>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!
The way Windows 95 could use DOS device drivers despite being 32-bit was fairly incredible. I think that fooled a lot of people into thinking it really was running on top of DOS, when in reality, once it has booted, the reverse is the case. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071224-00/?p=24...
It’s not correct to say it was “really 16-bit”, no, but as Unauthorized Windows 95[1] eloquently demonstrates, neither was Windows 3.1 or 3.11, especially with Win32s, and Windows 95 was much more of a direct descendant of that environment that the marketing implied.
And on a more personal note, reading the descriptions of the mixed 16/32-bit architecture always makes me feel conflicted.
On one hand, the technical achievement is somewhere between genius and madness and I’m not sure on which side—not only did they ship a hypervisor in a consumer OS in 1987 (as “Windows/386”), they also flipped a live MS-DOS with an unknown complement of drivers and binary patches from running on live hardware to running inside a(n admittedly unsafe) VM, then proceeded to use those drivers and respect the patches including in applications written for Windows and not MS-DOS. I don’t think I have the sort of arrogance it takes to even think of attempting such acrobatics.
On the other hand, I was there, I grew up on computers that ran Windows 95 and 98, and I remember just how much better Windows 2000 was, how much more comfortable it was to not worry about the system crashing on you every half an hour. Perhaps 95 was a magnificent technical achievement, but it certainly didn’t feel like one to the user. And thus I continue to feel conflicted.
There’s also the question of why, exactly, was NT too heavy to run on contemporary consumer machines. You could say it was bloated, but so was Windows 95: the multiple 16/32-bit mode transitions it took to write to a file certainly weren’t free; and don’t get me started[2] about shipping a COM-based shell, realizing it was too heavy for the minimum RAM requirement, and solving that by shipping a second, stripped-down copy of COM then live-swapping the real one in its place as soon as the fake one became insufficient.
WinNT in that era was a microkernel that ran the GUI outside of kernel mode and it was just too slow and too much overhead (copying datastructures etc).
Win95 GUI subsystem relied heavily on large shared memory segments and running things in kernel mode. Less safe, but less overhead. You don't need to copy bitmaps around because the GUI can just read them straight out of app RAM.
Win95 OSR2 and Windows 98 Second Edition were actually pretty reliable, unlike early 95, but the first person I knew to own a CD burner called NT his 100-megabyte CD burning software, because 95 and 98 just weren't stable enough (and blanks still expensive enough to care) at I/O.
Kinda. There are also the 32-bit bits on top, not (AFAIU) that different from their NT4 counterparts, such as the shell, COM/OLE2, TrueType, OpenGL, etc.; the core Win16 stuff (KERNEL/USER), which the Win32 layer thunks down to and which in turn invokes DOS routines; and the VxDs that intercept various pieces of DOS/BIOS and replace them with 32-bit code (“32-bit disk access”, “32-bit file access”, etc.). Only the first of those is new to Win95.
I noticed back in the days that my FidoNet point client software ran a lot faster (actually processing a lot of messages, so IO and CPU heavy) in Windows than in DOS, which was unintuitive to me back then.
Likely 32-bit file access[1] and the caching it included? The arrangement where Windows calls 16-bit MS-DOS entry points to do I/O (including from 32-bit programs) to respect preexisting DOS drivers, network redirectors, etc., but then in 3.11+ intercepts those 16-bit entry points (including when used from 16-bit DOS programs) to use a different 32-bit I/O stack when possible... it wasn’t intuitive back then and I don’t think it any more intuitive now.
Furthermore, legacy x86 BIOS will always boot in 16-bit real mode and require transition to 32-bit protected mode. Even NT is briefly 16-bit on those platforms, and Windows 95 only remains so just a little bit longer for backwards compatibility sake. It was less of a chimera than most of us thought.
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.
I tried a beta and was unimpressed. I tried to talk my dad out of buying it because it sucked... He went to the store and bought it with 4x4M EDO RAM DIMMs.
The clerk might've been afraid showing it would put people off.
