Windows 95 is 20 years old

I remember paying over $150 for that turd. Then came 95b and 95c. 95c wasn’t too bad but I would dual boot with NT4 so I could burn a cd instead of making a $8 coaster.

Windows 95 established a desktop interface paradigm that was so easy and practical that it’s still imitated by most alternative operating systems and is the most sorely missed element of Windows 8.x. With that being said, it had a pitifully underpowered and poorly engineered core system archtitechture and kernel that looked like a toy in comparison with its contemporaries. (Windows NT4 was CONSIDERABLY better in that aspect.)

Here is another good read. This one actually goes back farther than I can remember. But not by much.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/history#T1=era4

All from microsofts point of view of course, but still a good bit of history.

It indeed ate resources for breakfast, i had a Pentium 75 at the time, i stuck with DOS and Windows 3.1 for a long time, when i upgraded to a Pentium 266 then it ran acceptably :bigsmile:

I still have my Windows 95A install CD, i’ll bet it would run like lightning on my current computer if it were installable.

I’m not installing 10 on my machine even though M$ is giving it away for free. I’m looking this gift (Trojan) horse in the mouth. I don’t think Win 10 is the product. We’re the product.

Ha, nice one!

Yeah, even if Bill Gates is into philanthropy now in his old age, I can’t see them killing their hen that lays golden eggs unless they’re mighty sure another one is about to hatch.

I installed Win95, took a look and went to bed and almost cried.

WFW 3.11 was back on my machine the next morning.

Then I got to thinking about how I wouldn’t be able to run any of the new programs, and so had to join with the devil. - Was somewhat happy to see Win98 come along, but the best yet was XP.

Now I am faced with the obsolescence of Win7 and don’t know what I will do.

I actually had more fun with DOS and Geoworks:-)

Sometimes life sucks…
-Chuck
PS - Remember how when installing 95, how that it sounded like your hard drive was going to fly right out the window? :frowning:

Bye bye DOS - never was a fan ...

Thank goodness for W95 , I thought it the bees knees ...

Win 98SE , Neither here nor there , ME was a joke ,

XP ( free Version ) was crash city ...

First commercial XP was crash city ( Blue screen of death ) as well ..

Not till SP2 did XP settle down , and as it turned out MS was messing with AMD fan boys .. ( built in bug )

SP2 brought with it a fix for those suffering the AMD issues ..

SP3 , more stability , less blue screens ..

VISTA , more blue screens ...

W7 - Thank goodness some stability at last

W8 - 8.2 - Wonderful , marvelous .. I know a lot of people didn't like the interface , but it took so little to adapt ...

W10 - Except for the privacy issues ( ATM look to be cured with a 3rd party fire wall ) , I have had only one niggle , Oracle Virtual Box , which was cured by going to an earlier build .

Heck I had the same issues with 7 and 8 , so a bit of a non issue ...

I would love to see W95 ported for modern machines - I never had any issues with it ...

It would be lightning fast today .

I think for the last 10 years or so , I have been unable to load it ( just too old )

Win 2000 was a favorite for a long time , used to dual boot or triple boot with 98SE - XP and some times quad boot with linux .

I will miss a lot of the old arcade games I played on 95 , I did hold onto 95 for a very long time ..

Never completed Duke Nukem , the graphics were so poor , I could not tell what was what once I got into the caverns ( Maybe my graphics card )

Wouldnt matter if Bill wanted to give it away, the company is owned by shareholders who retain legal ownership rights and that includes profits. Bill couldnt give it away without shareholders approval, he would have to buy it for everyone to cover the losses. Last I heard he owns about 4%.

If anyone remembers Verbatim sold floppies (pack of 10) with one floppy containing WIN95 preview program.

I still remember my first PC, IBM Personal System2 model 55sx and hundreds of hours spent playing Dune2…
http://john.ccac.rwth-aachen.de:8000/alf/ps2_55sx/

I still have lots of old 360k & 1.2Mb floppies at my parents place stored away. I have Win95 Install CD in my drawer somewhere here mixed in with other CDs

IMO Windows 95 was a major step forward for Microsoft. Windows 3.11 and DOS in the early days did the job but Win 95 was a good product. I’m still holding off Installing 10, but expect to do so in months to come. Some of the first PC Games I played were the Kings Quest Series, MS Flight SIM. Then eventually got hooked on Dune and the Command and conquer series. Still an active gamer today but have slowed down.

