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posted by martyb on Tuesday August 25 2015, @03:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-out-of-the-teens dept.

It was twenty years ago yesterday (August 24, 2015) that Windows 95 was introduced, says El Reg.

Windows 95 was a great success, despite not being the most stable of operating systems. Microsoft's own Windows NT 3.1, released two years earlier, was built on stronger foundations, but high system requirements and lack of compatibility with many DOS applications and games made it unsuitable for consumers. Windows 95 was better in both respects, running in as little as 4MB of RAM – though painfully, with 8MB a more realistic minimum – and retaining DOS complete with 16-bit device driver support.

At the time, most PCs ran Windows 3.1 or 3.11 (Windows for Workgroups), and IBM was pushing OS/2 as a "better Windows than Windows". Windows 95 was a considerable improvement on Windows 3.x, with pre-emptive multitasking, mostly 32-bit code, and plug and play hardware detection. There was also new support for "portable computers", with a battery indicator on the taskbar and the ability to suspend the system without turning it off completely.

Perhaps what I'm going to say will be controversial, but I'm of the opinion that Windows 95 is the greatest software engineering feat ever, given the challenge Microsoft faced at that time. Unlike Apple, which continues to make its own computers, Microsoft did not and, therefore, had to do a vast amount of testing in order to ensure that Windows 95 would work on most existing 32-bit Intel machines.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Tuesday August 25 2015, @04:14PM

    by PizzaRollPlinkett (4512) on Tuesday August 25 2015, @04:14PM (#227653)

    I had a machine without a CD-ROM drive, so I took an external drive home from work to install W95 on my machine. I had to disassemble the machine and put a SCSI card in it (similarly borrowed from disassembling a macine at work), because those were the days before USB and similar interfaces. And before multimedia was too common. CD-ROM drives existed on newer, high-end machines around 1995, but they weren't standard. Anyhow, I got W95 installed, and ... my graphics chip was supported by W95, or I wouldn't have installed it, but the W95 driver didn't work with this particular onboard chip. So the screen didn't draw properly. That was when I started looking to get another machine. Those were the days when computers were obsolete after a year or so.

    We have things so much better now. Except I'm 20 years older. That's not better.

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by xav on Tuesday August 25 2015, @04:42PM

    by xav (5579) on Tuesday August 25 2015, @04:42PM (#227666)

    Those were the days when computers were obsolete after a year or so.

    Those were already the days when machines obsoleted by Windows could be recycled with Linux and then you got a nifty X environment with virtual desktops (yes, one of those Windows 10 new features) and a full TCP/IP stack on top of which you had everything you needed to set up any kind of server/routeur.

  • (Score: 1) by Francis on Tuesday August 25 2015, @05:26PM

    by Francis (5544) on Tuesday August 25 2015, @05:26PM (#227688)

    Higher end machines? One of my friends had an external triple speed CDROM and my parents had a built in quad speed drive about the time that Windows 95 came out. I don't think either computer was high end. The one we bought was made by a small company and wasn't that expensive. I think it was only like $1500 at the time. High end ones went as high as $3k. It wasn't until a few years later that sub $1k desktops became a viable thing.

  • (Score: 2) by isostatic on Tuesday August 25 2015, @08:37PM

    by isostatic (365) on Tuesday August 25 2015, @08:37PM (#227775) Journal

    My first win95 install was from floppies. Really annoying when you got to an error on disk 34.