Windows 95 anyone?

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29 years ago today, Windows 95 was released. Windows 95 is the first version of Microsoft Windows to include the Modern Windows Feel (Taskbar, Start M
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Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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ClearThunder, TechTango, Myst, Perturbance, Sueska, Sky, Charlie, SueW, Microfix, Rob F, Cybertooth

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I wasn’t very much into tech as such at the time, but in mid-1995 I did buy a Windows 3.11 PC from Dell at a very special price. Didn’t know it at the time, but the offer was on because they were clearing out inventory to make room for the new Windows 95 computers coming in.

Still have that PC, although it needs the attentions of a professional since the dead CMOS battery is soldered in and I don’t dare do anything with that.

My first Windows featuring the taskbar and Start menu was Windows 98. These two were brilliant UI improvements: in 3.11, I never knew what other applications were open at any given time, besides the one that filled my screen, and Program Manager was clunky to operate.

 

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Myst

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In 1995 I was already working for 27 years in IT.
At home I was using Apple IIGS pc and connected to the Internet/Bulletin boards using ISDN at 128kbit/s connection.

I bought a desktop PC with Windows 95 in 1996.

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I just remember being overawed by the upgrade from 3.1. Getting used to the Start Menu and the rest of the new GUI, etc. It was a fantastic upgrade (for me anyway), and I don’t think any subsequent new Windows versions had quite the same wow factor as that one. Happy days!

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I remember it well, mainly because of Microsoft having persuaded the Rolling Stones to let them use “Start Me Up” in their promotional ads. Having previously used CP/M, MS-DOS and Win 3.11, 95 seemed to be a bit of a leap forward. In an engineering design environment, the “serious” OS was Windows NT, which we used for CAD on 386 and then 486 workstations with “huge” 19 inch behemoth CRT screens which weighed a ton. A far cry from my home setup which has two Dell 24″ monitors.

 

Arthur J Davis
UK

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Ayjaydee wrote:

I remember it well, mainly because of Microsoft having persuaded the Rolling Stones to let them use “Start Me Up” in their promotional ads.

Microsoft paid $3 million for the rights to use “Start Me Up”.

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

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Ah yes, ‘Start me up’ – signature tune must have cost redmond a pretty penny to use in the OS..
‘rolling stones gather no moss..’ train of thought mr Gates?

Then there’s the Windows 95 startup sound composed by, none other than, Brian Eno on a mac, no less. oops!

Our intel 486DXII Overdrive 66MHz with 4mb RAM and WFW3.11 was still in use until I opted for a new 166MHz Pentium PC with Win95b (OSR2) and USB support on a 3.2Gb Quantum Bigfoot HDD a year or so later.

(Subsequent desktop devices were all custom built and upgraded by myself, yup there’s been a long list…as well as subscriptions to various PC magazines before, after and during that era)

Win98SE was my preferred with FAT32, pre-NTFS mainstream/homeuser OS releases

If debian is good enough for NASA...

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Steve, Myst, Sky

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They paid $3 million to use Start Me Up, I believe. Not at all bad for 30 years ago.

The Windows 95 startup sound, though, is still unbeaten as far as I am concerned. Maybe it is nostalgia, but it really evokes something for me.

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ClearThunder

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I remember it to be the time there was still a battle for the next desktop OS. Windows or OS/2? Although Windows 95 looked good, I set my money on the ‘superior’ OS/2…..

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Like you, I was also busy at the time having fun with OS/2 Warp on a 386/33DX with a “whopping” 4 megs of RAM. I completely skipped Windows, going though all the versions of MS-DOS until I landed on 6.22. From that, I took the leap to OS/2 Warp. I didn’t begin using Windows until Windows 98SE was released.

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I didn’t get to use it until 1997 (in our equivalent of middle school) but I loved it at the time.

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I never experienced W95 because I was somewhere within a string of Macs that started whenever the SE/30 came out (’87? ’89?) and didn’t end until 2000 when I sold what I recall as being a Blue & White G3 tower.

I didn’t build my first Intel PC to run Windows, but BeOS. In ’99 while at the shop buying all the parts to assemble that first PC I decided it would be crazy not to pick up an OEM copy of Win 98 SE along with the hardware so I could access all those games that didn’t run or ran badly on the Mac.

Fast forward 18 months or so and with BeOS floundering, Apple about to switch to a whole new OS with MacOS X, and Win 2k getting better and less buggy by the month, I decided Windows version whatever & cheap, fast commodity hardware were what suited me best for both productivity and entertainment.

That lasted for over 20 years until I bought a MacBook Air & iPad Pro to go with my iPhone and added a mini Appleverse to join my Windows dominated menagerie.

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Never ran Win95, I was on the NT3.1/3.5/3.51/4.0 workstation treadmill. Of course, I was playing with OS2 and SuSE Linux in the background.

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Got my first IBM-PC around 1982, complete with one 5-1/4″ floppy drive, keyboard, monochrome graphics adapter and composite output to a TV. Soon got a second floppy drive, a VGA adapter and a top-of-the-line Princeton color monitor. Eventually upgraded one of the floppy drives to a 5MB hard-drive which cost me $1,ooo!! It really was a copious amount of storage back in those days.

So, I’ve traveled with Microsoft for a long time: all the early versions of MS-DOS and Windows. Got Win95 on a Compaq laptop when I was living aboard my sailboat on Lake Union in Seattle.

The amount I spent back in those days for all my hardware would exceed $11,000 in today’s dollars according to an online inflation calculator. All for performance and storage that is trivial by today’s computer standards – and “trivial” is a massive understatement.

