The History of Windows 95 | Hacker News Reader

The History of Windows 95

abortretry.fail

113 pointsalexzeitler87 comments

The fervor around the launch of Windows 95 can not be overstated. I clearly remember at age 9 it being all over the news, local and national.

I strongly recall trying to get my dad to explain to me what it was. He tried to explain but I recall being frustrated and not understanding. Looking back I am not entirely convinced he knew exactly what it was or why people were so excited.

We had a monochrome 286 at the time of which I was the biggest user. We had Apple II’s at school I spent a lot of time with. I was pretty acquainted with computers but the idea of a GUI threw me for a loop.

In mid 95 I got a 'tech' job, and part of what I had to do was load up new laptops with 'stuff' - update OS, install our custom software, check modems, etc. We'd get a contract for custom development, and part of that contract was the hardware install/support part, so depending on the project we'd get a shipment of 20,30 or sometimes up to 100 laptops that I'd have to manually update.

The win 95 launch was just... insane. I was in a band at the time, and you'd get to the bar/club beforehand, and chit chat. When they found out I "did computers", I'd inevitably get asked by random strangers "should I get windows 95?!" Just... so much mania.

I mentioned the laptop story above because as part of the deliverable, we'd ship out a 'full laptop package' - the laptop, in a carrier bag, with any extra 'stuff' - usually an extra mouse, mouse pad, etc. Often people would want power strips for their laptop folks (sales guys on the road, mostly).

I distinctly remember early 96 getting a shipment of power strips that had a big "works with Windows 95!" gold rosette stamped on each box. It's not 'controlled' by windows 95 - there was no iot-level connectedness. It just 'worked' with Windows 95. Because... people bought anything with "works with windows 95" on it. Truly crazy times.

Yeah people don’t believe how insane it was. I missed the 95 craziness, but I worked at CompUSA for Windows 98.

That was nuts… people camped out in the parking lot a week out to get some giveaways and deals.

I had graduated from school and had a professional job by then, but I happened to arrive at the store for Windows Me launch day when I popped in to grab a cable or something. I remember it was sad, they did a launch event and nobody came. So I got a free windows birthday cake with my overpriced cable!

Microsoft really nailed product marketing in the 90s.

That's what a 200 million dollar marketing budget buys you ;)

...as a diehard Amiga user I just remember how ridiculous it was that PC users would be so excited about OS features which even "home computers" like the Amiga had since the mid-80s.

The place I bought my first IBM PC was Escom, who also had the rights to the Amiga at the time.

None of their sales team knew anything about the Amiga, so I bought a Pentium.

Surely a 486? Pentium didn't come out till 1993.

Timing could be about right though, IIRC Escom only got involved when the Amiga was already on its deathbed. They bought what was left of Commodore in 1995 and actually continued building and selling A4000 and A1200 throughout 1995, just not as much as they hoped. Eventually they sold the Amiga business again and went bankrupt in 1996 (here's an old news blurb in German from 1996 I just found: https://www.channelpartner.de/a/escom-ag,600999).

(myself, I actually continued using my Amiga 3000 as my main computer until around 1998, despite also doing programming work on a PC with WinNT4 and testing on Win95 - mainly DirectX stuff)

Yeah it was a Commodore branded Pentium 60, bought maybe 8 weeks or so before they went bankrupt.

No, a Pentium 60. This was spring 1996 not long before Escom went bankrupt.

Wow. Hadn't realised Amiga had clung on that long!

Mac System 7 also had a pretty solid UI at that point, which was clearly better than Win3.x's UI. At the time I thought they had caught up with (perhaps leapfrogged in some areas?) where Mac already was.

The most outlandish thing I remember was the CN Tower got a Windows banner strung down the glass elevator shafts. The same thing was repeated for Windows 98.

I don’t think there were any other displays of that “magnitude”. It must have been one heckuva an ad bill.

As a kid, I remember being fairly adept at Windows 3.1, but that all went out the “window” once ‘95 came out.

