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Windows Microsoft Operating Systems

Windows 95 Turns 20 284

Posted by timothy from the everyone-yell-surprise dept.
Etherwalk writes: Windows 95 turns 20 tomorrow, August 24, 2015. Users looking to upgrade from Windows 3.1 should be warned that some reviewers on the Amazon purchase page have been receiving 3.5" high-density floppy disk versions instead of a modern 150 kbps CD-ROM disk. Do you remember first seeing or installing Windows 95? Do you have any systems still running it?
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Windows 95 Turns 20 More

Windows 95 Turns 20

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  • The way to shut out novell .. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23, 2015 @09:32AM (#50373535)
    "if we are too rude in base then oems may either stick with win3.1/msdos or defect to os/2. the way to shut out novell in the base is to either ship a full client or make it so there is no network connectivity." ref [edge-op.org]

  • Solaris 10 turns 10 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    If you take 2x Windows 95, you'll end up with Solaris 10.

  • Installed in a VM (Score:5, Interesting)

    by old_kennyp ( 949607 ) on Sunday August 23, 2015 @09:39AM (#50373565)

    I still have a VM with it installed and running.
    I Think I also have an original OEM box with the full 13 Floppy disk installation.
    I also still have and original box set of Dos 6.22 and Windows 3.11 Somewhere too.

     

  • Yes (Score:5, Funny)

    by danomatika ( 1977210 ) on Sunday August 23, 2015 @09:42AM (#50373587)

    Yes, but I remember installing and using the first Command & Conquer quite a bit more!

  • an amazing OS (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Yes I (AC) remember it - it was a fantastic upgrade from W 3.11 for Workgroups:
    - the new UI/desktop made it much nicer than 3.11, the file manager was much better
    - the Recycle Bin made it much simpler to 'recover' accidentally deleted files, no more FAT16/32 undelete tools (anyone else remember Revive or was it Revival?) for most mistakes
    - the Plug'n'Play feature did work ok for well known extension cards, everyone I know found it way cool not to fiddle with deep technical settings just to get a sound blast

    • Re:an amazing OS (Score:5, Informative)

      by arglebargle_xiv ( 2212710 ) on Sunday August 23, 2015 @10:16AM (#50373739)

      The Amazon link currently shows a review that talks about the advantages of upgrading from Windows 8 to Windows 95, and the sad thing is that, at least for the UI, it's actually true. Instead of being held hostage to some braindead agenda to make my desktop PC look like a cellphone, with Win95's UI everything just works the way it should.

      (Oh, and unlike another recent offering it doesn't send every keystroke and whatnot to Microsoft for analysis either).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by arth1 ( 260657 )

      - the Recycle Bin made it much simpler to 'recover' accidentally deleted files, no more FAT16/32 undelete tools (anyone else remember Revive or was it Revival?) for most mistakes

      And these days, we have come full circle, and need the PC undelete tools again to recover files from the SD cards in our phones.

    • Yes I (AC) remember it - it was a fantastic upgrade from W 3.11 for Workgroups: - the new UI/desktop made it much nicer than 3.11, the file manager was much better - the Recycle Bin made it much simpler to 'recover' accidentally deleted files, no more FAT16/32 undelete tools (anyone else remember Revive or was it Revival?) for most mistakes - the Plug'n'Play feature did work ok for well known extension cards, everyone I know found it way cool not to fiddle with deep technical settings just to get a sound blaster to work At the time it looked amazing and although slower (on my old 486DX2@50MHz) it showed a new way to use the computer - the future to the 2000s looked bright.

      Although at the last Win 9x in the series - Windows ME - I switched to Linux full time (mostly for stability), I remember W95 fondly.

    • Re:an amazing OS (Score:4, Insightful)

      by tuxgeek ( 872962 ) on Sunday August 23, 2015 @05:58PM (#50376067)

      I started computing with Dos5/Win 3.0. Loved Dos 6.2 + WFW 3.11. Then M$ threw out their solid, stable, bought, code base and defecated out Win 95, and the world changed.

