Windows 95 Released a Quarter Century Ago (wikipedia.org) 108
New submitter bondman writes: Windows 95 was released a full quarter century ago today, on August 24th, 1995. Long gone, nearly forgotten? I'm surprised to not have come across a retrospective article yet. I've linked to the Wikipedia article.
As for me I still haven't grown to re-like The Rolling Stones "Start Me Up" yet. I got so sick of hearing it with all the pre-launch and post-launch hype, as the song was tied heavily to the Win 95 launch event. Microsoft paid the Stones a princely sum to use it.
I still remember how exciting it was to see the full-length, full-screen video included on the installation CD-ROM, "Buddy Holly" by Weezer. Mind-blowing to watch a whole music video on your computer. Crappy resolution by our standards today, and a very limited palette to my memory. But as I said, amazing in the day.
Windows 95 had many fans and many critics. At the time, I recall it as an exciting OS (or GUI on top of DOS, if you prefer). PC users were riveted to all the magazine and other media coverage pre-launch. I remember it fondly (with all the obligatory respect due Mac OS, the Amiga, and all the other early GUIs of course).
As for me I still haven't grown to re-like The Rolling Stones "Start Me Up" yet. I got so sick of hearing it with all the pre-launch and post-launch hype, as the song was tied heavily to the Win 95 launch event. Microsoft paid the Stones a princely sum to use it.
I still remember how exciting it was to see the full-length, full-screen video included on the installation CD-ROM, "Buddy Holly" by Weezer. Mind-blowing to watch a whole music video on your computer. Crappy resolution by our standards today, and a very limited palette to my memory. But as I said, amazing in the day.
Windows 95 had many fans and many critics. At the time, I recall it as an exciting OS (or GUI on top of DOS, if you prefer). PC users were riveted to all the magazine and other media coverage pre-launch. I remember it fondly (with all the obligatory respect due Mac OS, the Amiga, and all the other early GUIs of course).
I resisted for a long time (Score:5, Funny)
And even got in a fight with Toshiba to give me DOS and Windows 3.1 drivers for my laptop.
I released a Windows 3.1 demo for my company only to get a nasty call from some casino in Jamaica that installing it had overwritten a Windows 95 DLL with a Windows 3.1 DLL- my first professional experience with DLL Hell.
Re: (Score:2)
I was an early adopter. I remember installing one of the betas or release candidates (when it was called 'Chicago') from an enormous pile of floppy disks before I got the retail version on CD. One of the things I liked about it was the new desktop system. I had been using Windows for Workgroups 3.11 up until that point, and I often had something like PC Tools Desktop or Norton Desktop running for their capabilities beyond 3.11. But either one of those massively slowed down my system.
I probably switched back
Re:I resisted for a long time (Score:5, Informative)
I probably switched back and forth from 95 to 3.11 a few times in the early days when I got frustrated with Win 95's performance, but I was definitely on board with the idea. It helped that you could still boot to DOS when you needed your RAM to do something other than run the OS.
While the hatred of WIn95 eventually dominated, thanks to how much it sucked to support, it shouldn't be forgotten that it was a miracle of backwards compatibility. It's not just that it could co-exist peacefully with Win 3.1 and DOS: it could natively run 16-bit drivers.
That gave people the false impression it was just a desktop shell, but it wasn't. It was a 32-bit, flat-memory kernel and userland, that could seamlessly run 16-bit segmented-memory applications and drivers. The drivers part was everything, both a bit chunk of the cost of development, and the reason it won the desktop space so decisively. And if it gave people the impression it was just a GUI because you could launch it from DOS and use your DOS drivers, that just sold more copies.
Of course, those DOS drivers and 16-bit applications were utter crap, reliability wise, and Win95 did nothing to be more reliable than its weakest link, so it became the support nightmare we all remember. And that wasn't really fixed until the switch to the NT codebase, which didn't really happen until 8 years later when most people had finally stopped caring about 16-bit drivers.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Sorry you feel that way (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The OEM Service Release of Windows 95 added FAT32
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I remember Microsoft offering the beta of Windows 95 for sale for that. I don't think they even offered the release version - just if you were that keen on Windows 95, you could buy the beta copy and beta test it.
Never did figure out what the benefit was, other than offering for sale what was something that was normally done for free.
