Windows 98

~ the obit ~

This is the operating system I went online with. I got my first connection in 1998 on a modem at home in Turkey, and for the next several years Windows 98 was what was under everything: the dial-up connection icon in the tray, the two little screens blinking at each other while the line negotiated, the properties dialog where you set the modem's speaker volume down because your family could hear it. When the internet cafes filled up here a few years later, half of them were still running it.

Microsoft released it to manufacturing on 15 May 1998 and to retail on 25 June. It was marketed as a tune-up of Windows 95 rather than a new generation, and Walter Mossberg's review in the Wall Street Journal a month before launch said the same thing in fewer words: useful, not vital. Underneath, it was the same hybrid of 16-bit and 32-bit code booting through MS-DOS that 95 had been, which is why it crashed in the same ways.

What was actually new was unglamorous and mattered enormously. USB support that worked with hubs and scanners instead of only in obscure OEM releases. The Windows Driver Model, which almost nobody wrote for at the time and which every driver would eventually be written against. Windows Update as a thing in the Start menu. Multi-monitor support, if you had a spare PCI graphics card. ACPI standby, if your BIOS felt like cooperating.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the blue screen at COMDEX ~

In April 1998 Microsoft took the release candidate to COMDEX to show off Plug and Play. Bill Gates was on stage. Chris Capossela plugged a USB scanner into the demo machine, and the operating system went to a blue screen in front of the room. The applause was not sympathetic. Gates waited it out and said that must be why they were not shipping Windows 98 yet, which was the correct answer. The clip went around the web for years afterward.

~ what the shell swallowed ~

Internet Explorer 4.01 was not an application in Windows 98. It was the file manager. Explorer windows had a Back button and an address bar, folders could be skinned with HTML templates, and the desktop itself could hold live web content through Active Desktop. Typing a URL into a folder window worked. The company's argument was that the browser was part of the operating system, and the shell was built to make that argument physically true.

The Justice Department was already suing over exactly this when the release date was set. Critics expected the case to delay the launch and it did not: the operating system shipped on 25 June 1998 as planned, with the browser welded in. Microsoft won the desktop that way and spent the following years in court over it.

~ the eight-year afterlife ~

Second Edition arrived on 10 June 1999 and is the version people actually mean when they say Windows 98. It fixed enough that it became the machine you left alone, and a lot of hardware from that period has no drivers for anything else. Windows Me followed in 2000 and was worse. Windows XP arrived in 2001 on an entirely different kernel and took over.

Microsoft first announced a support cutoff of January 2004, at a point when roughly 58 million people were still running the thing. The complaints were loud enough, and the installed base in countries where new hardware was not a casual purchase was large enough, that the date moved. Mainstream support had ended on 30 June 2002; extended support for Windows 98, 98 SE and Me all ended together on 11 July 2006. Eight years is a long service life for software sold as a tune-up.

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