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• I resisted for a long time (Score:2)

  by Marxist Hacker 42 ( 638312 ) * writes:

  And even got in a fight with Toshiba to give me DOS and Windows 3.1 drivers for my laptop.

  I released a Windows 3.1 demo for my company only to get a nasty call from some casino in Jamaica that installing it had overwritten a Windows 95 DLL with a Windows 3.1 DLL- my first professional experience with DLL Hell.

  • Re: (Score:2)

    by imidan ( 559239 ) writes:

    I was an early adopter. I remember installing one of the betas or release candidates (when it was called ‘Chicago’) from an enormous pile of floppy disks before I got the retail version on CD. One of the things I liked about it was the new desktop system. I had been using Windows for Workgroups 3.11 up until that point, and I often had something like PC Tools Desktop or Norton Desktop running for their capabilities beyond 3.11. But either one of those massively slowed down my system.

    I probably switched back

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lgw ( 121541 ) writes:

      I probably switched back and forth from 95 to 3.11 a few times in the early days when I got frustrated with Win 95’s performance, but I was definitely on board with the idea. It helped that you could still boot to DOS when you needed your RAM to do something other than run the OS.

      While the hatred of WIn95 eventually dominated, thanks to how much it sucked to support, it shouldn’t be forgotten that it was a miracle of backwards compatibility. It’s not just that it could co-exist peacefully with Win 3.1 and DOS: it could natively run 16-bit drivers.

      That gave people the false impression it was just a desktop shell, but it wasn’t. It was a 32-bit, flat-memory kernel and userland, that could seamlessly run 16-bit segmented-memory applications and drivers. The drivers part was everythin
• Start Me Up! (Score:1)

  by TheZeal0t ( 5132333 ) writes:

  I love that they used the Stones “Start Me Up!” as their theme song.

  I guess they missed that the song later says, “You make a GROWN MAN CRYYYYYYYYY….”

  • Re: (Score:2)

    by Megane ( 129182 ) writes:

    Actually they conspicuously left it out of their version. It was an obvious joke back in the day.

    Windows 95: It Makes a Grown Man Cry
• Went straight from win 3.1 to OS/2 (Score:2)

  by sprins ( 717461 ) writes:

  I’m happy to say I departed from Windows when 95 came out. I went from 3.1 to OS/2 2.11 (I believe) and never looked back. Ultimately OS/2 went to Warp and when it failed in the market I transferred to Linux, and from there to Mac OS X.

  As a developer on OS/2 I had a smooth run thanks to Java which made my code easily portable along the way. And IBM DB/2 went along likewise from OS/2 to Linux.

  Still Windows 95 release gives me fond memories, if only as it reminds me of my developer career.

  • Re: (Score:2)

    by lgw ( 121541 ) writes:

    For me it was NT 3.1 to avoid Windows 95. Very similar to OS/2 at the time, of course, given the substantial common code. It was obvious that Windows 95 wasn’t a “real” OS, but I was disappointed that there were very few games and I ended up dual-booting. I was delighted with Win2000, which really got the core UI elements right, and more so when Starcraft came out and would run on it, thanks to it actually following the DirectX standard (first big game that did IIRC).

    I thank WinNT for getting me into se

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) writes:

      Wasn’t there something about earlier versions of NT not allowing to run (nearly) anything in kernel mode, including video drivers? That wouldn’t have made for a very good gaming platform.
• Plug N’ Pray (Score:1)

  by FluffySh4rk ( 6696800 ) writes:

  I will never forget this mantra when trying to balance / share IRQs with scsi controllers, scanners, 3dFX video cards , video capture card “Hauppauge”, Sound Blaster 16 card, and anything else you could throw at it. Get it all working, just to have it blow up 10 reboots later, ahhhh, the good old days.
• Released AFTER a Long Delay! (Score:1)

  by douglasfir77 ( 6439950 ) writes:

  What I remember is the delay! We where promised 95 in the spring not in the fall! https://buffalonews.com/news/m… [buffalonews.com].
• Full-screen video in 1995 (Score:2)

  by MachineShedFred ( 621896 ) writes:

  QuickTime called and wants it’s 1991 achievement back. [wikipedia.org] No, really, since Microsoft basically stole Video for Windows tech from Apple. [wikipedia.org]

  • Re: (Score:2)

    by tsa ( 15680 ) writes:

    Truly evil, MS was back then.
• Frustratingly Important (Score:4, Interesting)

  by nealric ( 3647765 ) writes: on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @05:29PM (#60440297)

  It may have been unstable and obnoxious in a lot of ways, but Windows 95 was an important milestone in that it set the standard for desktop UIs that has been in place since it was created. After the Windows 8 misstep, we are back to what is essentially the same layout of Win95 with a start button and a line of shortcuts on the bottom of the screen.

  I remember it corresponded to a pretty key turning point in what the computer could do for a home user. I went from a 386 that could barely run windows 3.1 to a Pentium 166 running windows 95. It was the turning point from what was mostly a relatively primitive command line and rudimentary graphics to a computer that could access graphical web pages and display 3d graphics. It was also the point at which even your grandparents started dabbling in computing and was the mass market OS for the beginnings of the world wide web and the first .com boom.

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• Is “released” the best word? (Score:2)

  by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) writes:

  I might have gone with “inflicted on” or “sprung on”, but that’s just me.

  Anyway, C:/ONGRTLNS.W95

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