I was so into the newshell back then. We had a full MSDN subscription and received every disk(I mean *every* disk, including every language pack you could imagine). I ran 3.51 with the shell preview as soon as it arrived, then later switching to 4.0 (both of which took advantage of our dual P-66 HP workstations). I also ran the third-party Unix subsystem (I forget who made it). It was pretty awesome, and worth looking into if you’re into that kind of thing. I think it might have morphed into WSL today.
Office 95 and 97 were both officially supported on NT 3.51. Office 97 did away with the custom system title bars, but did use the 95-style MDI controls.
Yeah, Office97 on NT3.51 doesn't look different from it running on Win95 or NT4, except for the system bars, is odd. Inside the window, them look all the same. Also Encarta95 uses modern controls when running in Win31.
@@supercellex4D indeed! I think almost every version of office has at least some small title bar flourish of some kind, and sometimes huge. Remember the office orb in the vista era?
Started my medical career with nt351. I subscribe to technet cds back then. Loved the searchable cds and provided updates. Documentation was extensive with ms back then. Now ms is just an advertisement company masquerading as an os. Thanks. For the video.
The taskbar/windows look a bit more chunkier in the shell preview by a few pixels. Glad that they slimmed this down for the retail Win95/NT4.0 as I think it looks much better.
Upping the Kernel version to 4 is almost certainly because programs can use a check for Windows Version 4 as a way to check if it has the Win95 UI. Windows 3.x is assumed to not have the new UI. As this was a preview for testing it makes sense that programs do not treat it as only normal 3.51 but instead run as if it is Windows 95. Some early Windows 95 programs will refuse to run/install unless they are on Windows 4 or above. Nt3.51 will fail the check by default but the shell preview with fake v4 Kernel should run those programs. It was just an early compatibility hack.
I loved the Windows Shell update for Windows 95 and NT 4.0 that came with.MSIE 4.0. I never knew that Windows NT 3.5 got it's own shell update to the Win95 style.
Interesting, I never knew that there existed a Windows 95 style GUI shell update for NT 3.51. But Windows NT 4 was slightly more than just the new shell on NT 3.51. As I recall Microsoft changed their device driver model (WDDM?) with NT4 and they also controversially moved the display drivers into the kernel to improve display performance (at the expense of some stability and, in time, security).
I first used NT3.51 and it’s fascinating how fully featured it was, most of the stuff that’s in windows today can trace its lineage back to the early days. Some stuff hasn’t changed much at all.
I remember the Windows 3.1 registry. There was a shareware program I used that hid its time bomb details in the registry so you could uninstall and reinstall it and even monitor the file changes to see if you could reset it. But no, you couldn't find anything because it hid itself in the registry. Delete the key it created and it resets the timebomb back to zero so you could use it another 30 days.
I remember using Windows NT3.1 when it came out, then we upgraded to NT3.5 and finally NT3.5.1 at first without the new shell. We tested some machines in the office with the new shell and some without. I didn't get it on mine and kept the 3x style GUI. This was such a huge innovation and made it much easier to get around windows than the old UI. When we then upgraded to NT4 I did miss some elements of the old 3x shell but quickly got used to the start menu.
I started with NT 3.5. I tried the New Shell, but don't remember if I liked it or not. It was interesting like any beta. I didn't like NT4 much, but since I had gone the 3.5 to 3.51 upgrade, I couldn't install 3.51 to larger hard drives. The Win2k GUI was my favorite of the windows shells. But, then again I usually used alternative shells since the windows 3.0 days.
@@user-qd9pg8xt2k Yes i didnt like NT4 as much either but i did like Win2k and still have it now on a P166 machine. Its a shame the alternate shells seemed to disappear apart from Stardock products.
Interesting, never got a chance to really use NT 3.51 and certainly not with this shell. I got NT4 and Windows 95 together on some sort of educational discount and quickly settled on NT4 as my main OS, never knew Windows could be so stable.
I stated my job as a CAD designer that knew more about computers than anyone that worked there and in turn I became their IT 😂 I really despised NT... Probably because of it was not as "plug and play". This is a cool bit of history though!
