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Windows 95 Turns 20
Etherwalk writes: Windows 95 turns 20 tomorrow, August 24, 2015. Users looking to upgrade from Windows 3.1 should be warned that some reviewers on the Amazon purchase page have been receiving 3.5" high-density floppy disk versions instead of a modern 150 kbps CD-ROM disk. Do you remember first seeing or installing Windows 95? Do you have any systems still running it?
"if we are too rude in base then oems may either stick with win3.1/msdos or defect to os/2. the way to shut out novell in the base is to either ship a full client or make it so there is no network connectivity." ref
I remember the Stones being a big part of the launch.
"You make a grown man cry-i-i."
"You make a grown man cry-i-i."
Seemed appropriate at the time.
Xitami webserver from iMatix.
Not so much the rest of it.
If you take 2x Windows 95, you'll end up with Solaris 10.
I still have a VM with it installed and running.
I Think I also have an original OEM box with the full 13 Floppy disk installation.
I also still have and original box set of Dos 6.22 and Windows 3.11 Somewhere too.
Yes, but I remember installing and using the first Command & Conquer quite a bit more!
Yes I (AC) remember it - it was a fantastic upgrade from W 3.11 for Workgroups:
- the new UI/desktop made it much nicer than 3.11, the file manager was much better
- the Recycle Bin made it much simpler to 'recover' accidentally deleted files, no more FAT16/32 undelete tools (anyone else remember Revive or was it Revival?) for most mistakes
- the Plug'n'Play feature did work ok for well known extension cards, everyone I know found it way cool not to fiddle with deep technical settings just to get a sound blaster to work
At the time it looked amazing and although slower (on my old 486DX2@50MHz) it showed a new way to use the computer - the future to the 2000s looked bright.
Although at the last Win 9x in the series - Windows ME - I switched to Linux full time (mostly for stability), I remember W95 fondly.
I was working for a small startup in 1994 and installed the Beta version of Windows 95 on a 486 with lots of help from the president of the company. Also installed the Beta of Visual C++ on the same machine and managed to actually get some work done between BSODs!
He dead. Looks dead.
START ME UP!
I remember if you bought it at CompUSA, on release day, that they would sell you ram at a discount.
Did the floppy version come with the a Wheezer video? IIRC I was running Ygdrasil Linux back then.
I spent 3 hours trying to get it to look good. Spent the next hour overwriting it with Linux. Why go back?
.... the Briefcase!
I just can't remember what it was for.
Win95 was such a huge upgrade. We forget now, but it packed an astonishing amount of stuff into just 4mb of RAM (8mb recommended). If someone produced it today in some kind of hackathon it'd be praised as a wonder of tightly written code. They even optimised it by making sure the dots in the clock didn't blink, as the animation would have increased the memory usage of the OS!
It's surprising how little Windows has changed over the years, in some ways. Not because MS didn't want to change it but because the Win95 UI design was basically very effective and people still like it, even today.
IIRC, Gates paid the Rolling Stones $12M for the rights to use their song "Start me up" which to this day I don't understand why he'd pick a song with the lyrics "You make a grown man cry!" in the chorus.
Trying to install Win95 on a Win 3.11 machine of the day certainly lent itself to tears. I don't think I was ever able to successfully do it (I reverted the 3.11 system back and then just went with Win NT and then then Win 2k) - I never used a Win95 or Win98 PC at work or at home.
A step in the right direction but definitely not an OS that was ready for prime time (sorry for the mixed metaphors).
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
That I was an OS/2 bigot at the time so I wasn't willing to spend a lot of time trying to get Win95 working.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I got my first PC in high school about a month before windows 95 came out. I got a free upgrade on that Packard Bell. It had an impressive 8MB of RAM, 1MB video card and a Pentium 100mhz. Those were the days.
I ended up installing Windows 95 a total of 52 times on that computer. I started experimenting with modifying the registry and often deleting things from it. For example, all those stupid "tips" messages you got at startup were stored in the registry. You could knock off a significant amount of data. That combined with a registry compression tool and you had extra RAM and more speed. I had pages of tweaks to do to windows 95. When 98 came out, I was disappointed. Went through an OS/2 warp phase and an NT4 phase before I got into Linux, Solaris and finally *BSD.
