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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

Yes, getting stuff together and getting it out there.

Windows 95 ate the world because the world was mainly still DOS; look at the numbers. It wasn't people upgrading from Win 3.1.

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Additionally, while this is US-centric, there were still many households in the mid-1990s whose first computers were PCs running Windows 95, just in time for the World Wide Web to be widely available, which created demand for personal computers. Additionally, this was during the time when Apple was struggling; its Performa lineup geared toward home users was not in the best of shape in 1995 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_5200_LC). By the time Steve Jobs returned and Apple released the first iMac (1998), it was just about time for Windows 98.

Being at the right age when Windows 95 came out, I didn't really know that there was a "Windows" prior to 95. My dad's computer ran DOS and used something called Powermenu as an organiser for executing programs. I think I had to run Wolfenstein in a tiny window for it to be fast enough to be playable, and may have, at one point, deleted one of the required DOS system files in order to try to tweak the life out of it to try to get it playable full screen. I think that was a 286. More years ago than I care to admit.

One of the big reasons people were upgrading to OS/2 was people that wanted a stabler/cleaner Windows 3.1. Most of the hottest apps for OS/2 were Windows apps. IBM started on the back foot in that competition. Windows 95 clipped their heels because it had the stability/cleanliness for cheaper and less of a RAM footprint.

What numbers? As much as I hated Windows 3.x (which is why I upgraded from DOS to Linux, not to Windows 95, and never looked back) it did not occur to me that many by 1995 did not have some Windows 3.x installed, as it was required for so much software (even some games).

Windows 3.1 sold 3 million copies in the first three months, Windows 95 moved ten million copies in the first year.

Everyone I knew went from either no PC at all, or an older DOS 386-era machine to a Windows 95 computer.

3M copies in 3 months is more than 10M in a year (if you assume sustained sales).

I don't get what the numbers are supposed to imply.

Windows 3.1: ~3 million in first six weeks, ~>3 million in first three months, ~25 million in first year.

Windows 95: ~1 million in first 4 days, ~7 million in first five weeks, ~40 million in first year.

These figures represent Microsoft’s own sales figures.

Still don't support the claim that people were mainly updating from DOS without Windows 3.x. Anecdotally I still think almost everyone using DOS by 1995 had Windows 3.x installed as well. Not necessarily a copy of Windows that was the result of Microsoft selling a copy of course.

Yeah those don't match parent's comment.

What numbers do you have in mind?

I was paying very close attention to this world at the time, and I am confident that 90%+ of every PC that could run Win95 at the time of its release had been sold by an OEM as booting straight into the bundled copy of Win3.1.

Yes, lots of people had older PCs and got Win95 with their hardware upgrade cycle.

They were never in any danger of upgrading to OS/2 or anything else: Microsoft owned the OEM sales channel and the software ecosystem for the PC for a solid 5+ years before Windows 95.

Hey give Windows 3.11 FOR WORKGROUPS some respect ;)

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