We couldn't afford to upgrade our 4MB 486 either (well, more like I wasn't allowed to) so I was stuck with Win 3.11 all the way till 1999, skipping 95 completely, skipping color (monochrome monitor).
But by '99 I was old enough to build my own PC, so I built a fancy PIII-450 box, with one of the first nVidia GPUs (RIVA TNT) with 16MB RAM (later upgraded to 32) and finally stepped into the world of fancy color graphics (new color monitor, yay), Win 98, and the world of multi-booting with Linux, QNX, BeOS and of course DOS. I had this fancy GUI boot manager (with mouse support too!), can't recall what it was called but it was so much more advanced than anything else at the time, it had a built-in partition manager and could also get past the 4-partition limit. Man, those were the days, so much cool shit to play around with.
Yeah, Windows 95 was an incredible step up. We had a Mac at home at the time, and 95 was when Windows went from an absolute joke to pretty fricken comparable to what the Mac could do.
One of my earlier memories of it back then was that _every single time I recompiled my kernel_ (which was frequent), my LILO bootloader ended up corrupted. There was just a totally broken default in whatever version that was.
SO MANY rescue boots.
Related, it took 8h to compile a kernel with 4MB of RAM. I didn't realize that was slow, honestly. I just thought that's how long it took. When I finally did get more RAM, and the system stopped swapping, and it took 12 minutes to recompile, it blew me away.
Anyway, it was fine. Well more than fine, great. Running a dozen virtual consoles (alt-f1 thru alt-f12) gave me everything i needed; interactive sessions, sessions I left logged into IRC clients, PINE for email, etc.
I didn't have enough RAM to run X Windows until later but once I did, that was a revelation as well. Remote X servers was so much more advanced than stuff we got in Windows/Mac until much much later.
In some part it was more advanced, I think windos 95 lacked TCP/IP in its first version, as microsoft tried to do a "Novell" on the LAN. To connect to the Internet there were 3rd party applications like trumpetsomething.
At that time there was the Xfree X11 implementation, before the Xorg coming, and you had to create your configuration for your GPU and monitor combination, using scripts or from scratch, the famous Xconfig. I recall the scary warning in the documentation to not mess with your monitor modelines as you could literally burn your CRTs; monitors at that time were already equipped with builtin protections, so wrong config would only result in a black screen, but every time it happened I held my breath.
There were already at that time a lot of different window managers, like FVWM, TWM and at least one or two desktop environments. I think CDE was already available for Linux in 95...
I think the first release of Windows 95 did include TCP/IP networking support. I remember using it. But I think it wasn't installed by default, so you had to go and install it separately via the control panel.
I used Trumpet WinSock with Win 3.1, but with most ISPs you had to use an emulated SLIP/PPP connection anyway. Otherwise you'd be dialing in to a shell so the advantage of the GUI was mostly lost (from the perspective of being able to use Mosaic or whatever, that is).
Ya, could be. We didn't get a copy at home for a while. Mostly, I remember when we got a new 486, which did have Windows 95. It was a multimedia machine with a CD-ROM and a fancy new copy of Myst. I remember being totally blown away.
Funny to think of W95 like some kind of luxury that a shopkeeper has to keep teenagers out, as if you were trying to test drive a Mercedes, or trying out guitars like that scene from Wayne's World (1992)
Or maybe the PC was in the back of the shop, in some non-public area that a bunch of random, inquisitive people (regardless of age) weren't welcome to visit.
Maybe the area was just trashed or otherwise unseemly, and would leave a bad impression. Maybe the shopkeeper smoked weed back there and didn't want to expose kids to Bertha, his prized six-foot bong. Who knows.
When I've worked in shops that sold electronics with a retail storefront, we tried to keep the showroom looking very nice and uncluttered. The back rooms where we repaired stuff and tinkered around with gear were very different: These were utilitarian spaces that regular customers weren't often invited to see.
Nothing particularly untoward ever went on back there, but still: There's reasons why shops (of all sizes) have interior walls. :)
"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."