History of the Plug and Play on NT and the PC is very tied to Compaq and Microsoft, and is complicated, long and worth of a documental. It took to MS not less than 6 years to put it on the streets, and then they could only get it stable on Windows XP SP2, many years after Windows 2000 reached the streets, and more years after the first NT5 beta build which included it as feature. It took a completely new driver model, guideline standards for PC manufacturers and a complete rework of the firmware which drives PCs (ONnow initiative/ISAPnP/PCI/USB/ACPI). Do you know, when you configure a non-PnP (jumper configured) ISA card under Windows95/Windows2000, you basically create a firmware-like structure in the windows registry with the configuration parameters (memory/io/dma values) to make Windows kernel and the driver stack to recognize it as if it was PnP hardware? This same technology later became a way to configure software-only "virtual devices" in the OS which don't require an special driver stack. I hope someone can cover this in detail later.
@hyoenmadan That's not really how I see it. It's just replacing the same settings in ini files with keys in the registry. Early windows moved some of the auroexec/cfg.sys to inis. Nt/95 moved it to the registry.
@@myne00 That's because you keep only with what majority of the ignorant and the linux fanatic crowd spread across the internet. What you said is in the same level of ignorance as saying Windows 95 is just a fancy shell on top of DOS. What I've said is backed by papers published by MS, ReactOS open source findings, and what people like George Chapell (rip), Andrew Schulmann, and in later times Mark Russinovich and Alex Ionescu have written about the subject, not just ignorants and linux/stallman sh1lls. But even in such case, you don't even need trust on that. You can always try to program a sample driver in the old NT4 monolithic style, which allows you to specify memory/io/dma values in registry as strings, and try to convince Windows to insert them in the PnP stack (them should appear in the Device Manager tree and answer to Power Management signals). Tell me when you get success.
@@myne00 I don't get how your comment is related to my comment. Is obvious for non-PnP hardware you still have to enter the memory/io/dma in the device manager control panel, that wasn't the point. I was talking about the mechanism, and how from Windows 95 and Windows 2000, for the OS Kernel and Driver Stack every piece of hardware is PnP, doesn't matter if it isn't. And how it provides the programmatical facilities to make it happen that way.
I remember reading about this a few years ago and I wonder if a reverse replacement can be developed, like, give NT4 (or even newer NT-derivates) the classic 3.x-chrome and UI.. Another interesting sight is office 97 with its flat toolbars in nt 3.51!
@@Bort_86 WindowBlinds by Stardock adds skinning capabilities to Windows, and exists like ages. They could certainly mimick the old 3x UI decorations. But I seem to understand, you're more into the direction of copyig (or binary editing) some files over, to bring it back?
This is something Microsoft would never do today. Too bad actually, this would be an actual good way to gather feedback rather than rolling out everything at will via Windows Update.
@@myne00 Eh... not worth it to me personally anymore. Spend most of my time in Linux, keep Windows 10 essentially only around to play VR games and hope they iron out the playground that 11 feels like.
3:53 and they're still doing that thing of updating partially to this day on Windows11 . and people still complain its not visually consistent, what do you want, all your old software to stop working ? like on Apple ?
One could argue, that also other OSes and their applications are not always visually consistent, i.e. on Linux with tons of KDE or Gnome applications. I guess it's just an effect that happens, when many different development teams with thousands of people work on different applications. Wether that's good or bad, lies in the eyes of the beholder. Same goes for backwards compatibility. Apple is more prone to cutting old stuff out, as Microsoft tends to keep decades long legacies in. Both approaches have pros and cons. It's surprising how a lot of old software still runs on Windows to this day. Apple cut out many things, like moving to 64-bit-only apps in 2019 with Catalina. And while they were announcing this 2 years ahead, this still left some software behind. Now, one might ask, if that's the problem of the OS manufacturer, or the problem of the one, who made the software and didn't bother to update it to make it work again? And to zoom out into bird's eye perspective: Was Apple already planning to move to ARM in 2017, when they announced the upcoming end to 32-bit support? And if they knew already, could it be that the transition to 64-bit only was an enabling step towards a second step, which was the ARM transtition, hence facilitating the implementation of the now-current "Rosetta 2" emulation layer in macOS? Again, I'm neither implying good or bad here. Just trying to show different perspectives.
old software stopping to work on appkit is simply not true. it is true, though, that the ui since windows 10 is like an amateurishly applied thin layer of bad paint.