Without windows being such a piece of shit, I never would have gotten into operating systems.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
By Ed in the Refrigerators
I purchased a Toshiba Satellite laptop with WFW 3.11 in early '95 that I upgraded to Win 95 in September of that year. I pulled it out of the closet three years ago and it still boots up with the clean install I put on it when I moved on to newer hardware.
Ah, the bad old days of .dll conflicts, memory managers, point drivers for PCMCIA cards, and coax. I don't miss any of it.
It was also the last one I installed. To me it was good enough. All I needed was something that showed the programs on my screens. So I then went to Windowmaker on Linux.
Because of reasons I started using XFCE, because bothe KDE and GNOME want to do so much more shit.
I used to like all the different programs in Linux doing all the different things. Now we have systemd, that tries to do everything just to run KDFE or GNOME trying to do everything just to run a browser that tries to run everything.
So yes, I liked Windows 95. And I am talking about the first version. The one without IE.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Just 75 years to go until the copyright expires.
I have a PC emulator on my phone and have both 95 and 98SE volumes on it just to mess with people.
(The answer is that box still has a copy of Syntrilliam's CoolEdit on it, so I can convert MP3 to OggVorbis. Worth it? Flipping a coin...)
I was just a kid back then and was really excited about it, especially with all of the TV commercials. We bought an upgrade CD at K-Mart for maybe $99 and installed it. I don't remember any problems, but do remember a friend at school said his dad didn't want it because he heard it was very buggy. My dad had me go knocking on doors asking if people would like me to upgrade their computer for $20. At least one person did. I didn't know about software piracy back then.
Does anyone remember the Happy Days/Weezer video on the Windows 95 CD? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqi2Jy0UMiA
C:\NGRTLNS.W95
The white zone is for loading and unloading only. If you need to load or unload go to the white zone. It's a way of life
I threw out my original boxes of:
- win95 upgrade
- win98 (that I received at MS when I interned there, the day they first pressed it--on a gold cd that was still hot when they handed them out.)
- winNT pro (that I won in a college programming contest)
- win2k pro (that I bought that same summer as an intern at the MS company store for almost nothing)
Dunno why I hung onto them for so long.
Where I work we still have a stand alone machine using win 95 to run a vinyl decal cutter. Analog monitor 20+ years old, Pentium 1, still works like a champ. If it ain't broke, don't change it.
Do you remember first seeing or installing Windows 95?
I do.
95 was really slick looking. Its splash screens and on-screen fonts seemed beautiful, after years of having run DOS programs, earlier Windows (2.1 and 3.0) and Desqview.
I also remember that 95 was awful to use for work -- it would crash, hang, and/or start acting erratically, requiring reboots several times during each work day. I also remember having to manually save my work every few minutes, unless I was using a program that could be configured to autosave every few minutes. (I think we were still using WordPerfect in a DOS box back then and WP was one of the few programs that could actually autosave.)
95 was so unstable that, when you purchased a Microsoft language (C, Pascal, etc), Microsoft actually include a copy of NT 4.0 for free. (At my college bookstore, buying a Microsoft language with a NT 4.0 CD in the box actually cost less than buying just NT 4.0 by itself.)
Sure! I have a laptop with 95 on it. Works great. I use it to run my milling machine.
I have a qemu image somewhere I could run on fairly short notice. Installed from floppies.
And I was one of the few, the proud and the brave who ran OS2 Warp for that approximately one year where it was the best desktop OS available. If you could figure out how to install and configure it.
How do you just barely throw something out? You toss it at the trash can, and it almost misses, but it narrowly goes in? You haul it to the curb just as the trash man's coming by. The trash man starts to drive away from your house because you took too long to get to the curb, but you manage to wing the boxes into the back of the truck anyway as he pulls away?
Inquiring minds want to know!
Program Intellivision!
We found Windows 95 lacking for our needs. One machine here is running DOS 5.1, another DOS 6.1, another WIN NT, and a 4th Windows 2000. Our other 4 computers are Macs. Why does an elderly retired couple need 8 computers? For starters, PCBoard BBS software runs only on DOS, and my Freeware Hall of Fame site distributes both of those.
