The Sophisticated Windows 95 Help Feature

Created on August 30, 2015
Indexed on November 28, 2022 at 02:12 PM

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A very important feature of Windows 95 is the well-organized, comprehensive, and detailed "help topics".

This quick and easy electronic reference library for using Windows 95 even includes a certain feature that has been lost in the evolution of Windows. What's this? It's a feature that I really like, and wish it wasn't removed later on...

Windows 95's help files are based on the Rich Text Format (RTF), so you can use a rich text editor like Word 95 to lay out most of the groundwork for your help file. Then, with the Help Compiler, you can add images and a table of contents to it and roll everything up into one neatly compressed help file to distribute with your software.

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Meanwhile, man pages on *nix OSes have inconsistent documenting quality and consistent user-hostility. Also there is not a single way to make such pages.

By "not a single way" I actually meant "too many ways".

The help topics have been subject of meme parodies, but how about *nix OS man pages? If those man pages were on par with help topics, then they would've not been an underused meme trope-thing.

I did feature an zooming looping animated gif including the famed win95 help topics stuff in my "the microsoft sound (windows 95 song) fm synth remix" vid: https://webm.red/V7Y3
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aZmu6L-ARhA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jXBUPhLIc0

I'm wrong, it's actually the Welcome window! We do have to note however that what the help topics and Welcome window have in common is that they teach users stuff, and they can be edited. Sure, the help topics are parodied, but the welcome window is more parodied (at least in my point of view). The zooming animated looping gif including the famed win95 help topics stuff is actually the zooming animated looping gif including the famed win95 welcome window!

From 10.20.22, my videos are going to webm.red (requires no account to upload vids, only .webm files) because of a transition where I don't need YouTube for my future stuff as it's harder to do YouTube today. That's the same reason I'm planning to do self-hosting videos, but I want smooth transition, so as a midway point, I chose to make webm.red vids because it's quicker to dump my videos there. Eventually, if all goes well, possibly I'll self-host my video content, but since my xnmcvHttp website is an ever-changing IP address, I might like simultaneously upload the vids to webm.red. I have my doubts on YouTube when it comes to evolving website quality, including increasingly annoying clickbait content. If I return there I'd not game and break the system unless it's 2005.

Now here's my "/view/" link to "the microsoft sound (windows 95 song) fm synth remix": https://webm.red/view/V7Y3.webm (check if your browser, software, and/or hardware supports the .webm file fomat beforehand)

Xnmcv: What were you even talking about?

lol. I was rambling on about various things and I was being confused. My apologies.

Xnmcv: I see.

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