It was late and it was overhyped. But it was better than Windows 95. On June 25, 1998, Microsoft shipped Windows 98, and while it didn’t get the fanfare Windows 95 did, it was better than Windows 95. And if you want a retro PC box today, you’re usually better off running Windows 98 or, better yet, 98SE on it than Windows 95.
Windows 98 was late
It’s easy to forget now, but Windows 98 was late. Windows 95 was late too, and the Win95 betas had elements that were more 98-like than 95-like, which strongly suggests Windows 98 was closer to what Microsoft wanted to ship all along, but they had to make concessions to get Win95 out the door in August 1995.
But Windows 98 was supposed to ship in 1997, and I have the magazine cover that proves it. The November 1996 issue of PC/Computing gushed about Office 97 and something called Windows 97, calling them the two most significant advancements since the invention of the PC. You can’t buy that kind of hype. I don’t think of Clippy and forcing Internet Explorer 4.0 down our throats as the two most significant advancements since the invention of the PC, but I’m just some rando on the Internet looking back on it nearly three decades later.
18 months after that magazine hit newsstands, Windows 98 still wasn’t ready. Hilariously, on April 20, 1998, Windows 98 bluescreened during a demo at COMDEX. Bill Gates and Chris Capossela were attempting to show off the new system when Capossela plugged in a USB scanner. The PC immediately gave the notorious blue screen of death. Gates, who could be a hothead sometimes, maintained his cool and made a joke. “That must be why we’re not shipping Windows 98 yet,” he said.
But it did ship two months and five days later.
Improvements over Win95
Windows 98 did have numerous improvements over Windows 95. It shipped with the FAT32 filesystem, introduced in Windows 95OSR2, but you couldn’t get that version of Windows 95 at retail. You had to either buy a new computer to get it, or copy it from someone who did. Not that anyone resorted to that, right? FAT32 allowed the use of much bigger hard drives and smaller allocation units. Although there was a speed penalty involved, in most cases it was worth it.
Although the USB support was never as good in Windows 98 as it is on a modern PC, it worked better than it ever did in any version of Windows 95. The versions of Windows 95 with USB support never bluescreened on me when I plugged in a USB device, as far as I recall. But I do remember plugging USB stuff into those Windows 95 versions and nothing happening at all. That’s why we used to joke that USB stood for “useless serial bus.”
And overall, Windows 98 was more stable than Windows 95 was. If I spent all day Saturday writing in Word 97 on my Windows 98 PC, I expected it to crash occasionally. But Win95 under the same circumstances would crash once a day. Sometimes it was Word that crashed, and sometimes it was the whole system.
Windows 98SE was better overall than its successor, Windows Me, as well. While I found a few things right away that Windows Me did better, in daily general use, 98SE was less likely to give you problems.
When Windows 98 was a step backward
My biggest complaint about Windows 98 was Active Desktop and making Explorer windows look like Internet Explorer. It slowed the system down and it forced Internet Explorer to be in memory all the time whether you were using the web or not. Today that might not be as big of a deal, because so much of what we use a computer for in modern times is based on one web app or another. It’s rare that I don’t have a browser open anymore. But in 1998, I certainly did shut my browser down and go offline for long periods of time.
I used a shareware program called 98lite that removed Internet Explorer and replaced a few components with their Windows 95 equivalents. It allowed me to run Windows 98 without Internet Explorer, which made it noticeably faster, but admittedly I was probably trading one instability inducing feature for another by doing that.
So while I do think Windows 98 was overblown, it does give a better retro computing experience than Win95 does, especially on a system with at least a 200 MHz processor and at least 64 megs of RAM. On something less than that, I’ll still run my hacked Win95 that omits MSN and some of the other bloatware that Microsoft cut out of the floppy-based version of Win95 anyway. But I won’t argue with someone who says Windows 98, or better yet, Windows 98SE, which followed on May 5, 1999, is a better experience overall.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
was Windows NT 4.0 better in 98 on a typical spec pc 98?
Of course, “Active Desktop and making Explorer windows look like Internet Explorer” was really Micro$oft’s ploy to claim that Internet Asploder was “part of the OS.” The real objective here, of course, was to strangle Netscape.
This was one of the factors inspiring the antitrust trial against M$, which rather famously failed to muzzle the Beast of Redmond, in part because M$ was able to stall things until the friendlier Administration of Bush the Younger called a halt.