      My memories of win95 were equally warm and fuzzy, until the the BSODs began.
      Oh the horror of working on a CS project for hours, with a upcoming deadline, and watching a good chunk of code and hours of work vanish upon File -> Save -> BSOD -> "NOOOOOOOOYYOOOUUUUFUUCCC..."
      M$-Anything is the only product brand that made me want to throw my computer out the window and go back to pencil and paper for tasks, where applicable

      As soon as I found Redhat 9, and it was what M$ should have been, I jumped ship from the M$ line of crapware entirely.
      Today it's FreeBSD all the way
      Fast, rock solid stable, bleeding edge software, safe and secure. This is what computing SHOULD be all about. Not the flashy, squirrely, dumbed down, garbage the marketing depts think people want today.

  • I was working for a small startup in 1994 and installed the Beta version of Windows 95 on a 486 with lots of help from the president of the company. Also installed the Beta of Visual C++ on the same machine and managed to actually get some work done between BSODs!

    • Re:Installed Win95 in 1994 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by TWX ( 665546 ) on Sunday August 23, 2015 @11:35AM (#50374073)
      I had Chicago Beta 1 Build 112, from May of 1994 and went through several builds prior to release. Ran it on a Cyrix-based 486DLC at 40MHz with 8MB RAM with a 400MB hard disk drive. A couple of the betas were really messed up, but my young teenage self was more than happy to work around the problems. There was one build where msgsrv32 had to be manually killed and quickly so that the shell would load properly at initial bootup.

      What initially appealed to me was the ability to use Windows NT applications that were 32 bit and more robust and reliable. Amusingly, Winzip was my first 32-bit application. It also was better for network gaming as it was easier to make the network stack work in Windows than it was with the Microsoft Network Client for DOS, though depending on the game over the years that was a useful option too.

      I didn't really start to dislike Microsoft until they started forcing Internet Explorer. Windows 95 OSR2 would attempt for force its install when the OS was installed as a separate component but that could be manually killed before it did anything. With Windows 98 I found a program called 98Lite that would extract the shell from the Windows 95 source files and put it on the Windows 98 installation; there were a few bugs for GUI features that were created for 98 but otherwise it worked fairly well.

      In some ways Microsoft's hamhanded IE integration helped push me towards Linux. Slackware jokingly released their version with the 2.0.0 kernel as "Slackware 96", started out with that and moved into the fold quite seriously.

      • I liked how Win 9x (by then 98SE) ran IPX and TCP/IP simultaneously, plus the emulated Netbios thing. I was dearly pissed when Windows XP was unable to run IPX networking in DOS games. And even its version of MS Hearts was incompatible with that of 98 and 3.11, though that's petty.

        Had it worked I would have had four-player doom 2 at home!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by TWX ( 665546 )
          I didn't know that about XP. We had XP with Netware at work for a short time, but we used the full Netware client instead of the lightweight Microsoft client due to problems.

          I've actually taken to using XP's versions of the Microsoft Games on Windows 7, haven't tried with 8/8.1 or 10 yet. I don't like the spacing or delays added to the newer versions, and they're just cards, I don't need a 3d interpretation of a 2d game.
  • Did the floppy version come with the a Wheezer video? IIRC I was running Ygdrasil Linux back then.

  • I remember ..... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 ) on Sunday August 23, 2015 @09:58AM (#50373657)

    .... the Briefcase!

    I just can't remember what it was for.

    Win95 was such a huge upgrade. We forget now, but it packed an astonishing amount of stuff into just 4mb of RAM (8mb recommended). If someone produced it today in some kind of hackathon it'd be praised as a wonder of tightly written code. They even optimised it by making sure the dots in the clock didn't blink, as the animation would have increased the memory usage of the OS!

