Windows 95 retail availability 25 years ago today

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August 24, 1995.
[See the full post at: Windows 95 retail availability 25 years ago today]

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John L, ve2mrx, Myst, AlbertMcCann623, SueW, GreatAndPowerfulTech, Microfix, Fred

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[Fred]

woody wrote:

August 24, 1995.
[See the full post at: Windows 95 retail availability 25 years ago today]

great memories , “the good old times” they were
a few days after the official launch in the USA, there was grand OpeningsShow in The Hague….
All the great stuff at the publishing time went wrong in the first trials …. But soon it appeared to have become some good publicity, really.
Now 25 years later… well you all know about the recent Redmond habits.

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• This reply was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by Fred.

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John L, Myst, woody, Microfix

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I remember when I first got it the cd had on it a game called Hover where you are a bunper car in a cool maze it was all 3-D.  I played this thing for hours, was my first taste of a 3-D game on a computer.  I don’t know about “the good old days” but was a better OS than microsoft put out now, at least for usability.

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John L, Myst, Charlie, woody

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I was 15 back then, putting my first steps in IT. I think I had about a year of ‘experience’ with MSDOS 6.2 and Win3.11 or so? Mostly breaking my sister’s desktop, and having to fix it before she noticed 😀

Being still a student I was always short on money. I remember an aunt offered to buy it for me, cause I was soooo excited about the Win95 release.

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John L, Myst, woody, Microfix

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I remember it well, was like computing christmas coming from Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on a i486 DX2 66MHz overdrive based beige desktop with 4mb ram.(also had Win95 b OSR2 later with a new PC)
Given what was available at the time, Windows 95 was a milestone for MSFT in the homeusers market. I remember the shop displays constantly being rebuilt due to public demand.
ah, the good ol’ days
Never forget the setup screen bmp and the first run (more nostalgia pics)

setup:

First Run:

Windows - commercial by definition and now function...

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John L, Myst, Cybertooth, Lars220, woody

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I was 11 or so and we had a similar desktop with windows 3.11 at home was in rough shape hard drive was always full etc.  My grandfather got us a 75Mhz Pentium with 2GB hard drive, it said on the box “more space than you will ever need in your life!”  Man and the demo games it came with lots of fun 3d ones, Descent, Star Trek, there were a few awesome ones we had, Redneck Rampage, and my mom had Wordperfect and whatever adult nonsense.  It even came with a microphone, man the day that thing became obsolete was a sad time.  56KB/s modem too which was new at the time.

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John L, Myst

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Those really were the good old days, when many of us looked forward to Windows 95, with excited anticipation. I had a salesman sit near my desk when my 13 floppy disk beta for W95 arrived. He was more excited than me about it. The beta was rock solid on the hand full of PC’s I loaded it on. People lined up to buy it when the final version came out. It was that good, or actually that much of a step forward in computing. Happy anniversary!

GreatAndPowerfulTech

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John L, Myst

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Remember this one?
Those were also the days of Quemm , Quarterdeck’s Extended and Expanded Memory Manager.
Using the little and very expensive Ram memory (KB’s) to the very limit to keep Windows going (or to play the game Doom in a virtual dos-partition).
Once you had found the optimum Qemm memory setting for a given pc , it was at the same time a mesure of quality of the different hardware parts working together. 😃

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? says:

ah, memories…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAkuJXGldrM

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Elrod, SueW

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First thing I thought of when I saw this article.  “Start me up…”

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How to run Microsoft Windows 95 on Windows 10, macOS or Linux

Why not experience Microsoft’s game changing OS for yourself, by running Slack developer Felix Rieseberg’s app version.

https://betanews.com/2020/08/24/run-microsoft-windows-95/

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John L, Coldheart9020

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Those were the days when you waited in line to get a copy. Now many try hard to block a new release. How things have changed with Windows.

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John L, ve2mrx, RamRod, Myst, Biiljoy, Microfix, Charlie, Cybertooth

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Still have and use a Windows 95 PC.

It’s is primary use to run a legacy software that I use with some of my radios – tuning, decoding teletype and Morse code, converting digital signals to TV graphics, etc.

And no, it is not connected to the Internet.

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John L, ve2mrx, Fred

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Can’t help thinking some things have gone backwards by eighty-five versions…

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RamRod, Myst, Fred

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Wow, I can’t believe its already 25 years, I was a kid back then.  I ran my first 3D games on Win95,  Wolfenstein, Eye of the Beholder series, Wizardry and Doom.  Remember how much fun it was to install new MSI programs which were reasonably reliable with an actual README FILE where you never had to go online to learn how to run the program because the instructions came with the disc.  No click-to-run garbage that is always broken and needs constant patching and requires you to be tethered online all the time.   Win 95/ 98 all the way to Win7 had customizable WELCOME SOUNDS like START, LOGON and LOGOFF sounds that you can NO longer customize with Win10.  Microsoft abandoned those options since they thought it was not necessary for people to customize those things, they know better!

