Windows 95 Turns 15

An anonymous reader writes "15 years ago on this day, Microsoft's then new Windows 95 was released. Among other things it moved users away from the archaic file manager and program manager to Windows explorer and the start menu. Compared to today's 'social desktop,' I'd much rather have the simpler and more sparse (pre-Internet Explorer integrated) Windows Explorer, though I do not like the (lack of) stability that Windows 95 offers. Of course if you were alive then, you've probably seen the commercials." I fondly recall downloading build after build and installing them. But within months of the official release, I switched to Linux.

Comments

Somebody has to say it

[qwertyatwork]

Windows is a 32 bit extension of a 16 bit shell for a 8 bit operating system written for a 4 bit processor by a 2 bit company that can't stand one bit of competition!

Re:Overly optimistic there...

[damn_registrars]

I won't go into my age when Win95 came out. I will say that I knew some people who were - in comparison to myself - early adopters of the system. However I also recall the first thing they showed me in Win95 was how to boot it to the command prompt, skipping the overhead of the GUI completely. Because after all, "real men" did their work at the command prompt or through DOS programs anyways.

I also remember being puzzled at the thought of running games in Win95 - why would I ever want to run something as great as Doom in a window? That seemed like sacrilege, futility, or both. However I did have one game fairly early that benefitted from Win95 - Warcraft2. While WC2 on its own did not need Win95, the map editor pretty much did. Some of us recall the map editor could run in Win3.1 with WinG and Win32s, but those were not easy to find. I remember many a long hour on BBSes with 14.4 dial-up looking through file repositories for "WinG" and finding long lists of "Wing Commander this" and "Wing Commander that".

I do remember wishing I had something better than Netscape on Win 3.11 w/ AOL dialup for surfing however.

Count yourself lucky. My first browser in windows was the Prodigy browser, on a 2400baud modem. Later I upgraded to a 14.4 - then eventually a 28.8 - and got access through the local university; browsing with a very early mosaic browser.

And don't get me started on gopher holes or telnet or ftp sites.