HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

The best talks and videos of Hacker News.

Hacker News Comments on
Windows 95 Crash Stream

Foone Turing · Youtube · 278 HN points · 2 HN comments
HN Theater has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention Foone Turing's video "Windows 95 Crash Stream".
Youtube Summary
Windows 95 can only run for 49.7 days before crashing, and I've had a win95 box slowly counting up until that date. Here's the final couple hours, complete with some MIDI tunes played on a Roland SC-55.

The MIDI pack mentioned in the end screen is here: https://archive.org/details/win95_crash_stream_midis
HN Theater Rankings

Hacker News Stories and Comments

All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.
Jun 20, 2022 · exikyut on Oldschool PC Fonts
It's perhaps an arguably unrelated suggestion, but if you like old MIDIs, this recorded livestream of what actually happens to Win95 when it hits 49.7 days uptime exclusively used a playlist of MIDI audio for the background music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdrRoSdBM5M

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28340101)

Aug 28, 2021 · 278 points, 88 comments · submitted by exikyut
exikyut
EPILOGUE

Here's the exact point of the crash (cued to 5 seconds prior): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdrRoSdBM5M&t=9778s

The counter overflows/resets, everything wraps around, the system counts 6 more seconds, then Windows 95 freezes.

The mouse cursor still seems to work, but the message pump seems to have frozen, to the extent that End Task itself is unresponsive, and a second CTRL-ALT-DEL is needed to reset the machine.

---

This whole thing started back in July, over here (warning: megathread): https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1413694652822163459

exikyut
Interesting addition: the machine angrily beeps at you from the internal PC speaker if you move the mouse after it's hung: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1431711101624852482
krylon
Having used Windows 95 back in the day, I am deeply impressed someone managed to keep it from crashing for so long.

I have seen a Windows NT 4.0 system with an uptime of more than five years, but with Windows 95, even a whole day of uptime was pretty close to a miracle.

ycom13__
I had Windows NT 4.0 with SQL Server 7.0 running for 6 years... never restarted (or patched)... This was our dev/qa server. Uptime from 1999 till October 2005.... then some fool shutdown the power to the whole dev cage....

Still remember the credentials too... sa and password Nimda

No issues ever... HP hardware....

cyberge99
I saw a new in box copy of Windows NT Server 5 user today for $4.99. I wonder what it cost new.
None
None
0x0
Do you mean Windows 2000? I didn't think "NT 5" was ever used as a brand?
EvanAnderson
It wasn't used in branding, but I did test some drivers on Windows NT 5.0 beta builds back in the late 90s prior to the switch to "Windows 2000".
gunapologist99
Probably NT Server, with 5 CAL's
bald
> 5 user

I think he's referring to CAL

floatingatoll
Huh?
stan_rogers
It's a 5-user Client Access License (CAL) package for Windows NT Server.
floatingatoll
Ah! Thank you.
Someone
If so, that’s not a Windows NT license, but an add-on that allows five users (¿at a time?) to connect to a Windows NT system that requires its own license to run, isn’t it?
brian_herman
exactly
chungy
It's probably pretty easy if you do literally nothing on it.

Windows 95/98/Me had a very weak concept of protected memory. It was there, but it wasn't very hard for an application to go read and write into the virtual memory space of other processes. Even then, any semblance of protected memory only existed for Win32 applications. DOS and Win16 programs, both of which were very common at the time, would just have free reign over everything.

accountofme
Windows ME had a very weak concept of being usable too. The thing crashed so much 98se was an upgrade...
krylon
I only ever used Windows ME for a while after starting to use Linux as my main desktop, so I could watch DVDs - CPUs back then were not quite fast enough to decode DVDs in software, and my MPEG decoder card was not supported on Linux.

It never gave me any trouble, but I admit this is not a representative use case. ;-)

userbinator
I used 98se for a long time, well into the Vista era --- and indeed the lack of protection affects stability, but that also means the stability is directly related to what software you run; and indeed if you regularly used the mass quantities of sub-par "shovelware" that was prevalent in those days, it would definitely make it seem like the OS was crashing constantly, when it was actually the software you added on top that caused it.

