Screenshots from Windows 95 | Hacker News Reader

Screenshots from Windows 95

guidebookgallery.org

94 pointsxeonmc84 comments

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This site makes some weird choices.

Calendar: "This GUI doesn't have this feature" -- yes it does. Double click the clock.

Clock: The old clock application is still part of Windows 95, but it's also in the corner.

Address book: Depends on the version of Windows 95. Ones that came with IE3 or IE4 have an address book.

CD player: maybe the floppy version lacked it? But Windows 95 definitely has a CD player.

Browser: CD versions of Windows 95 came with Internet Explorer; depending on the version of 95, it could be IE2, IE3, or IE4.

Desktop themes: Part of the Plus add-on. Most versions don't include it (some did, especially OEMs). Could probably count the Appearance tab of the display properties too.

Logout screen: Windows 95 has it, but you'll have to connect it to a Netware or NT domain to show it.

Good start, but those are the glaring omissions I spotted.

Double clicking opens the date & time preferences (which already has a screenshot), not a calendar program. 9x did not ship with a clock or calendar program unless you upgraded from 3.x. The article mentions the clock in the taskbar explicitly. And unlike 98, 95 doesn't have a separate logout screen; it is always just another entry in the regular shutdown screen.

The only glaring omission I see is the CD player, but I'd hardly call it glaring considering it is a non-default component, and many countries did not even get a CD version of 95 in the first place (or only OEM).

I don't even think the CD Player is an optional component, my Windows 95 VM doesn't have it in the Add/Remove Programs dialog. It's just there.

It was in an upgraded version of Windows 95. Not the original:

> CD Player was included in Windows 98, Windows NT 3.51, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 (as Deluxe CD Player). The program was also made available as part of an upgrade for Windows 95.

https://microsoft.fandom.com/wiki/CD_Player

That wiki is wrong. (First off, NT 3.51 came out four months before 95, it'd make no sense as an argument that the CD player was too new for 95, yet included in NT 3.51)

The Windows 95 release-to-manufacture disc, files dated 1995-07-11, the /WIN95/WIN95_14.CAB file:

    $ cabextract -s -l -F cdp\* win95_14.cab
    Viewing cabinet: win95_14.cab
     File size | Date       Time     | Name
    -----------+---------------------+-------------
           643 | 11.07.1995 09:50:00 | cdplayer.cnt
         88064 | 11.07.1995 09:50:00 | cdplayer.exe
         20579 | 11.07.1995 09:50:00 | cdplayer.hlp
    
    All done, no errors.

Windows 95 shipped with the CD Player from its very first release. It wasn't added in as an update. Day 1.

https://web.archive.org/web/20051214182952/http://support.mi...

Note that I _never_ saw 95 as a CD in retail. I actually took a trip to the US when it was released to search for it, since I got confirmation from my local MS that it was not in EU. Several people do ensure me that there was a retail CD version, but I have never seen it in person myself. I have seen plenty of OEM discs, though.

In the US, the floppy version was very uncommon. I didn't even know it existed for a few years, until I encountered someone that had it.

Ah ha. Mystery solved, thank you!

Turns out everybody's half-right. :)

Can I ask how you installed 95 on a VM. I've been trying for a few days but the installer errors out because of `VGA.DRV`. Dunno if it's a problem with my particular iso, but I'm using VM Ware Fusion

It's right there in Multimedia section.

The minimal install of 95 is ridiculously small. 3.x practically fits in 10MiB of disk space.; they could not just multiply it by 10x and call it a day.

95 definitely had a CD Player.

Before 95 came out I was selling the beta versions on CD like crazy. Blank CDs were like $20/ea back then.

But I started an online project to create a database of all the world's CDs by having everyone email me their cdplayer.ini file which contained all the track listings they had typed in.

This project lasted but a few weeks before I realized why it no longer worked properly. dot ini files are limited to 64K on Windows 95 lol

It looks like some of the omissions you mentioned are instead included on a separate page for the OEM Service Release 2 version of Windows 95: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win95osr2

>Calendar: "This GUI doesn't have this feature" -- yes it does. Double click the clock.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050621-04/?p=35...

Well I checked my Windows 95 VM, even opening a command prompt and typing "date"; changing the date view in that panel does change the date instantly. I never knew this was the behavior.