Re: I resisted for a long time (Score:2)
Thats what truly drove me to unix/linux. The damn libraries have their own maintainer and the software developers should NOT be packaging their outdated or altered versions. AOL discs were especially bad about that.
Never once at any user level did I have issues compiling software on linux/unix. Not even on student accounts I used to collect access to with devious irc scripts that wrote + + to their ~/.rhosts file. A long as I had access to the compilers I could LD_LIBRARY_PATH or hardcode the path to the l
Re: (Score:2)
vs OS/2 (Score:2)
OS/2 ran dos/Win games that died on dos/Win.
Re: (Score:1)
But, like so many things, in the fullness of time one sees what a piece of shit it was.
Re: (Score:2)
Start Me Up! (Score:1)
I guess they missed that the song later says, "You make a GROWN MAN CRYYYYYYYYY...."
Re: (Score:2)
Actually they conspicuously left it out of their version. It was an obvious joke back in the day.
Windows 95: It Makes a Grown Man Cry
Went straight from win 3.1 to OS/2 (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm happy to say I departed from Windows when 95 came out. I went from 3.1 to OS/2 2.11 (I believe) and never looked back. Ultimately OS/2 went to Warp and when it failed in the market I transferred to Linux, and from there to Mac OS X.
As a developer on OS/2 I had a smooth run thanks to Java which made my code easily portable along the way. And IBM DB/2 went along likewise from OS/2 to Linux.
Still Windows 95 release gives me fond memories, if only as it reminds me of my developer career.
Re: (Score:2)
For me it was NT 3.1 to avoid Windows 95. Very similar to OS/2 at the time, of course, given the substantial common code. It was obvious that Windows 95 wasn't a "real" OS, but I was disappointed that there were very few games and I ended up dual-booting. I was delighted with Win2000, which really got the core UI elements right, and more so when Starcraft came out and would run on it, thanks to it actually following the DirectX standard (first big game that did IIRC).
I thank WinNT for getting me into se
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Went straight from win 3.1 to OS/2 (Score:2)
Just drop into DOS.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Unlike Win95, NT did not have a kernel-level backwards compatibility layer for DOS, and wasn't launched from DOS or had anything to do with DOS, really, except a command shell with similar commands.
They gave you tools to dual-boot though, which was nice, though I just booted from floppy when I wanted to boot to Win95 for games.
Re: Went straight from win 3.1 to OS/2 (Score:2)
Youâ(TM)re right, thought we were still talking about Win95.
Though if you were on Win95, I would have righteously snubbed you for your lack of 1337.
Re: (Score:2)
Drivers were always kernel mode. Thr problem was that DirectX wasn't.
IIRC, it was one of the early service packs for Win2000 that moved DirectX into the kernel, and suddenly any game that actually used DirectX properly ran on Win2000. That was common for new games after the change, but Starcraft just worked, which was really nice.
Re: Went straight from win 3.1 to OS/2 (Score:2)
Correct. NT was the "server" version (based on OS/2 shared code) while 95 was the desktop version designed by specifically to kill OS/2.
Re: (Score:2)
Windows NT 3.51 was a true microkernel OS, nothing ran user-mode. Windows NT 4 ran the video drivers in kernel mode for performance reasons.
Of course, the bigger thing is, NT3.51 didn't support WinG or DirectX. NT4 added DirectX support up to DirectX 3, which allowed games like StarCraft to run that would use DirectX 3. Wi
Re: (Score:3)
As a developer for a DOS app, Win 3.1 crashed often and hard. I was super glad when I got OS/2 and could run Win.3 under it and when it crashed I'd just start a new Win process. Loved the MS C 7 cross compiler, I could compile my code under OS/2 for Win/Dos rather than having to run 386Max memory manager to compile under crashy Windows. OS/2 Warp 4.0 seemed more stable than the hardware was. At one time I had a Microsoft OS/2 notepad with Bill Gate's hand written signature on it. WS2003 was probably the
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Plug N' Pray (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, interrupt sharing never really worked right on the ISA bus, which wasn't designed to do it at all. It wasn't until PCI that it was a realistic thing, and even then it would cause performance problems if you shared an interrupt between your graphics card and anything else, so it wasn't until PCI-E that you could really and truly forget about IRQs and just let the system do its thing. ISAPnP worked ok to assign memory ranges, but the cards were often so limited in that regard that there were problems wit
Re: (Score:3)
Ahh, IRQ hell, what fun. The best was when you have a mix of jumper-switch IRQ settings and "automatic" ones, but the automatic ones were disjoint so sometimes they'd land in a working configuration and sometimes they wouldn't.
