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Comment by Kwpolska | Hacker News Reader

> Providing a plain black-and-white version was another standard recommendation at the time. But I can’t remember why – I certainly never actually saw a computer running Win95 or later with a B&W display!

Windows 95 can be convinced to run in monochrome: http://toastytech.com/guis/miscw95bw.png (from http://toastytech.com/guis/misc2.html)

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monochrome displays were common in low end laptops, but they were so expensive there weren't many around.

One of my "hero memories" was a time when I was a master of Win95 - and a friend had accidentally changed ALL of her display options to black - so all the UI was black, but I knew Win95 so well I could navigate the entire OS via keyboard - and was able to from memory navigate through the start menu, to settings, knowing how many tabs to hit to get to display and change that back to default.

The people watching thought I was a magician.

(I also had several sealed original W95 boxes on floppies...(we shutdown an office, and as IT mgr - I had to go liquidate - and we had ~50 boxes of original release W95s there - so I took several home) and I held them for ~10+ years then sold them on eBay, I only got $25 for each - but I sold them as pieces of "computing history")

What I think is amazing is that W95 fit on a set of floppies. I think the only installation medium I’ve ever seen for it was a CD-ROM.

CDroms were a luxury addon when W95 was released - but every machine had a 3.5

I want to say it was in the ~20 disk range...

There were a lot of really fun things that happened with W95 - a lot of "mischevious" cyberwar...

Like taking image of desktop as background came out with that - so nothing was clickable as a prank.

There were several backdoor utils

There were several prank links to something that seemed serious/work -- but then switched to a really loud voice yelling "IM WATCHING P*RN"

(The backdoor utils were really powerful though, and they remind me of a thing I am doing with Cursor/Claude -- Agent mode access to a fresh windows laptop as admin and having the bot fully config my new windows machine to my specs.

There was a little magic to make that happen too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format

Oh, I vaguely remember this from when floppy disks were still around (though not by the name DMF) - I remember them having a 1.44MB capacity but some smart people reformatted their floppy disks to get it up to 1.68MB.

Windows 95 came on 13 floppies. That version excluded most fancy features, you can't compress ~360 MB to ~22.

Windows 11 could also "fit on a set of floppies" - although thousands of floppies would be completely absurd, it is not impossible.

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