My 1993-1994 era Toshiba T6600C, a Win 95 486 machine, looks at first glance like a laptop, but it is a full desktop that looks like a compact little 20 lb suitcase. Here's a YouTube video of the computer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?.... (In the video, the T6600C uses Win 3.1, but mine has Win 95.) I have been using PC's since the first DOS days, and Win 95 was the rock star of its era. I once traveled with the T6600C after 9/11 (I was still using this computer in the year 2000!), and the airport officials insisted I go to a wall outlet (it doesn't run on batteries), and fire it up. Then they were fine with it. I would have thrown it out long ago, but it is so unique and charming that I just couldn't. So it currently serves as a quirky and rugged platform for my flatscreen TV in my home office, where I can see it every day. The fun (and amazing) thing is, it still boots to Windows 95 :).
20 years ago I was a teenager. My family wasn't rich growing up. By that point I'd owned a second hand Commodore 64 I bought for $75 through the classified ads, an IBM PC XT I bought from a consignment shop, and a 386 I built from pieces I bought second hand from a friend who was upgrading to a Pentium system. Around this time 20 years ago I was finishing up an internship I had in between my junior and senior years of high school that I had because I spent some time on BBSes and the guy thought I would enjoy learning to develop software with them. During the summer I used a 486 DX2 system with Windows 3.1. That was my fist real exposure to Windows.
There was a local trade mag for computers that they gave away free every month at news stands. I always enjoyed reading them and there were a lot of articles on Win 95. No one I knew had it or got it over the next year.
The following year when I was getting ready for college, one of the thing we had to buy was a modern computer to meet the requirements for my engineering program. It was built by a local shop and they offered DOS 6.22 / Win 3.1 or Windows 95. I remember being hesitant about 95, but decided to go for it since it was newer and I knew newer aoftware was designed for it.
That design really opened up computing to a lot of people. Having a single place to go to Start any program was a great idea. Before you had to know what directory to look in or where in Program Manager an icon was. All my non technical friends in college had no problem with it. With Windows 3.1 they would struggle and if they had to drop to DOS they were mostly lost. If you want to know what's running, it's right there on the task bar.
I've used various versions of Windows and Linux over the years, but I think the biggest legacy is the start button and task bar. They pretty much define how most people interact with the desktop. The Windows 8 UI debacle and the shift back to a start menu / having Modern apps on the task bar shows that it's how users have come to expect to interact with a desktop system.
Yeah, i remember installing it for getting the latest version of DOS.
There was a DOS upgrade included in W95, the latest official DOS (only) release was 6.2.
Ofcourse i hacked it so that it would not start windows (later found out this could be done through a hidden feature in windows itself).
If for any reason i would still need windows, i could still start it by typing 'win', just like for win3.x
Anyway, didn't matter much because not late after i discovered Linux and even more important the OSS movement.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
We had DOS/Windows 3.x PCs before getting the Windows 95 PC, and so we kept to the old use and booted under DOS by pressing the F8 key. See, a for us a PC was a gaming machine during the whole of the 90s, just like home computers in the 80s. We didn't have a modem or a printer. In 1998 Windows finally replaced DOS for games so we booted to the Windows desktop. We used to have only one Windows 3.1 game besides Solitaire, Minesweeper and Paintbrush, and that was Myst.
Perhaps a very few shareware/freeware/demos on Windows 3.1. In early Windows 95 era, some games were DOS-only then some had both a DOS and Windows executable.
One really great game that needed Windows 95 was Jedi Knight. Huge 3D maps, CD Audio music and FMV scenes. Good old times, before Internet, MP3 and OS that needs 1GB RAM and more than 10GB hard disk space to run.
Did my first real work as a technical translator on a 486 with 8MB RAM. The OS was a late version of Windows 95 (smth. like OSR2?), and Word 97 was used for text processing. BTW, I don't remember it blue-screening much, the system was pretty stable if slow-ish. I have pretty fond memories of that time.