And then you'd finalyl get it all stable, only to have the hell start all over when you needed to boot into DOS/4G for games, and needed a separate auctoexec.bat and config.sys just to get the few cards working the game needed.
Re: (Score:2)
That's because you have a terrible mix of components in a PC.
You have a ton of legacy devices that in hardware (jumpers) select their resources (IO, Memory, DMA, IRQ, etc). And now like every other computer, y
Re: (Score:2)
Released AFTER a Long Delay! (Score:1)
Full-screen video in 1995 (Score:3)
QuickTime called and wants it's 1991 achievement back. [wikipedia.org] No, really, since Microsoft basically stole Video for Windows tech from Apple. [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Truly evil, MS was back then.
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair, the Wiki article you linked clearly stated that Apple and Microsoft settled their dispute over Video for Windows and Microsoft even paid $150million (via non-voting stock) for the privilege. I'm not sure I would call that stealing (or even basically stealing).
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, paying for it 6 years after the fact, and only when it was very clear that Apple would win far more than that if it went to trial, but Apple could not afford to continue being a computer company if they took it all the way to a verdict.
Microsoft filibustered the thing until Apple couldn't afford to continue, and then settled for a song. Which, by the way, they made a tidy profit on that $150M in Apple stock.
Using someone else's code without license is called stealing. Getting caught and paying for i
Re: (Score:2)
Using someone else's code without license is called stealing.
Technically it's actually not.
Re: (Score:2)
It's plagiarism.
Re: (Score:2)
I think Apple made out rather well from that $150M payment as well. Apple was in dire straits prior to the settlement and it could be argued that they wouldn't be in the position they are now without that influx of cash and the continuation of Microsoft Office being available on the Mac.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, if the price you pay me after "stealing" my car is fair enough for me to accept the money I would say yes it is OK.
Frustratingly Important (Score:5, Insightful)
It may have been unstable and obnoxious in a lot of ways, but Windows 95 was an important milestone in that it set the standard for desktop UIs that has been in place since it was created. After the Windows 8 misstep, we are back to what is essentially the same layout of Win95 with a start button and a line of shortcuts on the bottom of the screen.
I remember it corresponded to a pretty key turning point in what the computer could do for a home user. I went from a 386 that could barely run windows 3.1 to a Pentium 166 running windows 95. It was the turning point from what was mostly a relatively primitive command line and rudimentary graphics to a computer that could access graphical web pages and display 3d graphics. It was also the point at which even your grandparents started dabbling in computing and was the mass market OS for the beginnings of the world wide web and the first .com boom.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I do remember the multimedia thing, PCs were ostensibly sold as "mutlimedia PCs" back then. Often with a copy of Encarta for Windows 95 included... Back then, Encarta was the must-have title for PCs, like "Brothers in Arms" was for people buying their first CD Player.
Re: (Score:2)
Competition among components did eventually result in better components and lower prices, but that took some time to happen. Most people don't understand the value of open standards, and only appreciate the benefits that open standards and competition eventually bring.
The Amiga range was typically a lot cheaper and more capable out of the box (eg decent sound/video capabilities were standard). Something like an A500 was cheaper than all but the lowest spec PC and considerably more powerful for the price.
Re:Frustratingly Important (Score:4, Informative)
The reason Macs never really took off was they were eye-wateringly expensive. Rich kids toys. Apple was content with that because they had the Apple II family alongside the Macintosh for many years. It was only when they killed off the Apple line that prices for the Mac dropped to be competitive with Wintel, and then just a year or so later the Pentium came out and soundly beat the 68040, making the Macs overpriced again for the performance.
The main selling point for Macs for business use was actually Word and Excel, of you recall, and the Mac UI was soundly better and color wasn't relevant so for a while it was a great choice for business use. But then Win95 came out, caught up to Mac in UI, and of course Word and Excel "mysteriously" outperformed even beyond the Pentium advantage. It pretty much killed Apple, until they brought Jobs back to resurrect the corpse.
