Windows 95 - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.capebreton.social/post/347724

Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995, almost three months after the release of Windows NT 3.51.

Windows 95 is the first version of Microsoft Windows to include taskbar, start button, and accessing the internet. Windows 95 merged Microsoft’s formerly separate MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows products, and featured significant improvements over its predecessor, most notably in the graphical user interface (GUI) and in its simplified “plug-and-play” features. There were also major changes made to the core components of the operating system, such as moving from a mainly cooperatively multitasked 16-bit architecture to a 32-bit preemptive multitasking architecture, at least when running only 32-bit protected mode applications.

Accompanied by an extensive marketing campaign,Windows 95 introduced numerous functions and features that were featured in later Windows versions, and continue in modern variations to this day, such as the taskbar, notification area, and the “Start” button. It is considered to be one of the biggest and most important products in the personal computing industry.

  • Cloudless ☼@feddit.ukEnglish
    925·
    1 year ago

    Better than Windows 11 in many aspects:

    • Runs on 4 MB of RAM
    • Less bloatware
    • Less invasion of privacy
    • Does not require TPM, Secure Boot etc
    • No ads
    • Not forcing you to use Edge, Bing, Cortana, or other random crap
      • Phrey@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        201·
        1 year ago

        32 bit

        But yes, rebooting for everything, including changing monitor resolution was a pain

        • Techmaster@lemm.eeEnglish
          132·
          1 year ago

          This might come as a shock to you, but Windows 95 isn’t even an operating system. It’s a GUI shell that runs on DOS, which is a 16 bit operating system. There is no Windows 95 kernel.

          • anlumo@feddit.deEnglish
            5·
            1 year ago

            It’s a bit more complex than that. Intel CPUs (to this day) boot in real mode, which is what DOS is using. In this mode, the system only has access to 640k of RAM. Windows 95 and later switch the processor to protected mode, where the system gets access to all of the RAM and also to memory protection features, so processes can’t real and write each other’s memory. However, in this mode it’s impossible to run real mode code, such as the one provided by DOS.

            DOS games had a trick where they briefly switched back to real mode to execute DOS functions (mostly reading and writing to disk) and then back to protected mode, but I don’t think that Windows 95 did that.

            • Techmaster@lemm.eeEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              I used DesQview in DOS and then switched to OS/2 Warp when it came out. DesQview was really cool.

        • TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
          82·
          1 year ago

          32 bit hacked and kludged onto a 16 bit system that was still MS-DOS at the core. It was a mess. A highly unstable “wonder how it’s even working” mess. The “lol Windows always bluescreens” memes came from this era because of this. The switch to NT and pure 32 bit from boot to desktop for consumer OSes with Windows XP made the stability issues mostly a thing of history unless you had bad drivers or hardware.

          • Techmaster@lemm.eeEnglish
            31·
            1 year ago

            And then starting with Vista, Windows went to 64 bit. It was a complete rewrite of Windows and is way more stable because it requires every driver to be signed by Microsoft. You can disable the signed driver requirement, but then you’re risking stability.

            • ripcord@kbin.social
              4·
              1 year ago

              It wasn’t a complete rewrite of Windows.

              Maybe if it was your first NT-based Windows, like you previously had 98 or ME or something, then it might appear that way.

              But Vista was a fairly incremental update. Lots of things changed but nowhere close to a complete rewrite.

              • Techmaster@lemm.eeEnglish
                11·
                1 year ago

                It was a whole new kernel. They didn’t rewrite every single utility, but the kernel was a rewrite along with things like diskpart and the boot loader. The core of the OS. They also dumped all of the old 16 bit legacy apps.

                • aksdb@feddit.deEnglish
                  4·
                  1 year ago

                  I would like to see a source for that. I know they rewrote critical subsystems (like the audio and video stack), but the whole kernel? I don’t think so.

      • RheingoldRiver@kbin.social
        31·
        1 year ago

        Also, the part no one ever brings up: No per-program volume control. Ugh. That was so actively irritating until they finally added it (was it in XP? or not until 7?)

        • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          No per-program volume control was entirely the fault of whatever program you were using, not Windows. The Windows audio API supported global and application-level volume from the beginning with Windows 95 (even Windows 3.1 had it). Even if Windows 95 had not had application-level volume control, a developer could have implemented it for their application since they were composing the audio data sent to the API for playback (in other words, they could have just attenuated all the sample values to a lower volume).