Only a tiny fraction of people in my country even had a PC but somehow the Windows 95 launch was a MAJOR event, it was everywhere on the news. I don't think anybody managed to match that marketing campaign.

I was in high school, and an older friend's dad was a Microsoft partner, so he'd get shipped CDs of the latest build. I was popular at school for about 5 minutes when he gave me a copy that was one build behind current ('cause his dad didn't need it anymore)

The Rolling Stones 'Start Me Up'.

I was in grade 8, my friend's dad worked in IT and took us to the Launch/Demo event at a convention centre that was packed.

And Bob Rivers' "Windows 95 sucks"

My dad showed me pictures of "Windows 4.0" in a magazine and told me that when it came out, it wouldn't have a Program Manager, and you could delete DOS. My mind was totally blown.

Fervor from the medias yes. But from the people? Did people really line up to buy an Operating System? At the time of the release it is not like there was a lot of software ready for it anyway. I remember our first pc with Windows 95, we only used it for browsing, most of the time we would boot to DOS to play games and make music with Fast Tracker 2 and Impulse Tracker. I think we were even preferring a DOS CD player to play music because it had lots of fancy graphics effects reacting to music. Can't remember the name of the player.

It is only during the win98 era that we really started to use windows apps on our family computer and even then it didn't last long for me as on a pentium 90 overclocked at 100Mhz it was slower and less productive than using a Linux distribution.

> Did people really line up to buy an Operating System?

Yes. I worked in government sales (think wear a suit, meet with people at their office) for CompUSA in Indianapolis, Indiana. I had to come in the night of the release and work on the retail floor (the first, last and only time I worked on the retail floor). We had a DJ, free bunny suit dolls from Intel, and a line that went half-way around the parking lot. The best part is all the employees got a free "Window95 w/Plus pack" and a bonus for working that night. It was a lot of fun, and Windows95 was that big of a deal, even in Indiana.

First sales in the world at midnight in Auckland, New Zealand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YluEi-WhTiI

I think Mick Jagger said I'd never allow his music for a commercial. Bill Gates proved that everyone has their price.

>Did people really line up to buy an Operating System?

I take it you haven't opened the article.

I did but the fact they wrote it doesn't mean it was true or wasn't part of the advertising campaign by paying people to pretend.

TBF, the desire to queue up for even the smallest occasion is a typical US-culture thing and met with disbelief and ridicule pretty much anywhere else ;)

More notably British.

I have happy memories of going to play on the PCs in the local computer shop that were all running Windows 95. There really was quite a buzz around them. I remember loading up 2 low resolution pixelated .avi files and playing them at the same time.

Soon afterwards I was running Windows 95 at home and a friend of mine who was in the hacker scene joined an IRC channel and one of his acquaintances demonstrated a new method of crashing Win 95 remotely by sending an Out-Of-Bounds packet to my IP. I was connected to the internet directly using a modem (no home router with NAT to protect me) and the resulting BSOD was warmly received by all.

Similar. I was really excited about Win95. My first computer that was my own came with Win 3.11, and a ‘free’ upgrade to Win95 after release. Win95 really was a radical change. I spent hours exploring Win95 and message boards (on MSN at the time).

> crashing Win 95 remotely by sending an Out-Of-Bounds packet to my IP

WinNuke. Any packet on TCP port 139 with URG (Out-of-band data) flag set crashed NetBIOS/SMB service.

Was that a Cult of the Dead Cow release, by any chance?

wow that's a name I've not heard of in a while. Didn't they release Back Orifice and other butt name related, ahem, "remote management" tools?

They just recently released http://veilid.com too

Semi-related, but I remember in the 98 days using "net send" to send a popup message to any computer on the local network. And my introduction to the windows API was a remote control application in VB. A great time where OS features outpaced OS security :)

I wouldn't be a programmer today if it wasn't for the relative openness and accessibility of Windows 98. It let me into the system files without flinching, and I learnt so much just from changing things just to see what happened.

Modern security is necessary for everything being always connected, but it does bolt the doors on curiosity.