Re: (Score:2)
In my anecdotal recollection, the main main selling point for Macs for business use was actually for work in graphic arts. Every business I worked with that needed Word and Excel.used MS DOS/Windows, though for many the main reason they stuck with MS was to use specialized 3rd party applications, like vendor applications, which were written for MS DOS/Windows.
Re: (Score:2)
I second this. The only industry that's ever been dominated by Macs is DTP. They also had a very strong following in low-end video for a while, but now PCs are good at all of that and they've been crushed there too. But for a long time, the assumption was that you'd use a Macintosh for desktop publishing. This made considerable sense, because Windows was something of a joke. NT was sufficiently expensive and resource-hungry that you weren't saving any money using a PC, and the PC versions of the dominant ap
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, we used to run Mac desktop publishing stuff under Shapeshifter on an Amiga because that was the fastest Mac you could buy at the time. Windows just sucked for DTP, I think the main issue being that it didn't use Postscript for printing internally so output quality was highly variable.
Re:Frustratingly Important (Score:4, Insightful)
On the other hand, Windows 95 was a fully preemptive multitasking operating system with a virtual machine manager that gave each process its own memory space to play in. In comparison, the contemporary MacOS was primitive and in many ways hadn't changed a whole lot since it was introduced in 1986. It wasn't until Apple released OSX in 2001 that Apple had caught up to where Microsoft was with Windows 95. And by that time, Microsoft had released Windows 2000 and Windows XP was right around the corner.
Re: Frustratingly Important (Score:2)
On the other hand, Windows 95 was a fully preemptive multitasking operating system with a virtual machine manager that gave each process its own memory space to play in. In comparison, the contemporary MacOS was primitive and in many ways hadn't changed a whole lot since it was introduced in 1986.
This advantage is why it was so famously uncommon for two processes in Win95 to interfere with one another or hose the entire OS. /hardesteyerollever
Microsoft looked at that vm hardware and said "hold my beer" ...
Re: (Score:2)
In Europe the Amiga was quite popular for home use, but the vast majority of users didn't realise it had a capable multitasking os, so it was basically treated like a games console.
With soundcards being an optional component, the vast majority of business computers were specced without one.
I recall at the time there was a lot of media coverage about windows 95, particularly focusing on the gui and talking about multitasking. At the time my grandmother watched one of these tv shows and then came to talk to m
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Hmmm... Without looking it up, I think the line of shortcuts was introduced with 98...
Re:Frustratingly Important (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows 95 was an important milestone in that it set the standard for desktop UIs that has been in place since it was created.
That's why I mainly run XFCE on my desktops. It's basically the original Windows95 concept, but done right. There's absolutely no need to try to "improve" on that paradigm.
I like that XFCE has almost none of the strange "UX", theories that have been foisted on users (then often abandoned) by the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Ubuntu, KDE, etc. over the years.
Re: (Score:2)
Totally agree, XFCE "just works". My introduction to it was Thunar, the file manager, which "just works". It replaced rox-filer for me.
I've used other WM's, KDE1x, Fluxbox, GNOME 1 and 2, Enlightenment 16/17, but eventually decided that XFCE was the one for me.
Re: (Score:2)
There's absolutely no need to try to "improve" on that paradigm.
For an expert, no. But computers are ubiquitous and therefore need to cater to the lowest common denominator. This is one of the reason "improvements" are never realised as such by techies.
Re: (Score:2)
XFCE doesn't fix the biggest problem with the Windows 95 GUI, and in fact with most desktop operating systems: organization of apps.
Windows apps like to dump icons all over the start menu and desktop and maybe pinned to the taskbar and perhaps a little sub-loader in the system tray too. There is no standard for organization, some do "Company Name->App Name->App/Help/Uninstall" and some just dump an icon in the root of the Start Menu. Desktop icons are by default unordered and apps and data get mixed t
GUI's live Re:Frustratingly Important (Score:3)
Desktop or desktop-like GUI's are currently still the pinnacle of "productivity" applications. The mobile-friendly webbish UI's still can't compete*. Mice save screen real-estate and can have roll-over text, right-click menus, etc. It triggers flame-wars when I point that out, but I'm just the messenger.
If we had a decent stateful GUI-over-HTTP markup standard, perhaps our office CRUD stacks wou
Re: (Score:2)
... the button formerly known as the start button.
I still have no idea what to call it, so I call it that.
