Version 6 of Windows 95

Richard Suchenwirth 2007-10-11 - Successor to Windows 3.11. Even older (three years) than Windows 98, but still going strong in some places, e.g. my ancient 200MHz 48MB box at home - where most of my many hundreds of fun projects were made...

From 8.5, W95 is no longer supported by Tcl/Tk. Here's my travelogue how I got Tcl/Tk 8.5b1 built and running, with mingwin/msys, with only two lines of code changed :^)

Building Tcl 8.5b1 on W95 SE almost worked... just in make install I got

 Installing time zone data
 /bin/sh: ./tclsh85.exe: Permission denied
 make: *** [install-tzdata] Error 126

and a pop-up which roughly translated says

 missing Export-USER32.DLL:MsgWaitForMultipleObjectsEx

So it's true when they say W95 is no longer supported... :( The sore spot is

 $ grep -n MultipleObjectsEx *.c
 tclWinNotify.c:475:     result = MsgWaitForMultipleObjectsEx(1, &tsdPtr->event,
        timeout,

GPS suggested to try it without the "Ex" - this lets make install come through. make test still running (hey, this old box has only 200MHz...) In fact, it seems to hang after

 ---- Result was:
 timeout {} foobarbaz timeout
 ---- Result should have been (exact matching):
 {} timeout foobarbaz timeout
 ==== io-6.56 FAILED

A more patient retry shows that io.test just takes very long, but ultimately terminates, and lets other tests carry on. Here's one failed test which I'm not so sure of (uppercase drive letters seem quite Win-idiomatic to me):

 ==== filesystem-1.38 file normalisation with volume relative FAILED
 ==== Contents of test case:

    set path "[string range [lindex $drives 0] 0 1]foo"
    set dir [pwd]
    cd [lindex $drives 1]
    set res [file norm $path]
    cd $dir
    set res

 ---- Result was:
 C:/foo
 ---- Result should have been (exact matching):
 c:/foo
 ==== filesystem-1.38 FAILED

Configuring Tk went well, in make I spotted a warning:

 D:\MSYS\src\tk8.5b1\win\tkWinEmbed.c:49: warning: 'EmbeddedEventProc' declared `
 static' but never defined

A bigger problem was another Win symbol, which I just commented out in tkWinX.c, near the end:

   /* SendInput(1, &inp, sizeof(inp)); */

After this, win85.exe does not come up, but tclsh85.exe with package require Tk does, and responds as I'd expect... So yes, there's even some hope for ninety-fivers... :^)

Not all is well, though. A canvas acts and reacts decently, while a text widget reacts to insertions from console only after touching it, and to typing in itself very sloppy. So there are still deeper problems.

Oh, and besides ActiveTcl 8.4, some things like eTcl 1.0-rc23 and tcltcc run right out of the binary box here.

Category Operating System

Category Operating System