    It's surprising how little Windows has changed over the years, in some ways. Not because MS didn't want to change it but because the Win95 UI design was basically very effective and people still like it, even today.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I think the briefcase you are referring to was used to sync documents between computers/locations. Though I didn't use it I think the idea was you could put things into the breifcase, sync documents and then restore them at another location.

      In the late 1990s, I volunteered at a education centre where I was tasked with restoring old computers, basically going through donated machines, ripping out the still-good pieces, cobbling together a few working PCs from the parts and installing Windows 95 on the final

    • Is it the WIn95 UI, or the WinNT UI? Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

      At the time Win 95 and Win 98 came out, I had a house full of rugrats, and empty bank accounts. I looked, but couldn't touch. When I finally got my hands on Win98SE, I was impressed. Then, the kids wanted to play games, and I learned quickly that WinNT was a much better system. Remember, there was no security model on Win9.x - none at all. WinNT, however, always did have one. It was serious competition for the various Unixe

      • Win95 pioneered the start button and taskbar UI. NT adopted the same UI later on.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by s.petry ( 762400 )

        NT was not a competition for Windows, not even for a little while. NT3.5 was competition for Novell Netware, but had no Internet services (and it's TCP/IP support was 3rd party only and generally bad). NT4.0 did not change that at all, so I'd say your memory is plain old wrong. NT4 had the Back Orifice stuff with a Mail and IIS server, but only the daft people were putting them on the internet directly.

        Sure, NT was better than Win9X for a lot of things. Workstation could run most games okay, but Server

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fisted ( 2295862 )

      They even optimised it by making sure the dots in the clock didn't blink

      *eyes parent with a dead stare*

      Like the "dots of the clock" would somehow blink by default rather than due to code making them blink? Oh well.

    • I have Windows 7 Pro, and the Briefcase still lives on!

    • it packed an astonishing amount of stuff into just 4mb of RAM (8mb recommended). If someone produced it today in some kind of hackathon it'd be praised as a wonder of tightly written code.

      Hey, ancient fanboy arguments. Mac users mocked it because it used up twice as much RAM as macOS. What a memory hog! And the blind users thought it was something good.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The briefcase was actually quite a nifty idea and worked pretty well for what it was. It's basically a file sync app, that let you keep your local files synced with copies on a floppy disk (did USB sticks even exist back then?) or even a network drive (e.g. sync to laptop and PC). As was typical of everything Microsoft did back then it was dumbed down as much as possible, just kind of magically working and having a complete spazz when things got a bit confused (changes in both places etc.)

      I know a few peopl

  • "Start me up" - What was Gates thinking? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mykepredko ( 40154 ) on Sunday August 23, 2015 @09:59AM (#50373661) Homepage

    IIRC, Gates paid the Rolling Stones $12M for the rights to use their song "Start me up" which to this day I don't understand why he'd pick a song with the lyrics "You make a grown man cry!" in the chorus.

    Trying to install Win95 on a Win 3.11 machine of the day certainly lent itself to tears. I don't think I was ever able to successfully do it (I reverted the 3.11 system back and then just went with Win NT and then then Win 2k) - I never used a Win95 or Win98 PC at work or at home.

    A step in the right direction but definitely not an OS that was ready for prime time (sorry for the mixed metaphors).

    • That I was an OS/2 bigot at the time so I wasn't willing to spend a lot of time trying to get Win95 working.

      • Re: I should also point out... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by rfengr ( 910026 ) on Sunday August 23, 2015 @10:06AM (#50373681)
        Same here. Being able to download at 28k from a BBS while playing Wolfenstein was years beyond windows.

      • OS/2 was great. I was always amazed at how it could run windows programs faster than Windows!

        The other thing I always remember is that if you sorted the config.sys file (which, IIRC, was something like 60+ lines long) so the drivers loaded in alphabetical order, you could literally shave minutes off of your boot time.

        One of my earliest Internet experiences, post-BBSes, was on Delphi using some OS/2 software called ODN--Offline Delphi Newsreader.

