Windows 95 turns 30: The OS that made people line up for blocks
Windows 95 released August 24, 1995
On August 24, 1995, Windows 95 launched amid unprecedented hype, with customers lining up for a Microsoft product. This retrospective from a former Best Buy salesperson recalls the anticipation, the hardware requirements that often necessitated costly upgrades, and the OS's lasting impact. Despite not being a fully 32-bit system, its improved stability and usability helped it succeed, cementing Windows' dominance and leaving a formidable legacy.
The idea of people lining up for blocks for a Microsoft product sounds like a bit of a joke today, and the more time goes on, the bigger of a joke it becomes.
- 1970-01-01
>It wasn’t truly a full 32-bit operating system, because there was still MS-DOS at the core if you dug deep enough.
Yes it wasn't truly 32-bit but the core was not MS-DOS. It was a hybrid. The Win95 kernel was 32-bit and drove almost all of the system, including memory. 16-bit DOS was used as a launching pad and then it's job shifted to handle 16-bit graphics and other hardware that was unable to work with the new 32-bit kernel. So you booted 16-bit DOS, and as WIN.EXE executed, the system transmorphed from 16-bit into a 32-bit (kernel) OS but some of that core 16-bit driver code was designed to remain welded onto it. Even more impressive is how you could dissolve this 32-bit level and return the system to 16-bit DOS. That remains a very impressive achievement 30 years later. Happy anniversary Windows 95!
- ramijames
I remember being 15, that August. We were excited for this release. My dorky friends and I went to a local computer store and tried to get the clerk to show us what Windows 95 was like. He had a pre-release version installed on one of their computers. I don't even remember how we knew.
The clerk refused to show us. I'm still irritated about it.
- scottious
My 10 year old brain was blown when I discovered the Buddy Holly music video on the Windows 95 CD. I just couldn't comprehend the idea of a music video being played on a computer. Felt like magic. Such different times.
- initramfs
"The box stated that it required a 386DX or better processor, 4 MB of more of RAM, and approximately 50 MB of disk space. Nothing stopped you from installing it on a 386SX. I know because I tried it, mostly out of morbid curiosity. It took forever to install. Booting took forever too. And once it managed to boot, it took forever to do anything.
But if you had a system that met the minimum stated requirements, the experience was still pretty terrible.
The minimum most of us recommended at the time for acceptable performance was a 486 faster than 33 MHz, 8 MB of RAM, and 100 MB of disk space. And some will take issue with that today, because the experience on a machine like that still wasn’t very good. You had to draw the line somewhere, and then, as now, different people had different definitions of words like “minimum” and “acceptable.”
You really needed a Pentium-class machine to be happy with Win95, and I think Win95 did a lot to goose Pentium sales for Intel. If you could afford a 100 or 120 MHz Pentium with 16 or 32 MB of RAM and at least a 540 megabyte hard drive, you were much happier with it."
I had a Pentium 100MHz, and 8MB was acceptable, although I had a friend with 16MB and a 166MHz, and the grass always seemed greener. He was able to play Tomb Raider.
I make a lot of retro videos and tested a 386 on 4MB of RAM here:
https://github.com/hatonthecat/linux_distro_tests#9-26-24-wi...
- beloch
"They could multitask, but it wasn’t modern pre-emptive multitasking. Instead, the applications cooperated rather than the operating system being able to hand out resources. This meant a poorly behaved program could do a lot more to gum up the works in 1994 than it can do today, since the operating system just had to trust all of the programs to cooperate fairly."
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The importance of this should not be understated.
Under Windows 3.1, or MacOS, programs could be written to periodically hand control back to the OS, allowing the OS to then hand-off control to another program, thus allowing cooperative multi-tasking. However, every single program involved had to be written to do this. If you ran a program that was older or not written for multi-tasking, it'd assume complete control of your machine until it terminated. Even multi-tasking friendly programs would hang your machine if they went into an infinite loop. There was no hope of appeal to the almighty task manager! The result was Windows (and MacOS prior to OS X) were simply not very good at multi-tasking, so users mostly didn't do it.
Preemptive multi-tasking allowed the OS to forcibly take back control from programs. Programs would be given slices of CPU time and didn't have to worry about handing control back, because the OS would simply take it back. If a program went into an infinite loop, it would continue getting slices of the CPU's attention, but so too would other programs and the OS itself. This […]
- throwaway_20357
Shouldn't we rather celebrate the GA of Windows NT4 Workstation on August 24, 1996? It was 30 years ago and an amazing OS that at least for some tasks made me switch back from SuSe Linux.
- billygoat
I was living in Seattle that summer, and Apple had plastered the city buses with big ads that week, and they simply stated,
C:\ONGRTLNS.W95
The article left out the triumphant arrival of long filenames.
That summer also marked the end of all my attempts to get friends and coworkers to switch to OS/2... although my linux experiments were ramping up at about the same time. Heady days!
- Insanity
Kind of insane to think about how in the span of 30 years we went from Win95 / DOOM-style games to UE5 and effective (to some degree) large language models. In a year-over-year view not much changes, but decade-over-decade is quite a different story.
When 95 released, smartphones weren't a thing, internet wasn't common for households, and downloading an album would take you a day if you were one of the lucky ones with an internet connection lol.