I don't really remember many Windows 95 firsts. One I remember is the ability to switch users without logging off. MacOS famously copied that (with a 3D cube look).

I think they made something really revolutionary at the IE3 time. Their News and Mail app was an Explorer extension that placed an e-mail reader as the presentation of a folder full of folders of mailboxes and messages. You wouldn't see the extension, as the apps launched as applications, but that's what the implementation looked like from what I investigated back then.

Unfortunately, the idea was seemingly abandoned almost immediately. I would love to have such views on top of a user-space file system keeping messages, address books, and calendars in sync.

A long time ago I did that to make Canonical's Launchpad easier to read - mostly making tables look nicer and so on. I was really nice. I saw similar initiatives at Workday as well - browser plugins that added extra functionality to the development instances of the application.

> What accounts for the premium price/TB of these extremely high capacity enterprise-targeted drives?

Spare capacity, mostly. That’s why they have higher endurance. If you want to double the endurance of a given drive, tell the controller to allocate twice as many spare blocks and report less capacity than you would otherwise.

In this case, you are also paying a premium for the PCIe attachment instead of SAS, and a lot for price elasticity. You see, with drives like these you slash space and energy consumption in relation to HDDs by a large number, and that allows you to pay a premium for the device, because, at the end of its lifetime, it’ll have more than covered the cost difference in saved space and energy.

You can trivially modulate flash endurance by tweaking the reported space - the less space you report, the more spares you have.

And thanks to the density, they won’t need as many racks as they used to.

I was going to say blood of virgins, but tears are probably better heat conductors.

The transfer rates limit how much each chip can be active at any given time, so a heat-aware writing allocator can pick the least active blocks for the next writes and distribute the heat accordingly. Even if it’s not heat-aware, the tendency will be that the writes will be distributed over as many chips as there are, and so will be the heat generated.

Now, I would LOVE to see this much SLC flash on a direct to bus attachment setting.

I imagine this is mostly about form-based applications, GUI or not, before the Microsoft pulled the rug from under IBM.

> Microsoft advanced the state of UI and UX more than anyone else in the '90s.

There is no universe where that is true.