On the other hand, I didn't have much of a problem maintaining multi-week uptimes simply due to the fact that I kept the system relatively "clean" and wasn't trying out new apps every day.

ziml77
It's long bothered me that Windows got a reputation of being an unstable OS when the issues were caused by poorly written software. Things got better when they moved over to the NT kernel, but drivers were still a frequent cause of BSODs since they ran in ring 0. A combination of WHQL certification and getting drivers to run in user mode instead of kernel mode has helped significantly with stability.
gabrielhidasy
To be fair, not crashing under poorly written programs is a fundamental part of OS stability. Windows at the time had no resiliency against a CS101 student messing up on an assignment, it was unstable.
masswerk
I had once a Win 98SE PC as a second system, mostly used for testing MSIE and accessing the company Outlook. (My production machine was a Mac running System 7.x. and System 8.) But it was also used by interns for production, running Photoshop, etc. I actually do not remember it crashing once. But this is probably quite averse to the common experience. However, it does seem to second your assumptions, as it had only a few "quality" applications installed.
tssva
In the late 90s to early 2000s I worked in the Network Planning & Design group for UUNET. They were phased out before I left but when I started Fore/Marconi ATM switches were used for interconnect within PoPs and to terminate the circuits between PoPs. For a while the NOC had to reboot them periodically at a scheduled time or else they would reboot themselves after a certain period of time. I believe it was 45 or 90 days.
smoldesu
IIRC, there was a long period of time where the max uptime on a Unix system was ~94 days. That makes a lot of sense.
aurelian274
Long time lurker but I had to create an account to comment. My first job out of college was at Fore Systems/Marconi back in 2000 as a QA tester. One of my first assignments was to test bug fixes for several different uptime issues we had. My favorite was the PNNI 397 day uptime where it would flap a port causing the switch to relearn all its SPVCs.

Fore/Marconi was a great place to work back then but the dotcom bust and the migration to pure IP/MPLS was a death knell to them. My entire division was laid off in Oct of 2001. I was lucky and had jumped ship only weeks earlier.

tssva
Now I feel guilty about my role in several migrations to pure IP/MPLS. If it helps at all a couple were off of Cisco Lightstream equipment.
2ion
Longest lived non embedded system I've worked with was a Linux server with an uptime from 2007 through 2019 serving as a L3 router. Amazingly, after shutting it down, it turned on again :)
thiagocsf
Completely off-topic but yesterday I upgraded my Debian 10 home server to 11 and it rebooted fine! It had a 132 day uptime on it.

I run a unify controller on docker, pihole, influxdb, grafana and a bunch of other small scripts. I did need to upgrade my collectd Python modules to 3 but that was it.

raffraffraff
I'm scared to even think about the NAS in my attic. It's running firmware based on a long dead version of Debian. I have no idea how long it's been running without a reboot but I'm guessing 2+ years.
laurent92
Yes. I forgot to maintain a Linux server after setting autoupdates, and it kept itself up for years. I’m ashamed of not monitoring the potential breaches on it.
ksec
I feel like a fool this somehow put a smile on my face :)

And my memory may be hazy, but in those days Windows always crash every few days and we normally "shut down" our computer after usage.

But the most interesting thing is a running Windows 95 in English version. May be screenshot [1] weren't hard to come by. And we are lucky nuke didn't happen in 2020.

[1] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

foepys
How far we have come.

Nowadays I usually let my notebook hibernate (not sleep) for the night and when I return the next morning, I often discover that I forgot to stop my debugger and it is still attached to my running program. Not even a hiccup when resuming.

progman32
Heh. In the meantime, here I am having to software-reset my network card after almost every resume. Thankfully, like beer, Linux is the answer to _and the cause of,_ all the world's problems.

# echo 1 > /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000\:0b\:00.0/remove # echo 1 > /sys/bus/pci/rescan

dredmorbius
Clock rollovers can be interesting.