-------------
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 meant you could Alt-Tab out of a word processor to look up something in your web browser without the risk of a browser crash bringing down your computer and causing you to lose everything you'd written since you last saved.
Windows 95 put an end (mostly) to the punishment of multi-tasking and changed how typical desktop users used their computers.
"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.
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.
True, although when my friend showed me PlayStation could load videos from CD ROM, I was blown away because it looked so effortless for a small system.
12 year old me didn't know who Weezer was, yet, but I knew Happy Days thanks to Nick at Nite. I was blown away, and my dad (who was the reason I knew Happy Days) thought I was crazy because he had no idea what it was. It didn't just feel like magic, it was magic. A whole music video right there on my Packard Bell.
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.
But yes, Win NT was the real game changer in Windows universe back then; if they hadnt made the switch, we would still have a tuned Win98/ME without proper multiuser account tenanting etc.
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!
That's funny. Somehow it completely escaped my notice.
I lived on the Eastside at the time, and I remember it being all over the news that Bill and Steve were running all over town in someone's 911 (I forget whether it was Bill or Steve's), blasting "start me up" and going to a bunch of launch parties at software stores.
^that's "CONGRATULATIONS w95" ... didn't see it at first ;)
90s Apple snark alongside full page ads in the press with lines like "Introducing Windows 95. It lets you use more than eight characters to name your files." "It has a trash can you can open and take things out of again." "It lets you drop files anywhere you want on the desktop." "Imagine that."
But where were they really?
Meanwhile we do remember the giant Windows 95 Start button banner on the CN Tower in Toronto. Marketing. Frenzy.
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.
> In a year-over-year view not much changes, but decade-over-decade is quite a different story.
I think this is the completely wrong takeaway. You are lumping in two very different 15 year periods into your 30 year view and giving undue weight to the latter half. Year-over-year in the 90s everything was changing. Decade over decade, 2013 to 2023 was basically unchanged. Move forward a bit, 2016 to 2026 and the only interesting computing development has been LLMs. They're neat, but 1995 to 2005 was way, way more interesting.
If you have 90 minutes with nothing else to do I highly recommend giving the launch event with Jay Leno a watch.. it's really something unique. https://youtu.be/_JzfROUDsK0
This might just be because it's a demo, but man are things ever fast... they open up a document and it just instantly comes up. They load a video and bam, instant. There's a little segment where Bill Gates is showing off opening up multiple instances of Excel and they open up so quickly. I tried opening up Excel on my desktop PC and the speed is nowhere close to what this video is showing. I open up a document nowadays and there's a splash screen, there's some lag as the application checks if there's an update, the application appears and the layout starts to jitter and flicker... none of that is in this demo.
Obviously some of this is for show, but even still it indicates people cared about having a very smooth and snappy user experience back then and that it was absolutely important to showcase performance. Somewhere along the way developers just quietly agreed that latency is the user's problem.
> I remember being a big OS/2 user/fan and thinking surely everyone would realize that Win95 was inferior
Power of advertising.
If you remember 1995, the advertising for Win95 was huge. Really really huge. Including adverts at sports stadiums, in fashion magazines and the like where nobody would have thought about advertising an operating system FFS! People were buying copies of Win95 who didn't even have a computer because they wanted to be 'part of it'.
By contrast, I only ever remember seeing an advert for OS/2 in a single computer magazine.
Yeah IBM really fumbled OS/2 badly, it was rock solid compared to Windows but the only places I really saw it used were at the old "true blue" companies that bought absolutely everything from mainframes to desktops to printers from IBM.
Even their "totally cool way to run your computer" campaign for OS/2 Warp pretty much fell flat. That was the last gasp, never heard about OS/2 after that.
They had it all: Lines of dependable PC hardware, an excellent operating system that was much more advanced than what people were used to, and they were even selling a cost-competitive CPU (the 6x86) with their branding soon-enough.
But even with a properly-big marketing budget they just couldn't fit it together.
