Happy 20th Birthday Windows 95

[Windows OS]

Image from Neowin
Today marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Windows 95, the operating system that laid the foundation of many parts of Windows that are still with us today (despite a certain ex-leader of Windows' certain wishes...). You can share your memories, good or bad, of the OS here. Here is some of mine:
I remember that 10 years ago, the first thing that I did that sparked my computer interest was figuring out that cables from one computer could plug in to another (hey, I was 5 ). The computer I plugged in had Windows 95 on it. Plus, the student computers from my first elementary school in kindergarten still had Windows 95 in 2005.
Anyhoo, share your memories down below. And again,
Happy Birthday!!!

[OltScript131]

Happy BirthDay Windows 95 !!!

[MSUser2013]

Even though I wasn't alive when Windows 95 was out, I've had some experiences with it on 2 computers, A 1997 Dell Pentium MMX laptop, and a 1999 Custom-Built Pentium II Desktop, I've only started out with 98, 2000, and XP, I didn't have a 95 computer until 2012 when I got the old Dell Laptop on eBay, It was good, I still have it on my Pentium II Desktop which is currently used for old games that refuse to run on 7 or even XP, I do plan on upgrading it to a Pentium III or early Pentium 4 running Windows 98SE though, But I'll keep it for DOS games.

Happy 20th anniversary to the release of Windows 95! Next year NT4 will be 20, and then 98 will be 20 in 3 years from now.

[Goldfish64]

Good old Windows 95. I figured somebody would make a post about it.

My last encounter using Windows 95 is when I was in elementary school in 2005-06, as that was the OS of choice for the AR computers, which were turned on and off using a power strip mounted underneath the desk. There were also various other Windows 95 student computers throughout the building, and XP ran on the computers in the lab.

Happy birthday Windows 95!

Don't forget that Windows 1.0 turns 30 in November.

[johnleakedfan]

I remember windows 95 or 98 in my early elementary school years, maybe 2005?
or 6?
Happy Birthday Windows 95

Offtopic Comment

Anyone want some cake?

[Windows OS]

Yep. Good times being a 5 year old. I remember my first elementary school had computers running 95, as detailed on my first post. Anyway, when I moved to my current location in '06, the computers at my new school was running XP.
At my house, our main computer was running Windows 98 until 2006-2007, when my late grandfather gave us a Compaq Presario Windows XP computer. And the rest was history.
Anyway, here's a question. What would Windows be like without Windows 95? Would we be still using Program/File Manager? Would Windows 8's Metro interface even happen? I think, Windows, and pretty much operating systems as a whole, would look very different today. What do you think?

[WindowsBetaz01]

Happy birthday, Windows 95! 20 years... It doesn't seem like it though.

[louisw3]

I remember all those people in line at midnight for Windows 95. It was crazy, ive never seen anything like it before, or since where average users were waiting for midnight to buy an operating system.

With the rise of real Win32 on the desktop, it marked the death of OS/2 as its greatest feature, Windows compatibility suddenly was irrelevant.

Plus with dialup ppp and lan TCP/IP, it was the OS to really bring the Internet to average users.

Its been an incredible 20 years!

[AyamiOoruri29]

Well... happy late birthday, Windows 95!

[Jens]

As I obviously belong to the older users in this place, I would like to give my five cents.
I remember walking with a friend of mine in a computer store shortly after Win95 was released. Me and him - still being totally used to Win 3.x - were trying to do something useful with a PC on display in that shop never having used Win95 before and having no clue at all. We totally failed and wondered where the hell the "Program Manager" is. We could not believe, this would be better than Win 3.x. Some time later another friend of mine installed Win95 for me and showed me its benefits. So - Happy Birthday from me as well

[nedvire]

Happy birthday!

I remember using it to play a musical instrument in an application. Don't remember which one but boy it was fun!

This is also how I got interest in computers. Blame Microsoft for my knowledge

Anyway, another 20 years (if an apocalypse doesn't happen) for Windows 95 and we will celebrate it again!

[cantasan99]

I'll also say a happy birthday to Windows 95, M$'s best job excluding XP and 7.

