Microsoft's momentous Windows 95 operating system became available to the public on this day [August 24] 30 years ago. Computing enthusiasts were queuing around the block at midnight launch events. Perhaps this was the first time an OS launch became a cultural event – one that was carefully primed by the launch a month earlier, and the Start Me Up advertising campaign.
PC users had access to Windows operating systems, and similar WIMP OSes, before Windows 95. However, Windows 95 was billed as a merger of Microsoft's DOS and Windows products into a unified whole. Moreover, it brought in a significantly revamped UI, including the Start Button and many other elements we still live with today.
Other welcome features that first became mainstream on PCs thanks to the introduction of Windows 95 include; the 32-bit preemptive multitasking architecture with task bar, plug and play hardware, support for long filenames, and many more.
To boost Windows 3.1 migrations, Windows 95's official requirements presented quite a low bar. Users should have an Intel 386DX processor, 4MB of RAM, a VGA or better display, and make sure to have 55MB of HDD space clear for the installation process.
Recommended settings, for those hoping to make proper use of the new multitasking capabilities, and internet features like MSN and Exchange were higher. For improved usability, Windows 95 would benefit from a 486 or better CPU, 8MB of RAM, an SVGA display, as well as more storage.
It is debatable whether this was the beginning of bloat. For some context, the contemporary Macintosh System 7.5.X required about half the fixed storage of Windows 95.
You can test Windows 95 RTM in an online VM, on PCjs Machines, using the link.
[...] PC enthusiasts at the time would have had to buy a new system with Windows 95 pre-installed or cough up $209, which adjusted for inflation brings us perilously close to $400 in 2025. Just for an OS...
Despite the entry price, Microsoft's lavish advertising budget and promotional activities paid off. Sales revenue from the release reportedly hit $720 million on day one. Also, a million copies of the OS had been shipped by day four.
[...] Paving the way for the success to come, it was also noted that 10 of the 11 publishers of the top 20 PC game titles were onboard with Windows 95-based gaming. Moreover, the use of the web was accelerating, with Netscape and Microsoft both releasing their new browsers on 32-bit Windows.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2025, @12:22AM (2 children)
https://www.ebay.com/itm/127314443261 [ebay.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by KritonK on Friday August 29 2025, @05:43AM (1 child)
Windows 95 = Macintosh '89 = Amiga '85
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2025, @06:33PM
Wishful thinking of a Amiga fanboi.
By W95 PCs had square pixels and no longer looked like the
toy UI Amiga was saddled with.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by looorg on Friday August 29 2025, @12:42AM (5 children)
Hard to say with certainty. But I have a memory of when it came out we had some fun trying to see how much junk and fluff could be removed from the install disks and the system would still install and work. After all HD space was still at a premium. While I don't recall exacts now it was a lot.
For me it was probably still one of those early memories of Ballmer going completely ape-shit-crazy.
(Score: 3, Funny) by mhajicek on Friday August 29 2025, @11:02AM (4 children)
I recall my father getting frustrated, booting into DOS, and deleting the windows directory.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Friday August 29 2025, @02:25PM (3 children)
Funny today, annoying as hell back then. I'd have done the same thing but Road Rash only ran on W95, the reason I bought Windows in the first place. I'd been more than happy with DOS 6.2!
Today, Road Rash won't run. But I have a PS4 game that's very similar.
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Freeman on Friday August 29 2025, @04:50PM (2 children)
I got Road Rash running in DOSBox. I had an old copy of Win98 laying around and got that running in DOSBox as well. I was messing around with old stuff and wanted kiddo to enjoy some of the old games. Not that I had them playing Road Rash, but they did get to take a look at 'ye olde Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia, and Oregon Trail (1 and 2 I believe). I forget what all we messed around with, but those two for sure.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Sunday August 31 2025, @06:48PM (1 child)
I'll have to see if it's still available, thanks! I still have a lot of old games that won't run any more.
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday September 01 2025, @09:55PM
DOSBox is open source and freely available. Win98 you should probably be able to get off ebay?
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Tork on Friday August 29 2025, @01:18AM (4 children)
Erm.. I don't think it's debatable at all, it IS bloat. Heh. Some of it is defensible, though. Windows 95 needed to run on approximately 1233 quadrillion configurations of machines, and as I recall lots of default drivers that wouldn't be necessary on Apple systems were part of the main install. I remember being elated I didn't need to run to the install CD that often.
