retrocomputing

apps had so much soul back in the day.

Mmm... Sonique.

Realmedia player. They tried so hard to make people like it...

That obsession with weirdly shaped windows with no window manager decor

This was lovely! Are there any other communities that share interesting posts from small blogs like this?

I remember downloading like a 1GB RealVideo video (over 56k dialup) of a South Park episode as a kid because we didn't have Comedy Central and I wanted to see it since everyone was talking about it at the time. I remember nothing else about the format aside it being advertised as super high def but the files were also massive and hard to find in the first place because NOBODY used it.

I would argue that multimedia came before win95. You can see many sound+video+more integrations on program-level before then (The installer for Command&Conquer is a legendary example. There'sa reason why the first setting the installer asks of you is your soundcard details.)

But it was with win95 the concept was embraced by an operating system geared towards it. And that's what allowed for many of the whacky UI designs of media players that came not long after.