He describes changing the behavior in Windows 2000 being "reluctant"; I would say it was the proper and expected design from the onset. Windows 95 does not have instant-change settings anywhere else, it's always safeguarded behind OK and Apply buttons. Changing the date immediately on changing the view is inconsistent with the rest of the operating system's GUI design.

Yup, absolutely. I'd go so far as to say that in a window with clearly labeled OK/Cancel/Apply buttons, the instant change is a straight-up bug.

There's always a degree of subjectivity and personal taste, but I do consider this to be the peak of OS UIs.

I have an "ironic" machine at home that is an old retina iMac, with Linux installed and themed with Chicago95. My attempt at a machine with a nice hardware, nice OS and nice UI :)

Windows 2000 might be the actual peak. It took the good parts of Windows 95 and 98 and combined them into something quite excellent.

All downhill ever since.

I agree with the choice of Windows 2000. The reaction to Windows XP was that it was too videogamish with its choice of colors and bezels. Then it lasted for so many years past Vista and in part Windows 8 that it became the reference Windows interface. Then the flat UIs mimicking the web and also the 80s with simple elements (we couldn't do complicated widgets back then, not enough pixels.)

Win XP with classic look was pretty decent and useable. There was an option in system settings to disable all theming, 3D stuff, animations etc. just the basic look of that time and a lot more snappy UX.

Do you have a picture of what that looked like? I'm curious. When I search for it, I can only find pictures of normal Windows XP and older versions of Windows. I can only imagine it looking like Windows 95 again.

It looked like Windows 2000.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win2000pro

Not easy to find, anyway here is a small one: http://toastytech.com/guis/wxpclassic.png

Here is a blog post that explains how and why: http://softwaretracker.blogspot.com/2007/08/improve-windows-...

Thanks, that's exactly what I wanted. It did look slightly nicer than the Windows 95 pictures here.

Classic style actually worked up to and including Windows 7:

https://betawiki.net/images/d/da/Windows_7_classic_theme.png

Thanks for letting me know. I looked into it, and apparently it's still even possible to activate on later versions of Windows with registry edits and helper software: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/discussions/167

I avoided the XP Luna theme as best I could when it was new, but now I look back at it and realize it was pretty good.

At least I could tell where the scrollbar was.

Windows still has the Classic Theme; it's just hidden. https://old.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/11qq0qi/why_did_mi...

Also took the good parts from Windows NT. I loved using Windows 2000. I remember being really mad when XP came out and it added all the colourful and curvy GUI elements - felt really dumbed down.

> Also took the good parts from Windows NT.

It is Windows NT 5.0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Releases

And XP was Windows NT 5.1 (as also seen in your link)

Got an old Dell running Windows 2000. Its remarkable how responsive the UI is. I open an Explorer window, it paints instantly. The Start Menu pops up completely drawn in a fraction of a second. Windows 11 on a monster machine is sluggish by comparison -- I can feel it drawing each window I open.

I was just having the argument the other that dragging windows on Haiku on a plain old unaccelerated framebuffer just feels an order of magnitude faster than dragging windows around on Windows 11 with all acceleration enabled. On a 5K monitor. Windows is not setting a very high bar these days.

USB support even.

I miss being able to tell what’s a button. And what state it’s in.

It is kinda funny that a style that looks like one of those bad UIs a stereotypical doesn’t-know-GUI programmer might have made as a stand-in before the actual designers could make it good, is what’s in vogue. Finally, even I can make a “good” UI! Thanks, flat design.

I agree with you. Buttons were immediately identifiable as such, menus had keyboard shortcuts visible everywhere, all items always looked the same across all apps, and everything was really snappy.

We've really gone backwards since.

Aqua (in early versions of OS X) did a fantastic job of combining all this clear usability with a lot of fun visual flair. Even the old Qt/GTK themes which emulated that look were pretty good.

It really is incredible how flat and boring modern macOS is.

At some point "skeuomorph" design went out of fashion, and everything had to be flat and simple. I think it all started with the Microsoft Zune (an MP3 player), which influenced Windows Phone, which influenced Windows 8. Then came iOS 7, and finally Android 5. I actually don't know when Mac OS went "flat". I only know ever since that time it is regularly unclear what a "button" is, as it doesn't look like a button.

If you're interested, see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1388534400&dateRange=custom&...

Ironically, back in 2012 I remember people were expressing their distaste for the skeuomorphic design of iOS and macOS.