That said I do remember Microsoft's marketing was in full swing. Remember when that Wheezer video was included? I honestly don't recall if that was a day 0 thing, but I do remember that a fresh Win95 install gave you a bazillion things to mess around with. Which, frankly, was great because it took a long time to install and it took even more time to get whatever games you wanted running installed as well. I remember my first evening with it I had to wait until the next day to get Wing Commander running again, but up until then I was playing with some pack-in shit intended to make me excited to run out to the software store and empty my wallet. Personally I think this does qualify as bloat, even if it was enjoyable bloat. Admittedly Im fuzzing the definition of 'bloat' here a bit. I mean it to mean 'essential to the operation of the machine', but I think keeping some of the default drivers handy is a worthwhile exemption.
I also remember it being like a full year or two before it was reasonable to completely ditch the old Dos days and go full-in with Win. One of the reasons MS had to market Win95 was before that Win 3.x was more like a shell you ran on top of Dos that mainly just ate up resources. I mean if you were doing bidness stuff like spreadsheets that wasn't too big of a deal, but why would I waste precious memory on that for games that demanded ExPaNdEd MeMoRy. Heh. I had to have Win95 for a while before I finally caught on to it being an OS. Like... one day I realized "oh.. I don't have to fiddle around with IRQs to make sound work anymore..."
Anyway, some of those times were great, but judging from the retro-gaming groups I've perused I'm one of the few that remember just how trying those times were. It was like 2 years after the release of Win95 before the average home machine had appropriate specs to run decently on it. It ran like ass on my 486 but when I moved to a Pentium it was like moving from an NES to a SNES. Magic Carpet, woooooot! Oh... and if you're wondering why Win9x's lack of stability wasn't a deal breaker back then- Today we leave our computers on 24-7, that is NOT how it worked way back when. You turned on the machine when you needed it, you shut it down when you didn't, and you heard from Dad if you left it on overnight. Daily-restarts masked that problem.
Eh sorry for my disjointed post, here. Lots of twists and turns with this trip down memory lane for me. It was right about here that I was moving on from being a kid to worrying about college and my future, and my computing shit at the time had a hugenormous impact on that. You guys are lucky I'm not going into boring detail about my first computer-related job. Heh
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈 - Give us ribbiti or make us croak! 🐸
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday August 29 2025, @02:29PM
...it took a long time to install and it took even more time to get whatever games you wanted running installed as well.
And it's worse today. Just upgrading from one version of Windows to the newer version takes about three times as long as installing a Linux distro from scratch.
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Friday August 29 2025, @02:31PM (2 children)
I'm pretty sure that Weezer was a day 1 feature, it's just that a lot of people didn't bother to go into the folders on the disc to find it. The point of it being there was as to introduce the new multimedia features. Back when Win 95 was new, a bunch of people still didn't have any sort of internet connections, DVDs wouldn't have been available until the next year, and that didn't really matter because computers of the day weren't fast enough to be able to play them anyways. So, you got a file that demonstrated what was coming. It's the same basic reason why Windows has always had a couple of games that shipped with it. Solitaire and Minesweeper were installed to help new users learn how to operate a mouse and get some practice. I don't think both of those were original, but the original Win 1 did have a couple games.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Friday August 29 2025, @03:07PM (1 child)
Oop! You unlocked a memory! I was in college when when the N64 was first being shown. And you're right, pre-internet! But my school had internet and that was where I first saw a 160x100@15fps quicktime of Mario 64! I was living in the future!!! Back then you had to hope someone in your area went to Vegas during CES (or one of the other tradeshows) with a video camera and made copies of the tape. This was the first time I sought that info on my own!
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈 - Give us ribbiti or make us croak! 🐸
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Friday August 29 2025, @04:07PM
I think it's easy to forget just how much tech was improving back then. Now, there's no reason for them to pay to include a video like that on their installation media, back then it was a way of demonstrating where things were going and what was already possible. IIRC, that was about the time that full motion video games for computers were starting to really pop and hardly anybody even knew what MP3s were.Several years later I got a Creative DVD drive that came with a special board to help accelerate the videos. And, even then, it was a bit on the jerky side at times.