I saved my allowance for several weeks to buy a 4MB stick of ram to get my 486 up to the 12MB minimum requirement. Then when I went to install it something went wrong. I can no longer remember what, but I do remember that I went back to 3.1 the same day.
lose != loose
> Do you remember first seeing or installing Windows 95? Do you have any systems still running it?
from an online (*1) friend, back then > Dude, are you going to get W95?
me> Only if they send me as a patch for all the problems with 3.11...
I never bought and never installed W95.
I was about to throw the towell and buy W98 (I don't "pirate")... then Linux came and saved the day -- but not at work, where "smart" (*2) people chose a Windows-only environment.What will they do if Windows 10 snoops on our data?
*1: online meant BBS back then
*2: "smart" as in sending soldiers with knives to fight a gun-wielding enemy... you know, karma is a b*tch...
This year will finally be the year of Linux on the desktop!
bare.ly
adverb
1. only just; almost not
* only a short time before.
Because IBM had the nerve to compete with Microsoft, they could seal the deal with Microsoft to install Windows 95 on their machines a whopping 15 minutes before the launch event. Well played Microsoft.
In my first job out of school, which was a 1 1/2 hour commute with rush hour traffic in both directions, we had to get our work done on desktop computers loaded with Windows 95. And Clippy.
I remember moving the mouse around and noticing how fine the detail was on the mouse pointer, at that point I knew the Amiga, with its chunky sprite mouse pointer, was dead.
Same thing when I saw the video demo... Sadly had to get rid of the stuff, Commodore was bankrupt by then anyways.
Mostly random stuff.
My first Windows 95 machine was a Mac 7600 with a 100MHz Pentium card in it. As bad as 95 was, it was still better than the old Mac OS at the time.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
I think the last time I used a Windows 95 system was in the 2000/2001 timeframe. It's been a while.
I used Windows 95 a lot. It worked, but when USB started to become important I upgraded to Windows 98. Some people claim there is a USB implementation for Windows 95 but after careful study I have come to the conclusion that they are mistaken.
I worked for the Evil Empire in the early '90s and had access to early versions of Windows 95 (still codenamed Chicago). One memorable early build crashed and corrupted my hard drive after I attempted to adjust the mouse settings.
...laura
It is running on a k6BV3+ mobo, with a k6-III-450 processor and 128MB of edo dram.
It has a Tennelec PCA3 ISA card in it, that is currently taking data. :)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Memories of long lines of early adopters spreading outside stores (I wasn't one). The unnerving Rolling Stones gimmick. Apple's shenanigans (back then, M$ was evil and Apple were the good guys --how naive we were...). It's not before a whole year later that I got a beta version from a buddy of mine and gave it a try. Believe it or not, I'd make it through the following years with the same Beta, which would run fine except for a necessary reinstall roughly once a year. Yes, once a year, all over again with the little drum dialog box. I must have been too lazy to consider upgrading to a (allegedly) stabler W98. When I bought a more powerful beast in 2001, I went straight to W2K and thoroughly enjoyed the First Decent Microsoft OS. I still have my old little Pentium box stacked somewhere, the impish little Beta OS still sleeping on its harddrive.
It was a perfect beautiful summer day in Redmond with blue sky and rolling white clouds exactly like on the cover of the Win95 box. Gates must have ordered the weather to match the box. Jay Leno was the featured speaker and told the audience how he had been a guest in Gates' house, "a double-wide." Overhead a plane circled with a banner that said, "Brought to you by Windows NT," that team having felt slighted by all the attention to 95. There were kiosks running the OS where I brought up my library's nascent web site on several. The bandwidth was probably 56K as everything was unbearably slow. My spouse over heard techs wondering how that could have happened.
There was ample food and entertainment and at the end they threw back tarps over a tent to give backpacks to all the attendees, each of which contained a copy of Win95. I rode back in the charter bus from Redmond to Seattle across from a grumpy John Dvorak, apparently pissed he hadn't been greeted as more of a celebrity.
And a good time was had by all.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
C:\NGRTLNS.W95
I remember when Apple paid for this full page advertisement in a thing called a "newspaper".
