1y ago

28 years ago, Windows 95 entered general availability (August 24th 1995)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.capebreton.social/post/347724

Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995, almost three months after the release of Windows NT 3.51.
Windows 95 is the first version of Microsoft Windows to include taskbar, start button, and accessing the internet. Windows 95 merged Microsoft's formerly separate MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows products, and featured significant improvements over its predecessor, most notably in the graphical user interface (GUI) and in its simplified "plug-and-play" features. There were also major changes made to the core components of the operating system, such as moving from a mainly cooperatively multitasked 16-bit architecture to a 32-bit preemptive multitasking architecture, at least when running only 32-bit protected mode applications.
Accompanied by an extensive marketing campaign,Windows 95 introduced numerous functions and features that were featured in later Windows versions, and continue in modern variations to this day, such as the taskbar, notification area, and the "Start" button. It is considered to be one of the biggest and most important products in the personal computing industry.

102 comments

Better than Windows 11 in many aspects:
Runs on 4 MB of RAM
Less bloatware
Less invasion of privacy
Does not require TPM, Secure Boot etc
No ads
Not forcing you to use Edge, Bing, Cortana, or other random crap
- 16 bit
  requires a reboot even for changing your IP address
  
  32 bit
  But yes, rebooting for everything, including changing monitor resolution was a pain
  
  Also, the part no one ever brings up: No per-program volume control. Ugh. That was so actively irritating until they finally added it (was it in XP? or not until 7?)
  
  Do you change your IP address, like, ever? DHCP and forget over here in my homelab. I do have like four reservations but they never change.
- A horse is better than a car in many aspects:
  eco friendly fuel emissions
  built in gps, FSD, and autopilot mode
  naturally low maintenance
  built in companion
  traffic jams are a breeze
  
  Cave art dramatically outperforms television
  • no streaming fees
  • no ads
  • rocks have very wide adoption rates
  • cave art can last thousands of years without power
  • content is auto-saved without a dvr
  • cave art programming is tangible, tv programming is not
  
  naturally low maintenance
  I see you have never had to care for a horse before.
  
  Horses low maintenance? Sure I listened to a podcast ones about the worst designed animals and the horse was up there.
  Like if you own a horse it’s really hard to keep them alive if they injure pretty much any part.
  
  NI! (natural intelligence). The best unsupervised learning in existence
  
  Relevant, catchy music video
  I don't need insurance, I don't need no parkin space
  and if you try to clamp my horse he'll kick you in the face
  I don't pay no tax, fuck NCT
  you'll arrive in style if you ride with me
- Don't forget great USB 1.1 support
  
  iirc usb wasn’t supported in the first win95 version?
  
  That was Win95 OSR2, but yrah
- Runs on 4 MB of RAM
  Lol, Win95 became crash prone when you hit the memory limit.
  
  Most OSes do.
- Buddy Holly and chips challenge
- Well. 4 MB was a bit of a stretch. I remember buying a RAM upgrade to 8 MB to get it to run decently. Cost me 200 DM on top of the 200 for the Windows upgrade. It was a huge leap compared to Windows 3.1, though. And this stuff just was a lot more expensive back in the day.

This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Seriously though, this is the first properly good UI for a desktop computer. Mac OS (or I guess Macintosh OS at the time) was okay, but reliant on the global menu and weird drop-downs. Windows kept everything self-contained. Even multi-window programs tended to use the "multiple document interface," i.e., windows inside windows. Tabs weren't really a thing yet.
It also crashed if you looked at it funny and had the antivirus capabilities of warm cheese. But there's damn good reasons Windows 7 was the same experience, extended, rather than replaced. It's more-or-less what I style Linux to look like. And in light of that I'm kinda pissed off any OS ever struggles to remain responsive, when this relic ran smoothly on one stick of RAM that's smaller than my CPU's cache.
- Mac OS (…) was okay, but reliant on the global menu and weird drop-downs.
  See Fitt’s law for why the Mac’s menu bar is the way it is.
  
  Thoroughly familiar with it; don't care. The global menu has always been goofy because of the invisible relation to some open window. Usually a small window floating out in middle of the desktop, because Mac OS took forever to adopt any concept of "maximize." I'm still not sure they do it right.
  
