Windows 95 released August 24, 1995
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Yes it wasn't truly 32-bit but the core was not MS-DOS. It was a hybrid. The Win95 kernel was 32-bit and drove almost all of the system, including memory. 16-bit DOS was used as a launching pad and then it's job shifted to handle 16-bit graphics and other hardware that was unable to work with the new 32-bit kernel. So you booted 16-bit DOS, and as WIN.EXE executed, the system transmorphed from 16-bit into a 32-bit (kernel) OS but some of that core 16-bit driver code was designed to remain welded onto it. Even more impressive is how you could dissolve this 32-bit level and return the system to 16-bit DOS. That remains a very impressive achievement 30 years later. Happy anniversary Windows 95!
When Windows didn't have a driver for some hardware, it would tell you it's "using 16-bit driver" (or was it DOS driver?). So it's all 32-bit.
Hah, this reminds me of Win32s on Windows 3.1x...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_32-bit_file_access
And on a more personal note, reading the descriptions of the mixed 16/32-bit architecture always makes me feel conflicted.
On one hand, the technical achievement is somewhere between genius and madness and I’m not sure on which side—not only did they ship a hypervisor in a consumer OS in 1987 (as “Windows/386”), they also flipped a live MS-DOS with an unknown complement of drivers and binary patches from running on live hardware to running inside a(n admittedly unsafe) VM, then proceeded to use those drivers and respect the patches including in applications written for Windows and not MS-DOS. I don’t think I have the sort of arrogance it takes to even think of attempting such acrobatics.
On the other hand, I was there, I grew up on computers that ran Windows 95 and 98, and I remember just how much better Windows 2000 was, how much more comfortable it was to not worry about the system crashing on you every half an hour. Perhaps 95 was a magnificent technical achievement, but it certainly didn’t feel like one to the user. And thus I continue to feel conflicted.
There’s also the question of why, exactly, was NT too heavy to run on contemporary consumer machines. You could say it was bloated, but so was Windows 95: the multiple 16/32-bit mode transitions it took to write to a file certainly weren’t free; and don’t get me started[2] about shipping a COM-based shell, realizing it was too heavy for the minimum RAM requirement, and solving that by shipping a second, stripped-down copy of COM then live-swapping the real one in its place as soon as the fake one became insufficient.
[1] https://www.os2museum.com/wp/book-review-unauthorized-window...
[2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040705-00/?p=38...
Win95 GUI subsystem relied heavily on large shared memory segments and running things in kernel mode. Less safe, but less overhead. You don't need to copy bitmaps around because the GUI can just read them straight out of app RAM.
The clerk refused to show us. I'm still irritated about it.
The clerk might've been afraid showing it would put people off.
My 486 only had 4MB of RAM and I couldn't afford the $400-$500 to take it to 16GB so I actually switched to Linux in August of 95, amusingly enough.
I remember reading about it those magazines, but got a love cd much much later
At that time there was the Xfree X11 implementation, before the Xorg coming, and you had to create your configuration for your GPU and monitor combination, using scripts or from scratch, the famous Xconfig. I recall the scary warning in the documentation to not mess with your monitor modelines as you could literally burn your CRTs; monitors at that time were already equipped with builtin protections, so wrong config would only result in a black screen, but every time it happened I held my breath.
There were already at that time a lot of different window managers, like FVWM, TWM and at least one or two desktop environments. I think CDE was already available for Linux in 95...
SO MANY rescue boots.
Related, it took 8h to compile a kernel with 4MB of RAM. I didn't realize that was slow, honestly. I just thought that's how long it took. When I finally did get more RAM, and the system stopped swapping, and it took 12 minutes to recompile, it blew me away.
Anyway, it was fine. Well more than fine, great. Running a dozen virtual consoles (alt-f1 thru alt-f12) gave me everything i needed; interactive sessions, sessions I left logged into IRC clients, PINE for email, etc.