Linux and BSDs still offer a lot. Everything is still just files. Hardware isn’t directly accessible anymore, but a lot can still be learned without writing to mapped hardware addresses.

If my memory doesn't deceive me, i remember the "net send"-command to anyone in the era of Windows 2000. I think Win 98 couldn't do that yet.

Ah yes you're right! According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_(command) it was also in NT, but 2K must be where I'm remembering it from. It was only 20 years ago, not sure why it would be foggy ;)

>Soon afterwards I was running Windows 95 at home and a friend of mine who was in the hacker scene joined an IRC channel and one of his acquaintances demonstrated a new method of crashing Win 95 remotely by sending an Out-Of-Bounds packet to my IP.

Ping of death <https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/blogs/history-of-windo...>

Amusingly, the ping of death was somewhat a result of all the other UNIX ping tools that silently truncated the ICMP packet to the “standard” size, even when told to use a larger size. It was Windows ping that actually honored the packet size option, which allowed the larger ping packets to be sent. Im pretty sure that many UNIX systems were also affected by it, as they had never been exposed to larger ping packet either. I don’t know if there are good sources explaining this, but I remember it when it happened.

> Three of these VxDs comprise the very heart of Chicago: Virtual Machine Manager (VMM32.VXD), Configuration Manager (CONFIGMG), Installable Filesystem Manager (IFM). VMM32 is essentially the Chicago kernel. It handles memory management, event handling, interrupt handling, device driver loading and initialization, the creation of virtual machines, and the scheduling. CONFIGMG handles plug and play. IFM coordinates filesystem access, provides a disk buffer, and provides a 32 bit protected mode I/O access system.

I'm so intrigued by how all of this must work. It really puts to death the notion that Windows 9x was 'DOS-based'. But to end the prejudice for good, I'm holding out hope that we will get an authorised release of the sources within our lifetime.

Windows 95 has a monolithic kernel, which supports much, but not all, of the 32-bit NT API. It provides NT-style processes and 32-bit memory management (sort of), NT-style APIs for long file names (sort of), etc. There's also a lot of hacks, and no real kernel/userspace separation, for the extensive 16-bit compatibility. While most of the kernel itself runs in 32-bit protected mode, much of the OS was still 16-bit. That code runs in a 16-bit VM86 virtual machine, which is shared with 16-bit user application code, in a common address space. Sort of how Windows 3.x worked in 386 mode. There were procedures to call between 16 and 32 bit code, both in the kernel and in user applications. That shared address space with all the 16-bit code, is the source of a lot of the infamous instability. That dependency on that 16-bit mode is why it got called "DOS-based", similar to how Win 3.x worked in 386 mode. Part of the OS was still running in 16-bit mode, even if that 16-bit mode was being virtualized by a 32-bit protected mode kernel.

You mean its based on a massively successful operating system that was used by millions?

You had to be around to understand the sentiment behind the "DOS based" issue. It's what many non PC users said about windows when discussing its instability and use of legacy code.

I didn't find DOS or Windows to be any less stable than other consumer operating systems. But regardless of which code-base is more/less stable, niche code-bases don't get stressed in the same way as a mainstream consumer OS.

Nothing wrong with DOS (and I mean that sincerely), just Windows 9x was much more than it.

No worries, I got the point you were trying to make, my comment was directed more at people who snipe at successful products - when the reality is a lot more nuanced/complicated. There is complete freedom to criticize, but then (I believe) there is also a responsibility to contextualize the criticism.

Why? 3.x in 386 enhanced mode was practically the same design (well, maybe no ConfigMG) and people there would have no problem saying it was "DOS based".

Win9x didn't use MS-DOS for filesystem access, while all versions of Win3 except for 3.11 for Workgroups did use MS-DOS for filesystem access. As a result, when you booted up Win95, MS-DOS didn't matter at all except as the second stage boot loader.

It's more complicated than that, Windows 95 would also check for programs intercepting INT 21h, sandwich its filesystem access routines in between and possibly call the old interrupt handler even when running from 32-bit programs.

It's more optimized and more polished but it's still Win386 at its heart, and it actually makes sense a lot. The book "Unauthorized Windows 95" talks in detail about how it works.

