the installer, although not from the side, but opening from the top. Just noticed it at 18:25! :)
At around 13:00, I noticed that you didn't install at least graphics and sound drivers. I've a feeling build 1596 was a test or an experimental build, but around the time they were finalising Internet Explorer 4 for Windows 95, and Windows 95 OSR 2.5 "C", which I believe was released only to manufacturers as a holdover before Windows 98 was released. 10:47 "Microsoft Internet Explorer Suite" Seems as though Microsoft were trying out a "Netscape Communicator" kind of thing there. I've a feeling build 1351 was around the time they merged Windows 95 and Plus for Win95 together, and then 1415 would be around the time they merged in code from their cancelled "Nashville" project. Both Nashville and Memphis are towns in Tennessee, so that naming convention would make sense. Then, with build 1511, they likely would've already removed quite a bit of "Nashville" code for features they found to not really work for users then. 9:58 Most likely a newer version of the MSN Internet Access client that was probably shipped to subscribers around the time on floppy disks and/or through the dial-up connection itself. 18:32 Dell, around that time, offered customers the choice of Windows 98, NT 4, or 95, at least on Dimension XPS and Latitude models.
Fun fact: the exact Windows Explorer description pane in build 1593 could be installed in Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0 if IE4 - IE5.5 SP2 with active desktop components (Windows Desktop Update) was installed onto the OS. Coincidentally enough, this package was also created in 1997. It also updated the explorer executable to include the quick launch bar. You can actually make Windows 95 function very closely to Windows 98 first edition by installing Windows 95 B/OSR 2.1 or C/OSR 2.5, which includes FAT32 and USB support (but not USB PnP) and the Windows Desktop Update package built into the IE installer. There are generic USB drivers that exist to create an almost-PnP experience for USB in Windows 95. I've done it before.
Can you make a slideshow of the screenshots from the faces of Windows from 3 up to the latest build of Windows 10? As a transition video to let us see how Windows changes over time? As a summary of all the history developments of the OS versions. I watched it all and it is so great. Thanks!