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Yet, as we are talking about this, one thing I miss is desktop applications having consistency of UI with the operating system, think Windows 95. web-apps are insane, everyone's trying to differentiate on visual design instead of technical features, it makes for worst experience overall. and it goes totally contrary to the purpose of having a "cascading style sheet" , remember when the web was for documents and the user could choose their own style sheet ?
@@britneyfreek The Win11 design is actually going to a good direction. Win10 was like that, a crap design, just old bad paid. The problem is that they're not repainting the thing fast enough. When Windows12 launches, there will still be leftovers. now about apple breaking their kit was more when they migrated away from the PowerPC, it was an old joke.
It indeed is, since there was no "Windows NT" before Windows NT 3.1. Microsoft decided to give its new child the version number 3.1 to set it on par with the already well known Windows 3.1
7:56 I don't get why Linux people hate the Windows registry so much, it is basically just a file system that store primitive values. And its implemented like a red-black tree (or was). Perhaps they think its slow because regedit is slow to scan/search, which is totally not what the system usually do, the registry is fast for retrieval if you know the path (with all software knows when they load value from the registry), its obviously slow to scan because that's not what it was made for, this is called engineering. Imagine having thousands of "ini" files shoved away under the rug "/etc", literally.... (ask about the way the DNS resolution configuration works on system/d? again, how is that any better? its not) Except its worse, because each software uses a different syntax and you need to parse, unix people must get hard programming parsers, everything is text means every program has a poor parser for a text, what a moronic idea. (write me a parser for the "fstab" that doesn't brick the system) The centralized database for system configuration was clearly the right idea. Except for the fact that COM puts way too much metadata there, that's a problem with COM, not the registry.
There was times, where the registry could become too big (as cluttered with too many things in there) and dare you it got corrupted and not having a backup. Recovering from a bad and corrupted registry was, at least in the Win9x near to impossible. At least in theory, getting an INI file back in shape (if you new the syntax and what actually belonged in there), is to some extended possible. Like you could borrow a WIN.INI and SYSTEM.INI from another system, and use it as a starting point to revive a broken Windows 3.x. Personally, I never had issues with it, as I didn't install applications like crazy. Though I personally saw (and fixed) many systems suffering from Registry issues, but mostly when people were just doing the "oh, what a nice program, I need to try it out"-limbo. The idea of the Registry IMO is a solid one, and it certainly has matured a lot over the years. Is it better than INI files? For certain. As opposed to the Unix/Linux world, where at least there is the convention, that all configuration goes to /etc or /usr/local/etc, the INIs were cluttered everywhere. For the worst, most of them resided in the C:\WINDOWS directory, making that one become a directory of all things and craze. So in that sense, the Registry added a standard convention to follow. Now, the Unix/Linux "etc" is a different beast on it's own...
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Registry can't be corrupted since MS added journaling to it in Windows XP. Not at least without physical hardware failure. Even viruses can't tamper with the low level on-disk structures by directly hexediting it, as the registry will check the hashes and revert them if it finds mismatches. So the only way to corrupt it is erasing the files. In fact... One of the reasons why ReactOS is still unstable, is because they still don't have journaling in their registry implementation. On later builds they have implemented half of the api, called "registry selfhealing" and just with that the OS doesn't get unbootable in case of BSoD or unexpected shutdown.
@@hyoenmadan I remember even in Windows 7, it's possible to get an unbootable system due to registry corruption by setting a user's quota to a value smaller than the user registry needs. (I haven't used newer versions, can't comment on them, but don't expect them to have fixed it.) Sure, in a perfect system, hardware failure would be the only fault, but it isn't the case.