(Score: 4, Touché) by namefags_are_jerks on Friday August 29 2025, @01:20AM (2 children)
Space Invaders disagrees about the "first" claim.
(Score: 4, Touché) by mcgrew on Friday August 29 2025, @02:49PM (1 child)
Pong. And I've read there was space game that ran on mainframes in 1964. There wasn't even ARPANET then, let alone the internet.
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 2) by namefags_are_jerks on Saturday August 30 2025, @08:01AM
I did think of Pong, but:
- it was implemented in hardware
- it was recognized by the 'mainstream', however it didn't get Music Videos, T-Shirts, merchandise, etc. like Invaders achieved.
..so as "Pop Culture Smash" goes, Space Invaders gets the point.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by SomeGuy on Friday August 29 2025, @02:25AM (5 children)
Often overlooked, I personally felt one of the strong points was Windows 95's built in LAN networking, enabling people to easily share files and printers. It was basically the same as Windows For Workgroups, but that was a separate edition - now it was standard. No need for expensive server licenses either. In 95 you could graphically browse the entire network from "Network Neighborhood" or type UNC names like \\95machine\share\important.doc.
These days Microsoft wants to brush that under the rug and literally force everyone to send them all of their data to their OneDrive garbage.
Windows 95 was also the first version to make standard use of the right-click menu. In Notepad all you had was "Undo", "Cut", "Copy", "Paste", "Delete", and "Select All". Things you would want to frequently use right where the mouse was pointed.
Now in Windows 11 Microsoft has shrunk those to tiny little awkward icons... so the rest of the menu can be taken up by their stupid "AI" garbage and a Bing search option. Oh, I don't know, people must be clicking on those AI options every five seconds so just having them only in the drop down is soooooo inconvenient. Yea, right. Consider yourself lucky you can still save text files to your own computer.
Also, the "Bloat" was already getting bad in Windows 3.1 applications. Once people escaped from the solid confines of 640k, programs just kept demanding more memory.
-- Posted from Microsoft Windows 95. (Yes, really!)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Friday August 29 2025, @03:54AM (3 children)
The networking was convenient compared to having to install Trumpet Winsock manually. However, W95 only got its TCP/IP stack over Bill's objections and the guy who basically forced Bil to include it risked his career in doing so. The TCP/IP stack was lifted from one of the BSDs rather than developed in house well because why would anyone, even M$, want a TCP/IP stack developed by M$ out on the net?
With W95 there were already anti-trust rumblings due to the illegal bundling of the MS Internet Explorer web browser [justice.gov] and licensing which prohibited OEMs from removing it. Furthermore, W95 was rushed to market to beat the court's decision by having it on the shelves first. It ended up being a hot mess, and not just from a user perspective, because the last weeks of development were spent not on improving the product but on metastasizing parts of MSIE throughout the product so that it could not be removed by others. The result was that I recall it crashing what felt like every few minutes, but what was more likely "only" five to six times per day. W98 wasn't any more stable. The two brought a new meaning for the words unstable and stable [debian.org] to software development.
On top of the illegal tying of their web browser to the GUI skin on top of DOS called Windows 95, they had illegally bundled a media player, too. Mainly that killed off Real Networks but later became a vehicle for introducing DRM through the side door. That was because many people let their kids run amok on their work computers which they had taken home and the kids set up the Windows Media Player without a thought as to what the DRM would mean for the rest of the system.
M$ was also laying the groundwork against Sun and Java in W95.