We still use an old Dell  Win98 SE with a Voodoo 5 5500 video and Sound Blaster sound card to mainly run inventory software and make backup files on DVDs and it even has the full Office 97 Pro and Power DVD which all still work great.  It boots up with the original microsoft welcome sound and is totally realiable, never breaks and never needs updating and patching.  It also meets the ENERGY STAR requirements since it barely uses any electricity.   Of course that old machine was taken off the internet many years ago but it still proves to  me that Microsoft was more reliable back then and that they once cared about the home and small business user, when times were much simpler.

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SueW, wavy, Fred, Cybertooth, Biiljoy

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John L wrote:

Win 95/ 98 all the way to Win7 had customizable WELCOME SOUNDS like START, LOGON and LOGOFF sounds that you can NO longer customize with Win10. Microsoft abandoned those options since they thought it was not necessary for people to customize those things, they know better!

I’ve never tried to change the sounds on Windows 8 or 10 personally, but this guide shows how to do it in Windows 10, so (assuming it’s accurate), it does look like you can still do this.

I remember 95 when I first saw it. After using it a few minutes, it struck me as the first version of Windows that actually had a reason to exist in its own right.  The previous versions seemed more like technology demonstrations intended to provoke ideas of what a GUI could do, but that did not actually accomplish having a useful-enough GUI for actual work themselves. It was Windows 95 that got me to accept and appreciate GUIs rather than have me being dragged kicking and screaming into the GUI world when the DOS versions of my old favorites stopped receiving updates, quickly falling behind the rapidly evolving hardware that kept coming.

Those were fun days for a PC hobbyist. I would buy a new hardware item at a deeply discounted price at a computer show/swap meet, use it for a relatively short while, then replace it again when its price came down to the level I’d paid for the previous iteration. I’d take the slightly used pieces and build a new PC of them, buying whatever new pieces I needed to fill in the blanks, and sell the whole thing as an almost new PC, at about the same price I would have tried to sell it for had it been all new.

The demand was so high, and the price still so much lower than normal retail channel prices, that it was easy to sell these PCs, and in that way, I managed to get a lot of upgrades for low or no net cost. The obsolescence cycle was brutal back then, and trying to stay on top of it while paying for each upgrade out of pocket would be tremendously costly, even at computer show prices. Of course, I didn’t see trying to keep up as an expensive chore… it was a series of fun opportunities to upgrade. Each one was like Christmas morning is for a kid!

 

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John L, Cybertooth

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I first got that oldie  on 13, 1.44 mb floppies! Nervous as heck to install over win3.11 !

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Fred

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Maybe some nostalgia, but… MEH! An OS literally DESIGNED to have to be rebooted daily? It had features we needed and the engineering organization I ran did use it, but it was not anything like reliable or durable. It did prove that a GUI could help productivity though.

Windows NT, derivative of DEC operating system design, was the real future. It could run almost forever without a reboot and didn’t just fall over when stressed a little. Anyone close to computers could easily see it back then, and of course it’s proven to be the case.

We should be celebrating Dave Cutler’s masterpiece in moving serious OS underpinnings to the PC world from the realms of the big computers, not a hacked-together derivative of DOS made by kids with little discipline.

-Noel

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SueW, RamRod

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Ascaris wrote:

I remember 95 when I first saw it. After using it a few minutes, it struck me as the first version of Windows that actually had a reason to exist in its own right.

Yup. For me, it was the introduction of the Start menu and the Taskbar.

Monitor real estate being at a premium back then, in Windows 3.x I would keep my applications maximized. But because they took up the entire screen, I was never sure what other programs were already running. At the same time, it was a chore to click around to reach Program Manager to eventually get to launch any other program.

The Start menu made it  incomparably easier to launch new applications, and the Taskbar kept me informed as to what I already had open and gave a quick way to get to it. These UI features were twin strokes of pure brilliance.

 

Keep Running Windows 7 Safely for Years to Come  
Make Windows 10 look and work like Windows 7

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John L

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Ah yes!

I remember launch day where there were Windows 95 ads simultaneously playing on all of my TV channels… And the NFR copies my electronics store got us!

I also remember my disappointment finding Central Point Software had been acquired by Symantec, and then finding they had killed PCBackup… And then there was no PC Tools :-/

Windows 95 had updates listed on a Microsoft web page, with an update description and an FTP link. *DONT LIST THE DIRECTORY* they said, as it took a while at those modem speeds! I know, I did 😉 Fortunately, Windows 98 added Windows update later!

And Windows 95 BSOD’d at least once a day. DLL hell started. Bad programming became Microsoft’s fault because Windows crashed. All the user saw was that Blue Screen Of Death, and it was from Windows. Microsoft’s fault 🤣

It was also the introduction of USB in households. This deserves to be celebrated as well! Else everything needed an interface card, serial or parallel interface, SCSI, joystick or proprietary adapter to work. Plug and Pray began!

Windows 95 is when command-line skills stopped being a requirement for home computer use. You could use the computer without having to type commands!

Yes, those where the days when Microsoft was a predatory company ready to do anything to please customers with Windows. You know, when they listened to everybody and tried to sell more and more licenses because that was their core business?

Yeah, I still remember those days when release meant final version as any bug would be costly to fix later by shipping floppies. Or mailing CDs. Yes, I remember those days…

</rant>

Martin

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I got mine at egghead for $5 I am guessing after w8 came out. Still seems a fair price. Never a real problem with it miss it still 🙁

🍻

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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John L

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