Happy Birthday Windows 95! – 266 days old

[Alakazam]

Ahhhh, the memories, this is a couple of days old but I missed it.

"With so much news around at the moment all about Windows 8, all its “modern” new features and the accompanying hardware launches that are imminent let’s pause for a while and look back upon the history of Windows. Seventeen years ago today Microsoft released Windows 95, which arguably set the mould of the Windows interface we now enjoy in Windows 7.

Windows 95 was a leap in usability over Windows 3.X, introducing us to the Start button and associated menu, a task bar, Windows explorer and a recycle bin on the desktop. Under the hood were also a lot of modern features we now take for granted like ‘plug n play’, long filename support and pre-emptive multitasking."



Read the rest at Hexus

[Troy]

Win 95 and AOL 10 cents a minute for long distance to get on the net. And slow as hell. (The net and Win 95)
Things have gotten better.

[Dark Angel]

Progress!

[ZemaTalon]

it introduced the BSOD - a feature we still enjoy today

[Grogan]

Yeah, before that it was a white screen of death. Just about any program error was death in Windows 3.1 (very fragile stacks and shit)

Windows 95 was an improvement though, for it was a 32-bit extension to a 16-bit patch, for an 8-bit operating system, that was originally coded for a 4-bit microprocessor, by a 2-bit company, that can't stand 1 bit of competition.

[Alakazam]

Grogan, how true!

[MSUredux]

That was pretty good Grogan

[Grogan]

I didn't make that up, it's been floating around the net since 1995. I don't know who came up with it but is indeed ironically funny. In the late 70's, when all this was starting, Microsoft really was a 2 bit company and gates was an opportunistic little weasel who acquired a variant of CP/M (the beginnings of DOS, called QDOS), stayed up a few nights porting a compiler and started to build his empire... starting with trying to convince people that software was something you should have to pay for, with incessant whining on bulletin boards.

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