        Good memories!

        • OS/2 was great. I was always amazed at how it could run windows programs faster than Windows!

          The other thing I always remember is that if you sorted the config.sys file (which, IIRC, was something like 60+ lines long) so the drivers loaded in alphabetical order, you could literally shave minutes off of your boot time.

          One of my earliest Internet experiences, post-BBSes, was on Delphi using some OS/2 software called ODN--Offline Delphi Newsreader.

          Good memories!

          Sorting config.sys was not alphabetical, and also was one of the things that become obsolete with win95. You sorted it by memory consumption so you never had programs using more than 640kbytes of memory at any time. The simplest algorithms just sorted it so they started the largest first so they were also over first, but there were more complicated programs for automatically sorting and packaging config.sys.

          Since it was part of the DOS operating system, it was rendered obsolete by win95 which hads it own dr

          • Sorting config.sys was not alphabetical, and also was one of the things that become obsolete with win95. You sorted it by memory consumption so you never had programs using more than 640kbytes of memory at any time. The simplest algorithms just sorted it so they started the largest first so they were also over first, but there were more complicated programs for automatically sorting and packaging config.sys.

            My post was talking about OS/2, which had an entirely different config.sys. I doubt there has ever been a DOS config.sys with 60 lines! Also, it's been a long time, but IIRC, with later versions of DOS, the first line in config.sys was usually himem.sys. Loading himem.sys enabled extended memory, and was followed by DOS=HIGH (or DOS=HIGH,UMB, etc.). You could also then load device drivers with DEVICEHIGH instead of DEVICE lines.

            I don't particularly remember needing to sort DOS's config.sys, other than--at t

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Win95 was MILES ahead of Win3.1. I was super excited about Windows 95.. it revolutionized home computing for millions.

    • I ran 95 for a while but found it pretty unstable. Changed to NT and it was like night and day.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Alomex ( 148003 )

      The number was never publicly acknowledged, though the rumor was indeed $12M. Many years later the COO said it was actually $3M.

    • Re:"Start me up" - What was Gates thinking? (Score:4, Informative)

      by zygotic mitosis ( 833691 ) on Sunday August 23, 2015 @11:09AM (#50373967)
      Obligatory throwback [youtube.com]

  • Ah memories (Score:5, Interesting)

    by laffer1 ( 701823 ) <luke@@@foolishgames...com> on Sunday August 23, 2015 @10:05AM (#50373679) Homepage Journal

    I got my first PC in high school about a month before windows 95 came out. I got a free upgrade on that Packard Bell. It had an impressive 8MB of RAM, 1MB video card and a Pentium 100mhz. Those were the days.

    I ended up installing Windows 95 a total of 52 times on that computer. I started experimenting with modifying the registry and often deleting things from it. For example, all those stupid "tips" messages you got at startup were stored in the registry. You could knock off a significant amount of data. That combined with a registry compression tool and you had extra RAM and more speed. I had pages of tweaks to do to windows 95. When 98 came out, I was disappointed. Went through an OS/2 warp phase and an NT4 phase before I got into Linux, Solaris and finally *BSD.

    Without windows being such a piece of shit, I never would have gotten into operating systems.

    • Re:Ah memories (Score:5, Interesting)

      by skirmish666 ( 1287122 ) on Sunday August 23, 2015 @10:26AM (#50373795)

      I remember... reinstalling Win95 during high school so often I had the serial key memorised.

      Was having some trouble with my laptop so the school IT desk wanted to do a clean install. Their face when I told them the serial key: priceless.

    • Went through an OS/2 warp phase and an NT4 phase before I got into Linux, Solaris and finally *BSD.

      No wonder you ended up finally with a Star Blue Screen of Death. Editing the registry that much would do that to you.

    • Hah, that sounds very much like my own experience.

