This is because a) windows is truly general purpose, anyone from your old grandma to a corporate scientist is the audience b) It is an emergent system, it was pieced together after supporting many features over decades to meet a wide range of needs. In other words, it wasn't architected to meet the needs of a specific subset of users. Like with MacOS it is the graphic designers and consumers that want a simple pc (wasn't alwayd corporate friendly, still isn't compared to windows) and nix, I hardly need to describe that on HN.
You must remember, Windows was at its core made for the PC! Which meant random manufacturers get to shove it on their PC and random devs get to write code on it and it was closed source. This meant a lot of apis and the burden of supporting them long term. It was made in the era whe se purchased software in CDs.
The more I learn the internals of windows (it's a hybrid kernel but I mean the stuff close to the kernel not userspace) the more I am finding our a lot of fascinating design decisions that others can learn from. But even in user space, COM and WMI alone would be amazing to have on nix (I think KDE sort of tries for COM).
But from curl's perspective I can see why he'd be frustrated but I truly wonder what the problems are. If you use openssl and basically the same libs as on *nix, could it be the build systems and runtimes (Visual C++?)?
As a teenager I avidly read some Microsoft book on the impending Windows 95 release (I didn’t have the “Chicago Betas”. I remember reading that book cover to cover. I remember that it depicted checkboxes are rhomboid-shaped, which didn’t actually appear in the final release. I remember my excitement as I queued to get my upgrade edition of Windows 95 that I then installed onto my sluggish 486DX2-66.
I had an NT4 machine at work until 2007 that only had a floppy drive for writable media. It had USB 1 ports but those were unusable in NT which was why $employer kept running it.
Windows NT 3.1 seems to have come with a CD, a complete installation set of 3.5" discs, and even boot discs for the CD on 5.25" discs (and a voucher for a 5.25" complete set). So Microsoft obviously thought 3.5" discs were often going to be needed back in 1993 (and there's a notable number of people that have a CD-ROM drive, but no 3.5" drive?). See https://socket3.wordpress.com/2016/12/24/ebay-purchase-5-mic...
Frankly, I'd count Windows 95 as really being in the CD era, floppy software was getting rare than (although apparently there's a even a 39 disc floppy version of Windows 98 if you're a real masochist), but a couple of years earlier CD-ROMs were still quite niche, although a high end workstation does seem a likely candidate to have one.
When I installed windows 95 soon after release, I had to figure out how to dial boot it with my SLS or Slackware installation which was installed from floppies.
And they were DMF format, 1680KiB instead of the usual 1440KiB which would have resulted in two extra disks. If you were unlucky and had an old/crap drive you might find you have to replace it to get Win95 to install. Somewhere into the 4.x line of MS Office, pre-dating Win95, this format started to be used as well.
Do you remember the Weezer “Buddy Holly” video that was included to show off the multimedia features? Hilariously small resolution by today’s standards.
If he's got the floppy disc edition he won't, it was only on the CD version.
(As well as bonus "filler" like Weezer and Hover they also cut a few things from the actual installer like some of the alternate sound effects and animated cursors from the floppy version IIRC).
I messed up my parent's computer so many times, that my uncle (the family IT guy) just left the set of floppies so I could re-install it myself. I inevitably kept breaking Windows 95 every 8 months or so.
You must remember, Windows was at its core made for the PC! Which meant random manufacturers get to shove it on their PC and random devs get to write code on it and it was closed source. This meant a lot of apis and the burden of supporting them long term. It was made in the era whe se purchased software in CDs.
The more I learn the internals of windows (it's a hybrid kernel but I mean the stuff close to the kernel not userspace) the more I am finding our a lot of fascinating design decisions that others can learn from. But even in user space, COM and WMI alone would be amazing to have on nix (I think KDE sort of tries for COM).
But from curl's perspective I can see why he'd be frustrated but I truly wonder what the problems are. If you use openssl and basically the same libs as on *nix, could it be the build systems and runtimes (Visual C++?)?