I didn't have enough RAM to run X Windows until later but once I did, that was a revelation as well. Remote X servers was so much more advanced than stuff we got in Windows/Mac until much much later.
But by '99 I was old enough to build my own PC, so I built a fancy PIII-450 box, with one of the first nVidia GPUs (RIVA TNT) with 16MB RAM (later upgraded to 32) and finally stepped into the world of fancy color graphics (new color monitor, yay), Win 98, and the world of multi-booting with Linux, QNX, BeOS and of course DOS. I had this fancy GUI boot manager (with mouse support too!), can't recall what it was called but it was so much more advanced than anything else at the time, it had a built-in partition manager and could also get past the 4-partition limit. Man, those were the days, so much cool shit to play around with.
Perhaps you meant 16MB, because an 80486 processor didn't have a snowball's chance of addressing 16GB of real memory?
I could not see the improvement in that. The frequent BSODs proved it was horribly unstable.
Maybe the area was just trashed or otherwise unseemly, and would leave a bad impression. Maybe the shopkeeper smoked weed back there and didn't want to expose kids to Bertha, his prized six-foot bong. Who knows.
When I've worked in shops that sold electronics with a retail storefront, we tried to keep the showroom looking very nice and uncluttered. The back rooms where we repaired stuff and tinkered around with gear were very different: These were utilitarian spaces that regular customers weren't often invited to see.
Nothing particularly untoward ever went on back there, but still: There's reasons why shops (of all sizes) have interior walls. :)
I was soooo excited when my family bought a PC with 95 on it. My best friend, who had Windows 3.1, was so jealous.
They met during an SNL taping where she was performing "What I Am", which is like the most 90s 80s song ever.
But if you had a system that met the minimum stated requirements, the experience was still pretty terrible.
The minimum most of us recommended at the time for acceptable performance was a 486 faster than 33 MHz, 8 MB of RAM, and 100 MB of disk space. And some will take issue with that today, because the experience on a machine like that still wasn’t very good. You had to draw the line somewhere, and then, as now, different people had different definitions of words like “minimum” and “acceptable.”
You really needed a Pentium-class machine to be happy with Win95, and I think Win95 did a lot to goose Pentium sales for Intel. If you could afford a 100 or 120 MHz Pentium with 16 or 32 MB of RAM and at least a 540 megabyte hard drive, you were much happier with it."
I had a Pentium 100MHz, and 8MB was acceptable, although I had a friend with 16MB and a 166MHz, and the grass always seemed greener. He was able to play Tomb Raider.
I make a lot of retro videos and tested a 386 on 4MB of RAM here: https://github.com/hatonthecat/linux_distro_tests#9-26-24-wi...
https://nand2mario.github.io/posts/2026/z486/ https://ei2030.github.io/FemtoTX/#about One can make Windows 95 solar powered again. The first time was at ISSCC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Juy8xP-hUtA
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The importance of this should not be understated.
Under Windows 3.1, or MacOS, programs could be written to periodically hand control back to the OS, allowing the OS to then hand-off control to another program, thus allowing cooperative multi-tasking. However, every single program involved had to be written to do this. If you ran a program that was older or not written for multi-tasking, it'd assume complete control of your machine until it terminated. Even multi-tasking friendly programs would hang your machine if they went into an infinite loop. There was no hope of appeal to the almighty task manager! The result was Windows (and MacOS prior to OS X) were simply not very good at multi-tasking, so users mostly didn't do it.
Preemptive multi-tasking allowed the OS to forcibly take back control from programs. Programs would be given slices of CPU time and didn't have to worry about handing control back, because the OS would simply take it back. If a program went into an infinite loop, it would continue getting slices of the CPU's attention, but so too would other programs and the OS itself. This meant you could Alt-Tab out of a word processor to look up something in your web browser without the risk of a browser crash bringing down your computer and causing you to lose everything you'd written since you last saved.
