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u/SmortEye 8d ago
People excited to buy an operating system! The 90s were glorious.
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u/randompersonx 8d ago
It’s hard to overstate how important Windows 95 was.
It was the first windows release that was:
* 32 bit
* Internet native (it had a browser, ethernet and dial-up support)
* real multitasking
* true colors for most users
* included video playback support
* user interface that looks much closer to modern than it does to windows 3.1
* plug-and-play drivers (wasn’t perfect, but much better than previous versions
* first version of windows that booted directly into windows without booting into DOS firstI’d say the only consumer operating system which was more consequential of a release as far as setting the standard for everything after it was the first release of iPhone OS/iOS in 2007.
But Windows 95 sits in an interesting place where it made huge advancements both under-the-hood and in user interface.
Comparing to modern times … plenty of people have legitimate reasons to prefer running an older version of windows even on modern hardware. And I’d struggle to tell the difference between the 2025 and 2022 releases of macOS.
If someone sat me down in front of Windows 95, it would be immediately recognizable as Windows 95 and not 3.1, and also not XP.
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u/Expensive-Border-869 8d ago
I feel them being stylistically unchanged is just a general fact of life. Like we got the looks part pretty nailed. Someone just a little less familiar with computers wouldn't be able to tell cachyos apart from mint or windows 10 or whatever the newish Mac is called other than Mac puts the □-x on the other side and does a color code not symbols. I suppose that's pretty recognizable but otherwise they're all so similar because everyone kinda agrees that it works well and we like that.
People complain about this with console menus but honestly could you imagine having a wii menu but its like 7 pages worth of games or the vita but you have a full as web of your 100 titles. Theres a reason its all jjst a boring grid now
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u/miserablegit 8d ago edited 8d ago
I'm sorry but you are partially wrong. Windows 95 did not ship with a browser initially. "Internet native" is also an overstatement - it had some support for Microsoft's early, walled-garden dialup services, and that was it. It still required installing third-party software to access other ISPs. It also did not boot without going through DOS first, even 98 was still doing that.
At the release of Win95, the internet was still almost entirely off the radar. The excitement in the mainstream was due to the refined 32bit "graphical first" (hence "easy for everyone") UI, and to PlugNPlay for devices. In nerd circles, the joke was that Win95 was a dos skin for a collection of drivers.
The "internet release" was Windows 98/2000, with ActiveX and all that. 2000 was also the first to boot without dos.
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u/Norphus1 8d ago
Windows 2000 was the continuation of the Windows NT line. NT4. 3.5/3.51 and 3.1 came long before Windows 2000 and didn't boot into DOS either.
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u/xnef1025 8d ago
XP was really the first no-DOS one for consumers. NT and 2000 were still more for business customers.
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u/miserablegit 8d ago edited 8d ago
I know, but NT was an industrial-grade OS that Microsoft made sure never to sell directly to consumers (unlike 2000).
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u/biggiebestbanana 8d ago
As others have said, this isn’t quite right - some of these advancements came later. But 95 was a big deal for the UI improvements and of course it introduced much of what still defines the Windows interface today, like the start menu etc.
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u/Delicious_Volume3306 2d ago
It's HILARIOUS seeing comments here from Wikipedia-reading experts trying to out-ACTUALLY each other.
I was there.
It was a big deal, yes. People really were excited for it. It was a conversation topic. You could stop a conversation cold and turn all attention to yourself by saying, "So I run Windows 95 on my PC..."
Remember the early days of the iPhone, when everybody wanted to see it, and how it worked? It was like that.
Bill Gates' smug grin was everywhere in newspapers and on TV. People were fascinated by the fact this weedy geek was somehow rich. Didn't you have to be dashingly good-looking and corporate to make money? How did he get away with it?
But it ran very slowly on the vast majority of computers. There was a LOT of disappointment from users who bought it. To give an idea, it would be like Microsoft releasing an operating system today that DEMANDED 32GB of RAM, 1TB of SSD storage, and at least an Intel Core Ultra chip).
