Windows 95 turns 25 years old today. The operating system was possibly the most significant and notable release for the Redmond giant, which laid the foundation for some core elements of the OS, such as the Start Menu Taskbar, and the Recycle Bin that are still present, albeit in a much more modern form. It also marked the phasing out of MS-DOS, with it being merged with Windows into one offering, making it more user-friendly operating system.
Windows 95 is the most impactful and most significant operating system release of all time – hands down. Windows 3.x laid the groundwork, mostly in corporate environments, getting people accustomed to and interested in Windows at their jobs. When it came time to get a computer at home, Windows 95 knocked it out of the park. It was a massive one-two punch that knocked out every single competitor, with Apple only surviving because Microsoft allowed them to.
A computer on every desk and in every home, and Windows 95 was installed on every one of those computers. It’s easy to forget just how massive and hysterical Windows 95’s launch was, and the fact Windows 10 today still looks and behaves in essentially the same way as Windows 95 underlines just how many things Microsoft got right.
If you’ll allow a revisionist history. IIRC when Windows 95 was first released, Microsoft thought “information at your fingertips” meant MSN dial-up (for a service similar to AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy) and encyclopedia-like CD-ROMs. Netscape deliberately waited in the weeds before unveiling Navigator, I think, and then Bill Gates sent his infamous “The Internet Tidal Wave” email to the troops. Microsoft acquired the Spyglass browser, rebranded it as IE, and came out with WIndows 95 R2 with IE bundled with the OS and configured as the default browser in typical Microsoft fashion.
There was even a R2 for Bill Gates’ book “The Road Ahead”… new and improved, with coverage of the Internet.
Woo.
Oh the memories. I bought a special issue of a computer magazine dedicated exclusively to Windows 95, a few weeks before the official launch. I salivated all over it.
A WIndows 95 uninstaller program won an award in 1995. I was an early migrant from Apple OS and was not that surprised people wanted to ditch W95. So it can’t have been all cookies and cream. It had a feature to :”discover your devices” , which was of course a no brainier on an Apple. The WIndows version was awful, hanging your PC for a long time before giving up, every time. Or so it seemed.
“Plug and Pray”
More commonly called “shrug and pray”.
I must admit, never heard “Shrug and Pray”. Plug and Pray though, now that became famous.
Iapx432,
It was really buggy, IMHO windows NT was a better OS although most consumers wouldn’t have known about it because it was marketed to different customers. While I did prefer the start menu to the program manager, besides that and some new themes it was fairly similar to win3.11. The biggest difference in usage that I can recall was popular 3rd party networking from novel and lantastic getting replaced with microsoft’s own versions of those tools. Most games at the time were still based on DOS. I’m not sure if it was win95 or 98, but the scandisk process is etched into my mind because windows’ frequent crashes would trigger scandisk on boot, haha.
I’m not so sure about that. NT was pretty obtuse until it became Windows 2000. I spent 8 hours one day trying to get NT 4+ to acknowledge a modem existed after the drivers were installed. I think it was a modem any.
Good times. 🙂
Years later, FAT32 became the de facto FS for removable media and got baked into the UEFI standard. We still carry little pieces of the sins of the ’90s around with us today.
Is the FAT FS the original sin of the computing world?
Alfman,
I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss the initial reluctance to move to NT as about marketing.
1. NT required 16Mb of RAM minimum when 95 required 4Mb. Neither really worked on the minimum, but you’d need fairly good hardware in 1995 to run NT.
2. 95 could limp along on legacy drivers in a lot of cases. NT needed all new ones. It was also still changing things, so NT 4 changed the video model and moved the networking stack to NDIS4, effectively requiring new drivers.
3. NT was priced about 3x the cost of 95. Arguably this is marketing, but consumers would need some convincing as to why they should pay 3x more.
