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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.
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by mendax on Tuesday August 25 2015, @07:16PM
Well, I wasn't going to put it into the summary but you are mostly correct. Windows 95 consisted of DOS 7, 32-bit preemptive multitasking version of DOS with a 16-bit window manager running on top of DOS like in Windows 3.1, but the window manager was completely redesigned to be much easier to use than that used in 3.1. In my opinion, it was better than what Apple put into MacOS at that time (and still is better than what they are doing now).
One thing that was not in earlier versions of DOS and Windows was the ability to do plug-and-play (or plug-and-pray as it was sometimes called in the early days). Now that was quite nice and welcome. Everything has plug-and-play now, including major Linux distributions, but the young folks here will not remember having to do manual reconfiguration in order to support a new piece of hardware. Got a new monitor? No problem, just plug it in and it will auto-detect it and adjust the resolution and refresh rate so you blow it up. And later on when USB devices become available, the operating system just "knew" what kind of device you plugged in and installed or activated the appropriate driver for it.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.