  In its basic form, Fitts's law says that targets a user has to hit should be as big as possible.
  Dear god, my biggest beef with using a smart phone is that UI designers 1) love to have tiny buttons for shit, and 2) the tappable areas for those buttons are almost never made larger than their tiny graphics, so it's a removed to actually tap them.
  I used to be a mobile app developer, and when I wrote apps by myself I would always expand the tappable areas so they were easy to hit with fat fingers. My last job was working for a huge cable company (maybe the name rhymes with "bombast") and whenever I expanded the tappable area of a tiny button the UI designers would pitch a fit and insist that that not be done. Management would agree with them on the grounds that expanding the tappable area would require too much time to implement - and then they'd order me to spend even more time un-implementing it.
- Certainly windows took inspiration from the apple button in the upper left, but changed a few things so they wouldn't get caught copying.
  
  There's only so many corners.
  
  I think they actually tried to take MS to court, but lost since they had stolen the ideas from Xerox in the first place.
- It really was a game changer. I remember the excitement of getting it for the first time after using windows 3.1.
- The full screen app contained in a single window was great! I hated the Mac eat fo many windows floating around. My ADHD was so overwhelmed by all the tiny windows instead of a clear one.
- mac os sucked ass

I remember the install CD had the Weezer “Buddy Holly” video on it. It felt pretty fancy
- And "Good Times" by Edie Brickell, but for some reason nobody ever remembers that lol
  
  Yeah, that was so cool. Watching a whole music video on a PC. Truly revolutionary.
  
  Microsoft made no point to credit Edie Brickell in that video clip, they only credited Geffen Records.
  I figure many if not most people probably didn't even know who she was, other than the pretty woman that sang the nice relaxing song in the street.
- I remember the stack of floppy disks for Windows 95 installation.

As someone who was working in IT support at the time - YAY! NO MORE FUCKING TRUMPET WINSOCK!
- Oh god quit bringing up the pain!
  IRQ conflicts when trying to install a modem and a soundcard!
  
  I was configuring COM ports just last week. Turns out the software is so old that it only supports COM1.

I remember installing it on my PC using a large stack of 3.5" floppy disks. It was great - a big upgrade from Windows 3.11.
- Yeah I remember that - it needed 13 discs and it always failed the last one and I would have to start all over.
  
  I already had one of those fancy new-fangled CD-ROM drives. You could get a computer magazine with a cover-CD and it had all the patches for all current games and major software packages. So cool.

I still have my Windows 95 "Start me up" Pogs!
- You mean those little discs that you throw a bigger, heaver disc on top of? You've gotta share a pic sometime
  
  I'm currently searching boxes. No one was taking them so they gave me like 20 of them.

And this marked the very first and last time I felt a sense of genuine excitement about an OS upgrade.
- You weren't stoked for XP? XP is the OS that got me into computing. Before XP computers were a novelty to me. When XP came out they finally seemed powerful enough to accomplish cool things with.
  
  Launch of Windows 7 was pretty exciting too. Felt very modern, especially with the updated Aero UI.
  
  Nah not really. Win2k pro worked pretty well for me
  
  I learned a lot with XP because it required constant trouble shooting. Was a buggy mess imo. I was more excited about hardware advancements and cool games at that time.
- MacOS X was freaking huge tho

My dad barely knew how to run things in windows 3.1 but he still regrets the day he installed windows 95 because it was all downhill from there when it came to him knowing what was going on.

I had to upgrade for the warcraft 2 level editor what a time to be alive!

Least bloated Windows version
- MS-DOS?
  
  That's not Windows, though.

Microsoft Windows 95 Launch Video - Start me Up
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=P0AJM6HMYjM
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
- I like how they selectively edited that so that you don't hear Mick singing "You make a grown man cry"....
  
  Microsoft marketing hasn't gotten any better about song choices. A few years ago their ads had soft bleep-bloop tunes and "go baby, go baby, yeah we're right behind you."
  The song is "Cherry Lips," by Garbage. It's the twink anthem.
  And it's still not as tone-deaf as whichever Bill Hicks target picked out "hey ho let's go" from the god-damned "Blitzkrieg Bop."

C:/con/con
- Haha I remember this. People who downvote you probably are too young to remember.

You make a grown man cry:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sH6lopuzdc
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=4sH6lopuzdc
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

I’m actually surprised it’s only 23 years go

102 comments