Windows 95 - 20 Years Ago

This summer will mark the 20th anniversary of the release of Microsoft's Windows 95 operating system. I won't debate the technical merits of the OS, but it did have one of the largest marketing campaigns behind it of all time. From Jay Leno to the Rolling Stones, it was a media tour de force.

So pervasive was the ad campaign, that there was a blurb I read not long after Windows 95 was released that appeared in the "Reader's Digest". Two women were in conversation and one said, "I'm thinking about getting Windows 95." The other remarked, "I didn't know you had a computer". To which the first woman replied, "You need a computer?"

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The Story behind "Start Me Up" and Windows 95

Greg

I liked windows 95. Back then you were able to strip stuff out of the OS to make it run better, unlike today.

Wow. I feel old.

Um, yeah. Win 95 with Netscape and Alta Vista... The Inter-what? We were all on BBS's and services, not forums like this one. At work we didn't have e-mail, couldn't use the new fangled Internet. Many didn't even use TCP/IP. (Where's my blazing fast 9600 modem...)

Worsaer said:

Um, yeah. Win 95 with Netscape and Alta Vista... The Inter-what? We were all on BBS's and services, not forums like this one. At work we didn't have e-mail, couldn't use the new fangled Internet. Many didn't even use TCP/IP. (Where's my blazing fast 9600 modem...)

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That was the great thing about Win95. It had TCP/IP built in. Previously you usually had to buy a (expensive) TCP stack from a third party vendor.

RoyAtl said:

That was the great thing about Win95. It had TCP/IP built in. Previously you usually had to buy a (expensive) TCP stack from a third party vendor.

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Exactly. So many today take something as pervasive as TCP/IP for granted - it wasn't always so. I spent too many years of my life cabling and troubleshooting twinax - progress is a good thing.

And you needed Novelle Netware just to create a LAN.

The cool thing about Win95 was that you booted right into Windows instead of having to boot into DOS and then launch Windows from the CLI. :wink:

Not quite... Windows 3.11 (Windows for Workgroups, aka WFWG or wiffy-wig) had Microsoft's TCP/IP stack AND a 32bit subsystem. Before that, we were on the web (if you could call it that) with Windows 3.1, add-on Microsoft's Win32 subsystem, add-on PC-TCP's aftermarket stack, then download Mosaic (predecessor to Netscape, aka Mozilla). I remember images loading line by line, almost like my friend's 300 baud modem streaming text across his screen in the 80's. Good times!
-Ken

Arc net , 10Base-T , .avi extension , muds , bbs , modems ..80386 ftw.

I remember testing Chicago back in the day.. rocketman Don Gates made it happen.

Kenny

Still have an archive machine in the garage that runs on Win 95. There's a 3.1 machine out there as well. <LOL>
The legacy of Win 95 is that it forced MS to make XP all that much better.

John

I still wonder if I can find a copy of 95 just to play around with on a VM...

I might still have one as well. As soon as I transfer all the data from the computer I have had under my desk for the last 5 years, you can probably have it...

KenRico said:

Arc net , 10Base-T , .avi extension , muds , bbs , modems ..80386 ftw.

I remember testing Chicago back in the day.. rocketman Don Gates made it happen.

Kenny

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Renegade BBS.. Tradewars... Globewars... ahh them were the days. lol

90's???

My first official "Meet the screen names" event tee shirt.

new2hpr said:

Not quite... Windows 3.11 (Windows for Workgroups, aka WFWG or wiffy-wig) had Microsoft's TCP/IP stack AND a 32bit subsystem. Before that, we were on the web (if you could call it that) with Windows 3.1, add-on Microsoft's Win32 subsystem, add-on PC-TCP's aftermarket stack, then download Mosaic (predecessor to Netscape, aka Mozilla). I remember images loading line by line, almost like my friend's 300 baud modem streaming text across his screen in the 80's. Good times!
-Ken

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yea, but WfW's stack was iffy. We still got the third party stack. One of my co-workers was on the Winsock committee and he was always complaining about this and that when he got back from meetings. But when Win95 came out, it was almost painless, though I remember PPPoE being somewhat problematic, though I don't remember the specifics... I put all that out of my mind a few years ago when I got fiber broadband.

My Laptop with 95 still work fine........

so, how many of you remember/played DooM? this December DooM will be 22 years old...and it is still fun to play!
Rex

Rex R said:

so, how many of you remember/played DooM? this December DooM will be 22 years old...and it is still fun to play!
Rex

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I remember, back then, to play multiplayer you had to type in the IP address of your opponent.

