LES describes: an old Microsoft operating system. Every week someone tells me it's "old", "obsolete", "a toy operating system" or "what? who uses Windows 98?". But it has everything I need. Including Tcl, of course. I use MS Office, OpenOffice, Internet Explorer 5, Firefox, e-mail, Cygwin, text editors, programming languages, etc. etc. etc. No more than a couple of times have I ever run into software that ran on newer versions of Windows and did not run on Windows 98.

Windows 98 is old, but still works and has everything I need. And it's small, which I hold as a great quality.

Unfortunately, Microsoft has released other operating systems that add very little to good ol' Windows 98, except greater numbers (2000, 2003) to its product name and an impressive amount of code bloat. And that has been enough for plenty of people to act as if Windows 98 had suddenly become a totally useless OS. Quite a shame indeed.

Even worse, members of the TCT have expressed publicly their strong desire to discontinue support to Windows 98 in oncoming Tcl releases. God only knows when the plug will be finally pulled.

The following Tcl'ers are happy users (while they still can) of Windows 98:

• LES
• Peter Newman (and the same goes for Windows 95)
• MG now uses Win XP, for compatability with other computers running MS software on XP, but has it set up to emulate 98 as much as possible.
• VI
• RS (Windows 95 in fact - still going strong on 200MHz...)
• Ro What's going on? I dissapear for my sabbatical for a couple of months and all of a sudden I come back to this?! Dropping support for Win98 is NUTZ! Win98 is a wonderful goodie, it works well on old machines like 400Mhz computers and that means all the world since you can pick up those kinds of computers for a hundred bucks (any dollar denomination) -- I do all of my commercial PROGRAMMING on it, not just screwing around like some computing dinosaur. If I can do my commercial programming, testing and debugging on it, why drop support? Tcl/Tk is the best, and not least of all because of how STABLE it is. It's no opensource FAD. IT's the real deal, baby.
• Ro - yes, it's not the best thing since sliced bread, but nothing is. Dropping support for this very-much-alive OS is tantamount to TREASON! Off with his head!

The following Tcl'ers are quite unhappy users of Windows 98:

• LV - but then, I'm unhappy using any of the Microsoft OS products...