Is "released" the best word? (Score:2)
I might have gone with "inflicted on" or "sprung on", but that's just me.
Anyway, C:\ONGRTLNS.W95
Re: (Score:2)
Hiroshima 45, Chernobyl 86, Windows 95.
Re: (Score:2)
Why it was called Windows 95 (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Only if you still needed to use 360k DSDD disks.
Re: (Score:2)
Contrary to popular belief, the 95 is not from 1995. It was from the number of HDD Floppy disks needed to install the OS.
Don't forget to tip your waitress.
Re: Why it was called Windows 95 (Score:2)
Meh. Never tried installing OS/2 from floppies, then?
Re: (Score:1)
I remember MS-Office took something like 7 floppy disks. A third of the time at least one went bad, meaning you had to carry 14 disks when sent on an install mission.
Re: (Score:2)
Office 95 was actually 25 disks. Though unless you selected everything in installer, including things like all the language packs and the separate viewer applications, it was unlikely you'd actually need to use all 25.
Re: (Score:2)
You joke, but only physically. Mentally the difference between installing an OS from 26 floppies or 95 is irrelevant. The will to live was lost somewhere around disk 8.
Re: (Score:2)
Contrary to popular belief, the 95 is not from 1995. It was from the number of HDD Floppy disks needed to install the OS.
In '95 the OEM system install was the gold standard in mass market PC sales --- and Win 95 was a mass market success like no other.
Switched me from Mac (Score:4, Interesting)
After going through a C64, a ram-hacked PC jr, a couple of Amigas, and a few PC clones, I settled into Macs for a few years, with a IIvx, and finally a glorious Power Mac 7600. The 7600 also had a 100MHz Pentium card in it, running Windows 95. At first it was barely used for more than watching that awesome Weezer video, but by late 1997 I found I was using Win 95 on the Pentium card way more than the actual Mac, so I sold it and built a 233Mhz AMD K6 machine. Win95 was a better UI than Mac OS 7/8/etc., and of course I used nothing but PCs at work, so that was that. I did play with OS X a bit at one point, and the UI was decent, but couldn't really see enough added value in it.
25 years of Linux for me. (Score:4, Interesting)
When Windows 95 came out, I got a copy and installed it on my new shiny PC. It was a steaming pile of crap. A fellow grad student told me I should try Linux. I thought, how good can a free OS be? But I tried it. It was rock solid. It was good as my Digital Unix. Since then I have never installed Windows on a computer again.
Re: (Score:2)
I was slightly later to the party. I had Win95 on my shiny new P133 (with a whopping 72M of RAM -- mate of mine had some spare). Must have been 1997. I liked it, it was a lot better than Windows 3.11, but I knew about unix and always wanted that. Found a box set of RedHat 5.2 in a bookshop in 1998 and that was the last machine I owned that ran Windows (outside of a VM).
I dual booted Windows 95 and Linux for ages (games). Eventually I did a fresh reinstall of '95, and all my games on the small hard disk, the
Re: (Score:2)
I have the exact same story, only after 10 years of Linux I was sick of it and rich enough to be able to afford Apple hardware. I never looked back.
Re: (Score:2)
It was a steaming pile of crap. A fellow grad student told me I should try Linux
Define crap. Some people think a system that crashes every 42 days like clockwork is "crap" (especially if you can't get it to run that long in the first place). Other's consider a system where you very much had to recompile a kernel to make it work properly on your hardware, or a system which finally got USB support long after most printers available at the local Staples came only with USB ports "crap"
We've come a long way. I don't have any fond memories of the 90s. Not in Windows for it's unreliability, n
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
But but but ...
Would Linux run DOOM? World of Warcraft? Okay, DOOM maybe, thanks to third party addons. And WoW thanks to WINE. Took a long long time though.
back in the day... (Score:1)
I remember being afraid that the Windows 95 release would be very popular and kill the momentum that OS/2 was finally starting to build, which is pretty much exactly what happened.
Mostly people on usenet (comp.os.os2.*) debated about all the different ways that IBM marketing sucked and all the ways that OS/2 was technically superior to "winblows".
ahh, the good ol days.
MS-Paint-95 emulator for the nostalgic minded (Score:1)
https://canvaspaint.org/ [canvaspaint.org]
Tip: Adjust browser zoom level to match native resolution if you see jagged edges.