The largest line item in m$ annual budgets started to be marketing from that point onward, until the early 2000s, so as to distract from all that and more like it.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Friday August 29 2025, @02:33PM (2 children)
Back then virtually everybody used the BSD TCP/IP stack and that may well still be the case, it's just less clear due to the advertising clause being dropped. There wasn't any good reason to develop one when there was a freely available one that you could interface with that everybody else was using.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by canopic jug on Friday August 29 2025, @02:58PM (1 child)
It was more than just the TCP/IP stack. M$ included quite a few BSD utilities including Telnet and FTP at least back then. I gave a tour of what I figured was the the full list and had people note the attribution. That was for a college class with a lot of students, and it really got the students' attention. Odd timing, but a subsequent Windows update shortly thereafter removed most or all of the BSD advertising and thus hid the evidence.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Saturday August 30 2025, @03:46PM
Just to be clear, that update which eliminated the BSD advertising was during the XP series. I seem to lump all that garbage together, same shit, different day, etc. when it comes to M$.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by ls671 on Friday August 29 2025, @10:06AM
Yeah I recall it, it was a really big wide open Workgroup
When win95 came out, you could proxy your connection through any win95 machine connected to the internet directly with a dialup modem from anywhere on the Internet. Plenty of fun back then /s
I don't recall the name of the win service/program but with default install, you opened your computer as a proxy for anybody on the Internet. You could even easily chain your connection through multiple win95 machines around the world before finally reaching the host you wanted to connect to.
Everything I write is lies, including this sentence.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by crm114 on Friday August 29 2025, @02:32AM
One of her music videos was on the CD, and I was introduced to an artist I still love.
"Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars" got me though several years of deep depression.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okt9GcWiWmE [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Touché) by driverless on Friday August 29 2025, @03:26AM (9 children)
And that was just enough to load the boot screen and display an error message that your hardware was insufficient to run Windows 95. NT4 had similar issues with their minimum hardware requirements.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by canopic jug on Friday August 29 2025, @04:00AM
Along those lines, didn't the W95 SDK have two hard requirement? One was that in order to have the special W95 logo, developing the same software for NT was required. The other was that the teams working on NT were prohibited from working with anything to do with competing operating systems.
That meant that development houses moved from having a Macintosh and a Windows team, to having a W95 (DOS) and NT teams most not being able to afford a third, air-gapped Macintosh team. Around that time the Macintosh went from having the best games and a wide choice of top software to basically no games and a weak selection of software.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday August 29 2025, @02:54PM (6 children)
4 MB of RAM??? Was the author even ALIVE then?? No PC had anywhere near that amount of memory in 1995! The norm, iirc, was 246K. I believe you're confusing RAM with drive space, 4 MB drive space was about right. My hard drive was only 40 mb!
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday August 29 2025, @03:02PM
Damn... use the preview button, mcgrew!
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 3, Touché) by epitaxial on Friday August 29 2025, @04:26PM
What are you babbling about? I used to own a 386 with 16mb of ram and a 300mb hard drive.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Friday August 29 2025, @05:57PM (1 child)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈 - Give us ribbiti or make us croak! 🐸
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Saturday August 30 2025, @05:29AM
Probably by like 3 or 4 years. The first computer I had at home shipped with a 40mb disk and defaulted to 1mb or RAM. My parents wisely opted to get a second meg installed. I eventually got another 2mb of RAM, I can't remember whether that was to play Doom or Doom 2 though. By 1995, I think the typical was at closer to 16mb, but by that point RAM requirements were growing particularly fast still, and I think it's only been in relatively recent times where that's stopped, at least for people that aren't needing to be too cutting edge. I've got 32gb, but only because I use virtual machines and like to be able to give them 8gb to work with.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday August 29 2025, @07:22PM (1 child)
I used to work in the PeeCee business during my summer holidays in the early 1990s. By about 1992, 4MB was the usual amount of RAM recommended for the serious Win3.1 user. I used to set up and install machines. One summer I did a couple of hundred.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 30 2025, @02:53AM
Yeah and 4MB RAM was required for Doom...
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/a4yi5t/original_doom_system_requirements_from_my_25_year/#lightbox [reddit.com]
https://www.mobygames.com/game/1068/doom/specs/ [mobygames.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 30 2025, @01:20PM
It was because of this I installed my first linux distro. I was in grad school and I had been on DEC and Sun mainframes since entering college in 1984, so I had little to no experience (nor desire) to be on DOS or Windows. When Win95 came out I was at that stage where I was in the writing part of my dissertation. I wanted to do most of that from my apartment. The department gave me a 386 because all the secretaries got new 486 machines. I also had Win95 install disks from somewhere and I saw that it could run on 386 and decided to try it. It was a disaster trying to boot and run it. I also saw a box of this RedHat Linux thing (I think it was 5.x) at the college store and installed it and it ran great. Plus, it was just like running on a mainframe, so it also felt great and natural. I was able to put off having to run on a Windows system for another six years when my new job got me a WinNT machine.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by turgid on Friday August 29 2025, @06:55AM (1 child)
That was the summer I installed Linux for the first time. I had just graduated from university and couldn't afford my own PeeCee but I did buy a big thick book that came with a Slackware CD. I had used Solaris workstations for coding my final year project and there had been a 486 running this weird free hippy thing called Linux on the network (kernel 0.99.x IIRC) and I was intrigued.
