Windows 95 is 30 years old this week.

Donoreo

Aug 24th was this past week, Windows 95 is 30. 3 Decades.

Thane_Bitter

Donoreo Ah yes, when they gave the CN Tower a Start Button banner and bastaritized the Rolling Stones start me up song.

It uses more memory, more processing power and didn’t do much more than windows 3.1 but it was pretty except the fact that it took something like 30 floppy disks to install.

GrumpyCanadian

It’s easy to dismiss it after the fact, but at the time, it was a major innovation, even though it could be rough around the edges. If you think about it, it re-defined the user interface, and many of its changes are still in use, even to this very day. There are many things to criticise about Microsoft, but every so often they do get some things right.

Astyanax

GrumpyCanadian It’s easy to dismiss it after the fact, but at the time, it was a major innovation

It was MS’s first GUI OS that wasn’t based on DOS.

real_aurgathor

GrumpyCanadian , it re-defined the user interface,

That is 100% true, and the success of 95 and many following versions were partly due to the type of GUI.

and many of its changes are still in use, even to this very day.

I think the GUI was the biggest innovation of 95, but starting with Win 8, MS was doing a very shitty job trying to change and redefine the UI in their misdirected attempt to combine desktop, tablet, and phone interfaces into one.

Donoreo

I never used it, I was on OS/2 at the time. Work never used it, skipped to 98.

vabello

Astyanax Its underlying architecture was still DOS based. Windows NT 3.1 was out in 1993 pre-dating Windows 95 anyway although not very popular yet and was a completely new architecture without anything DOS related. The much more widely used NT 3.51 was still out prior to 95 in May of 1995.

real_aurgathor

Astyanax It was MS’s first GUI OS that wasn’t based on DOS.

Nope. The W9x series (95, 98, 98SE, Me) were still based on DOS.

Up to and including 3.11, Windows and DOS were distinct entities, and Windows versions were really just operating environments that were loaded on top of DOS.

With W9x, they were *combined*, but much of the underlying OS code was still holdover from DOS, and with the exception of Me, one could still run them as plain DOS. (they intentionally disabled that functionality in Me, which is a real shame because bad reputation or not, they fixed quite a few 98/98SE bugs in Me)

The first totally DOS free Windows OS was NT 3.1 which was unfortunately using that idiotic Win 3 GUI. But the GUI was fixed in NT 4.0 (borrowed from W95), and NT started to become a successful and widely used OS.

I shall note that MS’s first DOS free OS was Xenix, but that’s a very different beast.

I *believe* OS/2 was also DOS free, but I’m not sure about the 1.x versions.

GrumpyCanadian

vabello Not only was it still DOS-based, but in certain situations, you could still end up using DOS services for certain core system functionality, as horribly inefficient as that got to be.

Andyross

Multiple machines at work run on Win95.

InstaGator

This website lets you use the older operating systems in your browser. It only takes a few seconds to spin up whatever you want to play around on. You can reminisce and see just how far we’ve came in the last 30 years.

Kithron

InstaGator

I’ve briefly used this site tonight to experience the memories of using Windows 95 in the past, and it worked well.

Thanks for sharing this link. I’ll have to add it to my bookmarks.

Donoreo

real_aurgathor I believe OS/2 was also DOS free, but I’m not sure about the 1.x versions.

It had a “compatibility layer” to run multiple DOS programs at the same time, this was kept through later versions.

urbanriot

real_aurgathor NT started to become a successful and widely used OS.

I still use a Pentium 233 MMX PC with Windows NT 4.0 SP6 + Microsoft Office 97 (Excel) because it’s fast and works great for my needs. Every once in a while I toy with the idea of migrating it to an SSD using an IDE adapter but because I tuned it up so much back in the 90s and ripped out a lot of services, it boots up faster than my i9 PC with 256GB of RAM and M.2 SSDs.

There’s literally no difference in performance with my 27 year old PC in doing my Excel work compared to my high end productivity PC (that’s more of a slight on Microsoft though, Windows and Office have so much bloat these days).

codezer0

I’m more wondering what software patches/files were used to make this possible. Especially with regard to the storage situation.

AMDUSER

Zenit_IIfx
Windows 3.1 was my first version of MS Windows. But Windows 95 was easier to use.

codezer0 That is a good question. I tried running that in Virtualbox and it kept getting BSOD screens. Windows 95 had problems with faster cpus.

Zenit_IIfx

Win95 was my first Windows and the second OS I used - first OS was Macintosh System 7.

Win95 really was a huge leap and a revolution. It marked the achievement of parity with the Mac in terms of ease of use, and it brought computing to the masses.

In my opinion, the UI in Win9x is peak design. It’s clean, uncluttered, stays out of the way, and minimalist in a good way (still has some depth to the elements, and they did it with very few resources!)

Stability, eh, the hybrid DOS-Win32 architecture wasn’t great, but if you had good hardware, good drivers (no legacy Win3x type drivers), and ran well written software, Win95 could be stable.

