Comment by peterfirefly
8 days ago
It crashed a lot more, the fonts (and screens) were uglier, and Javascript was a lot slower. The good thing was that there was very little Javascript.
8 days ago
It crashed a lot more, the fonts (and screens) were uglier, and Javascript was a lot slower. The good thing was that there was very little Javascript.
> The good thing was that there was very little Javascript.
Because all of the complicated client side stuff was in Java applets or Shockwave :( Pepperidge Farm remembers having to wait 10 minutes for a GameBoy emulator to load to play Pokémon Yellow on school computers…
[dead]
I cannot recall crashes being a problem.
I remember Netscape Navigator crashing, taking Solaris down with it. I could only imagine what it was like on Windows 9x. I don't want to imagine what Windows 3.x users endured. Windows 3.x was the OS where people saved early and saved often, since the lack of proper memory protection meant that a bad application (or worse, a bad driver) could BSOD the system at any time.
I once did an April Fool's spoof of netscape that displayed a wait cursor for 2 minutes then a bomb alert. For classic Mac, it was 90% accurate with only 1% the disk footprint.
With Windows 9x, I recall the crashes being manageable, but it was advisable to give the system 15 minutes to settle down after rebooting. Windows would start multiple things at once on startup and it was a bit risky to overstress it.
Windows NT 4 seemed OK, but a lot of software didn't run.
By the time of Windows 2000 the tradeoff was much better.
(Allowing a settle down time remained a good idea, in my experience. Even if Windows 2000 and later were very unlikely to actually crash, the response time would still be dogshit until everything had been given time to settle into a steady state. This problem didn't get properly fixed until pervasive use of SSDs - some time between Windows 7 and Windows 8, maybe? - and even then the fix was just that there was no longer any pressing need to actually fix it.)
In 1997-8 I met the first person I knew to have a CD-R burner.
He dual-booted 98 and NT 4. He joked that NT was his 100+ MB CD burning software. He used 98 for almost everything else, but it couldn't keep that steady stream of data going.