An impressively re-designed user interface that seemed very well thought out, researched and tested. The Explorer shell (no relation to Internet Explorer at this point) heavily lifted ideas from the Macintosh Finder, but it worked the way I wanted a desktop user interface to work and did so seamlessly with existing Windows application. 
Underneath the hood Win95 still ran on top of DOS and was still based on Windows 3.x but most of the user applications had been ported to 32-bit. The upside was it was compatible with most DOS/Windows 3.1 applications and utilities. 
The Windows 95 OSR/2 update brought Windows 95 to near perfection by adding FAT32 and USB capability.

I have said it before but I will say it again, Chicago is unique as it was really the only time in Windows history that Microsoft seems to have put significant effort and design research in to the Windows user interface. With the exception of Chicago (and perhaps any pre-1.01 version that might exist) I am really not interested in Windows alpha / betas.

[xelloss]

Windows 95 was technically crap and we knew it. But it was what the market needed.
I hated it for everything but UI and made sure that I had a system capable of running NT instead, but in retrospect MS understood what would be a commercial success better than me. After 20 years I guess we can say it was for the better.

[os2fan2]

xelloss evidently did not compare the OS at the time. Windows 95 was a lot better than Windows 3.1, and the desktop was better than Windows NT at the time. The UI and memory load was comparitable with OS2, which was the other main item on the market.

Many of the features in Win95 were available elsewhere. For example, you could get a taskbar for OS/2 and Windows, it was common fare for Lotus and for Microsoft to distribute button-bars etc with their Office suites. OS/2 acquired it from this.

Windows 95 was a lot more stable than DOS + Windows, and ran pretty much comparitbale with the OS/2 2.1 demand.

A lot of people had what is in the Win95 document as 'shell enhancements' (ie replacements). NDW and PCShell were huge ones that vendors had to reckon with. Windows 95 does much better than Windows 3.1 + Win32s.

Still, xelloss ought run these various operating systems off an 80 MB hard disk and 8 MB ram, and see which is better.

[xelloss]

xelloss evidently did not compare the OS at the time. Windows 95 was a lot better than Windows 3.1, and the desktop was better than Windows NT at the time. The UI and memory load was comparitable with OS2, which was the other main item on the market.

Many of the features in Win95 were available elsewhere. For example, you could get a taskbar for OS/2 and Windows, it was common fare for Lotus and for Microsoft to distribute button-bars etc with their Office suites. OS/2 acquired it from this.

Windows 95 was a lot more stable than DOS + Windows, and ran pretty much comparitbale with the OS/2 2.1 demand.

A lot of people had what is in the Win95 document as 'shell enhancements' (ie replacements). NDW and PCShell were huge ones that vendors had to reckon with. Windows 95 does much better than Windows 3.1 + Win32s.

Still, xelloss ought run these various operating systems off an 80 MB hard disk and 8 MB ram, and see which is better.

Errm, I was already there at that time. Believe me, I have tried everything.

[os2fan2]

Saying something is crap with nothing to back it up with? I was a PC-expert in ninety-two,

I mean, it was pretty good in its time, and it's perfectly true that much software gave expectations that were far in excess of what was delivered.

Windows explorer compared favourably with OS/2's WPS. Both of them had deep problems in their kernel. They did a lot of things right, but the Win9x line was meant to take the heat off Windows NT.

[xelloss]

Saying something is crap with nothing to back it up with?

Do I have to write a treatise every time I express a (widely shared) opinion?

I was a PC-expert in ninety-two,

I mean, it was pretty good in its time, and it's perfectly true that much software gave expectations that were far in excess of what was delivered.

What do you mean "pretty good"? Sure, in 1995 most people were still using DOS, an operating system designed for a machine that had been released 14 years before (and even at that time it was far from modern). Maybe that is enough to make Windows 95 "pretty good".
Architecturally, Windows 95 compared negatively with OS/2 (a system that was far from perfect): this is quite disappointing given that the performance of the two were more or less the same. And please, don't get me started on file systems.

Windows explorer compared favourably with OS/2's WPS. Both of them had deep problems in their kernel.

Of course I agree on explorer, a stunningly influential piece of software.

They did a lot of things right, but the Win9x line was meant to take the heat off Windows NT.

That's precisely what I said: Microsoft was planning to get all of us on NT but it needed time.

[os2fan2]

Even at the time of Windows 2.xx IBM/Microsoft had plans to move us to OS/2. At the time, OS/2 was dreadful, but IBM rewrote large bits of it for 2.0, and released it to some acclaim. DOS 5 was a working name for OS/2, and this is the last shared part of OS/2 and Winnt.