Re: (Score:2)
Best Windows Startup Sound? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
always disabled them because they have slowed down the startup on the hardware back in the day.
Don't forget Windows 93 (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Wow. That was really cool.
I have to say, though -- someone had way too much time on their hands.
right now I think windows 95 is better than 10 (Score:3)
windows 10 is a service, which seems to give microsoft cart blanche to not give a fuck about you and your computing.
it's a surveillance wet dream (and therefore the same for hackers and cybercriminals), unstable as fuck, and there's just so much extra shit going on in regards to every bloody vendor that is installing stuff onto your system it seems to have become facebook as an operating system.
i am missing the days when my computer ran ONLY what set it up to run, and when I could CHECK what was running without any levels of obfuscation and lockouts, instead of a 'black box'.
It's FAR worse than anything China or Russia are doing to me, and if it was an operating system made in either country you can bet what happens would be front page news.
Just an industry bittervet that has gotten sick of the direction microsoft has gone, with little choice but to run this crap because Microsoft dominated the desktop market prior to this garbage.
Astonishing! (Score:2)
I can do the math.
The Win95 CD-ROM was the best part (Score:3)
Bob Rivers Rolling Stones (Score:2)
Well, I bought it up
Brought Windows home and d'cided to boot it up
But when I load it up
It says my memory is not enough
I'd be runnin' out
I need some extra RAM to fix me up
I have to cough it up
Open my wallet up
It never stops, never stops, never stops, never stops
It's Windows 95
It suckin' up my drive
It makes a Pentium fly
But my PC is obsolete
I'll have to buy myself a brand new machine
Bring it up
Stick me up
You suck me in, and then you got me hooked
You got me, you got me
There's so much stuff to buy
I need a new h
Evil MS (Score:2)
Win 95 was really the start of the evil company MS became. The amount of MS bashing here on /. was enormous in the late 1990's and the 2000s. After that (only 15 years!) their software became somewhat usable and the bashing subsided. However, MS is now even more sneaky and monitors everything you do on Win10. Great! I ditched Word for Mac immediately when it suddenly asked for my MS password when I wanted to see my list of recently edited files. I'm quite sure MS knows exactly what I was working on.
Now I on
Re: (Score:2)
Win 95 was really the start of the evil company MS became.
haha no. Microsoft was evil back in the DOS days too.
After that (only 15 years!) their software became somewhat usable and the bashing subsided.
It did not. We simply moved from bashing their OS (which became decent in 2000, and remained so until Vista) to bashing their business practices.
However, MS is now even more sneaky and monitors everything you do on Win10.
Yes, they have reached new heights of shitlordery.
Re: (Score:2)
Win 95 was really the start of the evil company MS became.
haha no. Microsoft was evil back in the DOS days too.
You're right, but with Win95 came the money train that allowed MS to become exponentially more evil.
After that (only 15 years!) their software became somewhat usable and the bashing subsided.
It did not. We simply moved from bashing their OS (which became decent in 2000, and remained so until Vista) to bashing their business practices.
Of course the bashing didn't stop, but I have the idea that it never reached the height it had in the 2000s anymore after Vista.
However, MS is now even more sneaky and monitors everything you do on Win10.
Yes, they have reached new heights of shitlordery.
Well done MS...
64,000+ "known issues" (Score:2)
As PC Mag said in the issue the month it was released, it had over sixty-four thousand "known issues".
Not to mention the STUPIDEST IDEA IN SOFTWARE UP TO THEN puttin gthe GUI into ring 0.
Remembered he release (Score:2)
It really did make the PC a common person's device. I also remember commenting that when the regular person gets involved, the two or three year replacement cycle of PC's would change. At the time, I guessed people would expect their PC's to last 10 years, about the same as their televisions.
In a way that did happe
And, even more impressively... (Score:2)
And, even more impressively, it was released 1/40th of a millenium ago!
My memories are not so good (Score:2)
Wow, I remember that clearly. I had just purchased a high end sound card for a couple hundred dollars, and discovered it would not work in Windows 95. At all. I talked to the manufacturer, who put me in touch with engineering, who sent me three or four versions of Windows 95 drivers, none of which solved the problems. I got used to booting back into dos to play games, which I guess many people did back then.
And then the Ensoniq AudioPCI came out, and suddenly you didn't have to dink with sound anymore,