Comments on: Windows 98 shipped June 25, 1998

By: James

James — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 17:27:31 +0000

I remember it being immediately apparent at the time that the explorer windows were made to look like internet explorer but it was just fake so they could try to claim IE was a core component of the operating system. That aside, Win98 was a solid OS for its day and it was the platform of choice for PC gaming until XP caught on. For a time I dual booted Win98 and Win2k, that worked surprisingly well without requiring any third party tools, however I soon found that Win2k ran almost everything I needed and rarely booted into 98.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 12:45:21 +0000

“Useless Serial Bus” reminds me of that other thing of those days. The “Plug & Pray” standard for hardware configuration.

By: Amy

Amy — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 15:43:17 +0000

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.

By: neo

neo — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 14:31:01 +0000

was Windows NT 4.0 better in 98 on a typical spec pc 98?