Windows 95 put an end (mostly) to the punishment of multi-tasking and changed how typical desktop users used their computers.
But yes, Win NT was the real game changer in Windows universe back then; if they hadnt made the switch, we would still have a tuned Win98/ME without proper multiuser account tenanting etc.
C:\ONGRTLNS.W95
The article left out the triumphant arrival of long filenames.
That summer also marked the end of all my attempts to get friends and coworkers to switch to OS/2... although my linux experiments were ramping up at about the same time. Heady days!
90s Apple snark alongside full page ads in the press with lines like "Introducing Windows 95. It lets you use more than eight characters to name your files." "It has a trash can you can open and take things out of again." "It lets you drop files anywhere you want on the desktop." "Imagine that."
But where were they really?
Meanwhile we do remember the giant Windows 95 Start button banner on the CN Tower in Toronto. Marketing. Frenzy.
I lived on the Eastside at the time, and I remember it being all over the news that Bill and Steve were running all over town in someone's 911 (I forget whether it was Bill or Steve's), blasting "start me up" and going to a bunch of launch parties at software stores.
When 95 released, smartphones weren't a thing, internet wasn't common for households, and downloading an album would take you a day if you were one of the lucky ones with an internet connection lol.
That makes me wonder what the first pirated song was that was ripped to MP3 and provided for download over the Internet...
This changed with OSR2 I believe, when they started bundling IE4.
I think this is the completely wrong takeaway. You are lumping in two very different 15 year periods into your 30 year view and giving undue weight to the latter half. Year-over-year in the 90s everything was changing. Decade over decade, 2013 to 2023 was basically unchanged. Move forward a bit, 2016 to 2026 and the only interesting computing development has been LLMs. They're neat, but 1995 to 2005 was way, way more interesting.
In 1965 we didn't even have CPUs. Transistors and ICs were at their very beginning. "Network" meant a teleprinter.
I do remember my dad jumping back to Windows 3.1 atleast once, likely for the reason of performance/memory issues at the time with Win95 - but he did go back to it. Overall, it was a big step.
A couple of years later, likely to run Quake better that in did on our 486, he built his own PC. Pentium 133. I couldn't remember what RAM and HD space it had. Maybe 32MB RAM with 200GB disk or something. I am just guessing.
Regardless, running Windows 95 on it was night and day. High resolutions and smooth experience! It likely crashed a lot but when you had nothing really to compare it to, it is annoyances that were not that big of a deal back then. You just accepted it.
Of course, playing Quake on it was an absolute dream. A year or so later - we then had 3dfx cards. Good times!
Moving to Windows 98 just didn't seem like a big step to me. Windows 98 looked exactly the same as 95 except the desktop was riddled with icons to the internet. I hated it. Eventually you moved over it. Looking back, Win98 was likely a heavily improved Win95 and didn't crash as often. Again, these are things forgotten in time.
How times changed. I also had Windows 2000 at University and then moved to Windows XP. I had to keep reinstalling WinXP every 6 months as my mouse cursor would start to move downwards on its own. As much as I liked XP (eventually) it was the starting point of moving over to Linux.
My experience with Vista was not great. Again, from memory felt very bloated. Windows 7 was good. Never used Windows 8. Windows 10 was good. As for Windows 11... its simply mixed with pros and cons.
Obviously some of this is for show, but even still it indicates people cared about having a very smooth and snappy user experience back then and that it was absolutely important to showcase performance. Somewhere along the way developers just quietly agreed that latency is the user's problem.
It wasn't really Windows' fault. It was well optimized. Machines of that era were just really slow.
Even their "totally cool way to run your computer" campaign for OS/2 Warp pretty much fell flat. That was the last gasp, never heard about OS/2 after that.
They had it all: Lines of dependable PC hardware, an excellent operating system that was much more advanced than what people were used to, and they were even selling a cost-competitive CPU (the 6x86) with their branding soon-enough.
But even with a properly-big marketing budget they just couldn't fit it together.