One thing that always amazes me talking about software is how people believe a software release fixes things that are really fixed outside of the software. Hardware got cheaper. Drivers got written. People adopting NT in 1998 had a different experience to 1995. XP, at least to me, was just changing marketing after the situation had changed.
One thing people might also forget is that XP introduced “Home” and “Pro” pricing tiers because these were formerly totally different products, where people who paid more actually got something much better. Although it’s easier to write software for one system rather than two, I miss the incentives of the past where people building the “Pro” product could really focus on “Pro” needs.
You’re not misremembering. It was a giant ball of crap. Windows still is a giant ball of crap.
Unfortunately, at the time, the options were to be a martyr since alternative OSes probably didn’t have a port of some software or power through because a PC is just a tool.
In fairness, the first Macs weren’t expendable initially. Later they add the Processor Direct Slot, and only ever one in a system, so there wasn’t ever a chance of device conflicts. And PDS cards for one generation wouldn’t work in other systems.
NuBus auto-configured devices, as did PCI, and when Windows 95 was loaded up with PCI hardware device discovery was quick and painless.
It’s only ISA devices that were a problem – they had no standard ways of configuring them without using jumpers, and no standard for things like device or vendor IDs, which means devices had to be interacted with in order to identify them. Apple didn’t have this problem simply because they skipped a whole generation of device expansion, by offering less functionality.
Isn’t that what Apple does today?
I think i remember that in the late 90s and early 2000 you could expand you Apple computer somewhat. But that all went away. Except some external solutions.
I never had the money to buy a brand new Apple. It wasn’t a computer that i could afford.
From the Win3.1/95 days, How many of yall remember the term “Plug and Pray”?
Thom, I know you’re a Windows fanboy in denial but your take sounds like nostalgic gushing for what is widely considered the beginning of a personal computing dark age from the mid-90s to the early 00s. It’s especially rich with your constant handwringing over Apple’s current soured relationship with App Store developers that you conveniently overlook the fact that Microsoft was similarly reviled for bullying and undercutting devs and competitors with unfair OEM licensing requirements (the Microsoft tax), private APIs, and good old “embrace, extend, extinguish.” I’m flabbergasted that you actually think having an extant 30-year Microsoft desktop monopoly (instead of interoperable open standards) is a good thing for anyone other than Microsoft.
Also you may have a distorted memory of the PC market in the mid-90s. Windows 95 did little to knock out competing home computer companies, as they had mostly been crushed under the IBM-compatible clone market years earlier. Apple had only just entered its “beleaguered” phase around this time, following years of its own mismanagement, and it wasn’t that Microsoft “allowed them” to survive; $150 million alone from a code theft lawsuit settlement (San Francisco Canyon Company) wouldn’t have dug Apple out of the deep hole it was in by the time Bill Gates appeared on-screen at Macworld 1997. Microsoft was trying to save some face with the DOJ at a time when it was neck-deep in antitrust investigations. Also, while Windows 95 had the technical advantage of preemptive multitasking, in virtually all other aspects it was still a poor man’s Macintosh. Remember when Microsoft thought MDI applications were just the bee’s knees? 🙂
Anyway, Windows 10 hardly resembles Windows 95 unless you condense the entire UI down to a desktop with icons, a Start button (not the Start menu, dear God), and a System Tray. Hell, Windows 3.x was *nothing* like Win9x, so it’s a bit silly to suggest that familiarity with Program Manager in the office would have any future relevance at home. Meanwhile even with all the major functional changes that came with the transition to OS X, you can apply a user workflow from System 1 in 1984 to present-day macOS Catalina and hardly miss a beat. That’s good fundamental design. Over in Windows-land Microsoft has been trying and failing to reinvent the menu bar and tool bar since the mid-00s, reducing everything to unlabeled buttons and hamburger menus meant for mobile. We’re nearly a decade past Windows 8 and there are still two settings panels. It’s a usability nightmare from Hell and the only reason anyone still puts up with it is because Microsoft still has a monopoly on the desktop.
that guy,
You are right, but Thom was probably too young to really appreciate the stranglehold microsoft had. Microsoft’s abuses were egregious before the antitrust trials. We don’t yet know if apple will get a similar ball and chain or if the DOJ just look the other way. But a lot of microsoft’s abuses were actually tame by comparison, like bundling their own browser and interfering with netscape’s ability to get theirs installed. Not only does apple do this very same thing, but they actively block end users from installing alternatives, which goes way further than anything microsoft ever did. Microsoft could only have dreamed of having a walled garden the likes of what IOS has today.