> I think it all started with the Microsoft Zune (an MP3 player)

And its companion desktop application ca. 2009: https://www.neowin.net/news/flashback-microsofts-zune-hd-tur...

And it even matched the hardware back then. You could have the colorful blue Aqua theme to match for example the iMac G3 or the graphite appearance to match the design of the Power Macs back then.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2010/09/macos-x-beta/4/

Ah, I didn't have a Mac back then, but I can definitely believe that.

I always loved the Solaris Nimbus GTK theme. It was one of the most polished GTK2 themes around. https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1080244

I’m primarily a Mac user (from the 80s until now minus a Linux break), but still think Win98SE was the best OS ever made.

The UI was flawless. Fast/responsive even on low spec PCs, cohesive design across the entire OS, logically laid out, and minimal while still giving access to everything you needed within a couple clicks.

All OSes these days are just a bloated mess.

Peak UI happened with OS/2 Warp 3, but, yes. Everything went downhill after the Great Skeumorphic Rebellion of 2010.

OS X 10.0 dug too greedily, and too deep.

I too appreciate minimalist OS UI.

I believe that graphical polish is just a distraction. It's part of why I like reading this site!

When I have time to waste, I am happy to have something pretty and shiny to work with. For professional work, I want my OS to be snappy and without distractions.

Small side note: I think for GUI screenshots (especially of older software) you should add this CSS:

    img {
        image-rendering: pixelated;
    }

On my 4k monitor it all looks blurred. (I have a bookmarklet that fixes it.)

Flat design has destroyed UI readability.

I can’t stand modern platforms that make me guess whether any piece of text is a button.

What stands out to me though is how clear and straightforward to use the control panels were for e.g. mouse, keyboard, timezone and display. Their current counterparts are a bit of a mess and I find very difficult to navigate.

Although they did lead to the infuriating click "Apply" then click Ok behaviour that people got into the habit of.

And yes, that Desktop area of 640 by 480 pixels was what we started off with, and we liked it! Once I got a monitor that supported 1024 by 768 then it was just luxury.

I avoid Microsoft whenever possible, but I can say that they did a lot of things well with Windows 95.

I remember the pre-release hype of codename "Chicago", and even bought a book about their UI design, even though I was developing primarily for Unix workstations then.

Also, the Win95 widgets look would still be more effective than most desktop looks/skins/themes today. Just modernize with some aesthetic tweaks that don't throw out the baby that works.

Worst legacy of Windows 95, though: the extra keyboard keys where just Ctrl and Alt should be. New keys was a bold move, and made sense for their UI. But crowding my laptop keyboard with keys I don't want has cost me a lot of time for decades after, and made typing less fun.

I do miss those clear buttons and input fields.

I cannot tell you how much my 70 something year old Mom gets confused trying to figure out what's clickable vs not on modern apps and OS.

Almost everything I use now is either in the terminal or a browser/electron app. I do miss native gui elements that were respectful of your screen real estate.

There’s still dedication to that among macOS developers. It’s like an artisan trade at this point, but it’s still out there.

Tons of useful, native macOS tools are available through SetApp (which is nicely curated) or other channels.

The new System Settings would like to have a word about how all new UI is scrolling tablet-first UX.

> This is the first and only Windows to denote the current time zone on the map. Surprisingly, in the next editions of Windows, the world map simply occupies space and the highlight is nowhere to be seen.

Explained here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=42...

> In early 1995, a border war broke out between Peru and Ecuador and the Peruvian government complained to Microsoft that the border was incorrectly placed. Of course, if we complied and moved the border northward, we’d get an equally angry letter from the Ecuadorian government demanding that we move it back. So we removed the feature altogether.

> The time zone map met a similar fate. The Indian government threatened to ban all Microsoft software from the country because we assigned a disputed region to Pakistan in the time zone map. (Any map that depicts an unfavorable border must bear a government stamp warning the end-user that the borders are incorrect. You can’t stamp software.) We had to make a special version of Windows 95 for them.

I thought this was solved by setting map boundaries according to your locale.

Whatever country you set everything you, adjusts maps as well?

The Windows 95 user interface was really something special.

Yeah, it is special how almost every element is somehow looks slightly off-center.

It's also pretty much ripped off of NEXTSTEP.

Isn't a much bigger influence on Windows in general the IBM Common User Access material, which NeXTSTEP decidedly was not like?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

The app UI / interaction model patterns go deeper than "they both have greyscale 3D bevels".

