Version 7 of Windows 98

Updated 2004-10-23 09:20:30 by suchenwi

LES describes: an old Microsoft operating system. Every week someone tells me it's "old", "obsolete", "a toy operating system" or "what? who uses Windows 98?". But it has everything I need. Including Tcl, of course. I use MS Office, OpenOffice, Internet Explorer 5, Firefox, e-mail, Cygwin, text editors, programming languages, etc. etc. etc. No more than a couple of times have I ever run into software that ran on newer versions of Windows and did not run on Windows 98.

Windows 98 is old, but still works and has everything I need. And it's small, which I hold as a great quality.

Unfortunately, Microsoft has released other operating systems that add very little to good ol' Windows 98, except greater numbers (2000, 2003) to its product name and an impressive amount of code bloat. And that has been enough for plenty of people to act as if Windows 98 had suddenly become a totally useless OS. Quite a shame indeed.

Even worse, members of the TCT have expressed publicly their strong desire to discontinue support to Windows 98 in oncoming Tcl releases. God only knows when the plug will be finally pulled.

The following Tcl'ers are happy users (while they still can) of Windows 98:

  • LES
  • Peter Newman (and the same goes for Windows 95)
  • MG now uses Win XP, for compatability with other computers running MS software on XP, but has it set up to emulate 98 as much as possible.
  • VI
  • RS (Windows 95 in fact - still going strong on 200MHz...)

The following Tcl'ers are quite unhappy users of Windows 98:

  • LV - but then, I'm unhappy using any of the Microsoft OS products...

Category Glossary