Unfortunately many people only see this in the lens of microsoft versus apple versus google or some variation thereof, but make no mistake if we don’t put our foot down on anti-competitive behaviors across the board, things will only get worse. We should not just defend anti-competitive behaviors by making it some other company’s responsibility to honor owner rights (aka the “if you don’t like it, just go somewhere else” excuse). That is the path that leads to owner freedoms getting taken away inch by inch from all sides. Too many people are defending restrictions being placed on owners by putting the onus on other companies to protect owner rights, yet this creates a cycle whereby all companies act collectively to restrict owner freedoms over time. I cannot emphasize this enough, framing owner rights as a fight between company A versus company B is a loosing strategy for owner rights. The act of taking away an owner’s freedom needs to be robustly criticized regardless of the companies involved.
Between the two of you, you’ve just about covered everything I wanted to say, although I don’t think Thom is that much younger than me; and I still fondly treasure the Amiga.
A “Windows fanboy” who doesn’t run Windows on anything (I exclusively run Linux).
Sure bud.
Right, that’s where the “in denial” part comes in, as many former Windows users on Linux try to recreate the Windows experience down to the same IBM-compatible hardware, same IBM-based keyboard layouts, same IBM CUA- and Windows-style keyboard shortcuts, and same Windows-style desktop GUI, then they run Wine for all their proprietary Windows video games and productivity apps. But hey at least they can claim to be part of the cool crowd because they know how to fiddle with a package manager.
Well, I don’t run Wine. But if you haven’t read my anti-GNOME rants on here or elsewhere before, and that’s an advert for it, you won’t enjoy them if you do.
I remember the launch but never actually had a Win95 computer; we went straight from 3.1 to 98 in our house, I think. At my Uni they had Windows 3.11 on the desktops until my final year; they had one attempt at using W95 and it was a disaster — the OS made the machines dog slow and unreliable. Eventually they settled on NT4.
The interesting thing about the 95 layout is how many Linux desktops copied it. A version of FVWM with that layout came out almost immediately but all the elements were present in the default KDE desktop: the start (K) menu, the quick launchers, the app selector, the system tray, the clock. Looked fancier and you could move it all around but they were the same UI elements. The default GNOME initially offered a similar experience although later on in GNOME 2 they moved to the top bar with the three menus and the selector on the bottom bar. So, they may have got the underpinnings very wrong but the UI passed the test of time.
Never owned a copy (had Linux at the time). Did I miss anything?
Not really. XD
Office? Winamp? Printer drivers?
I tried RedHat 7.2 around that time, and I didn’t really work for me. I ended up back on Windows to get work done.
I’ve run Linux or MacOS at home pretty much exclusively since 1998, and it was Windows 98 that turned me to Linux. (iPhones and iPads encouraged me to try out Macs, though I had done so years earlier at school.) There’s a trope about the first six Star Trek movies (with the original crew from the sixties) that the even numbered ones are good, and the odd-numbered ones are bad; it’s much the same with Windows releases. So in short, Windows 98 was a steaming pile, (and I used to use Windows 3.1 at school and laugh about how primitive it and DOS were compared to my Amiga), but Windows 95 was actually good. As “that guy” says above, lots of Linux DE’s replicate the look of Windows with its Start Menu and Tool Bar, and for a good reason – it’s the one thing they got right. Although they were either lucky, or copied the idea from the Acorn Archimedes.