I found most problems stemmed from hardware misconfiguration.

Who here remembers the 3D maze game that came on the 95 CD?

GrumpyCanadian

Zenit_IIfx It marked the achievement of parity with the Mac in terms of ease of use, and it brought computing to the masses.

Apple already had huge problems by the time Windows 95 was released. By release day, with people lining up outside any store known to sell software for a chance to get their hands on a copy, Apple was in really big trouble, and it only got worse before getting better. Even when it started to get better, it wasn’t exclusively through their own innovation or software prowess.

Yes, for a long time, Apple had a big advantage in usability and U.I. innovation, but at a certain point, they basically stopped progressing. Part of what nearly killed them was their insistence on having everything in-house: they didn’t want to offer Internet access, they wanted you to subscribe to e-World; AppleTalk and proprietary ports instead of Ethernet and TCP/IP; etc. In that respect, some things never change.

Windows 95, by contrast, was a big leap in usability, had TCP/IP-based networking as a core service, had decent multi-tasking and memory management, and ran on faster, comparatively inexpensive hardware. With few exceptions, there was no reasonable justification for the average user to splurge on an Apple system.

Microsoft didn’t get everything right by any means, but compared to Apple, they delivered just the right amount of U.I. innovation, combined with modern O.S. features, in what was effectively a stop-gap development on the way to a DOS-free modern O.S.. In so doing, they won the day, while Apple continued struggling to figure out how to evolve their software from its archaic heritage into a semi-modern system. When Apple finally “delivered”, Mac OS X was an unsettling, radical and, in some ways, inferior, departure from what Mac die-hards had grown to love.

Hydraglass

What I can say for Windows 95 to “todays” windows OS’s is they are still similar enough in gui design that when I dropped my 10 year old kid who has been using windows 10 since he was old enough to hold a mouse (about 7-8 years) in front of aa Windows 95 computer he had zero issues navigating it - start button was right where he expected it, things were easily found in their respective groups on the start menu, applications closed and opened using the proper “X” in the corner of the window, he had no issues playing a few Win95 games on my old P3-233 system, his take was “yeah it looks older but it works pretty much the same”. On the other hand he was absolutely clueless when I launched up a windows 3.1 system, and of course had zero idea what to do at a DOS prompt. SO - what we can say is that at least in the “PC environment” - what Win95 introduced is still close enough to what is in common use 30 years later that its changes, above and below the skin, have all been step by step evolutions, rather than revolutions in OS. Going the other way, 30 years takes us back to punch cards or tape-and-reel mainframes. Even 15 years (1980) takes us back to bare DOS systems, the TRS80 and C64, and even Apple didn’t have a MacOS yet - you were still on an Apple ][ on AppleDOS. AmigaOS didn’t even come out until 1984 or so. ’95 wasn’t the first GUI OS by any means, but its paradigm is still exceptionally close to what we’re using today - settings/control panels, start menus, task bar, icon tray, etc.

codezer0

GrumpyCanadian which is a shame. If anything, I hold the G5 era particularly well, in part because it felt like the closest Apple ever got to being a viable alternative gaming environment at the time.

Linux back then, was only fit for servers. Wouldn’t be caught dead trying to run games from that environment.

If I didn’t already know about how faulty the factory cooling system was, I might still have a soft spot for the Quad G5 systems. But that’s neither here, nor there.

GrumpyCanadian

Thane_Bitter It uses more memory, more processing power and didn’t do much more than windows 3.1

I don’t think that criticism is justified; it ushered in Win32, making it the default for Windows development; provided decent multi-tasking and rudimentary memory protection, among other advancements. All of these were poor or entirely non-existent on Windows 3.1. If one had the hardware to run it well enough, it was, without question, a worthwhile upgrade.

Thane_Bitter

GrumpyCanadian And it died anyways.
The future was really with NT and its HAL design, where as windows 95-98SE dabbled around with an unsecured core architecture and was more of an art project of making a pretty looking OS. Yes it was nice being able to pole hardware directly without the OS knowing about it but it became a massive security issue.

For the added memory and CPU and storage I don’t think it was, yes the OS was new and shiney but it lost grace and stability though we can argue endlessly over that one. The issue with NT was it wasn’t built for all the garbage accessories and programs that exploded in growth under DOS and into the Win95 era. Not much of a gaming platform and it seemed like every setting or change required a reboot to take effect. By the time Windows 2K rolled out they took the modern look and welded it to a functional and powerful system with fare better permissive control and it became the bases for windows XP which finally did away with old windows architecture.

MS has made more errors, the Metro interface was fine for phone screens but was daft and inefficient for servers, Vista had too many variations, and still in the windows 11 era there are parts which still look outdated or a throwback to long past versions but MS is too busy ramming AI and other crap into the OS, even the simple right click menu had changed for notepad of all things, as if someone needs AI features more than they might cut and paste. I am ranting, for that I apologise but it seems like the win95 era was more of a misstep rather than real innovation still even if it was wrong it made them a lot of money.