AUGUST 24 2025, was officially the 30th Anniversary of the most important Operating System in Microsoft's History of Operating Systems.
That is:
This is the operating System that defined a generation of Computer users and brought in multiple users to PCs,
Ranging from Seasoned Users of Past Windows or MS-DOS,
People who've migrated from other systems like Atari, Apple, Commodore, etc.
or are newcomers who are just getting into Computers.
Truly it ushered in a GOLDEN ERA of Computers when this OS Arrived on Store Shelves for many a PC User of the 90s,
Whether it's from a new purchase of a PC,
or you're just setting up a new computer you've just built at that time and you need an OS to install it on.
The hype was massive, almost STAR WARS level of Massive even though that level wouldn't be for another 4 years after Windows 95's release.
(I'm referencing PHANTOM MENACE's hype before the backlash in 1999.)
Most of the hype was due to all the buzz and leaks that took place between 1993 and 1995, including a COMDEX show in 1994 which brought in all the buzz that people could muster in their heads.
Microsoft also marketed the OS Excessively by spending a CRAP-LOAD of money on the advertising campaign.
Amongst the hype was the famous use of THE ROLLING STONES' 1981 song
START ME UP.
A license agreement that reportingly cost MICROSOFT $3 Million to license from MICK JAGGER just to use the song.
And for the narm-obsessed,
It brought in the INFAMOUS VHS TAPE of Rachel and Chandler from FRIENDS setting up their new computer.
So what made WINDOWS 95 so ICONIC for us computer users in the first place?
Well let's go back to shortly after the release of 3.1 in April 6 1992.
After a bitter split from IBM over hardware licenses to other vendors instead of only IBM's machines when regarding the OS/2 operating environment,
Microsoft decided that it was time to provide a different GUI environment which would help the company differentiate themselves from all the other OS' out there which were mostly just copying off APPLE's homework, just with their own flair.
Between 1984 to 1995, this was what most operating systems looked like.
The wasting of all those 32-Bit executions for those 386 & 486 CPUS could be blamed on the fact that MS-DOS is still stuck in the 16-bit mold since 1981.
Most of the best uses of the 386 or 486’s 32-bit instructions were relegated to people using OS/2, Windows NT, or early Debian Linux.
How was it possible to allow Windows 95 to be Fully 32-bit even though it's tied to MS-DOS which is 16-Bit?
This 2007 article from former MICROSOFT EMPLOYEE Raymond Chen will give you an idea on how the Windows 95/MS-DOS Dichotomy worked out and let the OS be 32-Bit.
So with Microsoft not wanting them BRAND SPANKING NEW! Pentium CPUS to be left in the dust for their code execution potential, it was decided on that a new Operating system that would take full advantage of 32-bit would be a must.
Not only that but they also realized that instead of following IBM's homework by locking out the LOW-END USERS out of the 32-bit party by overcharging them on the hardware & OS, Microsoft would make the OS lightweight enough to be installed on even the slowest 386 CPU.
Yes, I know the INTEL PENTIUM CPU came out in 1993 but I like to say that the PENTIUMS showed up in 1995 because during '93 & '94, most people had 486 or even 386 PCs than they did the early Pentiums.
One of the greatest inventions to have been born from the birth of WINDOWS 95 is the START MENU.
The START MENU is a little menu that pops up when you click on the start button on the taskbar.
(Or press the WINDOWS key on your keyboard)
Out pops a menu of things like SETTINGS, APPS, ETC.
And also SUB-MENUS for other apps too.
A Welcome change from the PROGRAM MANAGER from the 3.1 days which was just a kludged MAC-like system of menus inside of another menu.
The START BUTTON was so iconic that many later LINUX distros started to copy Microsoft’s homework on GUI TASKBARS.
Microsoft also sort of borrowed some Homework from COMMODORE when developing the underlying parts of the OS.
What homework am I talking about?
PRE-EMPTIVE MULTITASKING.
What's Pre-Emptive Multitasking?
Pre-Emptive Multitasking is the process of running Multiple Applications in one Operating Environment.
For example, let's say you're writing a Word Document but you also want to play a game of SIMCITY for Windows, or you want to play a song on Windows Media Player, or watch a movie, if it was possible what with the early Multimedia Limitations of the time period.
Well in the past, you could multitask but what happened was that it was a matter of swapping tasks from one open app to another.
That's referred to as COOPERATIVE MULTITASKING.
Commodore.... or more like their AMIGA division birthed the Pre-Emptive multitasking system 10 years before WIN95 with their AMIGA WORKBENCH OS.
With it, it allowed multiple tasks to be run on the System at once.
That would explain how it was possible to write a Document on a Word Processor while also running the BOING BALL or JUGGLER Demos at the same time.
Not bad for a System in 1985 and not even that level of Multitasking was able to bog down the 512K System RAM of the computer.
But instead, I was born in Mid-December 1997......
Anyway,
Commodore's WORKBENCH OS for the AMIGA Computers were truly ahead of their time even for 1985.
