Win2K was my favorite as well. The transparency was tasteful. Everything worked and for the most part didn’t crash. Many (most?) games worked. It ran great on a PIII 600mhz. Everything good about NT4 was better and most of the consumer friendly stuff starting to take shape. The disc was even gorgeous. Peak MS design and engineering.

I love me some Windows 2000 but when I got to XP I was running it with a BeOS theme. My peak of windows ux may be around Windows 10 Beta 1 - combined 7/8/10 transparent and start menu and was super fast. That said beta 1 of Win11 was also super fast so that makes me wonder what they broke under the hood.

Yep, favorite version of Windows ever. Even with Windows 7 and XP I switched the settings back so it looked like Win2K.

Win2k was the last one I was excited about.

> There were OS improvements too, but I have forgot what …

Hold up, there is no need for this revisionist history.

At the very least, Windows 95 introduced the ability to run 32-bit apps pre-emptively that was otherwise only available on Windows NT. You continued to maintain the ability to run 16-but apps that wouldn’t run on Win NT.

You also gained support for long filenames, and to the chagrin of many, plug-and-play.

These were foundational and set the tone for the next 30 years of computing.

I don't remember if Plug-n-Play shipped with the original Windows 95 (it's certainly there in the final OSR), but that was a pretty big shift from the manual IRQ and port mapping days of DOS/Windows 3.1.

It did. That was one of its big features.

It also was the first version to remove the 8.3 limitation and give us long file names.

They were fake long file names though. At the actual dos layer they were 8.3. And the plug and play was terrrrible. I always turned it off. Ugh the plug and play modems/soundcards were trash.

Plug and Pray!

They weren't fake long file names. They were actual long files names but of course the operating system that didn't support long files names didn't know what to do with the (very real) long file names. It only knew the 8.3 file name that was also set for compatibility.

Of course it sucked if you looked at or worked with DOS based apps. But it was one of those things that was always good about Microsoft Windows: Backwards compatibility.

They literally would build in (bug-) compatibility layers for specific games, where if they detected you were running a particular game, they'd not use the fixed or optimized code paths, but the old ones / emulate / patch things as the game expected them to be. And that was not because Windows was buggy and the games were good. It was the other way around. Games used trickery and internal knowledge that they shouldn't and if/when MS would block those paths or change internals, those games would stop working or crash.

You're not wrong, but PnP including the configuration basis for PCI which still sits at the config space layer of the latest and greatest PCIe. That's the piece I find so significant. I work with GPUs that mostly communicate over a proprietary C2C connection, but how does the OS find them? PCI enumeration.

IRQ conflict stuff still kinda haunts me.

I remember. You get a tiny little sliver of sound and then press reset.

back then, it was still plug-n-pray. it didn't work as well as it was intended when it was first available

> A GUI that competed with the Mac.

Oh, that is _hilarious._ Mac started out strong and has always kept ahead of Windows in many if not most ways that GIUs are done.

Hell, every now and then I’ll fire up my 2002 Power Mac (dual 1.25Ghz G4, MDD) and just bask in the beauty that is OS 9.2.2. While it was lacking good multitasking and multi-user accounts, it is still an exquisitely gorgeous UI.

I still use it for various tasks, although it’s close to impossible to do decent Internet work on it, owing to no available modern web browsers.

IIRC we got long filenames with Win95, and a built-in network stack, no more Trumpet WinSock. And it did seem more stable, not nearly as good as NT/2000 but better than 3.1.

> IIRC we got long filenames with Win95, and a built-in network stack, no more Trumpet WinSock. And it did seem more stable, not nearly as good as NT/2000 but better than 3.1.

Kinda sorta but this misses context.

> we got long filenames

Consumers got long filenames. NT had been doing it for a couple of years. Win95 did it on FAT on a mass-market OS.

> a built-in network stack

No. Windows for Workgroups had offered that for several years. It talked NetBEUI, the Microsoft protocol, out of the box, and it also talked Novell IPX/SPX for talking to Netware, and DECnet, and HP-DLC...

But you hint at the important bit...

> no more Trumpet WinSock

Bingo. Win95 offered native 32-bit TCP/IP for the first time and it was over Ethernet.

WfWg had DOS-based 16-bit TCP/IP but only over Ethernet (or Token Ring!) It didn't have dialup networking -- at all. It couldn't talk TCP/IP over PPP, such as over a modem. WfWg 3.11 offered, only as an optional extra download, a 32-bit TCP/IP stack -- for network cards. And nobody had anything to download it over. ;-)

Internet Explorer 4 for Windows 3.x had an optional 16-bit dialup stack and optional 16-bit TCP/IP -- but that could not talk to a network card.

I know, it's prehistory, but in the late 1980s and early to mid 1990s, local-area networks were catching on like wildfire and by 1993 or so Microsoft noticed and made networking in Windows a standard feature.

What is overlooked today: it didn't use TCP/IP.

Nothing much did. Not even big iron or minicomputers like DEC VAX kit with VMS. TCP/IP was a Unix thing, and Unix cost $thousands just for the OS, plus $thousands more for the hardware. Even if you ran it on PCs, you needed $thousands worth of RAM. SCO Xenix was huge but for production it needed 2-4 MB of RAM, ideally 8+ MB, and in the DOS era, PCs came with 1 MB.