Windows 95 is 25 Years Old Today!!!

Daniel_Doty

"stinger608"
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Yeppers, today, August 24th 2020 marks the 25th anniversary of the release of Windows 95.

Wow, just doesn't seem that long ago. I remember having just purchased an amazing Packard Bell system that had a Pentium chip running 8 megs of ram......8 megs not 8 gigs. LOL

Was rocking some of the new games out and could run Quake 2 without any issues :ROFLMAO:

Happen to catch an article on The Verge that reminded me of this big milestone.

Here's a video of the Microsoft Windows 95 launch.


This was the start of the Windows Start Menu and look how far it has came since the launch of Windows 95, 25 years ago today!!!!!

Couldn't have been a better song for the launch in the day. :p
 
I remember installing this off something like 13 3.5"

Then someone had the CD, and it had freakin' music videos on it. Buddy Holly and ... something else ... and that was just the hippest thing ever.

It was glorious. The only thing I really didn't like about W95 was that hideous 90's green color (#008080) that was the default.

I have fond memories of the Registry corrupting (nearly) every time you missed doing a safe shutdown.
 
My dad had just bought a new PC the year prior that came with a CD drive, so we had the CD version. I remember having nothing but problems with 95 in the first year. He wanted to stick with 3.11, but he needed 95 for work. All the games we had still needed to boot into DOS to run. I actually can't remember the first game we had that ran natively in Windows. I want to say it was one of the NASCAR Racing games.
 
Too old for me. Never used it. The first version I used was Windows 98.
 
Oh my... First windows system I installed was Windows 3.1. My how times have changed! Hell... I was a DOS kid, and was lucky enough to get involved with NOVELL Netware back when it was relevant.

When I was in college, we had a DEC PDP 11/44 with a punch card reader. THOSE were the days!

And yes... I did walk to school up hill through 12 feet of snow.. BOTH WAYS!!! And we liked it.. We were HAPPY!
 
Brian_B said:
Microsoft does have more than it's fair share of screwups and dropped balls, but when they get something right they knock it out of the park.

I'd say XP and Win7 were both pretty well received.
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Because they didn't change anything significant. The UI is basically the same that was introduced in 95. in XP and in Windows 7, even in Windows 10 now. Whenever they tried to change it it was a failure. Even the small changes they make to w10 in the updates are all in the wrong direction. The current Windows 10 UI is significantly worse than the one in Windows7. And let's just forget 8 entirely, it's better for everyone.
 
Windows 98 was my first Windows experience. Still brings back good memories for me. I hadn't been on a computer since my old Commodore 64 days so it was pretty cool seeing all that cool new tech at my fingertips lol.
 
My first computer came shipped with Windows ME (I think it was just a special edition of Windows 98, maybe) which I deleted rather quickly to install Windows 2000 Professional. I don't think I ever bothered with Windows 98 and I know for sure I've never had or used Windows 95.
 
LeRoy_Blanchard said:
My first computer came shipped with Windows ME (I think it was just a special edition of Windows 98, maybe) which I deleted rather quickly to install Windows 2000 Professional. I don't think I ever bothered with Windows 98 and I know for sure I've never had or used Windows 95.
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Windows ME was a legit new windows release, it was windows 98 basically filled with bloatware. It had many of the problems that the windows store has now (creating random directories on system drive and eating space) MS Apparently never learns even from their own mistakes.

I experienced with Windows 2000, but never used it as my primary OS, it was just not good for gaming, lots of games had compatibility issues with it. So I went straight to XP from 98 as my primary OS. I started off with DOS 5.0 -> 6.22 ->Win95 OSR2 -> Win 98 ->XP -> 7 -> 10.
 
I guess I was lucky as I never had any issues gaming on my Win2k Pro system. Granted, my selection of games wasn't all that vast as I primarily stuck to playing Unreal Tournament almost exclusively. I did play other games occasionally, mostly during LAN Parties which included games like Starcraft, Serious Sam, Counter-Strike, and other games I can't recall off hand we used to play.

I then went from Win2k Pro to Windows XP (not at first, took till late 2005 to early 2006 because I started using Windows XP and only then I started because I had a Dell i9300 laptop that was shipped with XP. So I gave it a shot. After about 1 - 2 years after the release of Windows 7 I started using it. I have only started using Windows 10 in the last month as a primary system. I've had Windows 10 since first gen Ryzen laptops came out, but I hardly ever use it.
 
MadMummy76 said:
Last time MS got something right.
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Windows 95 was a nightmare. Basically, take the driver issues Vista had and multiply them by 10. Most devices that the OS inherited were not plug-and-play and required a lot of work to get working. I recall that our printer absolutely did not work and we would reboot into DOS just to print a document. The installation payload was also completely new, so many programs being released would not properly install or uninstall themselves. This caused registry and startup issues to pileup until your PC basically became a brick, since 95 was so sensitive to registry changes. 95 became somewhat livable when OSR2 was released, but at that point Windows 98 was right around the corner.

95 set the standard for years to come with the UI, sure, but everything else was an absolute nightmare. I think XP is so fondly remembered because it actually lived up to all the promises Microsoft had made with 95 all those years prior.
 
Armenius said:
Windows 95 was a nightmare. Basically, take the driver issues Vista had and multiply them by 10. Most devices that the OS inherited were not plug-and-play and required a lot of work to get working. I recall that our printer absolutely did not work and we would reboot into DOS just to print a document. The installation payload was also completely new, so many programs being released would not properly install or uninstall themselves. This caused registry and startup issues to pileup until your PC basically became a brick, since 95 was so sensitive to registry changes. 95 became somewhat livable when OSR2 was released, but at that point Windows 98 was right around the corner.
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Yes,95 was terrible, I meant the last time they got it right UI wise. I barely even used 95, we installed it as a novelty, but there was nor driver nor app support for it, especially for older hardware. I used OSR2 much more, but even that was prone to breaking especially on hardware changes. Changed the sound card? Reinstall. Changed the video card? Reinstall. That was life for the most part even with 98. XP was the first OS that only broke itself when you changed the MB.

95 set the standard for years to come with the UI, sure, but everything else was an absolute nightmare. I think XP is so fondly remembered because it actually lived up to all the promises Microsoft had made with 95 all those years prior.
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I think XP is only remembered fondly because Vista came after it. And due to the length of it's lifespan. I don't remember it being all that exciting when it came out. I was pretty reluctant to move from 98 to XP, as I didn't want to loose DOS games support, that was a given with 98.
 
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