But not many people bought COMMODORE AMIGAS back in the day.
Instead, they flocked to the PC Compatible Market and would rather get a COMPAQ,
A TANDY 1000,
or even COMMODORE's own PC Compatibles.
When COMMODORE went bankrupt in 1994, Microsoft decided to honor the AMIGA's achievement by borrowing IN PRINCIPLE the PRE-EMPTIVE MULTITASKING bit from CHICKEN LIPS' corpse and turn it into something that every PC user could use to their advantage.
Another thing that would make WINDOWS 95 important for all us enthusiasts was the then BRAND SPANKING NEW PLUG and PLAY system.
What's Plug and Play?
Well in the past, when you bought an Expansion Card for your Computer like a SOUNDCARD for example,
You'd need to configure it's IRQ, it's DMA Bus, etc.
A lot of that relied on things like drivers,
The ordeal was so headache-inducing for others that it was often referred to by enthusiasts as PLUG AND PRAY because we didn't know if it was going to work the first time around and god help us if you didn't know how to troubleshoot before calling out the manufacturers for how much money you spent on the card only to find it doesn't work immediately.
Windows 95 changed all that by having a protocol where it configures the hardware with either the most basic of Drivers, or Prompts you to locate the drivers from your Floppy Disk or CD during installation.
That's why whenever you get a new monitor for your hardware, the OS prompts you that it found new hardware.
Though automated PLUG AND PLAY mostly worked best with devices that were on the original PCI expansion bus and beyond.
ISA and VLB Cards often were stuck with manual Configurations unless the card was designed with AUTOMATED PLUG AND PLAY in mind.
GPU devices sort of fall in this category but what happens is that a BASIC VGA Driver is installed which grants very limited options for the end-user and it's up to said user to install the Graphics Drivers to enable higher resolutions, higher refresh-rates, or even higher color depth.
For example, in the past, if it detected the a graphics chip or Card that doesn't have the required drivers, it installs the most basic drivers where all you get is 640x480 Resolution with 16 Colors.
Compared to now where we have more colors and resolution but severely lacking in REFRESH RATE configuration or custom color profiles.
One thing that changed the face of WINDOWS forever since the release of Windows 95 is the PC GAMING market.
In the past, most PC Games ran under MS-DOS as the underlying operating environment.
Below are examples from JAZZ JACKRABBIT(1994)
Many of them were just EDUTAINMENT TITLES meant for the kids and warranted little to no attention from the most hardcore of GAMERS who were more interested in games like DOOM.
Sure, there were some titles released for Windows before 95 that catered to hardcore gamers but most of them were often from the likes of MAXIS.
Think SIMCITY for example.
However, Christmas of 1994 would bring out the worst of those problems.
After the Success of DISNEY'S THE LION KING in Cinemas in June 1994,
Disney Marketing wanted to bank on the success of the film during the Christmas season.
One game was released for Computers to bank on that.
This was the first entry in DISNEY'S ANIMATED STORYBOOK series of computer games meant to bank on the success of Broderbund's LIVING BOOKS series of CD-ROM Interactive Storybooks.
But instead of licensing other books for adaptation, the animated storybook series were meant to be based on the DISNEY AMIMATED MOVIES.
LION KING was the first entry in this series of CD-ROM Games.
The problem was that the Game originally ran under a bad API referred to as WinG.
Unfortunately, the game outright required this API in order to work.
The problem was this was at a time when many developers were not willing to make games be WINDOWS compliant because it would introduce issues with hardware configurations like BIOS ROUTINEs and Direct Memory Addresses to the Hardware in question.
So as a result of this awful API, the game ran poorly on many a computer that people had in the house.
Not helped by the fact that some people still had 386 machines rather than the 486 or early Pentiums that LION KING required to run at full speed.
AND YOU'D BE MORE UNLUCKY ON YOUR PART IF YOU RECENTLY BOUGHT A BRAND SPANKING NEW COMPAQ PRESARIO IN CHRISTMAS 1994.
yes, LION KING actually became a notable wakeup call for these developers when COMPAQ started shipping out their 486 & early Pentium Computers for the Holiday of 1994.
Many of these new COMPAQ PRESARIO Systems were not tested properly for WinG because they got the call from Disney to ship these computers to stores PRONTO.
Well the shipments happened and the game was bundled with them new PRESARIOS as promised.
The game would then be installed but the moment the user started up the game....
guess what happened?
Yup. That's right.
Instead of running the game properly, many a user of these unfortunate PRESARIOS were instead greeted with the dreaded BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH.
The kids cried and bawled their eyes out because their game wasn't working at all on these computers.
And the Parents or Older Siblings were MIGHTY PISSED because thousands of dollars were wasted on these PRESARIOS that could barely run a simple kids game just because of a STUPID API!!!
The parents were even more PISSED at Disney because their the Mouse House’s support line preferred to be silent on the problem not because of the Profit but most of Tech Support was on Christmas Vacation because....