Some time back I did work at a devices startup processing data collected from trial runs. For some reason an earlier developer had chosen to use time-of-day, in seconds, rather than elapsed time, as the index for data recording. I'd registered this as a poor design decision, though it was difficult to articulate why.

That argument became far easier after a field trial spanned midnight, and the data series iterated from 86,400 to 0.

On the other hand, I've never had trouble remembering just how many seconds (or minutes) there are in a day, since.

bogeholm
The term ‘clock rollover’ reminds me of the 2007 incident where 6 F-22’s crossed the date line:

> “…At the international date line, whoops, all systems dumped and when I say all systems, I mean all systems, their navigation, part of their communications, their fuel systems.”

https://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/f22-squadron-shot-down-...

kolinko
I would assume fighter jets don't update timezones and just keep time in sync with their home bases...
ChuckNorris89
But what if fighter jets move from base to base and each base refers only in their local time zone to the pilot on radio.
kolinko
I would expect bases to communicate in UTC, or have timezones embedded in each message...

Now I'm really curious of how time is managed in jetfighters, but couldn't find a good article on the subject.

dmurray
> On the other hand, I've never had trouble remembering just how many seconds (or minutes) there are in a day, since.

Not everyone is so fortunate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7717414

nicoburns
Huh, that's an old thread. Was quite confused when the "upcoming PHP 5.6 release" was mentioned!
dredmorbius
Ouch!
ed25519FUUU
This is why it’s better to express time in seconds using multiplication. Easier to write, easier to review, and easier to change.

    (60 * 60 * 24) // 1 day
    (60 * 60 * 12) // 12 hours
    (60 * 5)       // 5 minutes
dredmorbius
It's better yet to use a specific time or callendrical function if what you're accounting for is a specific clock or calendar interval.

Not all days have precisely 86,400 seconds.

For longer intervals, not all months have 28, 29, 30, 31, 30.43685, whatever, days. Not all years have 365 or 366 days, etc.

Pull out your copy of "Myths Programmers Believe About Time" and read it, hard. It will bite.

kasperni
Wasn't alive to watch the first moon landing. But I feel this must be up there with it.
laurent92
Funny thing, programming the clocks in assembler at the time of the moon landing was extraordinarily hard, especially since they had to code the timestamps in negative.
CGamesPlay
So, it looked like what happened was the system didn't immediately crash, but quickly degraded. It looked like the system was partially responsive, and Foone reported that the ctrl-alt-delete screen wouldn't kill the app. The uptime monitor app hung, although it's unclear where that failure originated from.
hyperrail
Here's a discussion of (at least one) original Windows 95 bug that causes the computer to freeze after 49 days, along with working download links to fixes: https://web.archive.org/web/20070223101651/https://support.m...

News coverage at the time (2002 or earlier): https://www.cnet.com/news/windows-may-crash-after-49-7-days/

(Feels like a bit of a silly Gotcha! to do it live now - did anyone run their personal computer for 49 days, even counting laptops which went to sleep/standby? But hey, do what you want. :)

Joeri
This wasn’t a limitation anyone ran into in the real world. I was lucky to get the original windows 95 to run for a day, let alone 49. Windows 95 OSR2 on the other hand was very stable. My most stable desktop from that era (late 90’s / early 00’s) was a debian stable build, the uptime at one point was over two years.
emersonrsantos
After the crash, the video author typed inside Notepad:

"It hung! I ctrl-alt-deleted it, but it wouldn't respond so I rebooted it with another ctrl-alt-delete

Thanks for watching.

TRANS RIGHTS!"

https://imgur.com/a/yoGyo6B

NewAcc1234
I like it how the trans community uses a professional setup to make aware of their private matters.

I will include my fetisch after thanking the audience nicely in some of my future correspondence (I will not say which one).

