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Windows 95 at Twenty

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

mendax writes:

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: 3, Insightful) by skater on Tuesday August 25 2015, @05:54PM

    by skater (4342) on Tuesday August 25 2015, @05:54PM (#227702) Journal

    Of course, when Win 3.x crashed, you just fell back to DOS and could restart it (usually). Win 95 required a hardware reboot. But I don't miss worrying about 640K, extended, and expanded memory... sheesh that was annoying. You could have a meg of RAM and still not enough memory to run something because of the way memory was allocated.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2015, @12:06AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2015, @12:06AM (#227867)

    I remember having multiple configurations available with my config.sys and autoexec.bat, so I'd be able to play particular games. Frustration endless, until I worked out how to do that.

    • (Score: 2) by skater on Wednesday August 26 2015, @11:26AM

      by skater (4342) on Wednesday August 26 2015, @11:26AM (#228057) Journal

      Oh, yeah! Hey, now I want to do "x"...oops, gotta reboot, wrong config loaded.

  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday August 26 2015, @09:46AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday August 26 2015, @09:46AM (#228033) Journal
    Windows 3.1 also sucked at higher resolutions. It was fine a 800x600, but anything above that and its default text size was too small and changing it didn't scale other things sensibly. Windows 95 assumed a slightly higher DPI by default, which made it useable (though true resolution independence wasn't there for a long time).
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  • (Score: 2) by jasassin on Wednesday August 26 2015, @09:52AM

    by jasassin (3566) <jasassin@gmail.com> on Wednesday August 26 2015, @09:52AM (#228035) Homepage Journal

    But I don't miss worrying about 640K, extended, and expanded memory... sheesh that was annoying

    I bought Wing Commander II and me and my friend spent about four hours diddling config.sys and autoexec.bat before we had enough EMS (or RMS I've repressed those memories [no pun intended]) for that piece of shit to run! Every driver mouse.sys sound.sys and the fucking glorious awesome memory hogging mscdex.exe driver to fit in the right places before the game would run. I'm surprised anyone even got to play the game! It sure as hell wouldn't work with QEMM (quarterdeck extended memory manager) that's for sure.

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    jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A