Windows 98
Windows 98 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x line of Microsoft Windows, a family of operating systems. It was the second operating system in the 9x line, as the successor to Windows 95. It was released to manufacturing on May 15, 1998, and generally to retail on June 25, 1998. Like its predecessor, it is a hybrid 16-bit and 32-bit monolithic product with the boot stage based on MS-DOS.
Windows 98 is web-integrated and bears numerous similarities to its predecessor. Most of its improvements were cosmetic or designed to improve the user experience, but there were also a handful of features introduced to enhance system functionality and capabilities, including improved USB support and accessibility, and support for hardware advancements such as DVD players. Windows 98 was the first edition of Windows to adopt the Windows Driver Model, and introduced features that would become standard in future generations of Windows, such as Disk Cleanup, Windows Update, multi-monitor support, and Internet Connection Sharing.
Microsoft had marketed Windows 98 as a "tune-up" to Windows 95, rather than an entirely improved next generation of Windows. Upon release, Windows 98 was generally well-received for its web-integrated interface and ease of use, as well as its addressing of issues present in Windows 95, although some pointed out that it was not significantly more stable than Windows 95. In 2003 Windows 98 had approximately 58 million users. It saw one major update, known as Windows 98 Second Edition, released on June 10, 1999. After the release of its successor, Windows Me in 2000, mainstream support for Windows 98 and 98 SE ended on June 30, 2002, followed by extended support on July 11, 2006 along with Windows Me's end of extended support.
Development
Following the success of Windows 95, the development of Windows 98 began, initially under the development codename "Memphis". The first test version, Windows Memphis Developer Release, was released in January 1997.Memphis first entered beta as Windows Memphis Beta 1, released on June 30, 1997. It was followed by Windows 98 Beta 2, which dropped the Memphis name and was released in July. Microsoft had planned a full release of Windows 98 for the first quarter of 1998, along with a Windows 98 upgrade pack for Windows 95, but it also had a similar upgrade for Windows 3.x operating systems planned for the second quarter. Stacey Breyfogle, a product manager for Microsoft, explained that the later release of the upgrade for Windows 3 was because the upgrade required more testing than that for Windows 95 due to the presence of more compatibility issues, and without user objections, Microsoft merged the two upgrade packs into one and set all of their release dates to the second quarter.
On December 15, 1997, Microsoft released Windows 98 Beta 3. It was the first build to be able to upgrade from Windows 3.1x, and introduced new startup and shutdown sounds. Near its completion, Windows 98 Release Candidate was released on April 3, 1998, which expired on December 31 of the same year. This coincided with a notable press demonstration at COMDEX that month. Microsoft CEO Bill Gates was highlighting the operating system's ease of use and enhanced support for Plug and Play. However, when presentation assistant Chris Capossela plugged a Logitech PageScan USB scanner in, the operating system crashed, displaying a Blue Screen of Death. Bill Gates remarked after derisive applause and cheering from the audience, "That must be why we're not shipping Windows 98 yet." Video footage of this event became a popular Internet phenomenon.
Build 1998 was compiled as Windows 98 on May 11, 1998, before being fully released to manufacturing on May 15. The company was facing pending legal action for allowing free downloads of, and planning to ship Windows licenses with, Internet Explorer 4.0 in an alleged effort to expand its software monopoly. Microsoft's critics believed the lawsuit would further delay Windows 98's public release; it did not, and the operating system was released on June 25, 1998.
A second major version of the operating system called Windows 98 Second Edition was later unveiled in March 1999. Microsoft compiled the final build on April 23, 1999, before being fully released to manufacturing on May 5, and publicly released on June 10, 1999. Windows 98 was to be the final product in the Windows 9x line until Microsoft briefly revived the line to release Windows Me in 2000 as the final Windows 9x product before the introduction of Windows XP in 2001, which was based on the Windows NT architecture and kernel used in Windows 2000.
New and updated features
Web integration and shell enhancements
The first release of Windows 98 included Internet Explorer 4.01 SP1. This was updated to 5.0 in the Second Edition. Besides Internet Explorer, many other Internet companion applications are included such as Outlook Express, Windows Address Book, FrontPage Express, Microsoft Chat, Personal Web Server and a Web Publishing Wizard, and NetShow. NetMeeting allows multiple users to hold conference calls and work with each other on a document.The Windows 98 shell is web-integrated; it contains deskbands, Active Desktop, Channels, ability to minimize foreground windows by clicking their button on the taskbar, single-click launching, Back and Forward navigation buttons, favorites, and address bar in Windows Explorer, image thumbnails, folder infotips and Web view in folders, and folder customization through HTML-based templates. The taskbar supports customizable toolbars designed to speed up access to the Web or the user's desktop; these toolbars include an Address Bar and Quick Launch. With the Address Bar, the user accesses the Web by typing in a URL, and Quick Launch contains shortcuts or buttons that perform system functions such as switching between windows and the desktop with the Show Desktop button. Another feature of this new shell is that dialog boxes show up in the Alt-Tab sequence.