227-3517
I didn't use Windows 3.1, and preferred DOS. With DOS disks, stuff booted up cleanly every time. But with Windows, if you set something up wrong or got a virus, your computer wouldn't boot at all. The funny thing we're still in the era of click on the wrong URL, and you get a virus. Viruses shouldn't be so easy to get.
God spoke to me
Do you remember first seeing or installing Windows 95?
One of the final beta releases. Don't ask which one, I can't remember, I spent most of my time with Linux boxes and Sun workstations back then - I was given the shitty end of the stick to evaluate the thing with me being the person in the organisation most likely to ferret out the bugs running our windows CAE/ECAD software on it.
The fun part about that was whatever beta copy we had, it was more stable on the test machine than the final commercial release, so much so, we fell back to using the beta copy for a while.
Do you have any systems still running it?
Yes, one of the spare CNC controller boxes we have in the store, though really we could get away with running WFW 3.11 on it..that would freak out the PHB...
Win-95 was the Next Big Thing, it had a TCP/IP stack, came with quick basic, a telnet and FTP client, a web browser that would eventually crush Mozilla. I even tried it because I bought a 3dFX banshee card assuming it would work with Linux; that support was months out. It even ran decently with only four MB of RAM. I can remember paying $500 for a 16MB SIMM so that Linux would run well.
Despite all that, it had no security, it was still based on a 16-bit architecture on top of DOS, and was a stupid kludgy hack, but it was good enough for most folks and not having to buy Trumpet TCP/IP to get on to AOL was a boon.
Since then everything Linux had, it still has but is better, easier, and does so much more. The use still has to buy all his applications for Windows, and the these privacy issues with 10 are unnerving to those in the know. Still, if Win-95 hadn't been as good as it was, the year of Linux on the desktop could have happened.
Never understood why Microsoft saw fit to torture their customers with 95,98,ME.etc. for all those years when they had NT.
Of course this was all back in the good old days when software companies actually had to provide new value to their customers in order to make money. Now it seems all software vendors are capable of doing is repainting the shell and spying on customers.
--
"Finally, we will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary."
It controls the heating system in one of our buildings. Until we need to replace the system or the computer dies, we have never found a good reason to replace it. It's not internet connected. Unless someone busts down the door because they're tired of wearing a sweater in the A/C, I see no valid reason to move to a more secure system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOwQKWiRJAA
WTF is this? Have we already forgotten how optical media works or something?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
At the time I was running OS/2. Microsoft announced it would release it's next OS by the end of the year (1995), figured that gave IBM a year to get their act together. Went to Comdex an Jan/95, headed straight to the IBM booth, and started asking OS/2 questions. Nobody in the booth knew what OS/2 was. That's when I knew OS/2 was the walking dead.
I found it ironic OS/2 ran more legacy apps that Win95 did. I found it maddening that of the apps that didn't run under Win95, Microsoft had an equivalent offering that did. How many word processors and spreadsheets didn't work on Win95 but ran fine on OS/2?
First (and only) install was a Chicago beta ... I was working as a Banyan VINES administrator at the time and needed to test the VINES client under the upcoming W95.
At home, I used OS/2.
At work, I switched to a SPARCstation.
Tells you what I thought of W95 and Microsoft.
Sound policy that I still follow today.
On the occasion of your 20th birthday.
#DeleteChrome
she has no fucking idea what she's talking about, typical
>" Do you remember first seeing or installing Windows 95? Do you have any systems still running it? "
I was installing Linux at the time, not MS-Windows. And yes, I still have almost all my systems running it (although not the same version, of course, and certainly not the same distro).
I still have my old IBM P120 Thinkpad with a dual boot of Win95 and an old version of Red Hat; I think 6.0. The battery is shot. But it still works great off the AC adapter. I bought it back in 1997 for about $1300, lol.
The 'Buddy Holly' music video that was included on the Win95 CD made me a fan of Weezer, which I still am to this day. I must have watched that video hundreds of times as a kid.
because we have some CNC machine software that needs to live in DOS with a non-USB parallel port, and so there's a Windows 95 install that spends most of its time in DOS mode. The GUI gets fired up when moving files around on the LAN. Hey, it's clunky, but it works and it's a tossup between this and replacing half the CNC controller, which is a lot more expensive than trolling for ancient laptops on ebay.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Nostalgia has its place somewhere on the internet, but this is supposed to be a news site.