Thank you for your big tits.

tomxor
I love this, and I don't understand why. Maybe it's the nostalgic combo of a physical midi synth with a physical pentium waiting for win95 to do what it's best known for.
burnt_toast
Semi-related but I recently bought a knock off windows 95 t-shirt because I wanted a shirt with something old that would be recognizable but not mistaken for nostalgia. Kinda like a "oh yeah that used to be big" feeling.

It's weird how we can have things that are extremely well known / commonly used in our culture that suddenly disappear as soon as something better comes along never to be thought of again.

userbinator
I'm curious what actually causes these effects. The counter rolls over --- so what? The maths still works fine over a wraparound modulo 2^32, and the tick counter is definitely treated as unsigned by the relevant code, or the symptoms would've appeared in half the time at 2^31. Unless there were some misguided/overly-paranoid attempts at overflow checking?

As someone who has written Win3.x/9x drivers for much newer hardware just to see if it could be done, I'd love to read an in-depth analysis of this bug, like https://www.os2museum.com/wp/those-win9x-crashes-on-fast-mac... --- if I had more time I might get around to doing it myself, and ultimately coming up with a patch to fix it.

andrew_
Back when we were writing alt shells for Windows 95/98/2000 (geoShell, Litestep, etc) uptime plugins/modules were all the rage. Screenshotting and sharing were popular and came with bragging rights.
johnchristopher
And they say Bitcoin is a waste of resources and here we are watching this :]. /s

How do they capture the screen output from the real CRT ?

dreyfan
> How do they capture the screen output from the real CRT

I would guess a pass-through VGA capture device? Something like https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087RMPRGT/

chrisseaton
I guess they don't capture it from the CRT - they capture it from the video signal from the computer.
usmannk
There is a huuuuge twitter thread with all the details. This tweet in the middle talks about a VGA to HDMI adapter https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1424242517243957250
johnchristopher
That thread is gold :).
dredmorbius
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1424242517243957250.html
13of40
A few months ago my XBox 360 that I was using as an entertainment center finally gave up the ghost, so I replaced it with a $25 Fire TV Lite - basically a thumb-sized dongle with HDMI on one end and USB on the other end, with WiFi somewhere in between. It worked great, until the second time I turned on my TV, and it had crashed. It does this consistently if left on its own for the night, and for a while I was unplugging the USB to power cycle it. Eventually I just bought a USB cutoff switch that I click on and off before I use the TV. But it's weird that one of the most posh tech companies in the world would sell a product that's intended to stay on forever but can't in practice stay up for 24 hours.
punnerud
I gave my kid an old Toshiba with Win95 when he was 3 years. He is now 5 and still likes to use it. His favorite programs are Minesweeper, Word and MSPaint.

Thinking about upgrading to Raspberry Pi Keyboard.

Maybe we should try the 49.7 days overflow as an fun example in memory overflow.

matheweis
Microsoft Lync for Mac OS had a bug like this; if the system uptime was > 49.7 days, the user’s presence would get stuck as “Away”.

Presumably it was using uptime as time clock for establishing presence and once it overflowed the comparison failed.

_V_
Spoiler: It did indeed crash :-)
isoprophlex
Pretty wild, it rolled over, then made it +- 6000 msec post-rollover before crashing!
themodelplumber
Did they time the Terminator theme to play along with the crash? That was pretty funny.
Shorel
I got the stream when it was Crash Test Dummies.

Yep, it was funny.

dredmorbius
For those coming along after:

The counter rolled over, then the system hung at about 6800 ms after the rollover.

The mouse responded and a ctrl-alt-del brought up the process-manager / restart dialogue, but the system didn't respond otherwise. It was restarted with a second ctrl-alt-del.

Final song was Toto's "Africa", followed by the theme to Terminator.