It would have made sense that a person could go to Sears or something, and buy an IBM-branded computer with IBM's CPU and with IBM's flagship operating system running out-of-the-box.
As far as I know, that was never a thing that happened.
---
I ran OS/2 Warp 3 for awhile -- in text mode at first, because I couldn't afford enough RAM to run the GUI. It worked; I had multiple computers online concurrently with the InJoy software from F/X Communications. I was playing videos, chatting on IRC, browsing the web, and reading Usenet with FreeAgent all at the same time, with multiple hard drives combined into a single namespace with LVM. It was running GNU utilities and other Unix-ey things and had a local rootless X server in the form of Humingbird's eXceed.
It was a fun time to do interesting things with computers. Software was still tight enough to get these things done with perhaps whole dozens of megabytes of RAM.
A good friend of mine transitioned his shop full of PCs and terminals (which had been based around IGC's VM/386, running MS-DOS programs from a shared box) to OS/2 Warp around the time it came out.
OS/2 worked well-enough for him that he kept using it until 2018 when he sold the business and retired, though it had been marginalized to VMs running in Linux by then.
But that worked well and provided great continuity: All the little programs and features and bits of custom software (with customer data) that flowed well when they were implemented in the early 1990s continued to flow well until the end.
IBM's PCs were dependable but came at a premium price that was undercut by PC clones. OS/2 might have been superior but it had higher system requirements ($$$) and itself came at a premium price that was undercut by Windows 9x. At the end of the day, it was all about the price.
(Linux, being free as in beer, did the same to Windows Server and the other UNIXes not many years after.)
I remember that campaign, me and a couple of college buddies convinced an IBM rep that we were an OS/2 User's Group and they sent us a crate full of Warp T-shirts, posters and buttons.
Kind of but not really. As I understand it some of the OS/2 dev team at Microsoft was involved in NT (after MS and IBM stopped working on OS/2 together) but they aren't the same code. The NT core is more closely related to DEC VMS than to OS/2. It can be confusing because the name OS/2 was applied to things that are NT at certain points along the way, and NT did have an OS/2 compatibility layer
It was amazing, I was doing my first year in software engineering at the time and it felt like the future, the multimedia was impressive.
At the same time Linux was really getting off the ground (RedHat released about then) and if your hardware supported it it felt rock solid. The multi user experience was amazing and it made you feel like a wizard.
I got to play with Qnx's bootable disk at about that time too. It came with a beautiful manual explaining the architecture.
I had a summer visiting professor job at Intel at the time doing signal processing. They set me up to use MatLab under Windows95. I installed Linux and code from Numerical Recipes to get around various limitations. Andy Grove had just banned Macs because they didn't use Intel chips. They believed the WinTel duopoly was giving them "more money than God." (A phrase that I first heard at Intel that summer)
I was so excited to install this and finally be rid of Win 3.11. I was 13 or so when this came out and really just coming into my own with IT stuff, building PCs and whatnot. It was really mind blowing back then.
Installing Windows 95 just worked, installing the first few times Linux bricked the only computer in the household. This made me delay switching to Linux for the next 15 years.
When Windows Vista got released, I bought a retail copy (from a real store!) to install on my daily-use XP laptop. I'd heard that it was a very different way of doing things, and because I was doing some freelance computer support around that time I felt I should spend some quality time using and understanding it.
It seemed better than Windows XP in just about every way. Other than an absolute fight getting a driver installed for a Prolific USB to serial adapter (PL2303, maybe?) that had previously been working well, I didn't really experience any issues.
Me and my colleagues had been downloading preview versions for months and it was such a revelation compared to 3.11. Except, it was (under the covers) still MS-DOS based.
I can remember having fun editing several bytes of the GDI.EXE or USER.EXE with a hex-editor when a colleague went to bathroom. You should've seen their faces when they got back and the screen turned funny colors.
Suffice to say we all installed Windows NT Workstation when we had the chance because it was much more stable.