      • FederatedSaint@lemmy.worldEnglish
        21·
        1 year ago

        Do you change your IP address, like, ever? DHCP and forget over here in my homelab. I do have like four reservations but they never change.

    • jmondi@programming.devEnglish
      311·
      1 year ago

      A horse is better than a car in many aspects:

      • eco friendly fuel emissions
      • built in gps, FSD, and autopilot mode
      • naturally low maintenance
      • built in companion
      • traffic jams are a breeze
    • LuciEnglish
      241·
      1 year ago

      Don’t forget great USB 1.1 support

    • Diplomjodler@feddit.deEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      Well. 4 MB was a bit of a stretch. I remember buying a RAM upgrade to 8 MB to get it to run decently. Cost me 200 DM on top of the 200 for the Windows upgrade. It was a huge leap compared to Windows 3.1, though. And this stuff just was a lot more expensive back in the day.

  • mindbleach@lemmy.worldEnglish
    582·
    1 year ago

    This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

    Seriously though, this is the first properly good UI for a desktop computer. Mac OS (or I guess Macintosh OS at the time) was okay, but reliant on the global menu and weird drop-downs. Windows kept everything self-contained. Even multi-window programs tended to use the “multiple document interface,” i.e., windows inside windows. Tabs weren’t really a thing yet.

    It also crashed if you looked at it funny and had the antivirus capabilities of warm cheese. But there’s damn good reasons Windows 7 was the same experience, extended, rather than replaced. It’s more-or-less what I style Linux to look like. And in light of that I’m kinda pissed off any OS ever struggles to remain responsive, when this relic ran smoothly on one stick of RAM that’s smaller than my CPU’s cache.

    • irdc@derp.fooEnglish
      111·
      1 year ago

      Mac OS (…) was okay, but reliant on the global menu and weird drop-downs.

      See Fitt’s law for why the Mac’s menu bar is the way it is.

      • mindbleach@lemmy.worldEnglish
        144·
        1 year ago

        Thoroughly familiar with it; don’t care. The global menu has always been goofy because of the invisible relation to some open window. Usually a small window floating out in middle of the desktop, because Mac OS took forever to adopt any concept of “maximize.” I’m still not sure they do it right.

        • irdc@derp.fooEnglish
          62·
          1 year ago

          Nowadays macOS maximises like Windows does. Whether that’s “doing it right” is something else entirely.

            • stankmut@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              If you hold down one of the modifier keys, either Options/Alt or Cmd I don’t quite remember which, and then click the maximize button it does the normal Windows style maximize.

              • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
                51·
                1 year ago

                If you hold down one of the modifier keys

                Lol this is my biggest beef with MacOS: the extent to which you have to memorize a bunch of utterly non-intuitive key combinations just to do basic tasks. Like taking a screenshot, which remains an absurd nightmare.

                • stankmut@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  2·
                  1 year ago

                  It usually maximizes it Windows style as well. I feel like I’ve had more inconsistency in behavior from that (like it would sometimes just fill the width but not the height), but nothing I can reproduce right now.

      • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        1 year ago

        In its basic form, Fitts’s law says that targets a user has to hit should be as big as possible.

        Dear god, my biggest beef with using a smart phone is that UI designers 1) love to have tiny buttons for shit, and 2) the tappable areas for those buttons are almost never made larger than their tiny graphics, so it’s a bitch to actually tap them.

        I used to be a mobile app developer, and when I wrote apps by myself I would always expand the tappable areas so they were easy to hit with fat fingers. My last job was working for a huge cable company (maybe the name rhymes with “bombast”) and whenever I expanded the tappable area of a tiny button the UI designers would pitch a fit and insist that that not be done. Management would agree with them on the grounds that expanding the tappable area would require too much time to implement - and then they’d order me to spend even more time un-implementing it.

        • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          5·
          1 year ago

          Something that irritates me in desktop design is, there’s a clickable icon. There’s no box around it to represent a button, just the icon on a blank background. You move your mouse towards the icon. When you get close to the icon, a box appears around it. You take this to mean “this object will be interacted with when you click the mouse.” You click the mouse. Nothing is achieved. You have to move the mouse into the actual borders of the icon, it’s just that now icons get visibly excited that you might pick them.

