The full Windows 95 launch event video is finally online | Hacker News Reader

The full Windows 95 launch event video is finally online

gizmodo.com

85 pointsgeox27 comments

> "This guy, he broke his neck doing backflips and then 1.5 weeks after breaking his neck he was at his computer fixing bugs"

There was a time when I celebrated stuff like this, but now it's the exact opposite.

One can simultaneously celebrate the personal resilience and drive that can allow something remarkable like that to happen, while still bemoaning the forces that would abuse that resilience.

Here's the link to the video that skips past all of the "broadcast starting in 0:15" crap.

https://youtu.be/_JzfROUDsK0?t=126

EDIT: 3 minutes in and WOW this is a weird video.

I'd rather see again the show where Bill Gates announces upcoming Windows 95. You know the one where he claims that the Internet is just a fad.

In all fairness, I don't know whether he actually believed such then or whether development of the TCP/IP stack was behind of schedule and he just wanted to set expectations.

Interesting, because I read his book "The Road Ahead" and a majority of the book is about the information superhighway changing the future. I never had the impression he thought the Internet was a fad, perhaps you're right in that he was covering their slow development. Or justifying not having it by saying there wasn't anything worth connecting to (at the time.)

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/on-ramp...

https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1994-04-11-19941011...

Looks like at the time the interest in the 'information superhighway' from MS was in proprietary services which were more like cable pay-per-view. That the term later was a synonym for the World Wide Web is misleading.

I guess similar terms today would be Web3 or Metaverse where lots of industry players agree it is desirable but don't agree on what it would look like. A buzzword.

>I guess similar terms today would be Web3 or Metaverse where lots of industry players agree it is desirable but don't agree on what it would look like. A buzzword.

well the Microsoft attempt was making an AOL-like half-assed contracted ISP (MSN) to compete with Excite/Yahoo/Lycos so they could shove ad-like experiences into peoples browser start page.

Let's hope the web3/metaverse turns out a bit more user-oriented -- 90s web companies were brutal.

The interesting thing about that book is that there are two versions that are significantly different, the wikipedia page "The Road Ahead (Gates Book)" describes this quite well (20,000 words were added mostly regarding the internet).

The original version stated "today's Internet is not the information highway I imagine, although you can think of it as the beginning of the highway". Before publication Gates realized the internet was gaining critical mass and he redirected the company to become internet-focused. And then the new version of the book was created.

Aha, that may explain my confusion. It's been years since I've read it, I'll have to dig it out and see which version I have.

This was marketed so well some people were lining up to buy it and didn't even have a computer - "I just want to be more productive". Crazy to think an OS launch could be so impactful today.

Well it was essentially the first good GUI for PC users

No one who has not experienced the limitations of the 8.3 filename convention especially in office environments would understand. 255-character filenames were a game changer.

Of course, you could have that on virtually any contemporary OS ... with the exception of the DOS/Windows-stack.

AT the time they were. Nowadays people barely know what a file is.

I almost guarantee that more people know what files are today than in 1995.

As a person who couldn't explain in a ~technical~ any terms why the XLSX file I gave isn't a "cloud one" merely hous ago...

[X] Doubt

People forget that for a VAST majority of computer users, they may have never seen a GUI, or barely used a Mac for awhile. Many people went from DOS -> Windows 95 without stopping at Windows 3.1.

That's completely ridiculous. There was an entire decade of windows before windows 95. Very few people in 1995 would have had a 10 year old 286 PC, yet never used a GUI.

Windows 3.0 came out in 90, and 3.1 came out in 92. There was very little adoption of the earlier versions, and even 3.0 adoption was sparse. 95 came out in, well, 95. People kept computers longer and upgraded much less back then. The previous post was not ridiculous.

> The previous post was not ridiculous.

it kind of is when you consider Win95 as 'the first good PC gui'.

people had been using OS/2 just fine, and Win3.1 was basically whatever a power user needed to be with the amount of aftermarket shells and front ends for it.

A midnight commander user might argue that Win95 was the start of the 'forced-bad' GUI experience.

Yes, Win95 was a nice jump in UX for the standard lay person -- but it wasn't novel in that; there were lots of options for the PC user.

Look at the numbers - a vast majority of people had no computer before Windows 95 - arguably Windows 95 is about the time computers started taking off and going mainstream.

I went from a 386DX2 to a Pentium 2-class machine in one jump, simply because it wasn't affordable for quite awhile (my first actual "my" computer was Windows 98 iirc).

Look at the numbers

What numbers? You just gave a single anecdote that doesn't even support what you were saying.

https://techland.time.com/2013/05/07/a-brief-history-of-wind... Here for some - Windows 95 sold 40 million copies in its first year, way more than the install base of windows before that.

Majority? World wide maybe, but not in the US or Western Europe. I'm looking at some old ads here from end 1993, and even their cheapest computer (a 386DX-40) came with WfW 3.11.

People weren’t really buying computers every 3 years then. They were way too expensive for most people to do that. My first windows 95 machine replaced a 10+ year old TRS-80.

Are you sure you remember that period correctly? (the general situation, not your personal situation at home). Windows 3.1 was everywhere at that time. And the 386dx that I mentioned cost 1200 euro (calculated with an inflation calculator).

Both are true. Because this was a time in which a large portion of people buying computers weren't existing computer users. 3.1 was very popular, and lots of existing computer users held on to their computers for a while. The PC market grew 100% just between 1994 and 1996.

> the general situation, not your personal situation at home

My Am486DX4/100/24/850+1600/CD/EdisonGold16 was replaced by Tualeron1300/i815/256/40+80/AC97/DVDCombo

*shrug_emoji*

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