I partitioned of 80MB on the hard disk of my Dad's 486 and put Slackware on. I never looked back. I then saw through the Microsoft hype, and Windows 95 for what it really was. A year later I built my own PC (Pentium 100, 32MB RAM) fir Slackware.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Interesting) by crm114 on Wednesday September 10 2025, @02:58PM
For me it was SLS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softlanding_Linux_System [wikipedia.org]
Which later was forked into slackware. SLS was a hot mess - but it was much better than the MS stuff.
I have never regretted the decision
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rich on Friday August 29 2025, @10:00AM (2 children)
Microsoft bought the rights to "Start me up" from the Stones for their advertising. Ever since then, I thought "19th Nervous Breakdown" would have been more appropriate.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Magic Oddball on Friday August 29 2025, @11:52AM
I don't know, I think the line, "you made a grown man cry" quite appropriate given how often Windows 95 would crash or otherwise misbehave.
(Score: 3, Touché) by SomeGuy on Friday August 29 2025, @12:13PM
Probably what more Windows 95 users remember is the "Windows 95 Sucks!" parody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOwQKWiRJAA [youtube.com] (sorry about the crummy youtube link)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Friday August 29 2025, @02:20PM (5 children)
In 1995 I had a non-stock IBM XT with its motherboard replaced with a 386 and its hard drive replaced with a 40 mb faster drive (the XT came with a 10MB drive; a huge drive in 1983 when that model came out).
I was heavily into computer games; racing games, Wolfenstien, pinball, etc, and W95 was a huge clusterfuck with the old DOS games. Then, the games each had its own screen and sound requirements that required you to first reboot and reset the interrupts, as DOS was not a multitasker.
I wound up having to write a four byte executable to reboot the computer, and myriad batch files to rename files and set the interrupts, etc, run the game, reset all of the renamed files and reboot again. This made it so I could have an icon to click, then play the game, although from clicking the icon to the game's start I could go into the kitchen and refill my coffee.
Writing all those files should not have been necessary, W95 should have come up with a way to be backwards compatible. They still aren't; I should be able to run a 16 bit program on a 64 bit computer! Shitty programming is MS's forte.
And Windows has been getting steadily worse ever since. I hate Microsoft but am forced to use it.
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday August 29 2025, @04:55PM (2 children)
The obsolescence of programs is a feature, not a bug. That way they can sell you more things. Now, if only they could do away with 64-bit and get everyone onto yet another platform. Just switching everything over to ARM might be good enough, though.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Touché) by turgid on Friday August 29 2025, @07:23PM
That's OK, all the stuff I use can just be recompiled.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Touché) by mcgrew on Sunday August 31 2025, @06:51PM
I have a scanner in my basement that probably still works, but it's been years since I've had a computer with a parallel port.
While 78 rpm audio records from 1905 will still play on a brand new 2025 turntable.
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 30 2025, @02:59AM (1 child)
I don't think computers were powerful and capable enough back then to be backwards compatible with all that crap you had to deal with (resetting interrupts etc).
Many of those games did all sorts of tricks for performance and memory issues. The simpler ones probably worked no problem (as long as you had enough RAM).
It's like expecting an optimized Apple II game to work on a C64 unchanged.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Saturday August 30 2025, @05:35AM
By the time Win95 came out, a bunch of DOS programs, especially games, were using DOS/4G or DOS/4GW which handled a bunch of the memory things. My memory of the era isn't super great just because how quickly things were changing, I know it was possible to boot into DOS 7 from Win95 when necessary, but I don't recall having to do that a lot for games. But, I mostly stopped playing Win 3.x games pretty much as soon as I had Win 95 and most of the DOS stuff seemed OK with it.