Is it a general observation, or just in certain segments? If you can point to the segments where I lost you, I can certainly reflect for a better way to improve.
And now Windows 11 has a shell for dummies that seems to be designed to make Android users happy, Windows users angry and Linux users laugh at Windows users even more 🤦♂ It was so easy to make it optional for new, inexperienced users that Microsoft wasn't able to do it 🤯
![A look into Xenix, Microsoft's long forgotten Unix Operating System [COMPAQ PORTABLE PLUS - Pt III]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/JlhDi2gGmhE/mqdefault.jpg)
Still waiting on the "12 Hours of OS Install Progress Bars to Sleep to" xD thanks for making all of these!
ASMR style for the ultimate tingling sensation? ;)
You know, I bet Dave Plummer would know quite a bit about the history of the shell on 95 and NT.
I think a collab is in order :b
If I remember right, he was responsible for the text down the side of the start menu
I was so into the newshell back then. We had a full MSDN subscription and received every disk(I mean *every* disk, including every language pack you could imagine). I ran 3.51 with the shell preview as soon as it arrived, then later switching to 4.0 (both of which took advantage of our dual P-66 HP workstations).
I also ran the third-party Unix subsystem (I forget who made it). It was pretty awesome, and worth looking into if you’re into that kind of thing. I think it might have morphed into WSL today.
ohhhh my allknowing friend is back! 🎉
(With a funny voice pitch) See, I told ya! ;)
Whenever someone utters “Windows”, you can hear a faint “Me”
Office 95 and 97 were both officially supported on NT 3.51. Office 97 did away with the custom system title bars, but did use the 95-style MDI controls.
Yeah, Office97 on NT3.51 doesn't look different from it running on Win95 or NT4, except for the system bars, is odd. Inside the window, them look all the same. Also Encarta95 uses modern controls when running in Win31.
The office team loves to make their own title bars lol
@@CmdrKeene They still do that lmao, the Office 2024 titlebars look different from Windows 10 and 11's stock decorations
@@supercellex4D indeed! I think almost every version of office has at least some small title bar flourish of some kind, and sometimes huge. Remember the office orb in the vista era?
Started my medical career with nt351. I subscribe to technet cds back then. Loved the searchable cds and provided updates. Documentation was extensive with ms back then. Now ms is just an advertisement company masquerading as an os. Thanks. For the video.
The taskbar/windows look a bit more chunkier in the shell preview by a few pixels. Glad that they slimmed this down for the retail Win95/NT4.0 as I think it looks much better.
Upping the Kernel version to 4 is almost certainly because programs can use a check for Windows Version 4 as a way to check if it has the Win95 UI. Windows 3.x is assumed to not have the new UI. As this was a preview for testing it makes sense that programs do not treat it as only normal 3.51 but instead run as if it is Windows 95. Some early Windows 95 programs will refuse to run/install unless they are on Windows 4 or above. Nt3.51 will fail the check by default but the shell preview with fake v4 Kernel should run those programs. It was just an early compatibility hack.
I loved the Windows Shell update for Windows 95 and NT 4.0 that came with.MSIE 4.0. I never knew that Windows NT 3.5 got it's own shell update to the Win95 style.
Interesting, I never knew that there existed a Windows 95 style GUI shell update for NT 3.51.
But Windows NT 4 was slightly more than just the new shell on NT 3.51. As I recall Microsoft changed their device driver model (WDDM?) with NT4 and they also controversially moved the display drivers into the kernel to improve display performance (at the expense of some stability and, in time, security).
I first used NT3.51 and it’s fascinating how fully featured it was, most of the stuff that’s in windows today can trace its lineage back to the early days. Some stuff hasn’t changed much at all.
I remember the Windows 3.1 registry. There was a shareware program I used that hid its time bomb details in the registry so you could uninstall and reinstall it and even monitor the file changes to see if you could reset it. But no, you couldn't find anything because it hid itself in the registry. Delete the key it created and it resets the timebomb back to zero so you could use it another 30 days.
