I just found out what the glorious emulator 86box is and I installed everything. Fucking everything. 98, 98 SE, ME, XP, 2000.

And then there was 95. I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with that OS. Bood disks and ISO were absolutely fine, but Setup took almost an hour. Then I wanted to install Plus!, but I opened the wrong setup.exe.

Instead of warning my dumb ass, the fucking thing started*installing over itself on the fly*. And it shat the bed so hard, the whole machine was unusable. Manually starting explorer.exe after reboot (which for some reason brought up Task Manager every time) worked, but every tiny click informed me that Rundll32 has performed an illegal actions. What in the futhark is that ugly ass OS.

What in the futhark is that ugly ass OS.

It was the first step up from Windows 3.11 which was basically a DOS GUI. It was rough, but definitely an improvement. Compare that to the latest “updated OS” from Microsoft now.

And 30 years ago it was quite easy to do dumb shit that completely ruined your system, be it in DOS, Win95, or OS/2.

Example from OS/2 - deleting the image file used for the desktop background in presentation manager (OS/2’s core GUI) meant your system could no longer boot, and when you can’t just google shit to sort things out, you were essentially up for a reinstall at that point.

OS/2 sorely lacked user rights management (but then DOS/Windows didn’t have any either). Other than that, it was an amazing system at the time. It’s a shame that the industry went with Windows.