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Worst Software you remember?

Skyroket said:
Netscape navigator...
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When first released it was actually pretty awesome, having grown out of the NCSA Mosiac it was able to do things that no other browsers could manage for a couple of years, plus the Mozilla Firefox project owes it's lineage to it.
 
i remember Microsofts poor excuse for photo editing software they called Picture It! took forever to install and it did nothing but crop. O and Works sucked major too imo.
 
Netscape was ok in version 4.0 and up, but 2.x and such always caused Windows 3.1 to crash--anytime. loading java, crashed. loading flash (well macromedia shockwave player which was flash then!), crash. too many animated GIFs? crash!

speaking of modem noise, no matter what you couldn't mute the problem of your mother coming home (or wife depending on how old you are!), picking up the phone and going deaf.

usually for me it was like this:

AHH! NICK!! ARE YOU ONLINE AGAIN!?

MOM!

**click!** GOODBYE![disconnected from AOL]

one of the funniest error messages in Windows was 'Error: The Operation Completed Successfully' which would come up most when the printer driver got unresponsive for a moment before it sent commands to the printer.

Another was the self-contradicting error from Adobe DreamWeaver "Error: No Error Occurred"

then, Windows XP: "An Error occurred during the creation of the error report" and "An error occurred but the message cannot be displayed due to another error"
 
Windows 95: [on bootup] "Windows has detected an undetectable error" (happened when i had a problem with installing a 56K Modem driver)

Xenix: Bugchk: Sckmud
"Shut her down Scotty, she's sucking mud again!"

Unix/Linux: lp0 on fire
 
nickdalzell said:
Be careful knocking Netscape since it used the Mozilla engine like our beloved Firefox is built upon!
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Thanks for making me feel old!

Actually the Mozilla project and the Gecko rendering engine are relatively new replacements that arose from the ashes of the old Netscape Navigator / Communicator products. (Firefox's original name was "Phoenix", then "Firebird", both of which were already copyrighted!) And while the original Netscape was bad, it was a whole lot better than the old UIUC Mosaic browser that was once the only graphical web browser available at one time!

Many years ago we used to FTP the latest version of Netscape Navigator from ftp.netscape.com, which was the only way to get it for free. Updates were so frequent that I used the DOS (or Linux) command line FTP program, and could type the long directory path by memory. I would sometimes find the latest release by guessing the dot-version number. Back then men were men... :D

Anybody remember the animated easter egg that came up when entering about:mozilla into the SCO OpenServer edition of Netscape Navigator?
 
OverByter said:
Novell Netware, back in the day this was pretty much the only way of networking. Their own buggy, crippled, proprietary version of DOS as a bootloader. It could easily take an hour to network two PC's, imagine 200. About the only market leader that I thank Micro$oft for killing. :rolleyes:
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Actually, DR-DOS was a pretty well respected competitor to MS-DOS. DR-DOS and others failed in the marketplace because of Microsoft's anti-competitive business practices. The only thing wrong with the Novell bootloader version was that it had no utilities included. It worked just fine for its intended purpose, though. And you could substitute any PC-DOS compatible product if you wished. I used to use the remnants of MS-DOS that was included in Windows 95B on my NetWare servers until late-night "911" calls from panicked night shift techs (they got scared when the "Windows 95" logo briefly flickered on-screen) made it counterproductive.:D

As a server OS, NetWare was very stable and capable when configured properly, no mean feat for a cooperative multitasking OS! Later versions even had a nice GUI for all the paper CNAs with only mouse hands. :rolleyes: NetWare was a very good and rewarding OS for the competent NetWare administrator. The fact that Novell was a pioneer in the LAN industry is to their credit IMO.
 
nickdalzell said:
Windows 95: [on bootup] "Windows has detected an undetectable error" (happened when i had a problem with installing a 56K Modem driver)

Xenix: Bugchk: Sckmud
"Shut her down Scotty, she's sucking mud again!"

Unix/Linux: lp0 on fire
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My favorite:

"You don't exist. Go away!"
From early Linux distributions, later copied in OpenSSH.
 
EDIT: I didn't notice Microsoft Bob when I looked. Those who disrespect Windows 95/98 should try Bob for a day!

