Dunno about the others, but I heard OS/2 was amazing... if you had the hardware for it. Which was notably higher end and more expensive than what DOS and Windows could run on.
I loved the Amiga, but it was basically dead by 1995. Commodore had gone bankrupt, the hardware had stagnated for years, and it was impossible to add modern features like memory protection to the OS.
Windows 95 was a game changer, especially for Internet connectivity. The built-in "dial up networking" / PPP was huge. I was working at an ISP at the time, and remember how difficult it was to get customers to download Trumpet winsock and set it up for Windows 3.x. It could take hours with a difficult customer.
I worked at an ISP in 1997 (the “You’ve got mail” one) and thankfully the software included a winsock. Our headaches were different; They had just come out with unlimited hours and busy signals were the cause of many complaints. After that got resolved, custom modem strings were really the only complicated bits.
I recall the original Windows 95 release shipping with TCP/IP but the protocol having to be manually added in the Network CPL: https://eml.berkeley.edu/wp/win95/isp.html
I did support for a tiny ISP in 1999 [1], we had to have people remove and reinstall that from time to time. Many people could just do it, but I remember one customer I spent maybe two hours on the phone walking her through it. Would put her on hold when another call came in, and then check back with her. Eventually got it all settled.
[1] we had one T1 for internet and one T1 PRI for the modem pool, and outsourced to MegaPath for out of area dialup, and then shunted all the customers to that when the PRI stopped working
Ow wow, worked ISP support in 1997 - 1999 and indeed recalled having to reinstall TCP/IP stack and tweaking setting to make stuff work. Next to that, gruesome installation of ISDN drivers (which technically were out of support for us) for a specific brand of ISDN modems the incumbent telco provided to customers.
Windows 95's USER and GDI implementation was essentially an enhanced version of Win 3.1's. user32.dll and gdi32.dll were just thunking layers. The 16-bit components were guarded by a mutex named "Win16Mutex" to ensure serialized access to them from the 32-bit side.
This mutex also protected a lot of other stuff. For example, if you wanted to access a DirectDraw surface, you needed to lock it in RAM, and this acquired the Win16 mutex. So if you then called a GDI function to draw something, it deadlocked the machine.
More impressive is the fact you can upgrade from Windows 1.0 all the way to the latest one.
I am not a fan of Windows but I found this to be impressive.
> More impressive is the fact you can upgrade from Windows 1.0 all the way to the latest one.
That's no longer true since Windows 11 went 64 bit only (with no in place upgrade path as 16->32 bit had). E.g. the linked video starts a clean slate at XP in order to switch to 64 bit from that point on.
Still damn impressive one can make it all the way to Windows 10 (32 bit), but equally crazy IMO the upgrade story finally ended with 11.
And for the folks that prefer to bash XP (Fisher Price UI or whatever): XP 64 was the first (and so far only) version of Windows in the chain to not be reachable by any upgrade path whatsoever (where at least Windows 11 can still be reached by upgrading 64 bit Windows 10 and so on, back to XP 64). So, arguably, it's at least (if not more) at fault than 11 - depending which brings more joy for one to blame.
Windows 95 was really the one which made the story interesting (the important bridge between 16->32), so no help to those that preferred NT or other OSs at the time and wanted an excuse to bash it :p.
Unfortunately the alternatives aren't much better, Apple is out of my budget for home computers, and I still can't buy Linux system at the local PC store other than Raspberry PIs.
I'm betting those guest instances are Windows 3.1 Real Mode however and so cannot load most protected mode drivers. IIRC, there are a bunch of protected mode things like the VDM that take control over the system because there's no such thing as nested virtualization until about 2005-2006 when VMware and similar hypervisors pushed for it.
The guest instances are fully 386 Enhanced Mode instances of Windows 3.1. Windows 3.1 (and Windows/386 and Windows 3.0) is implemented as an 80386 DPMI server, much like the DOS4GW you used to play Doom, and the the actual GUI code is a DPMI client. Windows 95 is also a DPMI server.
Windows 3.x could also run in “standard mode”, where it used a 16-bit only DPMI server. The Windows GUI system could run in real mode or as a DPMI client.
As far as “nested virtualisation”… Windows 3.1’s DOS windows could actually in turn run more instances of Windows 3.1, because Windows/386 relied on virtual 8086 mode only and Windows 3.x used DPMI which can be nested.
You had os/2 not doing that well, Amiga not doing great, NeXT hurting, riscos kinda floundering and the failures of Windows 1 and 2.
The risk of it not slapping was immensely high. A huge amount of the company was bet on it.
They were risk adverse all over the place with the design, it's clear to see when you do a deep dive.
And even then, people balked at things like the 8MB ram "recommendation", which was seen as expensive at the time.
Even after the release and into 1996, large vendors were still shipping some computers with windows 3.1 - it was an option.
It was really both a risky product and had to be done.
What was ever wrong with these? I never actually used them but everything I know about them sounds fantastic.
It ran Windows applications natively and crashed less than Win 3.1 — but still had some hardware compatibility issues.
It had a fancy scripting language and a lot of neat stuff already built in — unlike Windows at the time.
I really wanted to switch to it, but Win95 won…
However that price tag was horrendous as OS for home computers.
Yes it was amazing, but not worth the extra money for many of us.
For example with a Cobra expansion card, https://amiga.resource.cx/exp/cobra
NeXT was way expensive, OS/2 was way too business-oriented until too late, Amiga was mismanaged financially, Apple's Macintosh was too expensive, etc.
[1] we had one T1 for internet and one T1 PRI for the modem pool, and outsourced to MegaPath for out of area dialup, and then shunted all the customers to that when the PRI stopped working
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9f5DnlUyaq8
That's no longer true since Windows 11 went 64 bit only (with no in place upgrade path as 16->32 bit had). E.g. the linked video starts a clean slate at XP in order to switch to 64 bit from that point on.
Still damn impressive one can make it all the way to Windows 10 (32 bit), but equally crazy IMO the upgrade story finally ended with 11.
Windows 95 was really the one which made the story interesting (the important bridge between 16->32), so no help to those that preferred NT or other OSs at the time and wanted an excuse to bash it :p.
Windows 3.x could also run in “standard mode”, where it used a 16-bit only DPMI server. The Windows GUI system could run in real mode or as a DPMI client.
As far as “nested virtualisation”… Windows 3.1’s DOS windows could actually in turn run more instances of Windows 3.1, because Windows/386 relied on virtual 8086 mode only and Windows 3.x used DPMI which can be nested.