      For one Christmas the family got a brand new 486 dx33mhz with 16mb ram--the best computer any of my friends had, AND it included a CDROM. The first game on CD I had was a collection of Wing Commander 2 with expansions and speech packs. The 1x CDROM was too slow to effectively play the game, so I would xcopy the directories to the hard disk when I wanted to play. The only problem was I didn't have enough space to have wing commander (30mb!!) and anything else

  • I've got it on an old Toshiba Satellite laptop (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LazLong ( 757 ) on Sunday August 23, 2015 @10:08AM (#50373695)

    I purchased a Toshiba Satellite laptop with WFW 3.11 in early '95 that I upgraded to Win 95 in September of that year. I pulled it out of the closet three years ago and it still boots up with the clean install I put on it when I moved on to newer hardware.

    Ah, the bad old days of .dll conflicts, memory managers, point drivers for PCMCIA cards, and coax. I don't miss any of it.

  • Getting closer... (Score:5, Funny)

    by SuricouRaven ( 1897204 ) on Sunday August 23, 2015 @10:11AM (#50373713)

    Just 75 years to go until the copyright expires.

  • I have an old, old box with Windows 95 on it. If I could ever find a replacement for the motherboard battery, I could probably even boot it. If I wanted to. The question would be "why?"

    (The answer is that box still has a copy of Syntrilliam's CoolEdit on it, so I can convert MP3 to OggVorbis. Worth it? Flipping a coin...)

  • C:\NGRTLNS.W95

  • Looked slick, but so unstable (Score:5, Interesting)

    by McGruber ( 1417641 ) on Sunday August 23, 2015 @10:46AM (#50373857)

    Do you remember first seeing or installing Windows 95?

    I do.

    95 was really slick looking. Its splash screens and on-screen fonts seemed beautiful, after years of having run DOS programs, earlier Windows (2.1 and 3.0) and Desqview.

    I also remember that 95 was awful to use for work -- it would crash, hang, and/or start acting erratically, requiring reboots several times during each work day. I also remember having to manually save my work every few minutes, unless I was using a program that could be configured to autosave every few minutes. (I think we were still using WordPerfect in a DOS box back then and WP was one of the few programs that could actually autosave.)

    95 was so unstable that, when you purchased a Microsoft language (C, Pascal, etc), Microsoft actually include a copy of NT 4.0 for free. (At my college bookstore, buying a Microsoft language with a NT 4.0 CD in the box actually cost less than buying just NT 4.0 by itself.)

    • Re:Looked slick, but so unstable (Score:5, Insightful)

      by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 ) on Sunday August 23, 2015 @12:42PM (#50374373)

      Yeah, but that instability was not entirely Win95's fault.

      Back then computers had almost no resources. NT had a "proper", academically correct OS design with a microkernel architecture (until NT4). It paid for it dearly: resource consumption was nearly double that of Chicago. Additionally, app and hardware compatibility was crap. Many, many apps, devices and especially games would not run on Windows NT. Microsoft spent the next 6-7 years trying to make NT acceptable to the consumer market and only achieved it starting with Windows XP.

      So Win95 was hobbled by the need for DOS and Win3.1 compatibility, but that is why it was such a huge commercial success.

      Making things worse, tools for writing reliable software were crap back then. Most software was written in C or C++ except often without any kind of STL. Static analysis was piss poor to non-existent. If you wanted garbage collection, Visual Basic was all you had (actually it used reference counting). Unit testing existed as a concept but was barely known: it was extremely common for programs to have no unit tests at all, and testing frameworks like JUnit also didn't exist. Drivers were routinely written by hardware engineers who only had a basic grasp of software engineering, so they were frequently very buggy. Hardware itself was often quite unreliable. Computers didn't have the same kinds of reliability technologies they have today.

      Most importantly nobody had the internet, so apps couldn't report crash dumps back to the developers, so most developers never heard about their app crashes and had no way to fix them except by doing exhaustive, human based testing. Basically that's what distinguished stable software from unstable software: how much money you paid to professional software testers.