I remember using Windows NT3.1 when it came out, then we upgraded to NT3.5 and finally NT3.5.1 at first without the new shell. We tested some machines in the office with the new shell and some without. I didn't get it on mine and kept the 3x style GUI. This was such a huge innovation and made it much easier to get around windows than the old UI. When we then upgraded to NT4 I did miss some elements of the old 3x shell but quickly got used to the start menu.
I started with NT 3.5. I tried the New Shell, but don't remember if I liked it or not. It was interesting like any beta. I didn't like NT4 much, but since I had gone the 3.5 to 3.51 upgrade, I couldn't install 3.51 to larger hard drives. The Win2k GUI was my favorite of the windows shells. But, then again I usually used alternative shells since the windows 3.0 days.
@@user-qd9pg8xt2k Yes i didnt like NT4 as much either but i did like Win2k and still have it now on a P166 machine. Its a shame the alternate shells seemed to disappear apart from Stardock products.
Great piece of history
Hard to believe that I actually miss those shells. I hated them so much back in the 90's. Now they look cozy.
I didn’t really get into NT until 4.0. Those were the good old days
The next Windows deserves a new shell...
Interesting, never got a chance to really use NT 3.51 and certainly not with this shell. I got NT4 and Windows 95 together on some sort of educational discount and quickly settled on NT4 as my main OS, never knew Windows could be so stable.
This video from Dave Plummer fits here just nicely:
ua-cam.com/video/U6eb2pfTACc/v-deo.htmlsi=CwXEHyurOhuBnqQN
Nice video-
guets video. akzänt isch verräterisch gsi 🙂
Merci.
Und debi gibi mir so müeh, dass es nid nach "änglisch federau" tönt ... ^^
im interested in the video of the ability to run the OS2 presintation manager on Windows NT
That‘s this one here:
Inside the OS/2 personality of Windows NT 3.x
ua-cam.com/video/P2GhLVB_Oxk/v-deo.html
Thanks
I stated my job as a CAD designer that knew more about computers than anyone that worked there and in turn I became their IT 😂 I really despised NT... Probably because of it was not as "plug and play". This is a cool bit of history though!
History of the Plug and Play on NT and the PC is very tied to Compaq and Microsoft, and is complicated, long and worth of a documental. It took to MS not less than 6 years to put it on the streets, and then they could only get it stable on Windows XP SP2, many years after Windows 2000 reached the streets, and more years after the first NT5 beta build which included it as feature. It took a completely new driver model, guideline standards for PC manufacturers and a complete rework of the firmware which drives PCs (ONnow initiative/ISAPnP/PCI/USB/ACPI).
Do you know, when you configure a non-PnP (jumper configured) ISA card under Windows95/Windows2000, you basically create a firmware-like structure in the windows registry with the configuration parameters (memory/io/dma values) to make Windows kernel and the driver stack to recognize it as if it was PnP hardware? This same technology later became a way to configure software-only "virtual devices" in the OS which don't require an special driver stack. I hope someone can cover this in detail later.
@@hyoenmadan awesome info! And no I didn't know that. That's interesting that it took nearly a decade!
@hyoenmadan
That's not really how I see it.
It's just replacing the same settings in ini files with keys in the registry.
Early windows moved some of the auroexec/cfg.sys to inis. Nt/95 moved it to the registry.
@@myne00 That's because you keep only with what majority of the ignorant and the linux fanatic crowd spread across the internet.
What you said is in the same level of ignorance as saying Windows 95 is just a fancy shell on top of DOS.
What I've said is backed by papers published by MS, ReactOS open source findings, and what people like George Chapell (rip), Andrew Schulmann, and in later times Mark Russinovich and Alex Ionescu have written about the subject, not just ignorants and linux/stallman sh1lls.
But even in such case, you don't even need trust on that. You can always try to program a sample driver in the old NT4 monolithic style, which allows you to specify memory/io/dma values in registry as strings, and try to convince Windows to insert them in the PnP stack (them should appear in the Device Manager tree and answer to Power Management signals). Tell me when you get success.
