Windows 95 is 25 years old!

edited August 2020 in Software
The retail release of Windows 95 occurred 25 years ago today. It added a new user interface and included improved networking capabilities.

In other news, I feel really old today.

Comments

  • Those creaking sounds, and the sounds of stuff falling off. That's me.

    - Posted from Microsoft Windows 95
  • Shit, seems like just yesterday we were taking about it's 20th anniversary. Where does time go?
    Oddly enough, I just happened to be browsing archive.org last night and I found the old forum posts I made from when I was looking for a copy of Windows 95 and also the ones from right after I installed it, so I now know that the first time I installed windows 95 and used it at home was July 2003. I had used it at school before then, but I had never installed it on my own computer before. It was quite an improvement over 3.1. Plug and play was and still is a godsend that we take for granted these days.

    On a side note, those old posts are so incredibly cringe worthy, I can't believe I ever wrote them. It really made me want to go back in time and punch my past self in the face.
  • I'm also posting from Windows 95 (RetroZilla 2.2 20200131). It's very stable on this machine. There has never been a BSoD, unlike that ridiculously flaky Windows 98.

    After Dark 10th anniversary edition runs as a TSR, and web browsers fit comfortably within 128 MB of RAM. I think I'll stick to this. :)
  • I never cared for Win95, but it's a good milestone to pass nonetheless. Just goes to show how much things have changed since then.
  • To celebrate, I installed the original version of Windows 95 in VirtualBox.
  • Don't currently have the time to fully install 95, but as a mild celebration I installed the theme 'XFPE Classic' in SeaMonkey 2.53, which is a port of the old Mozilla 1.x theme to modern SeaMonkey (SeaMonkey 2 has a different theme).
  • edited August 2020
    offtopic:
    keep in mind this BlOaT is done on rtm release
    Wow, now this is called Bloat:



    And i rate windows desktop update -999938989593858939858289539885893 96839868396939868939683986938689396/100
  • Quite. Anyone wishing to experience Windows 95 should do so without the IE desktop "update", at least initially.
  • A company I did some work at used NT 4.0 for way too long (they skipped 2000 and went to XP) and in all of those years they never installed the desktop update, but did install IE4 and later. I personally like the update, but it’s probably that I just got used to the quick launch and being able to sort the start menu. I recall people back in the day saying that they experienced a lot of bugs associated with it. My experience is a little different, but I always turned off the website desktop immediately.
  • Heh, funnily enough 25 years later, there is a decent amount of people who think that the Internet was created by AOL or some nonsense.

    But yes, 95 and NT 4 (and 98) are much better with the normal shell, not the Internet Explorer shell.
  • As sluggish as 9x may be, it's still a very important milestone for 32-bit computing and in establishing Windows as more than just a graphical shell for MS-DOS.

    To celebrate, I'll probably be installing retail win95 with qemu-system-i386 :)
  • I always found it amusing that Windows was still referring to it as desktop update even in XP and I believe also even 7 and maybe even 10, but I'm less sure of that.
  • I made that screenshot for a joke. Now here is the screenshot (same VM):

    and also i agree with @SomeGuy, and did you know you can remove IE 4 from windows 95? (not completely, but it removes windows desktop update):



    and... my 95 driver can go to this:

    and heres a screenshot of thaaat:



  • edited August 2020
    Better windows 95 VM i've created:

    Also, what is this noise when I play a midi file:
    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tecBhE05LA51CL13bHoi7Hr64YLFe1dw/view?usp=sharing

    It playbacks without the noise on wav files, help me? (it play backs fine, but the buzzing sound is annoying me)

    EDIT: I've forgot the drivers, it is the pci128. download here: https://mega.nz/file/KJdADAqb#nO9Mug04jcecd9jESpDhAkJlIhUa4T7qA2QnhK8icY0
  • The desktop "update" was actually much more stable on NT 4. On 95 you could easily run in to resource leaks, and memory usage was quite a bit clunkier.

    Of course, clearly neither a quick launch button nor sorting a start menu should require a web browser.

    >there is a decent amount of people who think that the Internet was created by AOL or some nonsense.

    Also, a decent number of people who think Microsoft ignorantly "missed" the internet with 95. Notice that MSN icon prominently placed on the destkop. The internet was competition, and Microsoft didn't want competition. They intentionally "missed" the internet with 95 and then rapidly changed direction.
  • Actually, I read in Tim Berners-Lee's book 'Weaving The Web' that Microsoft had gone all out on MSN and panicked as they realized the quick rise of the WWW caused them to try to make Netscape the default browser, but Netscape turned them down and Microsft licensed Spyglass Mosaic, branded it Internet Explorer, and bundled it with the Windows 95 Microsoft Plus! pack.
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