As you yourself are saying, 3.11 did exactly the same. So one must find another criteria.

There are some pretty decent guides for VxD programming still floating around on the web that give a pretty good overview of how VMM32 worked.

I remember reading about Windows 4.0 in PC/Computing magazine.

If you want a glimpse of the excitement surrounding the release, take at look at the the cover story.

https://archive.org/details/pc-computing-magazine-v7i3/mode/...

I had never seen those screenshots before. Crazy to see Win95 widgets and Win3.1 windows decorations.

Also crazy to see the search button next to the start menu, which was just a windows icon. Windows wouldn’t have good search for another 15-20 years! (I last used windows heavily with Windows XP, so I’m not sure when, if ever search became good, but finding apps seems fine in Windows 10)

Win95 sale started at midnight on the release day. I recall going to a local Fry's Electronics store (out of business now) roaming around and at 12:01 am grabbing a box of the upgrade. I still have the box and its contents. Full version was too expensive for me back then. There was a big pile of Win95 boxes at the entrance of the store. A local TV crew was there interviewing people about the new OS. I came home and upgraded Win 3.1 and by morning I was watching in amazement the screen savers. There was one of an airplane flying around the screen.

I fondly remember the Windows 95 "Start me Up" parody which we watched as QuickTime video on a Mac IIfx with a nice 21" Trinitron screen... "It makes a grown man cry!"

Not exactly this video, but the same lyrics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sH6lopuzdc

I was a big Amiga fan back then, and I think for a long time, it was a superior machine to pretty much anything else (preemptive multitasking, multi chips, great graphics and sound, etc...).

In 1995, I booted Windows 95 for the first time and as soon as I saw it, I immediately thought "That's it, game over for the Amiga. Windows has won".

It looked gorgeous, was reasonably fast, featured preemptive multitasking (10 years after the Amiga...).

I sold my Amiga in the months that followed, with much sadness.

Game over for the Amiga happened in 1994 when Commodore went bankrupt.

Quite a few Amiga owners didn't switch away until Windows XP came out.

In early 1995 I ran Windows 95 release candidate 1. I got it on CD-R from a friend. I had to spend my savings on extra RAM in order to get it running. For a brief period of time I was the coolest kid on the block.

I installed Windows 95 on our 486 (with 24 MB RAM) using the disc from my uncle's Gateway 2000 G6-180. Initially the OEM installer refused to upgrade from Windows 3.11, so I renamed C:\WINDOWS\WIN.COM to WIN.MOC and it upgraded without a hitch.

I'm surprised that they included the "no upgrade" check and then make it so easy to bypass. Internet access was rare in 1995, so a stricter check could've been pretty effective.

I don’t honestly think Microsoft cared all that much. To them, having windows on a machine means far more than having a license fee paid for (at least for general consumers).

I remember Chicago (Win95) as "Oh that's interesting, they wrote a small kernel to run NT userspace code on old PCs." It also supported NT NDIS drivers (supposedly the same binaries, although initially I'm not sure that actually worked) which was interesting to me at the time since I worked for a company that made network interface hardware for weird mainframe networks, and the associated terminal emulation and file transfer applications. Since we had beta builds for months (years?) prior, there was no launch hysteria. It was always obvious this was a stop-gap measure only for as long as retail users wouldn't pay for a system with enough memory to run NT. That took 6 years -- bit more than I would have expected at the time.

The later paragraphs are quite too much rosy. Hard to be the operating system "that brough the WWW to the masses" when it initially did not even enable IP (the protocol) to begin with. They were too busy trying to make MSN and netbios win against the WWW and TCP/IP...

WinDows 95 was the first Windows architecture I wrote code for. I remember so much of the literature was awash with 16 bit sectors which I actually needed to undo to make 32 bit code. But I was thankful the resulting code was so relatively straightforward.

There was nothing like the hypetrain for Windows 95 ever before -- and the only thing that might compare after was the release of the iPhone. There was a guy in Software Etc. whose whole job was to stand at the door and remind people that Windows 95 was coming out on August 24th.