I don't think if you instructed someone to make a UI with greyscale 3D bevels it would look as close to NEXTSTEP as Windows 95 was. There's specific things like the source of light being on the top left, etc, which make them nearly identical.

There is a good reason to have a light source on the top: it's the natural position of the sun and of most artificial light sources.

Then it could be straight from the top, but you only get one side lit and furthermore it's not very natural as it happens rarely.

Then it's only two choices, from the left or from the right. A coin flip? Actually no. Top left lightning has a long history for some good reasons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-left_lighting so we could say it's the only professional and safe choice

> it could be straight from the top, but you only get one side lit

No, you could have the top highlight be 2 pts deep and the sides be 1 pt and one shade darker, or something like that. There are many other ways to do it.

> and furthermore it's not very natural as it happens rarely

Every day from 10 am to noon (1/3rd of the day), and any time you have your back to the sun?

> we could say it's the only professional and safe choice

Mac OS X has top down lighting and it looks great. I think what you are trying to say is that you can't think of any other ways to design the buttons.

Anyway, top left lighting is not the only detail they copied. BeOS had top-left lighting and still managed not to look like an exact clone of NEXTSTEP.

For the reference: NextStep 3.3 screenshot

http://toastytech.com/guis/ns33nfsmanager.png

(3.0 released Sept 1992, 3.3 Feb 1995)

Windows 95 released Aug 1995.

I mean the window close and maximize widgets are pretty much identical to NeXTSTEP... except they had slightly different semantics IIRC

It had Big Motif Energy, IMHO.

I have to say that what I slways loved about these os was the bitmap icons, the colorful tone to stick out I think even today works really well (except when they got the same icon in the backgroundwoth the front icon being different like web browser vs internet settings).

One thing that's I feel like is missing from this site: the blue screen of death.

I've heard second-hand that these were mostly caused by third-party drivers for devices, and truly fixing it required rewriting the drivers in-house and deprecating the old driver model.

> I've heard second-hand that these were mostly caused by third-party drivers for devices, and truly fixing it required rewriting the drivers in-house and deprecating the old driver model.

Windows 95 had some memory protection but it was rather basic compared to for example NT and UNIX'es. So it was pretty easy for a faulty piece of software to cause a kernel panic.

And now compare that to https://serenityos.org/ :)

They are doing a really good job keeping the old UI style alive.

IIRC it was Win95... If you start the computer and do nothing for a while (30 seconds?) then a yellow arrow appears and moves to the start button, so people don't ges stuck the first time they uses Windows. (I can't find a an image.)

Many years ago, I used a similar approach in an internal webpage that the T.A. must use without training. In the hallway usability tests many got stuck. I added an animated gif that is initially transparent, but after a while a yellow arrow appears to point to the "next" button.

MS has only made the GUI worse in nearly 30 years. Astounding.

I've set up Win95 many a time. Instant nostalgia.

It's insane how long some of these UI elements persisted. The Displays pane looks basically the same in Windows 11!

D: Where are the SS of easter eggs?

https://eeggs.com/tree/1154.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Easter_eggs_in_Microso...

Why no love for the UI refinements of Win 98SE? (Proper USB support, Quick Launch buttons, proper multi-display support)

Did someone crop all these screenshots pixel-perfectly by hand?

Or is there some tool to export windows that works on Windows 9x?

Either way... What was the goal of the person who put clearly hours of effort into constructing this page?

Alt prntscn

So many vivid memories associated especially with this desktop color, UI of the dial up, email, networking windows ... and until today I have no idea what the hell is "My Briefcase".

I used https://86box.net/ to install and run Windows 95, and it works perfectly.

I remember reading this site so much when I was eight years old. It's been around for at least sixteen years. Glad to see its still up, looks exactly the same too.

The biggest downside of Windows GUIs was that it all was tiny non-resizable dialogs and non-copyable text labels. Did they fix this? I don't use Windows anymore.

Dialogs with static text that you can select and copy are wonderful.

Phone apps continue that with the lack of being able to select on screen text.

At least on the iPhone you can get around it by taking a screenshot, then selecting the text

It's kinda weird that the windows desktop looks essentially the same today and not even talking about the config dialogs from then that are still there.

This sure brought back memories!

It’s now safe to turn off your computer.

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