      Everyone who used computers back then remembers the "save every few minutes" advice being drilled into people's heads. And it was needed, but that wasn't entirely Microsoft's fault. It was just that computing sucked back then, even more than it does today :)

  • Sure do. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by AndyKron ( 937105 ) on Sunday August 23, 2015 @10:47AM (#50373859)
    Sure! I have a laptop with 95 on it. Works great. I use it to run my milling machine.

  • I have a qemu image somewhere I could run on fairly short notice. Installed from floppies.

    And I was one of the few, the proud and the brave who ran OS2 Warp for that approximately one year where it was the best desktop OS available. If you could figure out how to install and configure it.

  • My 1993-1994 era Toshiba T6600C, a Win 95 486 machine, looks at first glance like a laptop, but it is a full desktop that looks like a compact little 20 lb suitcase. Here's a YouTube video of the computer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]. (In the video, the T6600C uses Win 3.1, but mine has Win 95.) I have been using PC's since the first DOS days, and Win 95 was the rock star of its era. I once traveled with the T6600C after 9/11 (I was still using this computer in the year 2000!), and the airport offici

  • Damn... 20 years has gone by fast (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jeepies ( 3654153 ) on Sunday August 23, 2015 @11:16AM (#50373989)
    20 years ago I was a teenager. My family wasn't rich growing up. By that point I'd owned a second hand Commodore 64 I bought for $75 through the classified ads, an IBM PC XT I bought from a consignment shop, and a 386 I built from pieces I bought second hand from a friend who was upgrading to a Pentium system. Around this time 20 years ago I was finishing up an internship I had in between my junior and senior years of high school that I had because I spent some time on BBSes and the guy thought I would enjoy learning to develop software with them. During the summer I used a 486 DX2 system with Windows 3.1. That was my fist real exposure to Windows.

    There was a local trade mag for computers that they gave away free every month at news stands. I always enjoyed reading them and there were a lot of articles on Win 95. No one I knew had it or got it over the next year.

    The following year when I was getting ready for college, one of the thing we had to buy was a modern computer to meet the requirements for my engineering program. It was built by a local shop and they offered DOS 6.22 / Win 3.1 or Windows 95. I remember being hesitant about 95, but decided to go for it since it was newer and I knew newer aoftware was designed for it.

    That design really opened up computing to a lot of people. Having a single place to go to Start any program was a great idea. Before you had to know what directory to look in or where in Program Manager an icon was. All my non technical friends in college had no problem with it. With Windows 3.1 they would struggle and if they had to drop to DOS they were mostly lost. If you want to know what's running, it's right there on the task bar.

    I've used various versions of Windows and Linux over the years, but I think the biggest legacy is the start button and task bar. They pretty much define how most people interact with the desktop. The Windows 8 UI debacle and the shift back to a start menu / having Modern apps on the task bar shows that it's how users have come to expect to interact with a desktop system.

  • Latest DOS (Score:3)

    by sad_ ( 7868 ) on Sunday August 23, 2015 @11:26AM (#50374027) Homepage

    Yeah, i remember installing it for getting the latest version of DOS.
    There was a DOS upgrade included in W95, the latest official DOS (only) release was 6.2.
    Ofcourse i hacked it so that it would not start windows (later found out this could be done through a hidden feature in windows itself).
    If for any reason i would still need windows, i could still start it by typing 'win', just like for win3.x
    Anyway, didn't matter much because not late after i discovered Linux and even more important the OSS movement.