If the stream remains up, the next crash will occur on October 17, 2021.

kregasaurusrex
Looks like the integer overflow had the system time try to start back over at zero, but that caused everything else to hang right after it did. Neat stream.
drekipus
I'm a little annoyed at how anti climatic it was. I had a windows 95 machine (chunky IBM laptop) when I was 12, there's plenty of ways the crash could've been shown off a little more. System freezing all of a sudden was a daily occurrence, not much to write home about.
bambax
OT, but I still have one of those Roland Sound Canvas expanders. Works flawlessly.
404mm
Well that was anticlimactic :(
aasasd
Windows is one thing, but I heard that Warcraft 1 or 2 had a patch to fix a crash that occurred after the game ran for three weeks. The mystery, to me, is how the hell did someone discover the problem.
yjamal2
And it just crashed
herodoturtle
Rickrolled the viewers like a boss.
herodoturtle
And their midi playlist is banging, gotta say.
rememberlenny
It happened. If you open the link, you will be watching the countdown starting from today.
usmannk
Looks like it'll crash a bit past 12:40 PT. Estimate on screen is 12:47. Exciting!
eitland
I remember applying the patch for this. First patch I can remember the contents of.
tored
Typical västgötaklimax.
greenhatman
So silly. I like it.
paulpauper
Lol value overflow errors.
SV_BubbleTime
Millisecond timer stored to a 32bit unsigned.
_Microft
RIP
donohoe
15 minutes to go....
neals
8 for me... weird?
H8crilA
5 minutes boys!!!!!!111oneoneone
_Microft
70seconds
tus89
That was underwhelming.
Huwyt_Nashi_064
Imagine being incapable of not telling the world that you're a transvestite. Keep it to yourself.
vmception
Computers having long uptime used to be considered a novelty, with counters shared on rudimentary websites and even magazines

Now its not even a consideration as it is so commonplace

At one point this was considered a hard problem

Hamuko
High uptime on a Windows machine is still a novelty.
hyperrail
Microsoft used to release a "checked" build for each version of Windows on MSDN/Visual Studio Subscription downloads. [1] This was a build with the same compiler optimization settings as the release build, but with debug-build-only assertions and checks included. In the checked build kernel, the system uptime had 49 days artificially added to it [2], precisely to help developers find out problems like this.

At one point when I was on the Windows team at Microsoft, there was an internal push for us to selfhost (dogfood) checked builds of Windows, since they theoretically provided better bug telemetry than "free" builds (release builds, which are free of debug-only code). "Slows your dev box down by just half!" was the basic pitch of that campaign in a nutshell.

[1] I don't know if this was ever done for Windows 95. It was done for Windows XP up to Windows 10 version 1511, but it appears to have stopped since then, at least according to my quick search.

[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/windows/win32/api/sysinfoapi/nf-s...

zeusk
chk (checked) and fre (free) builds are still here :) just not in public afaik

when testing stuff locally we usually binplace chk binaries; the CI pipeline and nightly tests use fre.

KindOne
What exactly do you search for? I've tried looking but I have no idea what to search for.
SSLy
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=windows%20checked%20bu...

EDIT: if you want to get the actual build, I can't help. I only remember it being available through MSDN AA back in the day.

hyperrail
If you are a current Visual Studio subscriber with access to Windows downloads, chk builds are available on https://my.visualstudio.com/Downloads/Featured like regular builds. Search for "checked".

I don't recommend chk builds for routine use by anyone outside the Windows teams because even if the regular Windows release still receives updates, the chk build typically doesn't. CDN disk space isn't cheap, and neither is CPU time on the build or test machines.

exikyut
A quick poke over at https://the-eye.eu/public/MSDN/ suggests the following (there may be more checked builds hiding in the sea of Latin filenames :P):

https://the-eye.eu/public/MSDN/Windows%207/

- en_windows_7_debug_checked_build_dvd_x64_398741.iso

- en_windows_7_debug_checked_build_dvd_x86_398742.iso

https://the-eye.eu/public/MSDN/Windows%20XP/

- en_windows_xp_professional_x64_chk.iso

KindOne
Thanks.
HN Theater is an independent project and is not operated by Y Combinator or any of the video hosting platforms linked to on this site.
~ yaj@
;laksdfhjdhksalkfj more things
yahnd.com ~ Privacy Policy ~
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.