Win10 Pro x64 22H2, Win10 Home 22H2, Linux Mint + a cat with 'tortitude'.

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Ahh, thanks for the fond memories. My first PC had Windows 3.11. I just had to have the new Windows 95 operating system. I did not wait in line, but purchased it from my school bulletin board. To the best of my knowledge, the disc and key were legit, but I received a lot of criticism for not purchasing it directly from a Microsoft vendor. As fate would have it not long afterward, my new computer would not power up. I assume it may have been a power supply problem. Surprisingly I was not asked to send it back for repairs, but instead in less than a week received a brand new PC delivered to my doorstep. And Windows 95 was installed on it! Those were the good old days.

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Yup, loved it. I was doing IT on large mainframes at the time. People were talking to me about Apple. Coming from a few different RS computers and a commodore and 3.11 on a real IBM PC. Used to buy those 1″ thick “magazines” with all the info about new mobos etc etc. A fun time. And you could even call MS and talk to a dev if you had a prob.

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bassmanzam

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I bought my first Win95 machine in 1996. It was a replacement for a BBS I hosted. I remember noting how much better the OS multitasking was out of the box (for managing concurrent dialup modems) vs. Win3.x where I always had to manually adjust the timeslicing settings for each BBS node’s processor usage.

I liked Win95 right away. MSFT made upgrades until WinMe. I ended up staying on Win98 SE and NT4.x until Win2K was available. Again, real upgrades until Win8. I largely feel like MSFT has gone downhill since Win8. They have made some kernel improvements to Win10 that I like, but weighing them against the other crapware they’ve added has pushed me almost completely to Linux. At this time I have no intention of using Win11.

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Charlie, Cybertooth

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When Win 95 came out I was using a desktop that I got in 1990 with the then brand-new Win 3.0. That was the first Windows PC that I owned (I had a Mac Plus before that, but it had mostly become a dust collector by 1995). I upgraded to 3.11 well before Win 95 came out, and I eventually upgraded to Win 95 as well, but not until my PC at work was upgraded to it, and I upgraded again to Win 98 sometime before 2000. I learned it was best to keep my home PC running the same OS as the current one at work. I liked Win 95, though my memories of it are a little fuzzy now. It was around 2004 that I replaced that old PC with one running XP, and my PCs since then have run Win 7, Win 8.1, and now Win 10 Pro.

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Sky wrote:

Windows 95 startup sound. Maybe it is nostalgia, but it really evokes something for me.

Me also.

https://archive.org/details/windows95_startup_hifi

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The second computer I bought in 1997 had Win 95B and it was so much better than the Win 3.1 I had been using.  The second computer came with USB ports so I tried to use them for a USB mouse, to my dismay it wouldn’t work. That’s one thing I wish they could have put into Win 95 – USB!  I had to get Win 98 before I could use USB and even then if you bought a flash drive, you had to go on their website to get a special driver for that particular flash drive!

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Win 98 was an improvement over Win 95 but if memory serves neither was as stable as NT 4.

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EricB wrote:

Win 98 was an improvement over Win 95 but if memory serves neither was as stable as NT 4.

From what I’ve found on Wikipedia, Win98SE had a bug fix for a bug that both Win95 and Win98 had in that they would crash after being up and running for 49.7 days.

A memory overflow issue was resolved in which earlier versions of Windows 98 would crash most systems if left running for 49.7 days (equal to 2^32 milliseconds),[79] a bug that was also present on its predecessor, Windows 95.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_98#Windows_98_Second_Edition The quote above is in the middle of the second paragraph below the heading. The “[79]” in the quote above refers to reference 79 of the entire article about Windows 98. I had to insert a “^” in the quote above to indicate 2 to the 32nd power because superscript isn’t supported here.

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I have never left a system running for that length of time and so never encountered the described issue.  It sounds like the roll-over problem described at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/sysinfoapi/nf-sysinfoapi-gettickcount.

When I comment on stability I mean that Win 95/98 would hang and require a reboot more often than NT4 ever did.

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Ooeee, those were the days. I remember having just started my freshman year of college and it’s all we nerds could talk about. I ran to Wal-Mart and bought 95 and Plus and miraculously they installed on my DXII-50 with 16MB RAM (or was it 8?).   Then not soon after got my free upgrade to Office ’95 in the mail.  Very fond of those days.

Will J Stewart
Independent IT 25 years
Austin, Texas

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I was using 3.11 at home, but at work we had W95 as soon as it hit the streets and mailboxes.  I was actually turned off by the ‘Start Me Up’ TV campaign because of the ….. Start button. I’m thinking ‘ a start button?  really?’  And I had to wonder ‘what actually happens after you click Start?’  Of course, the TV commercials really didn’t show much of a desktop, and having used program manager (which I still miss, but use Fences now) for so long, I just thought the whole thing was silly. It still ran over DOS, and was also a horrible memory hog, and it seemed as if it were never satisfied with 32MB of RAM we fed it.

Like all new GUI’s since, I got used to W95 eventually.  I found it had program manager, which was a relief since it helped keep my desktop organized.  And it was easier to edit your startup programs.  But over everything else, the System Tray was about the best innovation I saw with W95.  That was a feature that was actually useful —– being able to see what programs I had open, and the time and date.

 

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Steve S.

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Remembering a funny Doonesbury comic strip from when Windows 95 first arrived.
The punchline was the printer turning itself on, and one of the characters reading the print out and commenting “It’s issuing a list of demands.”

Fortunately, I was a Mac user at the time, and dodged windows until Windows XP came along.
Those were the days: Mac OS9 and Windows XP

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Myst, Cybertooth

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