I still remember some kid at school swearing that if the release date slipped into 1996 that Microsoft would get the US government to keep the calendar 1995.
A random memory from that time is that we went to a computer shop with my cousin (she was much older than me) and there was a publicly available PC.
She removed a plastic cover from the keyboard (does anyone remember those covers? They dont make them anymore due to cost cutting) and then... she wrote some magic and a demoscene demo popped up on the screen.
Now I think it was MSDos so she opened Norton Commander and simply opened some demoscene demo.
I wonder what was the name of that demo (or screensaver?)
It was a bird view of 3d animated green-blue water.. made from some surfaces.
There have been so many Desktop Environments over the years, but I still feel that Windows 95 perfected the desktop experience.
Even today, if you look at MacOS, it's just the Windows 95 interface, with the taskbar moved to the top of the screen, open tasks kept on the bottom of the screen, and instead of a Start menu, there's Spotlight Search. Same thing, messier execution (just to be different).
I remember feeling like I was becoming obsolete by Windows 95. I had built up a skillset getting Windows 3.1 configured properly and connected to this new thing called "the internet" (Trumpet Winsock!). Then Windows 95 came out with everything built-in - TCP/IP, browser, email, and most of all, plug-and-play.
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!
And on a more personal note, reading the descriptions of the mixed 16/32-bit architecture always makes me feel conflicted.
On one hand, the technical achievement is somewhere between genius and madness and I’m not sure on which side—not only did they ship a hypervisor in a consumer OS in 1987 (as “Windows/386”), they also flipped a live MS-DOS with an unknown complement of drivers and binary patches from running on live hardware to running inside a(n admittedly unsafe) VM, then proceeded to use those drivers and respect the patches including in applications written for Windows and not MS-DOS. I don’t think I have the sort of arrogance it takes to even think of attempting such acrobatics.
On the other hand, I was there, I grew up on computers that ran Windows 95 and 98, and I remember just how much better Windows 2000 was, how much more comfortable it was to not worry about the system crashing on you every half an hour. Perhaps 95 was a magnificent technical achievement, but it certainly didn’t feel like one to the user. And thus I continue to feel conflicted.
There’s also the question of why, exactly, was NT too heavy to run on contemporary consumer machines. You could say it was bloated, but so was Windows 95: the multiple 16/32-bit mode transitions it took to write to a file certainly weren’t free; and don’t get me started[2] about shipping a COM-based shell, realizing it was too heavy for the minimum RAM requirement, and solving that by shipping a second, stripped-down copy of COM then live-swapping the real one in its place as soon as the fake one became insufficient.
[1] https://www.os2museum.com/wp/book-review-unauthorized-window...
[2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040705-00/?p=38...
Win95 GUI subsystem relied heavily on large shared memory segments and running things in kernel mode. Less safe, but less overhead. You don't need to copy bitmaps around because the GUI can just read them straight out of app RAM.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_32-bit_file_access
When Windows didn't have a driver for some hardware, it would tell you it's "using 16-bit driver" (or was it DOS driver?). So it's all 32-bit.
Hah, this reminds me of Win32s on Windows 3.1x...
The clerk refused to show us. I'm still irritated about it.
The clerk might've been afraid showing it would put people off.
My 486 only had 4MB of RAM and I couldn't afford the $400-$500 to take it to 16GB so I actually switched to Linux in August of 95, amusingly enough.
But by '99 I was old enough to build my own PC, so I built a fancy PIII-450 box, with one of the first nVidia GPUs (RIVA TNT) with 16MB RAM (later upgraded to 32) and finally stepped into the world of fancy color graphics (new color monitor, yay), Win 98, and the world of multi-booting with Linux, QNX, BeOS and of course DOS. I had this fancy GUI boot manager (with mouse support too!), can't recall what it was called but it was so much more advanced than anything else at the time, it had a built-in partition manager and could also get past the 4-partition limit. Man, those were the days, so much cool shit to play around with.
Perhaps you meant 16MB, because an 80486 processor didn't have a snowball's chance of addressing 16GB of real memory?