DOS 1.0 to 4.0 had much of its run against 8-bit machines. I mean, stuff that runs on a 8086 with 24K of memory. The XBOX of the day was something that had no OS, and you poked a 4K cartridge in to make it work.

DOS would not have been able to handle things like usb or the sort of stuff we throw at it with win98/2k. The memory did not get huge until we hit the late 1990s. You can run OS/2, or Windows 95 or Winnt 4.0 to some effort on a 486 with 20 MB ram. But try putting Windows 98 or 2k on such a box! Yes, they do run, painfully slow.

It probably was a good thing that microsoft ran DOS/Windows right up to the millenium, with a fade out of DOS. It's different from when Apple changed from 68000 to intel.

[jimmsta]

Apple went from the 6502 to the 68k to the PPC, during the DOS-years, then to Intel chips in 2006. There was a pretty gradual progression away from Classic MacOS to OS 9, but a pretty large jump from OS 9 into the OSX code (effectively BSD with the CMU-engineered Mach kernel on top). MacOS System 7 was very much like Windows 3.1, and 8.6 carried the torch towards a more internet-connected Mac experience, all on PowerPC CPU's. Once OS 9 came around, Windows 98 was basically done with.

[Trev-MUN]

Wow, the 20th anniversary of Windows 95 was just this August? Amazing how time flies.

Not counting my dad's Commodore 64, Windows 95 was the first OS my family owned growing up, in the form of a Gateway2000 PC. I've got the tower here in my college dorm apartment, in fact. Been wanting to do some legacy computing with the old rig ...

It's kind of strange, though. I hear a lot of talk about how bad 95 was, but I actually had a worse time with Windows 98 and 98SE. I used to get BSoDs all the time on the family PC before I finally got my own machine. I'm guessing it had more to do with how badly treated the computer was rather than 98 itself.

[ovctvct]

*snip* I used to get BSoDs all the time on the family PC before I finally got my own machine. I'm guessing it had more to do with how badly treated the computer was rather than 98 itself.

I'd rather say it's something almost usual to get a BSOD in 9x. Because the monolithic kernel runs everything in a single layer of memory, while hybrid (NT) kernel runs everything in its own layer of memory, which greatly improves stability. Plus the fact 9x is still based on DOS, if DOS crashes the OS will crash too. I had a Compaq Prolinea around running 95 and it BSOD-ed, what? every hour.

[Trev-MUN]

Yeah, that's what it was like for me on the Win98 family computer, a BSoD an hour. I learned the importance of sequential backups pretty quick, haha.

Still, given I shared that particular computer with my father (who tends to go full Vinesauce on machines he owns), I don't think that helped matters. Once I had to help him get Vundo off his personal XP machine ... As someone who's a non-techie (but assumed to be a tech wizard since I "do computers"), trying to disinfect his rig was a world of pain.

I aim to get the old Gateway2000 up and running sometime soon, hopefully with a "factory reset" (as it were). Still runs great.

[Procta]

Windows 95 was the 1st operating system i used at secondary school and introduced me to the world of computers properly, our primary school had windows 1.0 or windows 2.0, but we hardly used them, as there were only about 3 maybe 4 in the school at the time, Then i think they got hold of windows 3.11.
Also windows 95 was the 1st operating system i installed on a PC back when i did my works experince in 2001. I had to use the floppy disks, took nearly 2 hours, installing it on a RM 75mhz PC.
I found it better than windows 98, as i think it windows 95 was more stable, but then again that might be just me.

[DuranMedine]

Windows 95 brings back alot of memories using those IBM 300GL computers with a Pentium II back in elementary school around 1999 before they upgraded to Windows 98 when I was 6 years old. To be honest Windows 95 was a very good operating system and it didn't have web-integration with Windows Explorer.

[Procta]

Windows 95 brings back alot of memories using those IBM 300GL computers with a Pentium II back in elementary school around 1999 before they upgraded to Windows 98 when I was 6 years old. To be honest Windows 95 was a very good operating system and it didn't have web-integration with Windows Explorer.

I think most schools where I am from, didn't go to windows 98 after 95, they all seem to just go straight to windows 2000, colleges done the same, went from windows 95 to windows 2000, By the end of my college years, they started just to push in windows XP on the systems.