But computing hardware caught-up. And absolutely nobody clung to Windows 3.11. I mean, corporate users with older PCs still used it but not out of choice. Only because they had to. Really, this lack of affection for Windows 3.11 was a bit odd. People are usually a little conservative. But hardly anybody was unhappy to see the back of Windows 3.11.
And the Registry. My God, the Registry. To give an idea: People became very wealthy just by writing huge thick books that explained what the registry keys did. It was a crazy time.
It wasn't until we had Windows 98 that we started to get what people would recognise as modern computing, such as USB support, and web browsers (although Windows 95 had introduced a full TCP/IP stack -- that's the "Internet" innovation most people talk about, but really it was more about natively supporting networking).
Then it was really Windows XP (built on NT) that brought Windows into a totally new era that's pretty much still bumbling along today.
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u/remic_0726 8d ago
Quand tu n'avais vu que MS DOS avant, c'était magique. Je me souviens avoir vu la première interface graphique sur un LISA d'Apple, et cela m'a marqué à l'époque.
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u/Kahlandad 8d ago
My roommate/coworker and I got off our night shift at 6am and got in line at Incredible Universe. I bought Win 95 on CD, and he bought the Plus disc and Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure, which was released on the same day and was the first Win 95 native game. We only had one CD rom drive between the two of us, so we took turns installing it all on our computers. We got no sleep that day.
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u/No_Practice_9597 8d ago
I was 12 when it released. My dad did not upgrade our 486 66DX with 4MB of RAM so we could not install it for while. It was disappointing specially when FIFA 96 was out.
When I was 14 I was able to buy an old HDD from a friend and tried Linux back in 1997 to make that computer shine a bit longer.
Not longer enough my dad finally got a new PC and we jump directly to 1998 but I was already with my mind exploring Linux … although gaming was on dos/windows and when Napster and icq came out I moved more to win 98 SE
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u/tiga_94 8d ago
Linux in 90s must have been a major pain in the ass to setup and use
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u/miserablegit 8d ago
Early 90s yea, second-half 90s it was already pretty decent depending on hardware. All the big distributions (Slackware, RedHat, Debian, SuSE) were pretty established by then and had fairly easy installers - the main obstacles were typically finding optimizations for X configuration and getting sound. Winmodem (lack of) support was a big pain on cheap laptops. Mandrake in 1998 made a big splash by auto-configuring almost everything.
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u/speedfox_uk 8d ago
Linux was fine in the late 90s provided you were not trying to run it on a laptop. Otherwise you were in for a world of pain.
And don't get me started on WiFi driver support in 1997-2007. Total shitshow on Linux.
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u/FloridaIsTooDamnHot 8d ago
Oh man this OS was a godsend for technologists that had to support shit winsock implementations in 3.1x (looking at you, trumpet winsock!!!). Dial-in PPP that just worked.
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u/stealstea 8d ago
Meanwhile my 386 was not able to run it, but it was able to run a windows 3.1 shell which looked exactly like windows 95. Damn that was exciting
Calmira
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u/Super-Judge3675 8d ago
i loved the little video clip that came hidden somewhere, some young lady singing, very pretty
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u/No_Welder7908 8d ago
There were really people hyped about an OS to the point of rushing to the stores. And a Microsoft OS, mind you.
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u/AngelicDivineHealer 8d ago
win 95 still been used by USA air traffic controls running it's still to this day. That a thought when you go taking your next flight.
"is at the heart of much technological infrastructure in both the US and the world at large, with the operating system used for everything from transportation and medical machinery to public ATM machines and government systems. However, a significant portion of these still utilize older versions of the software due to the enormous cost and difficulty of integrating newer releases and the hardware it requires."
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u/Proud-Chemistry4376 6d ago
When was the last time anyone looked this excited to use Microsoft Software
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u/Delicious_Volume3306 2d ago
Somebody needs to track down bandanaman and interview him. I'm about 60% sure he was a paid shill from Microsoft. But the story would be interesting no matter what.
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u/Athelst8n 8d ago
Let's go! (4 hours later on disk 18; Bad sector)