I remember reading about it those magazines, but got a love cd much much later
SO MANY rescue boots.
Related, it took 8h to compile a kernel with 4MB of RAM. I didn't realize that was slow, honestly. I just thought that's how long it took. When I finally did get more RAM, and the system stopped swapping, and it took 12 minutes to recompile, it blew me away.
Anyway, it was fine. Well more than fine, great. Running a dozen virtual consoles (alt-f1 thru alt-f12) gave me everything i needed; interactive sessions, sessions I left logged into IRC clients, PINE for email, etc.
I didn't have enough RAM to run X Windows until later but once I did, that was a revelation as well. Remote X servers was so much more advanced than stuff we got in Windows/Mac until much much later.
At that time there was the Xfree X11 implementation, before the Xorg coming, and you had to create your configuration for your GPU and monitor combination, using scripts or from scratch, the famous Xconfig. I recall the scary warning in the documentation to not mess with your monitor modelines as you could literally burn your CRTs; monitors at that time were already equipped with builtin protections, so wrong config would only result in a black screen, but every time it happened I held my breath.
There were already at that time a lot of different window managers, like FVWM, TWM and at least one or two desktop environments. I think CDE was already available for Linux in 95...
Maybe the area was just trashed or otherwise unseemly, and would leave a bad impression. Maybe the shopkeeper smoked weed back there and didn't want to expose kids to Bertha, his prized six-foot bong. Who knows.
When I've worked in shops that sold electronics with a retail storefront, we tried to keep the showroom looking very nice and uncluttered. The back rooms where we repaired stuff and tinkered around with gear were very different: These were utilitarian spaces that regular customers weren't often invited to see.
Nothing particularly untoward ever went on back there, but still: There's reasons why shops (of all sizes) have interior walls. :)
-------------
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 meant you could Alt-Tab out of a word processor to look up something in your web browser without the risk of a browser crash bringing down your computer and causing you to lose everything you'd written since you last saved.
Windows 95 put an end (mostly) to the punishment of multi-tasking and changed how typical desktop users used their computers.
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...
https://nand2mario.github.io/posts/2026/z486/ https://ei2030.github.io/FemtoTX/#about One can make Windows 95 solar powered again. The first time was at ISSCC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Juy8xP-hUtA
They met during an SNL taping where she was performing "What I Am", which is like the most 90s 80s song ever.
I was soooo excited when my family bought a PC with 95 on it. My best friend, who had Windows 3.1, was so jealous.
However the most wonderful thing about software written at that time was it was written with care and skill.
But yes, Win NT was the real game changer in Windows universe back then; if they hadnt made the switch, we would still have a tuned Win98/ME without proper multiuser account tenanting etc.
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!
I lived on the Eastside at the time, and I remember it being all over the news that Bill and Steve were running all over town in someone's 911 (I forget whether it was Bill or Steve's), blasting "start me up" and going to a bunch of launch parties at software stores.
90s Apple snark alongside full page ads in the press with lines like "Introducing Windows 95. It lets you use more than eight characters to name your files." "It has a trash can you can open and take things out of again." "It lets you drop files anywhere you want on the desktop." "Imagine that."
But where were they really?
Meanwhile we do remember the giant Windows 95 Start button banner on the CN Tower in Toronto. Marketing. Frenzy.
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.
I think this is the completely wrong takeaway. You are lumping in two very different 15 year periods into your 30 year view and giving undue weight to the latter half. Year-over-year in the 90s everything was changing. Decade over decade, 2013 to 2023 was basically unchanged. Move forward a bit, 2016 to 2026 and the only interesting computing development has been LLMs. They're neat, but 1995 to 2005 was way, way more interesting.
This changed with OSR2 I believe, when they started bundling IE4.
That makes me wonder what the first pirated song was that was ripped to MP3 and provided for download over the Internet...
Obviously some of this is for show, but even still it indicates people cared about having a very smooth and snappy user experience back then and that it was absolutely important to showcase performance. Somewhere along the way developers just quietly agreed that latency is the user's problem.