After beta testing the then-new pre-Windows 95 desktop as a shell replacement on Windows NT 3.51, I found the release version of Windows 95 to be quite nice, when configured properly, of course. My favorite Windows 95 release was the one on the Windows NT 4.0 Server CD.

Am I the only one here who made Windows boot discs from the ISO image of the Windows 95 CD and the image of the boot floppy?

Back when we were running Windows 3.1(1) on top of MS-DOS, I edited COMMAND.COM so it said "MS-DOG" on bootup. Nobody noticed...except my boss! He loved it...
 
mikedt said:
Error: Keyboard not connected, press F1 to continue.
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Before the PS/2 keyboard became the norm, it was possible to plug in the full-size DIN plug into a PC / XT / AT computer and keep on going. Nobody has ever explained to me why the PS/2 interface required a reboot.

Now we've come full circle. Every USB keyboard that I've used can be unplugged and reconnected without any dire consequences.
 
Speed Daemon said:
Before the PS/2 keyboard became the norm, it was possible to plug in the full-size DIN plug into a PC / XT / AT computer and keep on going. Nobody has ever explained to me why the PS/2 interface required a reboot.

Now we've come full circle. Every USB keyboard that I've used can be unplugged and reconnected without any dire consequences.
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It's because of the lack of interrupts available at the time, Windows wouldn't load the PS/2 drivers unless the hardware was detected at boot.
 
OverByter said:
It's because of the lack of interrupts available at the time, Windows wouldn't load the PS/2 drivers unless the hardware was detected at boot.
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Thanks, but I'm afraid that doesn't help much. The keyboard interrupt, IRQ1, is part of the "original eight" that every PC, including those prior to the AT, had. Also, the big DIN keyboard connectors were common on generic PC motherboards well into the '90s and up to Pentium processors. The "Press F1" message occurred during POST, which is well before Windows comes into play.

During the mid-'90s there was an overlap period when adapters were used to use big-DIN keyboards with little-DIN motherboards and vice versa. One thing I remember is that using a "PS/2" keyboard on a big-DIN PC using an adapter worked past F1, but using an older keyboard on a little-DIN motherboard usually would not enable the keyboard and needed a reboot before the keyboard would function. So the problem seems to lie on the motherboards.

Thanks for your help, but it still is a mystery to me.
 
I think I have mentioned MS Bob. I saw it once and wondered just who MS thought their customers were. I wouldn't buy it. Annoyances.org told you how to get rid of the junk.

They left the freaking characters all over. "Kill Clippie" and those damn help avatars are in XP.
 
Microsoft Bob was mentioned in my first post on page one, after BonziBuddy

In Bob the animated cartoon animals were in Actor format just like Clippy and his little friends were in Office 97. In Office 2K they were upgraded to Microsoft Agent graphics like Bonzi was. One could say Bob was a testing phase for all of it.

Packard Bell also had a desktop UI similar but less functional than Bob did. It was called Packard Bell Navigator
 
nickdalzell said:
Microsoft Bob was mentioned in my first post on page one, after BonziBuddy
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I stand corrected! Sorry I missed that.

In Bob the animated cartoon animals were in Actor format just like Clippy and his little friends were in Office 97. In Office 2K they were upgraded to Microsoft Agent graphics like Bonzi was. One could say Bob was a testing phase for all of it.
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The horror! The horror!

I had just about erased all memory of those nasty little CPU cycle-hogging monsters from my mind...
 
dotnet when it first arrived was horrible. I couldn't convert my vb 6 over to the dotnet framework. It was one of the biggest deterrents I had with programming in visual studio. I stayed with vb 6 for a while but eventually gave up on Microsoft and its proprietary systems.
 
argedion said:
dotnet when it first arrived was horrible. I couldn't convert my vb 6 over to the dotnet framework. It was one of the biggest deterrents I had with programming in visual studio. I stayed with vb 6 for a while but eventually gave up on Microsoft and its proprietary systems.
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More like dotNOT. Dump the runtime DLL! PowerBASIC to the rescue!
 
i remember uninstalling or deleting any reference to 'dotnet' on Windows 98 thinking it was a domain name creation tool or worse, malware (the dot.net virus was common then) and only recently have i understood what it really was!
 
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