It would have made sense that a person could go to Sears or something, and buy an IBM-branded computer with IBM's CPU and with IBM's flagship operating system running out-of-the-box.
As far as I know, that was never a thing that happened.
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I ran OS/2 Warp 3 for awhile -- in text mode at first, because I couldn't afford enough RAM to run the GUI. It worked; I had multiple computers online concurrently with the InJoy software from F/X Communications. I was playing videos, chatting on IRC, browsing the web, and reading Usenet with FreeAgent all at the same time, with multiple hard drives combined into a single namespace with LVM. It was running GNU utilities and other Unix-ey things and had a local rootless X server in the form of Humingbird's eXceed.
It was a fun time to do interesting things with computers. Software was still tight enough to get these things done with perhaps whole dozens of megabytes of RAM.
A good friend of mine transitioned his shop full of PCs and terminals (which had been based around IGC's VM/386, running MS-DOS programs from a shared box) to OS/2 Warp around the time it came out.
OS/2 worked well-enough for him that he kept using it until 2018 when he sold the business and retired, though it had been marginalized to VMs running in Linux by then.
But that worked well and provided great continuity: All the little programs and features and bits of custom software (with customer data) that flowed well when they were implemented in the early 1990s continued to flow well until the end.
(Linux, being free as in beer, did the same to Windows Server and the other UNIXes not many years after.)
Linux did not substitute for Windows Server to any great degree until quite recently. Commercial Unix, yes.
Power of advertising.
If you remember 1995, the advertising for Win95 was huge. Really really huge. Including adverts at sports stadiums, in fashion magazines and the like where nobody would have thought about advertising an operating system FFS! People were buying copies of Win95 who didn't even have a computer because they wanted to be 'part of it'.
By contrast, I only ever remember seeing an advert for OS/2 in a single computer magazine.
At the same time Linux was really getting off the ground (RedHat released about then) and if your hardware supported it it felt rock solid. The multi user experience was amazing and it made you feel like a wizard.
I got to play with Qnx's bootable disk at about that time too. It came with a beautiful manual explaining the architecture.
There was Windows NT and OS2/Warp too.
I didn't play a lot with the BSD variants.
It was truly a magical time for OS enthusiasts.
However the most wonderful thing about software written at that time was it was written with care and skill.
Microsoft dominated the 90s like no other.
She removed a plastic cover from the keyboard (does anyone remember those covers? They dont make them anymore due to cost cutting) and then... she wrote some magic and a demoscene demo popped up on the screen.
Now I think it was MSDos so she opened Norton Commander and simply opened some demoscene demo. I wonder what was the name of that demo (or screensaver?)
It was a bird view of 3d animated green-blue water.. made from some surfaces.
For a kid who did know any english DOS was magic
When Windows Vista got released I switched over to Mac.
It seemed better than Windows XP in just about every way. Other than an absolute fight getting a driver installed for a Prolific USB to serial adapter (PL2303, maybe?) that had previously been working well, I didn't really experience any issues.
Some task scheduling and event subscription features I think were from there that I liked. Firewall, BitLocker, WinRE
I asked GPT to list features introduced within vista... boy are there TON of stuff that got changed under the hood.
Even today, if you look at MacOS, it's just the Windows 95 interface, with the taskbar moved to the top of the screen, open tasks kept on the bottom of the screen, and instead of a Start menu, there's Spotlight Search. Same thing, messier execution (just to be different).
That may be true, but certainly not because macOS got inspired by Windows, rather because Windows 95 was inspired by NeXTStep.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20150824-00/?p=91...
The web page is a bit borked, so here's the table pulled out by claude
I can remember having fun editing several bytes of the GDI.EXE or USER.EXE with a hex-editor when a colleague went to bathroom. You should've seen their faces when they got back and the screen turned funny colors.
Suffice to say we all installed Windows NT Workstation when we had the chance because it was much more stable.