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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, @07:23PM
Yeah, it crashed on occasion. The Blue Screen of Death was sometimes your constant companion. However, I was in grad school when it came out and was doing a lot of writing in MS Word 6, a Windows 3.1 app that ran splendidly in Windows 95, except for the short file name conventions you had to follow because it didn't know about long file names. But I was also doing a fair amount of Windows programming for an on-campus job I had. I still remember some recursive code I wrote and botched that caused a stack overflow. When I was doing the development in Windows 3.1, the overflow not only ate Windows, it ate DOS, forcing a reboot. You hoped you saved your code in the IDE (Borland C++ for Windows I believe) because all you could do is reboot. In Windows 95, a similar error simply caused the program to crash, and the OS dutifully reported it to you. No reboot required. Now, for me that was an improvement.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2015, @09:37AM
You were lucky. I was developing a program that made Windows 95 BSOD. After several tries to get the right spot in the debugger, I gave up.
I ended up trying on Linux, and even though the program ran fine, I managed to find the problem. A simple memory leak. Linux simply swapped out the leaked memory, and the program continued merrily on its way. Windows 95 gave a blue screen of death every time I tried to debug it.
(Score: 2) by skater on Wednesday August 26 2015, @11:31AM
Remember the bug that Windows 95 (or was it 98?) would crash if you let it run for 24 days or something like that? Everyone I know was wondering how it was possible to have Windows running that long without otherwise crashing.