Windows 95 Turns 20 Today

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It's Windows 95's birthday today! The operating system launched twenty years ago today on August 24th 1995.

Accompanied by an extensive marketing campaign,[6] Windows 95 was a major success in the marketplace at launch and shortly became the most popular desktop operating system.[citation needed] It also introduced numerous functions and features that were featured in later Windows versions, such as the taskbar, the 'Start' button, and the way the user navigates.
 
As someone who "installed" win 95 day one. Thank you for reminding me of something that took years of therapy to forget. You may be receiving a bill in the near future.
 
As someone who "installed" win 95 day one. Thank you for reminding me of something that took years of therapy to forget. You may be receiving a bill in the near future.

But it was "major success". LOL.
 
It was smash hit by standards of that of that day.

Yea, and it was such a "hit by the standards of that day" that it birthed most of the stereotypes of Windows that hang with us to this day 20 years later.
 
And it also ushered in the Start Menu which a lot of folks think is the greatest UI convention ever created.

It also ushered in the system tray, something unfiltered and abused for years for years following. It also ushered in the always-being-reorganized-and-WTF-did-they-do-with-that-damn-setting Control Panel GUI.

W95 did a lot of things, sure. But many of them were and are PITAs to this day.
 
And it also ushered in the Start Menu which a lot of folks think is the greatest UI convention ever created.

Greatest? No, nice if you know how to organize it? Yes. Better than that shit they tried in 8? On non touch devices absolutely. Does it suck ass on small screen touch devices? You bet it does!

Context. Means everything.
 
Two months after I started my first IT position. By November of the same year we were directed that all machines in the building were to be "upgraded" from Win 3.1 to Win95 by Jan 1 1996. All 250 of 'em. At least a third were IBM PS/2 models with a 386 processor. A handful were Pentiums. The rest were 486 Compaqs, NECs and Stinkpads. A baptism of fire for sure...
Did I mention we had a total staff of 4 individuals (2 of which were competent) to pull off this miracle.
 
As someone who "installed" win 95 day one. Thank you for reminding me of something that took years of therapy to forget. You may be receiving a bill in the near future.

To this day, I still avoid installing optional drivers or printers as part of any initial OS install process. This was offered on, IIRC, about floppy 28 of a 29 floppy Win95 install set. If it failed, the installer rarely recovered well enough to continue and it was time to boot to DOS, reformat the drive and try again.:mad:
 
Greatest? No, nice if you know how to organize it? Yes. Better than that shit they tried in 8? On non touch devices absolutely. Does it suck ass on small screen touch devices? You bet it does!

Context. Means everything.

Being a heavy Windows tablet and desktop user I get this issue well. I was just saying what UI convention on any platform has ever received the attention the Start Menu has?
 
It also ushered in the system tray, something unfiltered and abused for years for years following. It also ushered in the always-being-reorganized-and-WTF-did-they-do-with-that-damn-setting Control Panel GUI.

W95 did a lot of things, sure. But many of them were and are PITAs to this day.

The system tray is a myth created by the very people who seem to clutter up the interface. It's the notification area, don't forget that and rain hellfire down on those who abuse it!
 
I loved Win95 - It had issues but it really did get things rolling in terms of GUI for the masses. It certainly has a place in the history of computing.
 
Does anyone even use windows 95 anymore? who cares.

Those who fail at learning from history are doomed to repeat it...

We must remember Win95 as to make sure not to repeat the many mistake that came with it, else you may get Microsoft Bob for Windows 10...
 
First version of Windows 95 I used was the SR2 release. First version of Windows 98 I used was the SE version. Rinse and repeat for every Windows OS I used afterwards, except for Windows 7 (friend got me a copy early, it was awesome).

Never use the 1.0 release unless you cannot help it :D
 
Those who fail at learning from history are doomed to repeat it...