I just remember that it was so great when my company allowed me to connect to the mainframe with my 2400 baud modem from my Win 3.1 machine when I got called in the middle of the night when our batch system went down rather than making the 1.25 hour drive to the operation center. No matter how slow it was, it beat driving in.

Of course, when I had to call the ops center, I had to disconnect because I only had one phone line.

My first computer had Win 95 on it.
I bought my first computer in 98.
We had Win 3.1 in HS, which was what Win 95 took the place of.



JD

My first PC had Windows ME, wish to say no more or even think about it.

blackbrandt said:

I still wonder if I can find a copy of 95 just to play around with on a VM...

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Hmmm. Somewhere around here I've got cd's for 95, 95sr2, 98, maybe even a set of 3.1 or 3.11 floppies... I'm sure there's a torrent out there with Microsoft's full blessing!
-Ken

We had Apple II's in high school. My first computer was a TI99/4A, then an Amiga 500, Amiga 2000 (still have running), then a series of about 40 or so PCs from 386 to dual quad-core Xeon.

My first computer was a Tandy, imagine that? Had 2 5.25" drives. One for the Dos OS, and one for the program. Saving files was a pain.
Then I was really hot **** when I was one of the first to get an 8088 with 2 3.5" drives.
Next was a 3rd Tandy, 286, had a huge whopping 10meg HD.
After that I started building my own towers. DX2 66, think it had 250meg HD.
They came and went so fast after that I can't remember all of them.
Soon as I got one built I started aquiring the latest stuff and building another. And another.
For about 5 years I built 2 a year. What a waste of money that was.
Win 95 lasted 2nd only to xp. Never did use 2000.
Had Millenium for a while, which was quite different, until they stopped supporting it.
Miss the days of editing config.sys and .bat files to make things run good.
Oh, and when color monitors came along, it was a blast of fool around with screen and text colors in Dos 5.
Unless you picked the same colors for both, then you were kinda messed up.

My first PC had MS-DOS (without Windows), and it looks like it is coming back:
[video=youtube;irJQDGw8Ptk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irJQDGw8Ptk[/video]

Reinhard

I have 3 games I really enjoyed over the time, Doom, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Battlefield , my first computer was an Altair and after a PC ( a real IBM PC in 1982 ) a Tandy II with 8" floppy and an Apple II clone ( they clone Apple a lot at the time , lol ) and of course the Comodore Vic 20 and 64 and then I start to build and sell a lot of IBM clones,

blackbrandt said:

Wow. I feel old.

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You feel old?

I have an original &#8220;HamStar Whirly-wheel X-10000&#8221; computer running &#8220;Windows Paleolithic&#8221;
My internet connection is two soup cans and a piece of string.

Amazing how the tech vocabulary has changed as well. In one of the video links I have, Bill Gates mentions "electronic mail". The words Google (as either a noun or a verb), thumb drive, and Cyber Monday didn't exist. Amazon did exist, but was only a year old. And terabyte storage for the consumer?

Greg

At the 2001 TechEd conference here in Atlanta, Microsoft or one of the other sponsors was handing out 32mb (I think, may have been smaller) thumb drives. Everyone was marveling over them. Don't know where mine went.

Hoax Win8.1 installation on 3711 3.5" floppies:



Win95 installation disks:

I remember installing Win95 from floppies. I also remember installing DOS 3.0 from 5.25" floppies. Heck, I remember booting up a TRS-80 with a 9" floppy. Those were the advanced days when you had things like monitors. Anyone else use a teletype machine?

ScottJ said:

I remember installing Win95 from floppies. I also remember installing DOS 3.0 from 5.25" floppies. Heck, I remember booting up a TRS-80 with a 9" floppy. Those were the advanced days when you had things like monitors. Anyone else use a teletype machine?

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When I took my first FORTRAN class in '79, it was under the auspices of the Business school at UGA. The Computer Science classes got the new IBM and Control Data punches, Hazeltine monitors, and Control Data Plato monitors. The Business school made do with old IBM 29 punches, and a few old teletype machines at 110 (or if you were lucky, 300) baud.

Three years later I hooked up a DecWriter to my TRS-80 Color Computer, for much the same experience, just as a learning exercise to see if I could write a RS-232 driver.