THEY DO HAVE FAMILIES TO BE WITH DURING THE HOLIDAYS SO PLEASE GIVE THEM SOME SLACK PLEASE.
Anger was also pointed towards COMPAQ for rushing to meet the Christmas Deadline just because of some Idiot Marketer's request.
And MEDIA STATION, the developers of the game, WERE CRITICIZED for their indifference on the matter, with the company instead calling out people for not having adequate hardware.
The WinG drama caught the attention of MICROSOFT because they were still in active development of Windows 95 and they so badly wanted the OS to be the FRONT-END for PC Gaming but because of both DISNEY and COMPAQ's fumbling just because of some STUPID MARKETING, the team needed to convince developers that WINDOWS 95 should be the FRONT-END,
NO IFS, ANDS, OR BUTS!!!
After careful planning and many months of programming, this gave birth to an API that would be important for all us PC Gamers.
That being:
It was on an Operating system level.
Not only that but it also mitigated compatibility problems when different hardware was present.
Though until the turn of the Millennium,
3D Gaming was dominated by the 3DFX Voodoo Cards like this Diamond Monster 3D below:
Sure, the 3DFX Cards could also handle Direct-X,
but many games used 3DFX's own GLIDE API to handle the 3D Stuff.
And gamers preferred GLIDE over DIRECT3D or OPENGL due to features that were offered on the 3DFX Cards that were not offered by it's competitors.
But then around the turn of the 2000s, DIRECTX, alongside OPENGL, were starting to make headways as dominant APIs for PC-Gaming thanks to NVIDIA'S GeForce and ATI's RADEON Architectures.
So rather than thank Microsoft and their operating system for helping PC Gaming evolve,
Thank Disney's THE LION KING for scaring the bejesus out of Microsoft's developers into taking serious action on API Compatibilities.
Another source of Nostalgia is the Uber-Famous MICROSOFT SOUND.
That startup sound that you hear every time you booted up WIN95 on your computer.
You can feel the nostalgia flowing through your veins the moment you hear that playing through your ALTEC LANSING(Or whatever was 90s era appropriate) speakers.
And all thanks goes to BRIAN ENO for composing that 6-Second .WAV sound for PC Log-Ins back in 1994, though we wouldn't hear it for until 1995.
Fun Fact:
BRIAN ENO composed THE MICROSOFT SOUND on a MACINTOSH.
According to ENO during a 2009 interview session on the BBC2 Radio show THE MUSEUM OF CURIOSITY, he stated that the reason he composed the sound on a MAC was because...
HE'S NEVER USED A PC IN HIS LIFE & HE DOESN'T LIKE THEM.
How Classic.
On April 2025, THE MICROSOFT SOUND was selected for preservation in the
NATIONAL RECORDING REGISTRY by the LIBRARY OF CONGRESS for being
Culturally, Historically, or Aesthetically significant.
One thing I see from people when they have their NOSTALGIA GROUPS on Facebook is that they say they miss this one screen that they used to see on their computers:
Because many computers during WINDOWS 95's early beginnings were still used the older AT Power specification,
and because many of the early ATX Motherboard BIOS Firmware Versions weren't ACPI Compliant for Automatic Soft-Power Shutdown, People saw this screen on their computers every time they Shutdown their computer, requiring the user to flick the switch or press the power button to turn off the PC.
That’s because Windows 95 was originally built for the APM power management
By the time the late-1996 era Socket 7 Motherboards started showing up, the Motherboard BIOS' were ACPI compliant and trusted enough to perform automatically shutdowns for computers whenever the Users shutdown WINDOWS for the night or after the end of their shift at work.
I know because my first WINDOWS Computers from 1999 and 2000 were already ATX Power Compliant so after the Shutdown Screen, the computer was shutdown until it was ready to be used once again.
And there you have it.
WINDOWS 95, the most important Operating System that Microsoft made and forever changed the landscape of Computers.
Not even MAC or LINUX could come close to unseating Microsoft in Market Dominance despite close call efforts.
Currently now, we're running WINDOWS 11.
(Yes, I know you WINDOWS 10 holdouts and I still respect you.)
For Desktops, you know us Enthusiasts.
We prefer to build our hardware because Custom-Built Machines are better than the Pre-Builds due to us wanting to rid ourselves of the OEM MANUFACTER'S Bloat.
But take a moment to look back and remember when Microsoft was just about to change the world of computers for the greater back in 1995.
And Thank Chips and PGA Sockets that 1995 was the right time for change in Computers.
.....
And to end this blogpost, I'd like to share this old photo of me from back in the day, just to show that yes, I have used WINDOWS 95.
This blogpost was written on my DELL INSPIRON 14 2-in-1 Ryzen 7 Laptop which I bought on July 14 2025 to capitalize on the 30th Anniversary of Windows 95's RTM Release.
And now I'm using this exact Laptop to type this very Blogpost too.
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