Time for computer enthusiasts could be divided into two eras: before and after Windows 95. Before Windows 95, computers were for nerds and office drones only, pretty much. After Windows 95, awareness and curiosity about computers among normies increased phenomenally. That's how much effort Microsoft put into raising Windows awareness, and how much it paid off.

I was running huge warez dumps at the time Windows 95 was in development. I'd also just got my hands on a stolen $4000 0.5X CD writer [1]. I was selling dozens of copies of each development release of Windows 95 as it came out of Microsoft. Every single new minor build number people wanted an update, so I would sell them another CD-R. Blank CD-Rs at that time were £10 a pop and I was selling them for £20 a piece. Had to wake myself every two hours at night to switch CDs in the burner. Fun times.

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cdd521_compact-disc-...

I think this article's mention of Windows NT alongside Chicago and Cairo is a bit of a timeline error. NT first released in 1993 but development started in the late 80s, well before either of those projects.

When I was working at MS it wasn't uncommon to see 1989 copyright dates in NT kernel source.

I grew up with an Apple Lisa, PowerBook 145 and 180 and later 180c, and then a Macintosh 638CD.

Windows 95's release was during a pretty dark period for me as a Mac user. System 7 was pretty unstable and crashed frequently. I don't remember it becoming particularly more stable until maybe 7.5.3 (1996). SCSI was slow and unreliable. My Performa had only SoftGPU and couldn't play the games I wanted. (Funny, an unsolved problem for the Mac in 2023!)

I nearly gave in. I remember going to MicroCenter and leafing through a Windows 95 book that went over its UIs. Everything felt so different and that was exciting.

But I hung in there as a Mac user. I eventually ended up with a PowerComputing Power Tower 225 (I think) and had never been so happy. It was remarkable being able to finally use the software I wanted to use. Then the iMac, Mac OS 8, and eventually OS X.

Kudos to Windows 95. For all my insistence in the early 90s that Macs were better, for a time, they mostly weren't.

Although Commodore went bankrupt in 1994, the Amiga was still better than the Macintosh and Windows in 1995.

Also, the Amiga could multi-task Classic Mac OS and it was faster than a real Macintosh due to the Amiga's custom graphics chips. It could also multi-task DOS, Windows, OS/2 or Linux using a Bridgeboard, allowing Amiga OS, Mac OS and OS/2 to all run at the same time.

That said, the Amiga OS could also crash due to a badly written app. At least if Mac OS crashed, you could just restart Mac OS as it didn't affect the Amiga OS or Bridgeboard.

Quite a few Amiga users didn't replace their Amigas until Windows XP came out.

As for the UI, the Amiga's Workbench 1.x was pretty ugly but later versions looked pretty good although quite minimalistic. Mac OS looked the best in color but not having pre-emptive multi-tasking was a major downgrade for Amiga and OS/2 users. I prefer the look of OS/2's Workplace Shell over Windows 95.

Weren't Amigas expensive? My only exposure was AV class at school. And they mostly used PCs by that point.

They weren't as expensive as Macs but they were also much more powerful so they were well worth the money even if Macs were cheaper. Macs were pretty minimalist systems from a hardware standpoint with no graphics acceleration and little sound capability in the early days. The Amiga's graphics and sound chips relieved the CPU of a lot of work, allowing it more time to focus on other things. This is why running Mac OS as a task under Amiga OS on some CPU and at some MHz would ran faster than on real Mac hardware of the same CPU and MHz

The biggest the thing for me is the jump from 3.x that felt like a forced GUI to what felt like native GUI with round corners.

Then, if needed, full screen DOS more. I still miss that UI flip.

I get what you mean about 3.x feeling forced, but 3.x->95 was a transition from rounded buttons to glorious sharp bevels everywhere. Then in Office 97 they started that business of hovering over buttons.

I worked at an early ISP, and Windows 95 really simplified dialup Internet, since TCP/IP, PPP, etc was all built in! With 3.1, you had to install Trumpet Winsock just to get online. It was tons of extra steps and painful for both users and the ISP to support.