Considering that Microsoft announced the "death"(a.k.a. "Extended Support End Date") of Windows 95 to have been in 2001, the news should read:
"Windows 95 would have turned 20 if Microsoft hadn't euthanized it"
Win95 is the reason I switched to Linux. I was building my own pc at the time, for the first time (a PII system). I bought an OEM version of Win95, along with the hardware from Treasure Chest Computers, and had an awful time trying to install it. I finally figured out how to get it installed, using a Windows boot disk. But in the meantime, while I was having difficulty, I was looking at OTHER options. I installed Linux, alongside Winblows. Even though I continued to use Win95, I used Linux much much more, and loved what it was all about. So, Win95 was the last version of Windows I ever installed, I'm happy to say :)
Even though IBM boasted about having threads in OS/2, even IBM never actually used them. Ironically a lot of windows versions of IBM apps, like the documentation reader that came with the OS/2 development kit, worked a lot better in OS/2 than their native apps did. You could actually run windows apps in separate memory space, so one crashing didn't bring them all (or the OS) down. And if one of those windows apps stopped processing for a while, you could still get stuff done on your computer.
When the 95 COMDEX rolled around in Atlanta, I volunteered to go on my own time and provide tech support for Team OS/2. They gave us all pink Team OS/2 polo shirts and a bunch of install packages. My favorite bit about the show was setting the OS up on a quad processor Compaq system with a MASSIVE 16 MB of RAM on it. We made a ram disk, pulled the demo videos off the OS/2 install media and set up 4 media players to play the videos in separate windows -- an amazing feat at the time. Hell, playing video at all was not a common thing at the time. Most people were lucky if they could dial up a BBS and download some 8 bit porn.
I'd already started switching to Slakware when IBM announced they were killing OS/2, and that was pretty much the end of all that.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I remember driving down El Camino Real the week of launch and seeing a homeless guy holding a cardboard sign that read "Will un-install Windows 95 for food"
It's also the 20th anniversary of Microsoft Bob but I don't see Slashdot commemorating it. Oh, the unfairness :-)
I recall signing up for the Windows 95 Preview program and having to pay to "join the club". I received a box full of 3.5 inch floppy disks in HD (High Density (format) and a printed guide to how the software was supposed to work.
Recently I had the joy of reinstalling it in a VM.. anybody remember the 4.5 MHz bug? If you CPU was too fast, it couldn't boot.
Also recall this was "not" a multitasking operating system.. you had to "switch tasks" much like we "switch users" or "switch desktops" now.
There was an incredibel amount of graphics design and "cogent" thought that went into making the best of limited resources.. which makes it way better than Windows 10 today. What was lost first was the "culture" of it being designed by engineers and crafted for "end users" by a professional team.. today "volume and speed" are suppose to replace that.. and unfortunately the "language and cultural" norms of the people refuse to adapt to the countries that will often haphazardly buy into it.. before rejecting it as an affront to culture and langauges. Microsoft back then famously considered what does a mailbox look like in India or Africa.. those same countries to day working on the project flatly "refuse to adapt" and take out vengence on American symbolism.. to the point more and more American users are fleeing the latest versions of Windows and all things India.
I'll never forget seeing Windows 95 for the first time. According to all the hype, DOS was gone, and this big new thing wasn't just another fancy DOS shell like all its predecessors. As it happened, I had some kind of custom boot switcher setup in place (all I really remember is I wrote it in C) to swap AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files for various purposes, like booting into a really lean and clean environment for games that required huge TSRs, and booting into Windows if I wanted to use a program with a GUI for some reason. I misremember the particulars, but I had things installed in non-standard, custom places, and probably a version of OS/2 in the mix there somewhere.
Anyway, the long and the short of it is that when I booted into the new "it's an operating system, not a DOS shell" for the first time, I ended up with Windows 3.11 running on top of whatever hidden version of DOS came underlying Windows 95. It was nothing but a fancy DOS shell, exactly like all the hype said it wasn't. I took note of the fact that Microsoft had taken me for an idiot and tried to blow smoke up my ass.