Power of advertising.
If you remember 1995, the advertising for Win95 was huge. Really really huge. Including adverts at sports stadiums, in fashion magazines and the like where nobody would have thought about advertising an operating system FFS! People were buying copies of Win95 who didn't even have a computer because they wanted to be 'part of it'.
By contrast, I only ever remember seeing an advert for OS/2 in a single computer magazine.
Even their "totally cool way to run your computer" campaign for OS/2 Warp pretty much fell flat. That was the last gasp, never heard about OS/2 after that.
They had it all: Lines of dependable PC hardware, an excellent operating system that was much more advanced than what people were used to, and they were even selling a cost-competitive CPU (the 6x86) with their branding soon-enough.
But even with a properly-big marketing budget they just couldn't fit it together.
It would have made sense that a person could go to Sears or something, and buy an IBM-branded computer with IBM's CPU and with IBM's flagship operating system running out-of-the-box.
As far as I know, that was never a thing that happened.
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I ran OS/2 Warp 3 for awhile -- in text mode at first, because I couldn't afford enough RAM to run the GUI. It worked; I had multiple computers online concurrently with the InJoy software from F/X Communications. I was playing videos, chatting on IRC, browsing the web, and reading Usenet with FreeAgent all at the same time, with multiple hard drives combined into a single namespace with LVM. It was running GNU utilities and other Unix-ey things and had a local rootless X server in the form of Humingbird's eXceed.
It was a fun time to do interesting things with computers. Software was still tight enough to get these things done with perhaps whole dozens of megabytes of RAM.
A good friend of mine transitioned his shop full of PCs and terminals (which had been based around IGC's VM/386, running MS-DOS programs from a shared box) to OS/2 Warp around the time it came out.
OS/2 worked well-enough for him that he kept using it until 2018 when he sold the business and retired, though it had been marginalized to VMs running in Linux by then.
But that worked well and provided great continuity: All the little programs and features and bits of custom software (with customer data) that flowed well when they were implemented in the early 1990s continued to flow well until the end.
(Linux, being free as in beer, did the same to Windows Server and the other UNIXes not many years after.)
Linux did not substitute for Windows Server to any great degree until quite recently. Commercial Unix, yes.
At the same time Linux was really getting off the ground (RedHat released about then) and if your hardware supported it it felt rock solid. The multi user experience was amazing and it made you feel like a wizard.
I got to play with Qnx's bootable disk at about that time too. It came with a beautiful manual explaining the architecture.
There was Windows NT and OS2/Warp too.
I didn't play a lot with the BSD variants.
It was truly a magical time for OS enthusiasts.
When Windows Vista got released I switched over to Mac.
It seemed better than Windows XP in just about every way. Other than an absolute fight getting a driver installed for a Prolific USB to serial adapter (PL2303, maybe?) that had previously been working well, I didn't really experience any issues.
I can remember having fun editing several bytes of the GDI.EXE or USER.EXE with a hex-editor when a colleague went to bathroom. You should've seen their faces when they got back and the screen turned funny colors.
Suffice to say we all installed Windows NT Workstation when we had the chance because it was much more stable.
Microsoft dominated the 90s like no other.
She removed a plastic cover from the keyboard (does anyone remember those covers? They dont make them anymore due to cost cutting) and then... she wrote some magic and a demoscene demo popped up on the screen.
Now I think it was MSDos so she opened Norton Commander and simply opened some demoscene demo. I wonder what was the name of that demo (or screensaver?)
It was a bird view of 3d animated green-blue water.. made from some surfaces.
For a kid who did know any english DOS was magic
Even today, if you look at MacOS, it's just the Windows 95 interface, with the taskbar moved to the top of the screen, open tasks kept on the bottom of the screen, and instead of a Start menu, there's Spotlight Search. Same thing, messier execution (just to be different).
That may be true, but certainly not because macOS got inspired by Windows, rather because Windows 95 was inspired by NeXTStep.