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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?
The Amazon link currently shows a review that talks about the advantages of upgrading from Windows 8 to Windows 95, and the sad thing is that, at least for the UI, it's actually true. Instead of being held hostage to some braindead agenda to make my desktop PC look like a cellphone, with Win95's UI everything just works the way it should.
(Oh, and unlike another recent offering it doesn't send every keystroke and whatnot to Microsoft for analysis either).
I guess you haven't been reading the recent /. posts about what network-trace analysis has shown it actually does (not what Microsoft claims it does)...
To be fair, Command & Conquer had a pretty awesome installer.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Obligatory throwback
Virtually nobody had 32mb of RAM back then. 8mb was pretty typical for new, nice computers. You couldn't have twenty browser windows open, that's for sure, but people managed OK with lots of swapping and patience.
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.