Windows 98 also integrates shell enhancements such as LiteStep, themes and other features from Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95 such as DriveSpace 3, Compression Agent, Dial-Up Networking Server, Dial-Up Scripting Tool and Task Scheduler. Windows 98 had its own separately purchasable Plus! pack, called Plus! 98.
Title bars of windows and dialog boxes support two-color gradients, a feature ported from and refined from Microsoft Office 95. Windows menus and tooltips support slide animation. Windows Explorer in Windows 98, as in Windows 95, converts all-uppercase filenames to sentence case for readability purposes; however, it also provides an option Allow all uppercase names to display them in their original case. Windows Explorer includes support for compressed CAB files. The Quick Res and Telephony Location Manager Windows 95 PowerToys are integrated into the core operating system.
Improvements to hardware support
Windows Driver Model
Windows 98 was the first operating system to use the Windows Driver Model. This fact was not well publicized when Windows 98 was released, and most hardware producers continued to develop drivers for the older VxD driver standard, which Windows 98 supported for compatibility's sake. The WDM standard only achieved widespread adoption years later, mostly through Windows 2000 and Windows XP, as they were not compatible with the older VxD standard. With the Windows Driver Model, developers could write drivers that were compatible with other versions of Windows. Device driver access in WDM is implemented through a VxD device driver,NTKERN.VXD, which implements several Windows NT-specific kernel support functions.Support for WDM audio enables digital mixing, routing and processing of simultaneous audio streams, and kernel streaming with high-quality sample rate conversion on Windows 98. WDM Audio allows for software emulation of legacy hardware to support MS-DOS games, DirectSound support, and MIDI wavetable synthesis. The Windows 95 11-device limitation for MIDI devices is eliminated. A Microsoft GS Wavetable Synthesizer licensed from Roland shipped with Windows 98 for WDM audio drivers. Windows 98 supports digital playback of audio CDs, and the Second Edition improves WDM audio support by adding DirectSound hardware mixing and DirectSound 3D hardware abstraction, DirectMusic kernel support, KMixer sample-rate conversion for capture streams, and multichannel audio support. All audio is sampled by the Kernel Mixer to a fixed sampling rate, which may result in some audio getting upsampled or downsampled and having a high latency, except when using Kernel Streaming or third-party audio paths like ASIO which allow unmixed audio streams and lower latency. Windows 98 also includes a WDM streaming class driver to address real time multimedia data stream processing requirements and a WDM kernel-mode video transport for enhanced video playback and capture.
Windows Driver Model also includes Broadcast Driver Architecture, the backbone for TV technologies support in Windows. WebTV for Windows utilized BDA to allow viewing television on the computer if a compatible TV tuner card is installed. TV listings could be updated from the Internet and WaveTop Data Broadcasting allowed extra data about broadcasts to be received via regular television signals using an antenna or cable, by embedding data streams into the vertical blanking interval portion of existing broadcast television signals.
Other device support improvements
Windows 98 had more robust USB support than Windows 95, which only had support in OEM versions OSR2.1 and later. Windows 98 supports USB hubs, USB scanners and imaging class devices. Windows 98 also introduced built-in support for some USB Human Interface Device class and PID class devices such as USB mice, keyboards, force feedback joysticks etc. including additional keyboard functions through a certain number of Consumer Page HID controls. Windows 98 also supports UDMA, 3DNow! and SSE.Windows 98 introduced ACPI 1.0 support which enabled Standby and Hibernate states. However, hibernation support was extremely limited and vendor-specific. Hibernation was only available if compatible hardware and BIOS are present, and the hardware manufacturer or OEM supplied ACPI-compatible drivers. However, there are hibernation issues with the FAT32 file system, making hibernation problematic and unreliable.
Windows 98, in general, provides improved — and a broader range of — support for IDE and SCSI drives and drive controllers, floppy drive controllers and all other classes of hardware as compared to Windows 95. There is integrated Accelerated Graphics Port support. Windows 98 has built-in DVD support and UDF 1.02 read support. The Still imaging architecture with TWAIN support was introduced for scanners and cameras and Image Color Management 2.0 for devices to perform color space transformations. Multiple monitor support allows using up to nine multiple monitors on a single PC, with the feature requiring one PCI graphics adapter per monitor. Windows 98 shipped with DirectX 5.2, which notably included DirectShow. Windows 98 Second Edition would later ship with DirectX 6.1.