@@myne00 I don't get how your comment is related to my comment. Is obvious for non-PnP hardware you still have to enter the memory/io/dma in the device manager control panel, that wasn't the point.
I was talking about the mechanism, and how from Windows 95 and Windows 2000, for the OS Kernel and Driver Stack every piece of hardware is PnP, doesn't matter if it isn't. And how it provides the programmatical facilities to make it happen that way.
I remember reading about this a few years ago and I wonder if a reverse replacement can be developed, like, give NT4 (or even newer NT-derivates) the classic 3.x-chrome and UI..
Another interesting sight is office 97 with its flat toolbars in nt 3.51!
Um... Yeah.
Shell=progman.exe in the win.ini of 9x, or hklm\software...blah..\shell in nt
@@myne00 no, going further, getting the old window decorations back and all
@@Bort_86 WindowBlinds by Stardock adds skinning capabilities to Windows, and exists like ages. They could certainly mimick the old 3x UI decorations.
But I seem to understand, you're more into the direction of copyig (or binary editing) some files over, to bring it back?
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR completely forgot about window blinds! But yes, you got it, that was what I was taking about :)
have a look at serenity os!
This is something Microsoft would never do today.
Too bad actually, this would be an actual good way to gather feedback rather than rolling out everything at will via Windows Update.
There's official beta channels now.
Pretty sure you can join with a brief sign up process.
@@myne00 Eh... not worth it to me personally anymore.
Spend most of my time in Linux, keep Windows 10 essentially only around to play VR games and hope they iron out the playground that 11 feels like.
3:53 and they're still doing that thing of updating partially to this day on Windows11 . and people still complain its not visually consistent, what do you want, all your old software to stop working ? like on Apple ?
One could argue, that also other OSes and their applications are not always visually consistent, i.e. on Linux with tons of KDE or Gnome applications.
I guess it's just an effect that happens, when many different development teams with thousands of people work on different applications.
Wether that's good or bad, lies in the eyes of the beholder.
Same goes for backwards compatibility. Apple is more prone to cutting old stuff out, as Microsoft tends to keep decades long legacies in.
Both approaches have pros and cons.
It's surprising how a lot of old software still runs on Windows to this day. Apple cut out many things, like moving to 64-bit-only apps in 2019 with Catalina.
And while they were announcing this 2 years ahead, this still left some software behind.
Now, one might ask, if that's the problem of the OS manufacturer, or the problem of the one, who made the software and didn't bother to update it to make it work again?
And to zoom out into bird's eye perspective: Was Apple already planning to move to ARM in 2017, when they announced the upcoming end to 32-bit support?
And if they knew already, could it be that the transition to 64-bit only was an enabling step towards a second step, which was the ARM transtition, hence facilitating the implementation of the now-current "Rosetta 2" emulation layer in macOS?
Again, I'm neither implying good or bad here. Just trying to show different perspectives.
old software stopping to work on appkit is simply not true. it is true, though, that the ui since windows 10 is like an amateurishly applied thin layer of bad paint.
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Yet, as we are talking about this, one thing I miss is desktop applications having consistency of UI with the operating system, think Windows 95.
web-apps are insane, everyone's trying to differentiate on visual design instead of technical features, it makes for worst experience overall.
and it goes totally contrary to the purpose of having a "cascading style sheet" , remember when the web was for documents and the user could choose their own style sheet ?
@@britneyfreek The Win11 design is actually going to a good direction. Win10 was like that, a crap design, just old bad paid.
The problem is that they're not repainting the thing fast enough.
When Windows12 launches, there will still be leftovers.
now about apple breaking their kit was more when they migrated away from the PowerPC, it was an old joke.
they don't change much things nowadays do they ? mostly a freshly coat of paint
Hey you haven't come across a shell extension for win 95 called big gak ? Someone i know looking for a copy/ reference
@@random_precision_software Nope, never heard of it, I‘m afraid!
IMHO, NT 3.x is the groundwork of modern Microsoft operating systems and the basis of azure and Xbox live has been built.
