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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
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!
.... 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
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
Same here. Being able to download at 28k from a BBS while playing Wolfenstein was years beyond windows.
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.
Just 75 years to go until the copyright expires.
That's from 'Satisfaction.' The Rolling Stones did an ok cover version of that DEVO song. Passable, but not great.
Yes, OS/2 was a great DOS multitasking environment, I also used it to run a Fidonet BBS back in the '90s, but IBM had an obsession with trying to make the 286 useful, which crippled it from the start. Back in the day, I thought 64K segments were the height of stupidity, which is why I've been primarily a Mac user since '85. Also, this would be the second time that IBM let Microsoft use it to further their (MS) own goals.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I just remembered something else.. Windows 95 used about 50 MB of hard drive space back when our hard drive was 170 MB. It seemed like a HUGE pig compared to Windows 3.1 + DOS which was somewhere between 10 MB and 20 MB. That inspired a Weird Al style parody song about Windows 95: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwb74UQPK3s
Windows 95 came with a very early version of Internet Explorer. At one point I remember realizing that it was way better than Mosaiic. For example, it could display background images, play background music, and generally better positioning of elements on the screen. I think Microsoft hosted a haloween website that really showcased IE and impressed me.
I also remember when Microsoft was pushing developers to build ActiveX controls for web pages. They were competing with the mind blowing "Hot Java" which could render animations in a web page and do neat things.
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.
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.
OS/2 was great. I was always amazed at how it could run windows programs faster than Windows!
The other thing I always remember is that if you sorted the config.sys file (which, IIRC, was something like 60+ lines long) so the drivers loaded in alphabetical order, you could literally shave minutes off of your boot time.
One of my earliest Internet experiences, post-BBSes, was on Delphi using some OS/2 software called ODN--Offline Delphi Newsreader.
Good memories!
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
I remember the Weezer video that came on the CD. It was amazing to me that my PC could finally play video in a window like on Knight Rider. Now it's just part of every day life.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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!
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.
I loved that song and I loved having it on the PC. It blew my mind and it rendered amazingly at the time through my 2MB ATI Video Card. And that really was a video card, not a 3D card.
I never get used to these constant resurrections
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!)