Before I continue, I will make it completely clear that as I write this column, I will not let the fact that I couldn't get past the gate at Launch95 affect my writing. I will also not let the fact that I am trying to infiltrate Microsoft under the guise of getting a job there affect my writing. Hey, as I have said before, I have a healthy respect for Microsoft's lawyers.
Six months before it was released to the public, I managed to get a copy of the developer's version of the "final beta" (build 347, for those of you in the know about that type of stuff.) Living here in the heart of Microsoftville, you run into this kind of stuff often, especially when you have connections... ;)
Anyway, this version contained the full Win32 SDK on the CD it came on. Even though I didn't have a 32-bit compiner capable of using most of the stuff in the SDK (and the 16-bit C++ I had on the system ran nightmarishly slow,) I managed to dig through the directories and find a few binaries. Particularly interesting was one program that tested the various types of digital compression for graphics. The test picture I found showed some T-shirt clad MS employee with a demented look on his face strangling a stuffed toy bunny. We have to wonder about some of these people.
Since Zippy (or the network) hadn't been introduced to the den at the time, and since my dad would have had a fit otherwise, I was left with Kids (my 386SX/20 with a single-speed CD-ROM) to install the sucker on. Being very patient (something that I had learned already from using a 386 in a Pentium world,) I went ahead and installed the thing. To my surprise (and to the surprise of some of my Mac-headed "connections,") the thing actually worked.
Ok, so here I was, using a super-unleaded( I know, bad metaphor) OS on a "diesel only" computer. Something was supposed to go wrong. Murphy's Law demanded this. I waited for that terrible event to happen. It never did. Even when we first networked the two computers we had at the time, it went of almost without a hitch. I had figured that it was waiting. Eventually, when I looked away for a minute, the system would spontaneously explode, taking out a significant chunk of the den and garage with me in it. I figured that adding a little duck-and-cover to my computing wouldn't hurt, so I kept using it.
Almost immediately after I got a copy of what was supposed to be the final beta, it was outdated. I was unable to get a newer build until build 950. Then one of my connections came through again. Apparently, this one was actually the final beta. Figure that.
My 386 has been reduced to a slightly more reasonable OS (Windows 3.11, which is a slight improvement. By my calculations, the most truly "reasonable" OS for my 386 is CP\M.) Now I am running Win95 on Zippy, with an external SCSI hard drive (which requires the internal drives to be unplugged. It is because of this that Zippy is now in a state of perpetual caselessness.) Although I still write The Sledgehammer on my 486, Zippy has become my primary Internet machine (thanks to SubSpace, a rather addictive Win95 net game.) I still tend to think that my computers conspire against me, so the occasional duck-and-cover drill does still sneak into my computing routine at times.
In a workplace where people often work 12-hour "half days," the collective sanity of Microsoft has to be suffering. This is inevitably manifest in the software they write to control our computers. Hmmm... Does that mean that the inmates are running the asylum when we use Windows95 to power our systems? There are probably quite a few people out there inclined to agree with me on that one.