  • I booted in DOS (Score:4, Informative)

    by Blaskowicz ( 634489 ) on Sunday August 23, 2015 @11:31AM (#50374051)

    We had DOS/Windows 3.x PCs before getting the Windows 95 PC, and so we kept to the old use and booted under DOS by pressing the F8 key. See, a for us a PC was a gaming machine during the whole of the 90s, just like home computers in the 80s. We didn't have a modem or a printer. In 1998 Windows finally replaced DOS for games so we booted to the Windows desktop. We used to have only one Windows 3.1 game besides Solitaire, Minesweeper and Paintbrush, and that was Myst.
    Perhaps a very few shareware/freeware/demos on Windows 3.1. In early Windows 95 era, some games were DOS-only then some had both a DOS and Windows executable.
    One really great game that needed Windows 95 was Jedi Knight. Huge 3D maps, CD Audio music and FMV scenes. Good old times, before Internet, MP3 and OS that needs 1GB RAM and more than 10GB hard disk space to run.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • I saved my allowance for several weeks to buy a 4MB stick of ram to get my 486 up to the 12MB minimum requirement. Then when I went to install it something went wrong. I can no longer remember what, but I do remember that I went back to 3.1 the same day.

  • I remember moving the mouse around and noticing how fine the detail was on the mouse pointer, at that point I knew the Amiga, with its chunky sprite mouse pointer, was dead.
    Same thing when I saw the video demo... Sadly had to get rid of the stuff, Commodore was bankrupt by then anyways.

  • My first Windows 95 machine was a Mac 7600 with a 100MHz Pentium card in it. As bad as 95 was, it was still better than the old Mac OS at the time.

  • Not in a long time... (Score:3)

    by spaceyhackerlady ( 462530 ) on Sunday August 23, 2015 @12:21PM (#50374255)

    I think the last time I used a Windows 95 system was in the 2000/2001 timeframe. It's been a while.

    I used Windows 95 a lot. It worked, but when USB started to become important I upgraded to Windows 98. Some people claim there is a USB implementation for Windows 95 but after careful study I have come to the conclusion that they are mistaken.

    I worked for the Evil Empire in the early '90s and had access to early versions of Windows 95 (still codenamed Chicago). One memorable early build crashed and corrupted my hard drive after I attempted to adjust the mouse settings.

    ...laura

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dwedit ( 232252 )

      What? I have a CD sitting on my desk that says "Windows 95 with USB support" on it...

  • I'm still running Win95... (Score:3)

    by Grog6 ( 85859 ) on Sunday August 23, 2015 @12:23PM (#50374267)

    It is running on a k6BV3+ mobo, with a k6-III-450 processor and 128MB of edo dram.

    It has a Tennelec PCA3 ISA card in it, that is currently taking data. :)

  • It was a perfect beautiful summer day in Redmond with blue sky and rolling white clouds exactly like on the cover of the Win95 box. Gates must have ordered the weather to match the box. Jay Leno was the featured speaker and told the audience how he had been a guest in Gates' house, "a double-wide." Overhead a plane circled with a banner that said, "Brought to you by Windows NT," that team having felt slighted by all the attention to 95. There were kiosks running the OS where I brought up my library's nascen

  • I didn't use Windows 3.1, and preferred DOS. With DOS disks, stuff booted up cleanly every time. But with Windows, if you set something up wrong or got a virus, your computer wouldn't boot at all. The funny thing we're still in the era of click on the wrong URL, and you get a virus. Viruses shouldn't be so easy to get.

  • Win-95 was the Next Big Thing, it had a TCP/IP stack, came with quick basic, a telnet and FTP client, a web browser that would eventually crush Mozilla. I even tried it because I bought a 3dFX banshee card assuming it would work with Linux; that support was months out. It even ran decently with only four MB of RAM. I can remember paying $500 for a 16MB SIMM so that Linux would run well.

    Despite all that, it had no security, it was still based on a 16-bit architecture on top of DOS, and was a stupid kludgy

    • Win-95 was the Next Big Thing, it had a TCP/IP stack, came with quick basic, a telnet and FTP client, a web browser that would eventually crush Mozilla.

      The web browser Internet Explorer crushed was Netscape Navigator - Mozilla didn't exist at the time. A for-profit single-product company couldn't compete with "free". Ironically enough, from the ashes of Netscape came Mozilla Firefox, which eventually broke Internet Explorer's cancerous stranglehold on the market.

