The End of an Era

[Big Media]

For the final time, I powered down our Windows 95 machine today. It had worked flawlessly and constantly for nearly 11 years. It was still working flawlessly this very morning---we decided, it was just time.

She was a beaut... Dell Optiplex, 200Mhz Pentium Processor with MMX technology, 32 Megabytes of Ram, 8 megabytes of video ram, 10 Gig Hard Drive, a 32x CD-ROM drive. This thing was built for speed.

It is off to the Smithsonian.

[Lester]

GX Pro?

[David Paleg]

It is off to the Smithsonian.

To go on a shelf right near the Commodore Vic 20 and the Radio Schlock TRS 80?

[Big Media]

It is off to the Smithsonian.

To go on a shelf right near the Commodore Vic 20 and the Radio Schlock TRS 80?

Indeed. I will try to remember to take my camera to get some pics and take some screen shots to post. The only problem is I can't remember how to network a Windows 95 machine with another computer. I have no other computer with a floppy drive either.

I wonder if I place the monitor face down on a xerox machine... will that make a scannable screen shot?

[Lester]

Digital camera and a tripod will do the trick.

[sportsvoice]

Wonder if you can put a USB thumb drive on a 95 machine? I've never tried. You can network them using an Ethernet card if you've got a router or switch at home, or crossover cable. Or, you can use a parallel cable and use the "direct cable connection" wizard to get the files off the machine.

My old 200MHz machine worked pretty well with a stripped-down install of Windows 2000 Professional. I maxed out the RAM at 256 MB and it did OK.

[Dave Harman]

If you can't figure another way, I guess you could upgrade to Win98, network, and remove the files.

But it would probably blue-screen before you got done.

[Lester]

Wonder if you can put a USB thumb drive on a 95 machine? I've never tried. You can network them using an Ethernet card if you've got a router or switch at home, or crossover cable. Or, you can use a parallel cable and use the "direct cable connection" wizard to get the files off the machine.

Sort of. Win95 OSR2 supports USB, but it requires vendor drivers. So if you can get a driver for the USB key, you "should" be able to get it to work on Win95.

[Big Media]

Screw it. I will just pull the drive.

[Big Media]

It was actually easier to take the screen shots with my camera.

Here's the cute little stickers on the front:



It actually has USB ports but I am confident they were not active in the WIndows 95 set up.


The hard drive is actually only 4 Gigs.


The cleanest 11 year-old PC I have ever seen. Remember, this thing isn't something I just pulled off the shelf after 7 or 8 year. We have actually been using this thing and it has been running nonstop (on a UPS no less) for 11 years!


Holy cow!


It boots in FAR less time than my HP Vista machine.


32 Megs! What now, bitches?

[sportsvoice]

...from back in the day when the CPU didn't run hot enough to need its own fan...a heat sink was enough!

[Lester]

Which is a funny sidebar... the way the PC industry keeps bragging about how small today's processors are compared to 10 years ago... but once you factor in the cooler, they're actually about 150% bigger.

Bummer that's not a GX-Pro. I still have two "dual processor" kits floating around for those.

[djMatty]

What was the purpose of this long lived Windows 95 Machine?

[Big Media]

What was the purpose of this long lived Windows 95 Machine?

To run a crappy 15 year-old CG software package. What's more, we are STILL running the SAME DAMN 15 year-old software just on an XP platform instead.