Believe it or not, it was a huge deal. I went to two launch parties -- one hosted by CompUSA and one by a local place -- the night it came out. This wasn't in Silicon Valley, but in the U.S. Midwest (St. Louis, MO). Hundreds of people stood in line at midnight to get the first copies at the two places I went to and the same thing happened all over the world. (Of course, CompUSA also had a whole display of upgrades to get your computer running better if it wasn't ready for Windows 95.)

The same sort of late night excitement existed around each early Mac OS X release, incidentally.