Internet explorer was also a big thing. Having a web browser built into the OS was a major enabler to getting people online. (Though, it wasn't in windows 95, it was part of the "plus" expansion pack :D)

Huh. I was supporting myself by buying cheap NE2000 clones and doing installs for students wanting onto the campus Ethernet. It took me a while to figure out the first one, but after that the DOS-mode packet drivers and Winsock were a lot less finicky than Win95's. 95 always wanted you to clear IP assignments, reboot, then assign the (static) IP you were supposed to have. Then reboot again for it to take effect. And it rarely seemed to work the first time you did that process.

With most non-new PC's being a bit anemic for 95 at the time, especially all the disk activity, I was happy on 3.11 for several more years. I tried 95B on my 486-66, but was never really happy with the performance. I was happy with packet drivers on the campus network and the wonderful ETHERPPP package that did all the dial, connect, handshake stuff and then emulated a packet driver if I was stuck needing dialup (which, considering I was still using a 14.4k modem because I had no need for dialup speed most of the time, was not ideal). You could use the NCSA Telnet (+ ftp, etc.) software for DOS, and seamlessly start using Winsock in Windows (or native TCP/IP with WfW 3.11) without a reboot.

But I'm sure that built-in, especially for dialup, was far easier for ISP's to support.

https://archive.is/X8Cjt

I recall being in a Babbages and examining a Windows 95 box on the shelf. What a different time.

The story of Windows 95 as a feat of software architecture is under-explored.

This team made a wildly successful transition from a 16-bit, cooperatively multitasked, unprotected, DOS-extender OS to a 32-bit, preemptively multitasked, protected memory “real” OS while maintaining excellent DOS and Win16 compatibility—in three years.

It took Apple, working in a much smaller hardware and software ecosystem, at least a decade & a near-death experience to do much the same, and only via acquisition.

There’s a great book about the creation of NT, Showstopper. Its implementation has been explored extensively since the beginning in Microsoft Press’ own Inside Windows NT and Windows Internals books.

But the story of how Microsoft pulled off “Cougar” and “Panther” remains largely untold, AFAIK.

Windows/386 (a version of Windows 2.0) had preemptive multitasking in 1987.

For DOS programs only. Windows 95 was the first non-NT version where an errant Windows application couldn’t freeze the system by failing to yield.

Covered in https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-history-of-windows-20

And discussed here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37216455>

>to a 32-bit, preemptively multitasked, protected memory “real” OS while maintaining excellent DOS and Win16 compatibility—in three years.

and only >10 years after competition! :)

this is a mischaracterization of Apple OS development

source: in the room at the time

Which part? Copland never got all of those (particularly back-compat) even close to complete and stable.

Yeah -- it was probably even worse than that!

This picture sounds oh so rosey. The winners who write history and what actually happened are usually totally different things. I'd take the presentation of this information with a grain of truth.

My personfeat of glory on windows 95 happened in ~1997 (I had recently moved to Seattle and was the IT CAD Manager for a very large architectural firm on the west coast...

I deployed many 95 machines...

This friend of a friend had somehow managed to go into the windows (aesthetics) setting and somehow changed ALL the component colors to black - so you could navigate with the keyboard through every menu in Windows...

I had to use muscle memory to get from boot through hitting all the right keys to navigate to control panel and open the settings and reset the colors back to normal, just by clicking through the menus via the keyboard...

They thought I was some sort of wizard.

The reality was that years of gaming with games such as Bards Tale, I was a master of the ten-key - in bards tale you would memorize the key patterns to get from dungeon to store to dungeon to inn etc...

Before that, we used "Pathminder" to manage our BBS warez directories and such, all keyboard navigation So since middle grades I was ten-keying my way through dungeons and villages like a wraith

(and I had a grocery store inventorying job in highschool, with a ten-key on my thigh.

So Windows 95 was extremely easy to navigate and memorize all it's keyboard shorts and clicks..

Honestly, it's way better than Windows 11

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