They're still doing that, apparently. Fortunately, I switched to Linux right on the eve of Windows XP, and I never did go back. I've experienced all subsequent versions briefly, and in passing, but I have yet to find a reason to actually use one of them for something. Linux is far from perfect, but it's the devil I know at this point, even if I will never live long enough to see the year of the Linux desktop.
(And yes, of course, I obviously mean Debian GNU/Linux and all its derivatives and permutations of GNUey GNUoodness, because it's not an GNUperating system without putting the GNU in GNU. GNUf said about that nod toward political GNUrrectness.)
For most users, Windows 95 plus Office 95 plus Netscape plus Eudora could do everything that that they do today. (The big exception is 3D graphics on modern games.)
Most users today only use a fraction of the power of Word 95 and Excel 95. Netscape was more than enough to run Facebook and Google Search and classic web pages which is what most people actually use the web for. Windows 95 could even display passable video. And Emacs gave me a powerful IDE.
It could be a bit unstable, but now that Microsoft had finally discovered 32bit instructions 20 years too late it was very programmable. It also cursed us with the registry.
And all this in just 8 megabytes of memory. Not 80, 800, or 8,000 needed today, but just 8.
So what are the other 7,992 meg on my computer doing? They are filled with stuff (including whole VMs), I seem to need it. Sure 8 might have become 16 and then 80. But how on earth did it become 8,000?
There is nothing substantial that I do today that I could not do on Win95 with, say, 32 meg. (OK, so I could not run bloatware like Eclipse, maybe that is my point!)
Ah, not a laptop but in a suitcase. I've heard of those referred to as "luggables" because they're heavy.
I'd just purchased the fastest machine on the planet, a Gateway 486-66 for which I'd paid almost $4000. I did it knowing Windows 95 was coming. My wife was going out of town for the weekend so I had the weekend to myself tom complete the upgrade. I started the install and it went fabulously; I watched EVERY moment of it.
A couple of months prior, I had spent $250 for a cd-rom so I could play this awesome new game, Revenge of the Tentacle. (Chasing down a CD-ROM was an exercise in frustration at that point).
After the installation, I played with every aspect of Windows 95 and settled on the CD player. For the rest of the night, I listened to Cheryl Crow relating BJs in theaters and how ironic tragedy was... (tragedy is NOT ironic... Cheryl Crow was a moron (or her song writers were)... but that's neither here nor there).
In any case, I listened to that album over and over until 4 am on my Altec Lansing thunderboom speakers (which, coincidentally) are STILL working and STILL sounding awesome behind the monitor on which I write this post. It's the only part of my Gateway still working.
Ah, those were the days.
Since then, I've become a devout linuxista and I cringe at my former Microsoft tolerating ways. But it did happen and I can acknowledge it.
Linux was coming along nicely. But the marketing for 95 was genius. Even Apple was impressed. But if you ask me, 95 was a ratty piece of unpolished crap. Just like windows 10. Too bad Linux can't manage itself, I mean between gnome, kde and kernel folks, there's a lot of whacky attempts that make windows still a good choice.
When I was in high school, one of my first "computer projects" was upgrading to Windows 95 over the summer. I remember installing RAM to bring it up to 8MB and 250 MB HDD's into old white box computers that were in use at my school. All of them were already 486's with math co-processors. We installed 3COM Ethernet adapters and removed the old BNC cards. There were already Ethernet drops done.
:) When I graduated in 2000, we had gotten all Dell work stations running Windows NT 4 with 64MB of RAM and Pentium III's. Ah memories, makes me want to go build a desktop for old times sake!
It took about 2 weeks to upgrade 60 computers, all installs done via the network. This was in 1997, and it was an awesome experience to a 15 year old kid who was just realizing that he had a knack for computers
So I gave Win 95 a chance after IMB OS/2 Warp failed miserably for me.
After a week of Win 95 I went back to Slackware.