          • mindbleach@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Windows 95 legitimately had better UI than that “Material” bullshit, via relief shading conveyed through four fucking colors. The hierarchy of elements is instantly visible. Buttons even popped in and out when clicked. There’s just no excuse for how minimalism fetishists have taken over user experience.

    • Kahlenar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      92·
      1 year ago

      Certainly windows took inspiration from the apple button in the upper left, but changed a few things so they wouldn’t get caught copying.

      • snaggen@programming.devEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        I think they actually tried to take MS to court, but lost since they had stolen the ideas from Xerox in the first place.

        • scottywh@lemmy.worldEnglish
          6·
          1 year ago

          The movie Pirates of Silicon Valley does a great job at illustrating the basics of the story.

        • anlumo@feddit.deEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          First off, Apple licensed the idea from Xerox, they didn’t steal it. Second, Apple lost because they had a badly worded contract with Microsoft for implementing Word for Mac that could be construed to allow them to copy the system’s API and thus UI.

    • FederatedSaint@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      It really was a game changer. I remember the excitement of getting it for the first time after using windows 3.1.

    • LazaroFilm@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      The full screen app contained in a single window was great! I hated the Mac eat fo many windows floating around. My ADHD was so overwhelmed by all the tiny windows instead of a clear one.

  • comedy@kbin.social
    40·
    1 year ago

    I remember the install CD had the Weezer “Buddy Holly” video on it. It felt pretty fancy

      • over_clox@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        Microsoft made no point to credit Edie Brickell in that video clip, they only credited Geffen Records.

        I figure many if not most people probably didn’t even know who she was, other than the pretty woman that sang the nice relaxing song in the street.

  • digdilem@feddit.ukEnglish
    19·
    1 year ago

    As someone who was working in IT support at the time - YAY! NO MORE FUCKING TRUMPET WINSOCK!

    • Yewb@kbin.social
      13·
      1 year ago

      Oh god quit bringing up the pain!

      IRQ conflicts when trying to install a modem and a soundcard!

      • wmassingham@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        I was configuring COM ports just last week. Turns out the software is so old that it only supports COM1.

    • mike@lemmy.dlct.caEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Yeah I remember that - it needed 13 discs and it always failed the last one and I would have to start all over.

      • Diplomjodler@feddit.deEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        I already had one of those fancy new-fangled CD-ROM drives. You could get a computer magazine with a cover-CD and it had all the patches for all current games and major software packages. So cool.

  • LuciEnglish
    9·
    1 year ago

    I still have my Windows 95 “Start me up” Pogs!

    • GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      You mean those little discs that you throw a bigger, heaver disc on top of? You’ve gotta share a pic sometime

      • LuciEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        I’m currently searching boxes. No one was taking them so they gave me like 20 of them.

  • imgonnatrythis@lemm.eeEnglish
    81·
    1 year ago

    And this marked the very first and last time I felt a sense of genuine excitement about an OS upgrade.

    • SokathHisEyesOpen@lemmy.mlEnglish
      13·
      1 year ago

      You weren’t stoked for XP? XP is the OS that got me into computing. Before XP computers were a novelty to me. When XP came out they finally seemed powerful enough to accomplish cool things with.

      • imgonnatrythis@lemm.eeEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        I learned a lot with XP because it required constant trouble shooting. Was a buggy mess imo. I was more excited about hardware advancements and cool games at that time.

  • mycatiskai@lemmy.oneEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    My dad barely knew how to run things in windows 3.1 but he still regrets the day he installed windows 95 because it was all downhill from there when it came to him knowing what was going on.

    • 1984@lemmy.todayEnglish
      21·
      1 year ago

      Haha I remember this. People who downvote you probably are too young to remember.

    • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I like how they selectively edited that so that you don’t hear Mick singing “You make a grown man cry”…

      • mindbleach@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Microsoft marketing hasn’t gotten any better about song choices. A few years ago their ads had soft bleep-bloop tunes and “go baby, go baby, yeah we’re right behind you.”

        The song is “Cherry Lips,” by Garbage. It’s the twink anthem.

        And it’s still not as tone-deaf as whichever Bill Hicks target picked out “hey ho let’s go” from the god-damned “Blitzkrieg Bop.”