It indeed is, since there was no "Windows NT" before Windows NT 3.1. Microsoft decided to give its new child the version number 3.1 to set it on par with the already well known Windows 3.1
you‘re right. the interview with dave cutler that dave plummer did should interest you. it’s here on yt.
@@britneyfreek Dave Cutler is the man
7:56 I don't get why Linux people hate the Windows registry so much, it is basically just a file system that store primitive values. And its implemented like a red-black tree (or was).
Perhaps they think its slow because regedit is slow to scan/search, which is totally not what the system usually do, the registry is fast for retrieval if you know the path (with all software knows when they load value from the registry), its obviously slow to scan because that's not what it was made for, this is called engineering.
Imagine having thousands of "ini" files shoved away under the rug "/etc", literally.... (ask about the way the DNS resolution configuration works on system/d? again, how is that any better? its not)
Except its worse, because each software uses a different syntax and you need to parse, unix people must get hard programming parsers, everything is text means every program has a poor parser for a text, what a moronic idea. (write me a parser for the "fstab" that doesn't brick the system)
The centralized database for system configuration was clearly the right idea. Except for the fact that COM puts way too much metadata there, that's a problem with COM, not the registry.
There was times, where the registry could become too big (as cluttered with too many things in there) and dare you it got corrupted and not having a backup.
Recovering from a bad and corrupted registry was, at least in the Win9x near to impossible.
At least in theory, getting an INI file back in shape (if you new the syntax and what actually belonged in there), is to some extended possible.
Like you could borrow a WIN.INI and SYSTEM.INI from another system, and use it as a starting point to revive a broken Windows 3.x.
Personally, I never had issues with it, as I didn't install applications like crazy.
Though I personally saw (and fixed) many systems suffering from Registry issues, but mostly when people were just doing the "oh, what a nice program, I need to try it out"-limbo.
The idea of the Registry IMO is a solid one, and it certainly has matured a lot over the years.
Is it better than INI files? For certain. As opposed to the Unix/Linux world, where at least there is the convention, that all configuration goes to /etc or /usr/local/etc, the INIs were cluttered everywhere.
For the worst, most of them resided in the C:\WINDOWS directory, making that one become a directory of all things and craze.
So in that sense, the Registry added a standard convention to follow.
Now, the Unix/Linux "etc" is a different beast on it's own...
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Registry can't be corrupted since MS added journaling to it in Windows XP. Not at least without physical hardware failure. Even viruses can't tamper with the low level on-disk structures by directly hexediting it, as the registry will check the hashes and revert them if it finds mismatches. So the only way to corrupt it is erasing the files.
In fact... One of the reasons why ReactOS is still unstable, is because they still don't have journaling in their registry implementation. On later builds they have implemented half of the api, called "registry selfhealing" and just with that the OS doesn't get unbootable in case of BSoD or unexpected shutdown.
Ask any Linux user that complains how they feel about dconf (basically, the Linux equivalent of the registry) :)
@@hyoenmadan I remember even in Windows 7, it's possible to get an unbootable system due to registry corruption by setting a user's quota to a value smaller than the user registry needs. (I haven't used newer versions, can't comment on them, but don't expect them to have fixed it.)
Sure, in a perfect system, hardware failure would be the only fault, but it isn't the case.
@@hyoenmadan I was referring to my encounters with it in the Win 9x days.
This is cool. Why did it exist?
Mostly to familiarize early adopters and mostly the developers with the new capabilities of the upcoming UI.
You constantly move between os-es fast and made that video hard to follow.
Is it a general observation, or just in certain segments?
If you can point to the segments where I lost you, I can certainly reflect for a better way to improve.
And now Windows 11 has a shell for dummies that seems to be designed to make Android users happy, Windows users angry and Linux users laugh at Windows users even more 🤦♂
It was so easy to make it optional for new, inexperienced users that Microsoft wasn't able to do it 🤯
Windows ME sucks!
Could this run on a 386sx with 4mb ?
Minimum spec for NT 3.51 was a 386DX with 12 MiB.