You know how old it makes us, when we remember using DOS and thinking it was cool!. First computer was one that someone else had at work. I cannot remember the model. Had a tiny square screen built in and ran on floppies. Learned DOS commands on that thing. Win95 hated it, didn't care much for 98 either. XP after SP02 was good and probably the best one of the bunch. 8.1, just a joke, not as stable as XP. Win 10-11-12... by then I won't be using a PC, so I don't care. I have learned to hate tablets with a vengeance. Waste of time and useless small screens that I can't see, with things I have to press. I remember how mad my mom got if anyone ever dared to touch the TV screen. Now we are supposed to make love to screens, with our fingers.

I don't think my first computer was even as advanced as DOS. It was a commodor 64. Just a floppy disc drive a key board and a 13" TV.
http://www.oldsoftware.com/history.html




Not to mention Gates is not even MS CEO any longer. (Not since 2000)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Nadella

My first was a 4K ram Atari, but then I always was a late adopter:-)
-Chuck

Tiring quickly of the Atari, I next got a $1800 Kaypro 4X.

This machine used twin 5 1/4”, 390K floppies (yes, 390K), and no HD.

64K Ram, and ran CPM (Control Program Microprocessors), a DOS of sorts. - A “True” Business machine:-)

Oh - Had a built in 9” Green Screen, and weighed something like 20lbs. - The precursor to the Laptop:-)

Great Fun!

https://www.google.com/search?q=Kaypro+4x&es_sm=122&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0CB4QsARqFQoTCMGZ7uaRx8cCFQbZHgod0X8LMg&biw=1517&bih=714&dpr=0.9

-Chuck

I poked random values into the SID registers to make some interesting “music”. I remember how awesome my first driving simulator, Test Drive, was to play on it. So life like I felt like I was driving a real corvette! :wink:

KuoH

i remember Win 3.1, it had a wow factor over the basic DOS.

First exposure was through TRS-DOS, on a TRS-80, model 3.

After that, I learned on MS-DOS V6. I was High-School age at the time, when my parents bought our first new PC. It was a custom-built 33Mhz 386DX with the upgrade to 4MB of RAM and a 210 MB Hard Drive, cost $2k+. We used that PC to the play the Commander Keen demo. I also played the demo to “Descent” extensively on this system, and the ones to follow. Although the game was playable, you had to shrink the playing view down to a very small box in the center of the screen.

Ultimately upgraded to a AMD (IIRC) 486-class processor, still running DOS, but also had Windows 3.1. Windows was annoying. We had a handful of apps that needed to run under Windows. Basically, it was just a front-end we used to run the apps we needed, everything else still ran from DOS. We played a LOT of Commander Keen 4 on this system, eventually located all of the hidden secrets and areas. This 486 system was eventually replaced with an early Pentium 2 system.

Eventually, we installed a 4x CD-ROM drive with a Sound Blaster, all part of a box-kit, purchased from Sam’s Club. That was awesome! The kit came with a demo for the LucasArts game “Dark Forces” (awesome, for me, the Star Wars fan) and the full versions of “Cyberia” and “Full Throttle”. I still remember the “set blaster=A220 I5 D1” command to run some of the apps with the early sound card.

Cyberia was an early attempt at pre-rendered cinematic gameplay. Full Throttle remains one of my favorite adventure games ever. We played that one repeatedly through, along with “The Dig”. I also ended up playing the Monkey Island games as well, and enjoying them all.

By College, I inherited the old 486, when my parents had upgraded the family PC to the Pentium 2 system. I quickly found that the 486 wasn’t cutting it any longer, and built my own system. Based on the Cyrix III 333Mhz (Cyrix “equivalent” IIRC) CPU, I installed an early 3dfx Voodoo Banshee card, and had a decent gaming machine, playing the original Half-Life, Need for Speed 2, and Unreal, along with various other games. I think this system still ran the Win95 OSR2.

Things progressed from there, and I eventually built a new PC when AMD/Intel were in the heat of the GHz war. This machine was a 600Mhz AMD Athlon system, using the SlotA hardware. I actually purchased a new license of Win98SE to load on this system. I finally upgraded that system to the newer socketA system running an early Athlon XP. This system saw several upgrades, with the CPU being upgrade to an Athlon XP 2000, then up to a newer-core 1700 that was highly overclockable, beyond the specs of the original 1700.

This system was finally replaced around 2007 with an updated system based on the Athlon 64 X2. I eventually had to purchase an updated video card 9800GTX to play “Bioshock”. For this system, I first installed the Win7 beta, then, after a couple of updates, found it stable enough to purchase a full copy after the beta expired. That system still runs in that configuration, and has been a great PC, with no issues, other than some early Windows7 video driver problems. Mostly sees some occasional Half-Life 2 play, but not much else.

^

Very Interesting…

That sure brought back a lot of memories.

Thanks!
-Chuck