      It is unfortunate that Firefox has become the pathetic has-been we see now (thanks to the incompetent boobs currently in power at Mozilla). But we shouldn't forget how important it once was.

  • Never understood why Microsoft saw fit to torture their customers with 95,98,ME.etc. for all those years when they had NT.

    Of course this was all back in the good old days when software companies actually had to provide new value to their customers in order to make money. Now it seems all software vendors are capable of doing is repainting the shell and spying on customers.

    --
    "Finally, we will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other priva

  • It controls the heating system in one of our buildings. Until we need to replace the system or the computer dies, we have never found a good reason to replace it. It's not internet connected. Unless someone busts down the door because they're tired of wearing a sweater in the A/C, I see no valid reason to move to a more secure system.

  • "..instead of a modern 150 kbps CD-ROM disk" (Score:3)

    by kheldan ( 1460303 ) on Sunday August 23, 2015 @02:16PM (#50374813) Journal
    WTF is this? Have we already forgotten how optical media works or something?
  • At the time I was running OS/2. Microsoft announced it would release it's next OS by the end of the year (1995), figured that gave IBM a year to get their act together. Went to Comdex an Jan/95, headed straight to the IBM booth, and started asking OS/2 questions. Nobody in the booth knew what OS/2 was. That's when I knew OS/2 was the walking dead.

    I found it ironic OS/2 ran more legacy apps that Win95 did. I found it maddening that of the apps that didn't run under Win95, Microsoft had an equivalent

  • First (and only) install was a Chicago beta ... I was working as a Banyan VINES administrator at the time and needed to test the VINES client under the upcoming W95.

    At home, I used OS/2.

    At work, I switched to a SPARCstation.

    Tells you what I thought of W95 and Microsoft.

    Sound policy that I still follow today.

  • On the occasion of your 20th birthday.

  • >" Do you remember first seeing or installing Windows 95? Do you have any systems still running it? "

    I was installing Linux at the time, not MS-Windows. And yes, I still have almost all my systems running it (although not the same version, of course, and certainly not the same distro).

  • Weezer (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SpectreBlofeld ( 886224 ) on Sunday August 23, 2015 @03:29PM (#50375315)

    The 'Buddy Holly' music video that was included on the Win95 CD made me a fan of Weezer, which I still am to this day. I must have watched that video hundreds of times as a kid.

  • because we have some CNC machine software that needs to live in DOS with a non-USB parallel port, and so there's a Windows 95 install that spends most of its time in DOS mode. The GUI gets fired up when moving files around on the LAN. Hey, it's clunky, but it works and it's a tossup between this and replacing half the CNC controller, which is a lot more expensive than trolling for ancient laptops on ebay.

  • Win 95 + Office 95 only needed 8 meg! (Score:3)

    by aberglas ( 991072 ) on Sunday August 23, 2015 @09:15PM (#50376973)

    For most users, Windows 95 plus Office 95 plus Netscape plus Eudora could do everything that that they do today. (The big exception is 3D graphics on modern games.)

    Most users today only use a fraction of the power of Word 95 and Excel 95. Netscape was more than enough to run Facebook and Google Search and classic web pages which is what most people actually use the web for. Windows 95 could even display passable video. And Emacs gave me a powerful IDE.

    It could be a bit unstable, but now that Microsoft had finally discovered 32bit instructions 20 years too late it was very programmable. It also cursed us with the registry.

    And all this in just 8 megabytes of memory. Not 80, 800, or 8,000 needed today, but just 8.

    So what are the other 7,992 meg on my computer doing? They are filled with stuff (including whole VMs), I seem to need it. Sure 8 might have become 16 and then 80. But how on earth did it become 8,000?

    There is nothing substantial that I do today that I could not do on Win95 with, say, 32 meg. (OK, so I could not run bloatware like Eclipse, maybe that is my point!)

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