I waited in Walmart the eve of Aug. 24th 1995. I bought Windows 95 and Plus for Windows 95. It wasn't that bad of an OS, much better than Windows 3.1 or 98. However, once they tried integrating IE into the OS to kill Netscape it drove me away from them and I returned to Linux and X Windows. Windows may have looked fancy, but it wasn't productive for me, when I opened a shell I felt like I was stuck in a small pond, compared to the see of options available in a Linux shell.
I waited in Walmart the eve of Aug. 24th 1995. I bought Windows 95 and Plus for Windows 95. It wasn't that bad of an OS, much better than Windows 3.1 or 98. However, once they tried integrating IE into the OS to kill Netscape it drove me away from them and I returned to Linux and X Windows. Windows may have looked fancy, but it wasn't productive for me, when I opened a shell I felt like I was stuck in a small pond, compared to the sea of options available in a Linux shell.
... to be celibrating... ask me again in another 10, 20 or 30 years ! ;) :)
I just got rid of my last Win95 machine, it was an i-Opener which I used for running my embroidery machine. That died. Goodbye, i-Opener. Have fun being recycled.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I was working for a start-up software company in Silicon Valley back then. I was charged with compatibility testing with different environments and operating systems. I got to see Windows 95 in Beta. I also remember the various proposed names they were going to give Windows 95. First they were going to call it Windows 4. Then they went to Windows 94 (which I thought was a stupid idea). Then they settled on Windows 95 when it was clear that it wasn't going to be released until later in 1994.
Although Windows 95 was a significant step-up from Windows 3.11, I never liked it very much. The UI bugged me and the stability wasn't that great. Plus they removed Schedule+ which came free with Windows for Workgroups, and sold it as Outlook. I was heavy into OS/2 back then, and it was much better. I never really used Windows 95 and later Windows 98 that much. In fact, it was the combination of Windows 98 and NT 4 which drove me to switch to Linux. I've been using it as my personal desktop OS ever since.
Until 2 months ago, I could occasionally hear the "bleeerrm bing bing bing bing" sound of Windows 95 starting up somewhere in the office. There was some ancient machine programming cartridges for some other ancient machine (not a PC, a custom franking machine) that some of our customers had.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Well that does bring back memories!
Was a a kid then... First had the floppy version, but at the time we bought a new PC and got the CD installer. I remember the second CD that came with it, something like "Windows begins here and now". It had these two video clips showing the multimedia capabilities. Wow, I was very impressed! I must have wathced those dozens and dozens of times. And it had multitasking. And finally no more 8 letter filenames!
Also, I remember a big marketing campaign, was living in Toronto at the time and they had a huge banner running down the side of the CN Tower.
I had just ordered a 133 MHz Pentium and made a special request to have it ship with Windows 3.1 instead of Windows 95. With the (glass) monitor, the computer cost over $5,000. Up until then I had been using a 80386 upgraded with a Cyrix math co-processor and a 50 MHz 486 replacement. The Pentium, of course, blew it away. Oh, those were the days.
I just ran through my archive this morning, testing for bitrot, and found my Win95 OEM SR2 hologrammed CDROM still in perfect working order.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Coming from the pre-Windows 95 era I well remember having to spend a lot of time looking for free interrupts and messing with memory settings for Windows 3.1 and Windows for Work Groups. Windows 95 was a godsend for me. And it looked great to boot!
I installed the Windows 95 Upgrade on top of W4W3.11. Ran for 28 days without rebooting, in an era (28.8k modem, PPP connection, AOL over IP, Trumpet Winsock, Mozilla) where I rebooted 3-4 times an evening (once an hour) to restore my connection.
Then I got some patch from Windows Update. No such uptime ever again until Windows 8. But damn, 95 was the shizzle, compared to all else before it.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Remember it well, fortunately don't need to run it anymore. Wasn't it Win95 that had the "Start it up" campaign hyping the "start" button?
1. (As discussed in TFA) The Start Menu and new UI.
2. The beginning of the end of DOS as an element highly visible to the user.
3. The beginning of the surge in Windows-native game availability. Prior to Win95, most games were still DOS-based, and getting some to run in Windows was quite a configuration challenge (or impossible).
Don't have any machines still running 95, but a few still running it ultimately-refined version (IMHO), Win98 SE. For some of those old games.
With 85 revisions I can't wait to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 95 !