The Full Windows 95 Launch Event Video Is Finally Online (gizmodo.com) 26
The full 90-minute keynote of the Windows 95 launch was uploaded this week by the Blue OS Museum YouTube account. As Gizmodo's Florence Ion notes, "clips from the presentation have floated around online for decades," but the full keynote "has been harder to track down." From the report: [T]he complete presentation is an absolute time capsule of technology culture as it existed on Aug. 24, 1995. It also features some incredibly cringe moments, most of which stem from Jay Leno's cheesy and problematic joke-telling. My face felt flush the entire time I watched this presentation from all the nostalgia pulsating throughout it. There are all the requisite hairstyles, khaki pants, and overly-used Bill Clinton jokes that make this a quintessential event of the '90s. In a slideshow, Gizmodo highlights the "best and worst parts" of the event, adding that if you do watch the entire presentation, "you will have The Rolling Stones' 'Start Me Up' stuck in your head for the rest of the day."
Cringe (Score:2)
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UGH. Steve Ballmer at 4:25. So. much. cringe.
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Does it include the Apple ad? (Score:2)
I think the best part was the Apple ad mocking [google.com] MS for finally moving past the shitty 8.3 filename limitations that they copied from CP/M.
Re: Does it include the Apple ad? (Score:1)
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Before. They invested in Apple a couple of years later.
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At the time it just came across as really petty, because MacOS of that era crashed if you looked at it funny. Microsoft was making progress at improving their unstable, frequently-crashing OS, Apple was making jokes.
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That wasn't the only time Apple was snarky [arstechnica.com] with Microsoft. Timeline of some notable events:
* Jan 1983 Apple "innovated" the 1 button Lisa mouse [wikipedia.org]
* May 1983 Microsoft's Mouse [wikipedia.org] was not ergonomic either.
* 1990 Microsoft "Dove" mouse
* 1990 Windows 3.0 Released
* 1995 Windows 95 = Macintosh '89 button [google.com]
* 1997 Microsoft invested $150 million into Apple
* 2004 Redmond, start your photocopiers [staticflickr.com]
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Hehe. Yeah, Apple has always been this weird mix of streamlining the user experience and being incredibly myopic.
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TIL Microsoft had a mouse back in 1983 just a few months after Apple.
* Jan 1983 Apple "innovated" the 1 button Lisa mouse [wikipedia.org]
* May 1983 Microsoft's Mouse [wikipedia.org] was not ergonomic either.
Jay Leno (Score:1)
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FTFY
The prophecy has been fulfilled! (Score:1)
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Windows 7 was the time where All the promises of Windows 95 came true.
yay ! (Score:2)
I was there (Score:5, Interesting)
We were bused to the event from a Seattle hotel. I sat next to John Dvorak. It was a perfect day, blue sky with white clouds just like the Win95 box. An airplane dragged a banner which said, "Windows 95, brought to you by Windows NT." They tried to network a bunch of PCs on what was probably a 56K line, but they kept crashing. At the end they threw open a tent and gave everyone a fancy backpack with a copy of Win 95 inside. I remember Leno's jokes as being lame, but Gates' weren't much better, consisting mostly of his complaints on how much they paid Leno to be there. It was a pretty heady time, though. Microsoft knew how to throw a party in those days. You never went away hungry.
"You make a grown man cry..." (Score:3)
To coin a phrase, now you know "the rest of the story."
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"You make a grown man cry..."
And that reminds me of Winsongs 95 [youtube.com].
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I'm guessing Blue OS museum will lose any Youtube ad revenue rights over that.
I don't think YouTube revenue goes very far these days anyways. That's why most content creators now suddenly launch into a rant about some dumb mobile game or VPN service in the middle of their videos. They work directly with sponsors. Writing this post sure has worked up a thirst, and when I'm thirsty I reach for a nice ice old Brawndo. It's got electrolytes. So yeah, as I was saying, being demonetized by YouTube really isn't as big of a concern as it used to be back when they actually paid well.
Cringe? (Score:2)
1) Educated adults using the word "cringe" and its derivatives;
2) Stiff moralists with a medieval incapacity of appreciating context, who invariably see the worst in the actions of everyone else, and enjoy pointing fingers at them.
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Windows 95 Set computing back a decade (Score:3)
Compared to the 1995 alternatives of Operating Systems which include Mac OS (classic), Linux (Slackware), OS/2 and Windows NT. Windows 95 being a 32bit upgrade to a graphical DOS Shell. Created a legacy where the bulk of the computing masses, were expecting a system to crash at a whim, Reliance and continuation of 16bit coding base, an over reliance on DLL's however without proper explanation on when to use them properly. GUI screen deep security.
It really kept the main computing population in a relieve dark ages, while its advertising got a lot of new people to use computers, it created bad habits, bad coding, and a general fear around the reliability of the computer that still often exists today. Where now anything that is run by a computer, people are going, ohhh it is run by a computer what happens if it crashes!!