We must remember Win95 as to make sure not to repeat the many mistake that came with it, else you may get Microsoft Bob for Windows 10...

mr-clippy-angry.jpg
 
I miss Clippy. He was always so happy. Why did they have to kill him and his palls? :(
 
If you were a gamer when Win95 came out, you wouldn't be dissing it today. Win95 took us all out of the Dos Prompt boot up and let us start to forget about our audio drivers not working with our mouse drivers and our video drivers not working with our VGA drivers....and then all of it breaking when new drivers came out, and watching manufacturers point the finger at everyone else saying "its the other guy's driver that is causing the problem"......remember those days? I do. They sucked. :D
 
Windows 95 created the internet the net used to be a fun place that is why I hang out here.
 
If you were a gamer when Win95 came out, you wouldn't be dissing it today. Win95 took us all out of the Dos Prompt boot up and let us start to forget about our audio drivers not working with our mouse drivers and our video drivers not working with our VGA drivers....and then all of it breaking when new drivers came out, and watching manufacturers point the finger at everyone else saying "its the other guy's driver that is causing the problem"......remember those days? I do. They sucked. :D

Windows 95 didn't mark the end of DOS games. PC games still remained primarily DOS until about 1997 or so with the advent of 3D acceleration and DirectX that wasn't completely useless.
 
I liked that Good Time video on the disk. Man they actually had some neat stuff on the disk back then.
 
I was on the phone over 9.5 hours of my 10 hour shift that day at a MS site working as a contractor supporting installation issues for the general public.

Try taking a grandfather who isn't particularly computer literate through the process for fixing a start button occupying the whole screen because while there were limits on the font size you could set for it using the up and down arrows, but you could just type 999 in the field and it would take it. No, booting into safe mode doesn't affect that value. Had to figure out the keyboard sequence and navigate through all the setting screens one key at a time with no visual confirmation of the dialog boxes until we got the font size to something normal.

Had another person call in who did the same thing a couple of weeks later.

We also actually took calls on who were the people in the videos on the CDs. Some people waited up to hour to ask stuff like that. It was crazy. I still have the pennant they handed out to us that day.
 
If you were a gamer when Win95 came out, you wouldn't be dissing it today. Win95 took us all out of the Dos Prompt boot up and let us start to forget about our audio drivers not working with our mouse drivers and our video drivers not working with our VGA drivers....and then all of it breaking when new drivers came out, and watching manufacturers point the finger at everyone else saying "its the other guy's driver that is causing the problem"......remember those days? I do. They sucked. :D
I was a gamer long before win95. However I was also a tech, so yes I "dis" it. That os is only second to win me in the amount of aggravation it caused.
 
I was a gamer long before win95. However I was also a tech, so yes I "dis" it. That os is only second to win me in the amount of aggravation it caused.

I loved using the OS. I hated supporting it. Same with Vista or 8. I love them, but supporting them was a bitch.
 
I loved Windows 95. I ran it until 2000 when Windows 2K came out. Great OS, no matter what the naysayers say. :)
 
windows 95 is so great i'm still using it today! to hell with directx, all the good games are old anyways.
 
I have it in a VM mostly for the lulz. A few years back I had a wild hair for all the sounds so I made VM for every version of Windows.
 
If you were a gamer when Win95 came out, you wouldn't be dissing it today. Win95 took us all out of the Dos Prompt boot up and let us start to forget about our audio drivers not working with our mouse drivers and our video drivers not working with our VGA drivers....and then all of it breaking when new drivers came out, and watching manufacturers point the finger at everyone else saying "its the other guy's driver that is causing the problem"......remember those days? I do. They sucked. :D

Yea, I also remember when some games would replace a system .dll with their own version of the .dll so their game would work but none of your other games that required that .dl would. All they had to do was put their own .dll in the game folder and leave the system .dll alone and all would have been fine, but no, they had to screw us over by overwriting the system .dll.
 
Loved Windows 95 when it first came out, I miss using it when I first got my first PC back in 1998. Windows 98 shortly came out after that and I upgraded to 98 which was even better. Loved Windows 95 Plus! and it's themes.
 
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