That’s not a typo. Windows 96 promised to build on the success of Windows 95, yet it never materialized as originally intended.
I only learned about this a few months ago. To me, this was an incredibly fascinating discovery and wanted to write about & share it.
So much nostalgia for the Windows 95/98 era.
Playing Descent with musicmatch jukebox running in the background. (Probably a 98 memory).
Bouncing sheep…
I was actually part of the beta test group for Windows Nashville. It was an improvement over Windows 95, but Windows 98 really brought home a lot of good UI design improvements that began in Windows Nashville. Sadly, it was so buggy that they delayed for several years and, instead, just released Windows 98 when it was finally ready.
Windows Longhorn was a similar failure a few years later
Windows Vista is Microsoft’s greatest success, because it’s main purpose was to make people forget the promises made for Longhorn.
I do kinda wish we had gotten WinFS. All the “ideas” of it seemed cool, just impossible to implement without breaking every existing application.
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This is a very good article, but this part peeved me on a petty level (as well as explaining why there’s precious little in the way of screenshots):
While I can’t find any uploads that are set to run on their website in a virtual computing session, the files are available to download if you felt like spinning up a piece of computing history.
The opportunity to do a little investigative journalism is right there, and the blog author didn’t take it
Hi, author here 👋. Thanks for the feedback. If the Internet Archive had it on their own VM to run, I would’ve tried playing with it and taken some screenshots. However, I simply did not have the time to get it running locally on my machine, especially because I’m all Mac and Virtual Box doesn’t run on M-series hardware.
I agree it’s a missed opportunity, but I chose to go a little bit of an easier route.
Thanks for reading and enjoying the other 99% of the article. 😉
