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There's an almost mystical air about the era of Windows when Microsoft was focused on world domination through offering a genuinely better product. I still remember sitting on my bed totally transfixed during the install when I moved from 95 to 98.

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That's interesting, I didn't like 95 much, and 98 didn't particularly impress me either. Both would blue screen a lot.

Back then I was more impressed by NT and OS/2. Windows 2000 is the one I remember most fondly.

OS/2 would have beaten NT in the consumer and SMB markets.

95 dealt with every weakness of NT in those markets and provided developers, consumers and SMBs with a smooth migration path towards it. It had very good backwards (DOS and 3.11) and forwards (XP) compatibility, reasonable hardware requirements and the ability to boot into DOS (important for gaming and some other applications at the time). It also offered massive advances over 3.11 (proper multi-tasking, the best looking GUI of the time and greatly improved stability) that when combined with the above, pushed user adoption.

Given its design requirements, 95 could never have been as stable as NT, but it was a spectacularly successful interim solution for customers not yet ready for the trade-offs that would have involved.

And I believe Windows NT 4 (which had the Windows 95 UI) was the most stable version of NT for a while, even after Windows 2000 came out. Windows 2000 put the video driver in kernel space, which was faster than NT 4, but the early drivers were not great.

—-EDIT:

I misremembered. It was NT 3.51 that still had the video driver in userspace, NT 4 moved it into the kernel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_4.0

Depends on what you had to compare it with. For me, the base of comparison was Win 3.11 and DOS, and Windows 95 blew my mind.

> I still remember sitting on my bed totally transfixed during the install when I moved from 95 to 98.

For me, the key Windows 95 moment happened while I was sitting in an IBM lab working as a tester for OS/2 Lan Server. We had a copy of Windows 95 we were testing for compatibility.

Playing around one afternoon, we decided to try to break it. We started Drivespace compression, let it run for a while, and pulled the plug on the machine. Plugged it back in and it picked up right where it had left off...

And Windows 95 is DOS too, not NT. So less stable than NT

Agreed, although the relationship of DOS and Windows 95 is significantly stranger than that wording implies. DOS boots Windows 95, and legacy I/O can go through DOS, but DOS is also hosted by V86 machines to run DOS apps.

I'm pretty sure it's possible for a DOS process running in a window to issue a file system request (a DOS API call) that gets trapped and processed by 32-bit VMM code and then immediately forwarded back to (a different instance of) DOS for handling by a legacy device driver.

There are reasons for this.

It's amazing it worked.

I'm thankful it's gone.

Not quite. DOS was just the bootloader for Windows 9x.

While Windows 95's kernel didn't have the full feature set of NT, it still was more sophisticated than DOS.

Source: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=24063

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