How did Windows 95 decide that a setup program ran?

Join the discussion

• Hacker News
• Windows 95, for all its UX niceties, was a hack job under the hood. Reading this is just another example. When people make comparisons to clunky Model T cars in the 20’s and Win95, they aren’t far off.
  by sanmarzano
• > When people make comparisons to clunky Model T cars in the 20’s and Win95, they aren’t far off.

  I think they are. Model T’s were clunky because they were minimalistic; Windows 95 was clunky because it tried to do impossible things.

  This is a fine example. In the Windows 95 architecture, it’s impossible to detect whether a program is an installer, but they tried anyways.

  Another example is Plug and Play. The original IBM PC parallel ports were designed for printers. That interface got extended (a few times. See https://computer.rip/2023-01-29-the-parallel-port.html) and reused to support tape drives, CD-ROM drives, scanners and whatever. Plug and play was intended to detect these devices, but with the original port about anything you sent on it to a printer resulted in characters being printed.

  Also, there was no way for a printer to tell the PC it was a printer. All it could indicate were a few bits to signal they could receive data, were out of paper, etc.

  So, how do you figure out what, if anything, is connected to a parallel port?

  The answer is “very carefully”, and I don’t think it ever worked flawlessly. I definitely remember a tape drive that, whenever Windows started, flashed a few LEDs and got in a weird state that required some manual intervention.

  by Someone
• I wonder why specifically those languages. Were only those markets using localized file names and everyone else sticking to English?

  Or was it just random chance, i.e. some setup programs from those locales happened to cause issues and got escalated, so those names got on the list?

  by xg15
• Maybe many other languages were already covered by "inst" due to common language roots or just straight up borrow "setup" or "installer" from English because there was no established localized term.
  by account42
• In 95 localization was scarce. Also, the partial "inst" would have matched "install" translated to several languages (about 15 by my quick count, could be more).
  by throwaway_ocr
• "Ayarla" is very confusing... Setup can't be translated to Turkish as "ayarla". The correct word would be "Yükle/Kur" (verb) and the correct noun would be "Kurulum". Ayarla means "configure" and "ayarlar" means "settings".

  Also, why just Turkish and Hungarian?

  by patates
• That is one of the reasons why desktop Linux conquest is slow. Linux people won't approve such kludges, which means broken applications and back compatibility. I am not sure which strategy is correct, but I certainly have a compassion for users who just want their pc to work, and not search for library versions or manuals how to compile code in a new system.
  by theragra
• I sometimes feel like Hal changing a lightbulb[1] when I'm trying to install an app on Linux, either I don't have the correct distro, I need to enter km long command line to add some repository to apt, I need to download 346 packages from I don't know where to the build the app, and finally find out that it's not what I wanted.

  Yes, I know that's how Linux works and I know all the advantages of that, but when you see now that many install are just 'curl mywebsite.com/install.sh | bash', you start to wonder which is a "good" solution.

  1. https://youtu.be/AbSehcT19u0

  by whynotmaybe